Optimize Engagement using AddThis and ShareThis with Analytics

Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this year we introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with any social plugin installed on your site - after all, what can be measured can also be improved and optimized!

MilkADeal started using Google Analytics earlier this year. It is a company in Malaysia that has benefited greatly from using Social Plugin Analytics. By using these new reports, they are able to uncover insights and create significant business process improvements. As reported in the New Straits Times, "In particular, the newly introduced social interaction tracking tool...We've been using it only in the last couple of weeks but we have seen an increase of almost 60% in social interaction visitors to our site," said Wilson Quah, founder of MilkADeal."

By optimizing the instrumentation of a few buttons on their site, MilkADeal is able to achieve better engagement, a big boost in number of high quality referrals, and better outcomes! Today, we are happy to announce that our partners, AddThis and ShareThis, are making this social plugin analysis even easier. Just as the +1 button is automatically instrumented for you by the Google+ team, publishers using AddThis and ShareThis will now have first class integrations with Social Plugin Analytics!

“Providing real-time analytics to 10 million domains each month, we see what big data can do every day. Integrating AddThis social signals into Google Analytics is a big win for publishers. We’re excited to contribute social sharing insight where it can be viewed in context of the GA interface.”

Will Meyer, VP of Publisher Products, Clearspring

“At ShareThis, we work to provide our publisher network of one million+ websites with actionable analytics on their social activity. It's great to see Google paving the way for the entire industry to derive meaningful insights from the social Web and we're incredibly pleased to be a launch partner."

Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!

Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team

Update: AddToAny users will also be happy to know that their social buttons are automatically instrumented to work with event tracking and social plugin analytics!

Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics for everyone

Back in June, we announced a pilot program to allow users to surface Google Search data in Google Analytics by linking their Webmaster Tools accounts. We’ve been busy making some improvements and tweaks based on user feedback, and today we’re excited to make this set of reports available to all users.

The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results. We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section. The reports you’ll find there are:

• Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
• Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
• Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

Queries report

To start using the reports you first need to link your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts. You can get step by step instructions and additional information on the reports in this Help Center article. If you’re not already using Webmaster Tools, we highly recommend you start. It’s a free tool that helps you understand how Google sees your site. Sign up on the Google Webmaster Tools homepage. Enjoy the new reports, and let us know how they’re helping your analysis.


Posted by Kate Cushing, Associate Product Manager, Google Analytics team

It’s now easier to set up Google Analytics Site Search tracking for your Custom Search Engine

Cross-posted from the Google Custom Search blog

Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it.  You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation.  In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging, but we’re happy to announce that now we’ve made it easy to setup Site Search tracking directly from your Custom Search Engine.

If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu. We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.

Once you save your changes, we’ll generate a new code snippet.  Copy it from the Get Code page, paste it into your site and setup is complete!

You can then access Site Search reports from the Content section of Google Analytics.

Happy analyzing!  If needed, you can find help with setup here and an explanation of the differences between Google Analytics and Custom Search statistics here. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by Zhong Wang, Software Engineer

+1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Cross-posted from the AdSense and Google Webmaster blogs.

It’s been a busy week for us here at the Googleplex. First we released +1 buttons to Google search sites globally, then we announced the beginning of the Google+ project.

The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.

But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.

First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
• The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
• Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.

Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.

Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.

• The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
• The Social Actions report lets you analyse the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
• The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.

Over the next few days (and if you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code), if you’ve added +1 buttons to your site we’ll automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

UPDATE: 7/8/11 5:30pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Posted by Dan Rodney, Software Engineer

Google Instant and Google Analytics

Today, we announced the launch of Google Instant, a new Google.com interface that shows relevant results while the user types. This exciting new search interface applies to both search results and related ads. We expect Google Instant will help users find what they’re looking for faster. With this change, you might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and in the distribution of organic keywords. For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward.

To read more about how this change affects AdWords advertisers, please visit the Inside AdWords Blog. Users of Webmaster Tools should also see their post about Google Instant.

Update at 5:10pm PST: Clarified that you may see a change in the distribution of traffic of organic keywords.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Coradiant/Urchin Analytics In A Box Launched

Urchin analytics software has a long tradition of integrating with other software/hardware platforms, and today we are pleased to announce the latest such collaboration: Coradiant's new Analytics In A Box (AIB). AIB is an appliance that sits behind your firewall, passively collecting web traffic data via a packet-sniffing technique. This gives you the option of reducing your reliance on page tags, as Coradiant's system collects traffic data in an independent way. Log file headaches are also gone for good, which will be music to the ears of any sysadmin!

AIB uses a modified version of Urchin 6, in conjunction with Coradiant's complementary technologies to give you new ways to look at both your web traffic AND the performance of your site/server.

