We all know that you can’t manage what you don’t measure – so Analytics (or some sort of stats package) is vital if you want to improve your website over time.

Well it just got a lot easier to do so

Google have just announced a number of improved features for Analytics, such as:
- better engagement metrics. eg you can know count a goal as someone that stays on the site for over 2 minutes
- up to 20 goals for each profile (at last!)
- filtering of results. eg don’t wade through a list of thousands of keywords, now you can filter say those with a low bounce rate & high time on site. sweet.

and many many more

check it all out here
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-analytics-now-more-powerful.html

eg. setting a goal that a visitor stays for over a minute

Don’t delay, install it today (or get your friendly geek to). Invaluable information & free.

Click the image for the expanded version…

From this we can tell that a decent, benefit-driven Ad highly relevant to that keyword & a decent Landing Page will probably cost about $3-4 per click at the top of the page.

And yet 2 of the top 5 results are for American sites (complete with American credit check jargon that most Aussies wouldn’t begin to understand) and another site is broken – see image.

How to avoid a broken AdWords campaign:

1. Check your Landing Page regularly – at least once a month – on all 3 major browsers (IE 6 or 7, Firefox & Safari). There are websites that will show you what your site looks like if you don’t own a Mac

2. Ensure that your list of countries (in your AdWords account) is limited only to those countries that you regualrly sell to. Once you know your account has a great ROI, then by all means extend your reach – but do so with a different campaign, a specific landing page, no jargon & ideally a domain name for that country. A .com.au domain for an Australian AdWords account will make a huge difference to your CTR (how much? it varies by industry, but we’ve seen accounts triple their CTR overnight with a .com.au & that’s without further testing)

3. Ensure that you can actually sell to the countries that are on your list! If your only payment option is PayPal, are residents of those countries even allowed to open a PayPal account?

4. Use Google Analytics to check your Bounce Rate regularly – at least monthly, if not weekly. A higher than normal (whatever normal is for your site) bounce rate indicates that visitors are not getting what they expected. GrokDotCom has an excellent post on this topic this week.

5. Common sense is sadly under-rated! As often as you can, sit down at a computer with someone that’s not a staff member & look over their shoulder as they navigate through your site. Try to stay silent & just watch! You’ll learn a lot. Do this often.

6. Install ClickTale & watch movies of your visitors trying to use your site – probably an eyeopening experience.

7. Hire an expert to look over your site & give you objective feedback.

Did I miss any? Feel free to add more below in the comments. Thanks, Mike

My answer is almost always to start with AdWords. Why? Because I’m a huge fan of the 80/20 rule.

Start with the 20% of effort that will give you 80% of the result. Then, once you’ve cracked Google & found what works there, by all means take your results to the other advertising options.

Below is a fairly typical shot from a client’s analytics report… It shows the traffic coming to their site from people searching. Now admittedly Yellow Pages isn’t in this report (it’s under referring sites report) but that showed a grand total of 26 for the same time period

Now again, bear in mind that this site hasn’t been optimized, but it’s in a fairly small niche, with little competition. But still, there’s about 30x the traffic coming from Google as there is from msn & 45x the traffic than from yahoo!

Of course, I could prattle on about how much easier to use AdWords is, how much faster you can test your headline, offer, price, even domain name or how well it works with Google Analytics… but I won’t. Suffice to say – just try it for your business (or blog!). Run a small test, with a low budget & see what happens.

I think you’ll like what you find.

 

Hopefully you’re already using it to track the changes you make on your website & ensure that that all important conversion rate gets better and better over time.

So today, here’s a quick look at one of the reports that’s had a makeover, the Goal Funnel Report.

You can easily see where the holes are in your website & exactly how many people are dropping out of them! Then you can use the 80/20 rule to prioritise: and patch up the largest holes first.

Every hole you fix means more conversions, more happy customers & more profit.

The example below starts at the beginning of the checkout process as this client’s current store software doesn’t allow Google Analytics to be added to each page (yes, we will migrate to a more sensible solution very soon!). Even so, the report clearly shows that the checkout page needs some improvements (remind buyer of benefits, larger product image, less navigation options etc). While the Ship/Pay page is obviously working very well.

Which pages on your site do you need to track? What one thing could you tweak today (right now!) to help improve your conversion rate just that little bit?

With what looks to be a Google Finance type graph, dashboards that you can customize (clients will love this!) and, at last, emailable reports just like AdWords – this promises to be a decent leap forward in usability of this already incredibly useful tool.

I hope that it means more businesses will start to use Analytics – as Avinash Kaushik told Jeremiah the other day, using analytics can make a huge (5000%!) impact on the profitability of a company.

Start small, learn one thing a week – but start.

As soon as this lands in Australia, I’ll have more video guides for you – as always, drop me a line to let me know which videos you’d like to see & I’ll do my very best to help

 

 

 

iGoogle launches today & already it’s live here in Australia.

If you’re not yet using this service, I highly recommend you check it out. Just go to the Google in your country & look for the link that says ‘Personalised Home’ top right.

If you’re new to the service, click the ‘Add stuff’ link & go crazy. I’ve found that, for me, the best use is to add all of my regular blogs to the home page – now I can see at a glance when Seth Godin or Matt Cutts posts another great article.

If you’ve been using this for a while, you’ll see there aren’t huge noticable differences in the home page’s appearance (we need an Aussie theme!). However, the lovely Google folk have made it super easy to create your own Home page Gadgets!

So I’m looking for suggestions… Tell me what gadget you’d like & I’ll go & build (or have built!) the best one that’s either AdWords or Analytics related. So get those thinking caps on & get writing!

 

It’s been a very interesting (very busy) experience and dozens of people now understand AdWords a bit better and, thanks to some great folk, I’ve learnt a lot about eBay.

What does this mean to you?

I was amazed to see that maybe just 5% of these smart people were using any kind of Analytics. And even those (I think it’s fair to say) aren’t using it to it’s fullest potential.

So what should you do?

If you own your own site, install google analytics (or any other analytics program) today. If this is all you do today, go do it now – then take the day off.

Now use it!
Use to find out how people use your site.
Use it to find out which of your products are most popular
Find out how long people stay on each page
And which pages they hate & leave as soon as they get there
You can find out which country your visitors are in & which language they prefer
And of course you can find more technical information – like screen resolutions – which is wonderful when you get around to that particular to-do & redesign your site.

Optional extra – watch the Google Analytics Tutorials on this site to learn all the ins & outs of this powerful, free tool.

How can you use Google Analytics to make more money?

Simple. Do more of what works & less of what doesn’t.

Use the 80/20 rule to your advantage. Improve your strengths even more & cut out the really weak areas. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.

Sounds so easy I know… but most people do the opposite. They spend all their time trying to make the crappy bits look better & figure the good bits are good enough.

Wrong!

Make the good into great. And turn the great into outstanding!

You’ll increase your income & profits by a factor of, well, lots. You’ll stop trying to be all things to all people, and your site will get further & further ahead of your competition, and you’ll start to dominate your niche.