Empirical Path's Jim Snyder presented a webinar, "Google Analytics on Steroids - New Features: What You Need to Know," with one of our agency partners and clients, Seattle search engine marketing firm Point It. Jim and Point It's Preston Parshall taught attendees:
• Powerful new features in Google Analytics and why that's important to you
• How to get actionable, impactful, data out of Google Analytics
• How to integrate data into Salesforce and other CRMs
• How to use attribution modeling & remarketing in Google Analytics
Please see our blog post and video here: http://ow.ly/hClQG
Powerful Google developer tools for immediate impact! (2023-24 C)
Google Analytics on Steroids: New Features & What You Need to Know
1. Google Analytics on Steroids – New Features &
What You Need to Know
Jim Snyder, Web Analytics Practice Lead at Empirical Path
Preston Parshall, Point It
October 10, 2012
2. Presentation Agenda
• Launched in April 2002
• Seattle’s largest independent
search marketing firm
• SEM, SEO, Social, Local, Mobile
• $30 MM in managed media/yr
• Servicing clients across all
verticals and revenue models
3. Webinar Information
• Being recorded & will be uploaded to website
• This is an interactive webinar so it is okay to
ask questions during the presentation
4. Presentation Agenda
About Empirical Path
• Web analytics, market research
and campaign measurement
• Founded in Washington DC in ‘02
• Atlanta, NM and DC offices
• Seasoned Web analytics
professionals
• Google Analytics Certified Partner
• Webtrends Agency
• Contacts
• www.EmpiricalPath.com
• @EmpiricalPath
• Facebook.com/ EmpiricalPath
• +Empirical Path
5. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Reports
• Multichannel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in GA
6. Test Ideas: Content Experiments
• GA lets you experiment with
ideas and use conversion
rate in key segments to pick
a winner:
• Landing Page
• Ad Copy
• Calls to action
• Offer
• Discount
• Button color
• Page layout
13. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Reports
• Multichannel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in GA
14. Goals & Reports: Funnels
Funnel
Visualization
in GA
Online
purchase
funnel steps
16. Goals & Reports: Goal Flow
Select only
purchases
via tablets
Highlight sources
to study their
purchase
behavior
17. Goals & Reports: Standard Report
Last click gets
credit
for purchases
18. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Reports
• Multichannel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in GA
26. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Reports
• Multichannel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in GA
27. GA in Docs: Standard Reports
GA Reports in
standard
interface
28. GA in Docs: Custom Report Limits
Can’t add
more
dimensions!
29. GA in Docs: API Background
Can’t add more
dimensions!
http://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/explorer/
30. GA in Docs: Excel
Same data –
exported into
Excel
31. GA in Docs: Google Spreadsheet
• Go to Google Docs
and start Spreadsheet
• Click Tools/Script
Gallery and search for
‘Magic’
• Install the GA Report
Automation
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/08/automate-google-analytics-reporting.html
32. GA in Docs: Settings
Set each of
these on each
report
34. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Custom Reports
• Multichannel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in GA
37. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Custom Reports
• Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in Google Analytics
38. Google Tag Manager: Why Consider?
• Too many tags can slow down sites
• Very tough to manage multiple tags
• Free up dependence on IT Dept.
• Gives marketers greater flexibility to track and
target key segments
40. Google Tag Manager: Base Code
Old way: GA Code on all pages
New way: Code on all pages but controlled from GTM Interface
41. Google Tag Manager: How It Works
Rules
• Sets when you want a tag fired
Macros
• Where data is stored
Tags
• GA, Javascript, HTML, AdWords, Dart, Floodlight
45. Agenda
• A/B Tests & Content Experiments
• Goals & Custom Reports
• Multichannel Funnels (MCF)
• GA in Google Drive
• Integrating GA into Salesforce.com
• Google Tag Manager
• Remarketing in GA
46. GA Remarketing: List
Rule sets to fire
on Thank You
page Choices on
visitor
segments for
remarketing
51. Thank You
• Preston Parshall • Jim Snyder
• prestonp@pointit.com • jim.snyder@empiricalpath.com
• Point It Search • @jimdsnyder
Marketing Agency • 203-804-4509
• www.PointIt.com • Empirical Path
• support@pointit.com • www.EmpiricalPath.com
• @EmpiricalPath
• Facebook.com/
EmpiricalPath
• +Empirical Path
Notas del editor
Thanks for joining us – just some quick background on Empirical PathAll we do is measurement - web analytics, market research and campaign measurementThat’s why it’s great to team up with PointIt on search and marketingWe have offices in DC, Atlanta and New MexicoWe have a very close partnership with google as a certified partnerThese are some of the companies we’ve worked with on Web analytics
So here is our agenda. These are features that if you’re not using now – you really need to be in GA.They’ll save you time, give you more insights than you imagined and make you a rock-star in to your C-suiteThere are some you may have heard of – some are very recently released - others have new parts to them that you’ll want to know about.Especially MultiChannel Funnels and the API.So we’ll start out talking about A/B testing (essentially what is merged from the GWO product)Then I’ll take a look at Multichannel funnels and what dimensions you should really look at.That leads into the API which feeds the abilty to see your GA results in Google Docs –so you don’t really have use the GA interface anymore if you don’t want!Then we’ll look at tag Manager – a just released product that controls all of your GA and marketing tags.Finally we’ll look at the remarketing feature.