From Coradiant's press release:

"Analytics In A Box provides a comprehensive view into customer Web site interaction, and insights into online conversion outcomes. Analytics capabilities are substantially enhanced through access to a richer data model and customizable reporting solutions. A complete set of dashboards for executive consumption, as well as access to granular data allows deeper insights into marketing optimization, site performance, content optimization, conversion behavior and navigational analysis."

Please see Coradiant's site for more information.




Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Software Manager

Bagging the Conversion Elephant

In reading an Occam’s Razor blog post from earlier this year, “Aggregation of Marginal Gains: Recession Busting Analytics!," I noted that Avinash is discussing exactly the same experience we at FutureNow underwent. Ten years ago, low hanging fruit in the conversion improvement space meant high traffic, high impact changes from fixing obviously-wrong calls to action: bad linking, non-obvious next steps, poor UI (user interface).

In fact, for several years conversion improvement was all about UI. Remember that? The theory was (mostly from the UI people, of course), that if you just improved the UI then conversion would follow. What we found out was that if you had a weak UI then of course fixing it would help... but only so far. When it worked you got big fireworks-busting improvements, but only at a singular point in the sales process.

A few years after that it was analytics. If you simply measure everything, then (wave hands here, sprinkle magical pixie dust) you’ll “just know” what to do to improve. If you want to improve more well then just “measure more” — get more analytics apps installed. Or buy more expensive ones.

In the last year or so, the buzz word technique seems to be testing. If you just test everything then somewhere, somehow you’ll know what helps conversion. And when I say “everything”, I mean “EVERYTHING.” Testing is great — in fact, I wrote a best-selling book on this very topic, "Always Be Testing", centered specifically on Google Website Optimizer — but if there’s a bee on your grandmother’s nose, do you honestly have to do a test to determine whether to swat it away? Yet, some companies out there imply to clients they should freeze like a deer caught in the headlights unless and until they have a test to back up every decision made. And if you don’t have enough traffic for the test to be valid just drive more traffic, any traffic, even if precision comes at the cost of accuracy. It's lunacy. No thanks, m’am, that bee on Granny gets swatted and I don’t need 95% statistical confidence to make that decision.

Each time the industry thinks it’s got the elephant in its sights, that five-ton peanut-eater slips away. I think it’s because everyone keeps chasing technology as the solution to pachyderm-sized conversion improvement. If you install the right mix of digital toys, then whamo you’re sure to be the next market leader in your space. Again with the pixie dust.

But it just doesn’t work that way. What we’ve learned is that the big wins come from a long series of small wins, accumulated over time. And small wins come from experienced insight and hard work. And it has to be the type of hard work that a company is willing and able to perform. Not pie-in-the-sky goals without any mechanism for implementing.

I'd recommend focusing less on "big projects" and more on iteration. At FutureNow we did just that, re-tooling our entire business model around this "OnTarget" concept, letting clients decide how many resources they have to devote to improvement in a current cycle, and delivering experienced recommendations specifically for that cycle, and using analytics tools to measure the improvement and testing tools to back up any conclusions. "Rinse and repeat". How do you eat the conversion elephant? One small bite at a time. Exactly what Avinash was speaking about.

Posted by John Quarto-vonTivadar of FutureNow, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Track Yahoo! Search Marketing Campaigns and More with Urchin 6.6

On Monday June 8, we released Urchin 6.6, a significant upgrade to our "run-it-yourself" web analytics package. This release brings some serious enterprise-level heft to the table, and also advances Urchin's marketing-analysis capabilities in a big way.

New Search Marketing Reports and Tools

Chief among Urchin's new report-side features is the Performance Comparison report. Finally you can compare the performance of your Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) campaigns side-by-side... Yes, this means you can tap into the Yahoo! API and import your YSM campaigns automatically!

With Urchin 6.6, you can easily compare campaigns, keywords, etc., from different search engines.

There's more. Here's a breakdown of the new CPC-management tools and reports in Urchin 6.6:

• YSM integration: Download your YSM campaign data via the Yahoo API.
• Deep links into AdWords: Provide your login credentials and Urchin lets you jump directly from CPC reports to related management screens in your AdWords account.
  
• Budget Alerts: If your AdWords campaigns are in danger of exhausting available funds, Urchin will tell you.
• Keyword Generation Tool: Add keywords to your AdWords campaigns directly from Urchin.
• Copy Campaign Tool: Duplicate existing CPC campaigns (for example, YSM campaigns) as new AdWords campaigns.
• Tag Manager: Automates your keyword destination-URL building, a big timesaver.
• New reports: Time on Site, Performance Comparison, CPC Structure, and more!

Urchin's new Keyword Generator Tool helps you identify promising keywords and add them to your AdWords campaign, all within Urchin!

It doesn't stop here. We've also taken a close look at how Urchin plays with other other systems in your organization. Which brings us to...