So let’s start out by talking about a big change that happened at the end of this summer.Google Website Optimizer essentially was retired and brought right into Google Analytics.What is content experiments and why should you care? This is a very feature product that essentially can help you increase performance of landing pages By letting you literally test various landing pages, ad copy, calls to action, offers, discountsEven details down to button colors and page layouts. Each page is served up automatically an equal amount of time.You tell Google the pages you want to test and the action you want them to take and wa- lah you can see what is the most successful page.
So who’s actually using this tool and what did they get out of itHere’s an example of a client of our’s that was able to produce a lot of value through Cont. Experiments. You’re looking at the original landing page for a client of our’sKapitall. This company has an online stock trading platform. The call to action is a sign-up for a brokerage account. Each sign-up is huge to Kapitall so they need to have the most efficient landing page. So we set up a Content Experiment in Google Analytics.
So as you can see their interface is kind of like a gaming interface. we worked with the design team to create four different versions – classic gaming – Pac Man/Mario/Space Invaders and newer Angry Birds. each of which (like GWO) is served up equally over the course of about 2 weeks (usually around 1K visits to determine statistical significance).So some of you might be familiar with how A/B testing works – not going to cover a lot. It’s a bit of a black box in GA but suffice it to say that a Google does all of the work for you to serve up the pages.
This is what the set-up looks like in content experiments. Create different versions of the landing page ahead of time to a unique URL. There are some considerations for SEO that I’m not going to cover but suffice it to say that you can include ‘REL’Cannonical’ parameter is a signal to Engines that the pages are essentially the same. You can have up to I believe 9 variations
Jim: Each experiment must have one goal in which to evaluate a ‘winner’. They call this an ‘objective’ in CE but it’s a goal on your site that is in use. In this case the goal set up is triggered off of new account sign-ups. You can see there are other settings such as the % of visitors you want to see the experiment. In this case it’s 100% but lesser percentages can be selected.
Just like GWO there is a simple workflow where the code is spit out for you and you can insert right on your ‘original’ page. You then publish the experiment code to the live site. There’s some validation that takes place and then you launch the experiment.
And this is so cool. We can see after 15 days we have Google has served up each page equally and determined with statistical significance that Angry Birds won! We can see that it has a 99.93% chance to beat the original. There’s even an option to serve the winning version automatically.So this ended up being very big for Kapitall because every sign-up they get for brokerage accounts is critcal to their business.
Next we’ll talk about Goals and Custom Reports.These are existing features but there are some features that have recently changed in goals. I also wanted to provide some background to our next se multichannel funnels
So to give a little flavor on goals wanted to set the stage a bit with Goals. Goals are a way to tell Google Analytics when a conversion occurs – this can be a purchase, someone going to your directions page, staying longer than 5 minutes. Very flexible.What you’re looking at is a gaming website. Here is a typical online purchase screen and to the right what that purchase funnel looks like in Google Analytics that is set up as part of a goal.Many of you have seen this funnel – it’s the Funnel Visualization. You can create this when you create a goal.We can see when someone purchases, but also where they dropped out. Did they drop out when entering an address, shipping, credit card etc?Each of those steps can be defined as part of the goal.We can see all of this inside of our goal funnel
Here’s the same funnel blown up. And this is awesome. So we know someone purchased because they reached our thank you page and we’ve also set up e-commerce tracking. Many of you have seen this funnel Great information – shows you your funnel and where people are dropping out. 18% conversion rate – good information. This is great information.
A newer update to the Funnel Visualization is Goal Flow. This takes goals to a whole new level.Here we’re able to see not only each step of the funnel but to dive inside and be able to highlight specific source.Here we see we can take a deeper dive into understanding Google Organic by highlighting the segment.And not only that but we can also segment – here we’re looking only at
So this is great information. We can know how each source is contributing to our game sales. We can see a breakdown of what sources get credit for each source. Organic is a big contributor. So is paid and referral traffic.This is all great data – I can get an idea of where my marketing spend is going - and which source is getting credit for the sales on my site.You’re looking at a custom report that is reporting last click attribution. In fact – last click attribution is the default for all custom reports.
Next we’ll dive into multichannel funnels. And our gaming story continues.
But first a bit of backround when you look at the whole picture – last click isn’t this simple. So when we look at visitors that come to your site - there's a series of decisions that people make before buying something, downloading a white paper things that we call 'conversions'It's almost never a simple 'see a display ad or adwords ad and buy'. There are very complex decisions that are made before say making a purchase.And Google Analyitcs has had for about 1 year - a tool called MultiChannel Funnels.We can see some that go from a display ad to a search ad then purchase.Or Go from Organic to Social to purchase. Or some that don't purchase at all. And Multichannel funnels allows for you to see the entire conversion paths.Often times we see email and social and display typically far away from the last click. They introduce and ‘assist’ in the conversion process.
So this is an overview report in multichannel funnels. a 30 day period with the MultiChannel Funnels tools I can see the whole interaction path. Need ecommerce or goals set up. 2). Autotagging for GAW 3). Need to link the account to GAWWe can see that 2500 conversions and about ½ of them are assisted conversion. Any time a channel is involved in a conversion. This is a 30 day lookback window. It’s also based on cookies (if I show on 2 different devices I’m seen differently) Not just the last click which always gets the credit by default. Here I can see that all of these other factors like. SO understanding this data is really an amazing opportunity to help marketers and advertisers in growing conversions and overall businesses
So this is the ‘assisted conversion report in MCF’The key takeaway and biggest value prop is In the last column we can see that email/display/social – are super important to our marketing mix. Those weren’t even on the radar of our first report just looking at last click. The assist/last conversion column highlighted is essentially a ratio of assisted/last click interactions. What this means is a higher number shows the importance of that channel in assisting your conversions.Explain – dollar amounts
This is the same ‘Assisted Conversion’ report but this time I’ve added a second dimension for Keyword.You can drill down at a whole bunch of other dimensions. We can view all the individual all keywords even if they’re not part of paid or GAW . So we can see 75 assists from a display remarking ad and only 14 where we would see this getting credit on a last click model. So it's essential a 5/1 ratio.You can experiment with many other demensions to where you’re reaching people on the marketing funnel.So what a lot of adverstiers do is export this list and compare to their current paid campaigns to make sure all the terms that are part of the conversion funnel are represented. SO it’s really powerful to understand where items are converting on your funnel.
This is the top conversion paths report. This tells us the order in which a conversion was made and the corresponding breakdown of value. In this case it’s a purchase from our gaming site.Again – the key here is that social networking is really important. This didn’t even show up on our first report but it’s critically driving many of our purchases as you can see but would never get credit under last click.
Taking a deeper dive – what if I want to know how my branded keywords are assisting in conversions?Well I can create a ‘Conversion Segment’ – very similar to an ‘Advanced Segment’I can ID the Keyword - here – the term FPS is an example branded search termYou can see the set up is fairly straight forward
And now I’m looking at specifically which branded keywords are actually assisting.What role are they playing? This is huge for SEO to know this information.
Next we’ll look at getting GA into Google docs via the API.SO why should you care about getting GA into Google Docs…What we’re seeing is that the GA product is growing so fast that the demand for getting the data right into spreadsheets to build custom dashboards.The first thing we hear about from our clients is they want to save time and energy in getting to the data they want quickly.You can see that there is some set-up in getting to speciifc data and Google docs is an awesome way to get at you
Jim: So you all are very familiar with getting your reports directly in the GA interface. It’s nice and easy interface to navigate but many of our customers have a serious workflow and reporting problem in getting the right reports to the right people. Typical complaints are ‘it takes too long to clean up the data and get into excel’. Well look no further than the GA API
Jim: So we’re looking at the set-up of a custom report on a ‘Flat Table’. On this example - I’m a restaurant chain and want to really know what day of the week people are coming, what source they’re coming from. Also would be great to know keywords. But in GA – I’m limited to only 2 dimensions side by side. I can drill down but that gets to be pretty cumbersome and tough to share.
Jim: The GA API is a great way to get a little taste of what the API is all about. It’s essentially a really easy way to dive into your data and not be limited by the constraints of the GA UI. The great thing about this data is it’s unsampled, and you can quickly check a few boxes an you can have a great spreadsheet.This is query explorer – it’s intended to be a gateway to doing more with the API – think of this is just a taste. You can enter in your metrics/dimensions. Same stuff you see in GA.
Jim: The GA API is a great way to get a little taste of what the API is all about. It’s essentially a really easy way to dive into your data and not be limited by the constraints of the GA UI. The great thing about this data is it’s unsampled, and you can quickly check a few boxes an you can have a great spreadsheet.
Jim: So these are some steps in setting up GA to talk to your Google Docs.There’s a couple of other settings that you need to set up. I’m not going to walk you though each one but you can find these on the blog link which is a video that will walk you through steps of setting this up in Google Docs.
Jim: And once you install – you can simply set up your metrics and dimensions.You can see in this example I’ve got pageviews, TOS, Bounce Rate. You can access nearly all of the same information inside of GA – And it’s right at your fingertips.
Jim: And when you run the report it will look something like this. And this data should look somewhat familiar. This is the same data from the Multichannel funnels. This is a brand new feature that Google just released. If I really want to drill in and understand those impacts of how a first/last channel has on various sources I can create a MultiChannel funnel report directly into Google Docs. Here I can see where sources assisted in a conversion, were the first interaction or closed the deal as the last click.
Jim: So here is a form for an event sign-up. This is a great report – extremely valuable. I can know which are the best sources driving my sign-ups. How well is my paid search performing. Of course I can do more in MCF but I’m limited in GA on being able to credit on an individual level – who actually filled my form out. The TOS with GA prevents you from passing personally identifyable info. So when you look at SalesForce you’re typically left with having to piece together all of this information separately.But with a little JavaScript embedded on your page you can grab some of the source inforamtion right from the GA cookies and send them over with your salesforce form.
Jim: And so this is what the SF Form will look like. This is a Web to Lead formcan pass over data right over from the Googl Analytics Cookie right along with the salesforce sign-up. You can see with a little customization we can also know about their first and last clicks, their landing page. And just to be clear – this is not coming over from the API – this is coming right from the GA cookie.
So here is our agenda. These are features that if you’re not using now – you really need to be in GA.They’ll save you time, give you more insights than you imagined and make you a rock-star in to your C-suiteThere are some you may have heard of – some are very recently released - others have new parts to them that you’ll want to know about.Especially MultiChannel Funnels and the API.So we’ll start out talking about A/B testing (essentially what is merged from the GWO product)Then I’ll take a look at Multichannel funnels and what dimensions you should really look at.That leads into the API which feeds the abilty to see your GA results in Google Docs –so you don’t really have use the GA interface anymore if you don’t want!Then we’ll look at tag Manager – a just released product that controls all of your GA and marketing tags.Finally we’ll look at the remarketing feature.
Jim
So this is a little peek at what Google Tag Manager is. It’s a completely different product and login from GA.In it you can see the basic breakdown. The main elements are defining tags, rules and Macros.
So this is a little peek at what Google Tag Manager is. It’s a completely different product and login from GA.In it you can see the basic breakdown. The main elements are defining tags, rules and Macros.
Jim: A container tag helps you manage different kinds of tags that you may have on your site. This include web analytics tags, advertising conversion tags, general JavaScript, etc.You can control all of your Google Analtyics code with inserting just one set of code called the container tag. The container houses Rules, Macros and of course tags.
SO here is an example website. What if I want to track pop-ups on each page?
Jim: So what does that look like under the hood?
Jim: This is an example screen that you can control for various tag that you want to fire.You can see that you have Adwords Conversion TagsDoubleClick Floodlight TagsOf course Google AnalyticsAnd Adwords remarketing
Next I’ll talk a little about getting out of the GA interface and into Google Docs with the GA API.
SO remarketing is important. These are people that have come to your site and completed a conversion such as add to cart late in the conversion process. Very valuable segment that we have access to through GA. So this is a set-up screen on conditions for remarketing to various segments on your site. There are many Lifetime-value filters let you set conditions for visitor behavior across all sessions for the date range of the report. Within a single lifetime-value filter, you can create include and exclude conditions, and combine them with AND and OR operators. For example, you can create a filter for visitors whose revenue > $100 AND who visit from Japan.Sequence filters let you set conditions for a specific sequence of pages in your site that visitors saw across all sessions for the date rage of the report. For example, you can set up the filter to identify visitors who saw your home page first, followed by a particular product page, followed by your shopping-cart page, and then your checkout page. You can set up the filter so that the pages must be seen one immediately after the other, or just any time after one another.
So if I know my target audience that I want to remarket to – I can set up very specific custom fields. YOU can set up a Visitor filter to target our Seattle/Denver goal completers.
This is repping a page out of the multi-channel funnel playbook – which is time lag this report shows the number of days before people convert. On top I’ve added custom segment that shows only those where first interaction is paid, or organic or any interaction is referral. And we can see that on the 3rd day – 179 conversions came from referral traffic and those that are first time visitors. We can take these segments – and this is a great opportunity to remarket to these segments.
And on the sequence filter I can focus only on those that are from the Seattle area. Likewise on the previous screen I can select all visitors and retarget based on metro area containing Seattle/Tacoma Washington and then have those that only hit my home page. The possibilities are nearly endless here.