New Enterprise/IT Capabilities

Urchin has long been appreciated by web-hosting companies and enterprises for robust performance and integration flexibility. Urchin 6.6 adds key features that make it even better.

• LDAP integration: Use your existing corporate authentication with Urchin, including LDAP, MSAD, etc.
• Data API: Pull your Urchin report data into a CRM tool or any other system. (See the Urchin Data API documentation.)
• Rollup Report: A new Urchin "home" page shows each user a list of all profiles to which they have access, with summary metrics for each profile.
  
• Process Control: Kill a running Urchin log-processing job gracefully, without corrupting the database.
• Urchin 5 to Urchin 6 Migration Utility: Haven't upgraded from Urchin 5 yet? Our new data-migration utility is much faster and less prone to errors.

Urchin's new process control functions allow you to cancel jobs without worry.

Urchin 6.6 is available now as a full-featured 30-day demo from our download servers and licenses can be purchased from any of our Authorized Consultants for US$2995. Check it out!

Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Team

Marketing Optimization with Google Analytics

Improve ROI from Shopping Comparison Sites

These days, I'm getting a lot of clients who want to increase their ROI on referral site campaigns. We'll explore this topic by talking specifically about shopping comparison sites. The same techniques are generally applicable to all kinds of referring sites. My goal is to help you track and identify the referring sites that bring you quality traffic and generate more business and profit.

We'll explore:

• How to identify shopping comparison sites in Google Analytics reports.
• How to assess revenue generated by each of the sites.
• How to export your Google Analytics data and merge it with cost data.
• How to analyze to identify winners and fix under performers.

Identify Shopping Comparison Sites in Google Analytics Reports

To identify the sites in question, check with your marketing team and get a list of all the shopping comparison sites you use. This sounds like an easy step, but sometimes it takes a lot of back and forth with your marketing team to get the complete list. In this list, you should see some common names such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, DealNews, and Shopping.com. There might be other sites that are not as common but may be applicable to your vertical, so look for those too. You could also include other sites in this analysis such as Yahoo! Shopping if you have your products listed there.

Let's get started!

Say your site gets traffic from NexTag, BizRate, Shopping.com, and Yahoo! Shopping. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources, click on Referring sites, and then use this inline filter to quickly look at the sites you want to analyze:

You can examine time on site, bounce rates, and other readily available metrics.

If you like to review this report frequently, and you should if you are spending a lot of money on these sites, you can create an advanced segment with "Referral" as the medium and then list your comparison sites as the sources.

Assess Revenue Generated by Each of the Sites

In the same Traffic Sources/Referring Sites area, you can next click on the Ecommerce tab and get a full picture of revenue and conversion rates.

In this report, and for this specific site, you'll see that although NexTag generates a lot of visits, its conversion rate, 1% is less than half of BizRate which is 2.32%. You can also see that shopping.com did very well with a conversion rate of 2.94%. Traffic from shopping.com seems to outperform the rest as it has the highest conversion rate and also the highest average order value.

So far these reports are very helpful in providing easy access to how each source is performing and the revenue it is generating.

There is still one thing that is missing though - cost data! There is a cost in bringing these visits to the site, and what if the cost of listing our products on these shopping sites is higher than the revenue being generated? I would think that a ninja analyst as well as a novice analyst would definitely want to include cost data and ROI in their reports. After all, you are in business to make money, not just to improve conversion rates!

Export your Google Analytics Data and Merge it With Shopping Sites Cost Data

For now, Google Analytics doesn't allow importing cost data into its reports (except for Adwords), so we will export the GA data and merge it with the shopping sites cost data in a spreadsheet.

Step 1: In the above report (Traffic Sources/Referring Sites, with your sites filtered), click on the "Export" button, choose the CSV format, and save the file

Step 2: Get your cost data from your respective shopping comparison sites.

Step 3: Using Excel or a Google spreadsheet, open the CSV file and, insert your cost data, and run your ROI calculation

For our analysis below, the client has indicated that to make money (profitably) they can't afford to spend more than 25% of their revenue on advertising. So we created the Return on Ad Spend table below taking into account the client provided business metrics. (you can view this table at the following link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pkrS9PTOkmimeBKiGJ3oZMQ)

Analyze to Identify Winners and Fix Under Performers

• It is clear from the table above which sites are profitable, namely sites#2 and #4. Both had a less than 25% of Ad Spend/Revenue ratio.
• It is also clear that the site with the highest conversion rate, site#1, might not be profitable at all!
• What actions can be taken?
• See how you can get more of the high quality traffic from sites#2 and #4.
• Immediately investigate site#1's traffic because it is a top spender with an unacceptable ad spend ratio.
• Once you are done with the above, start examining the other under-performing sites.
• You can also look into average order value and create a different ROI baseline it. Maybe it is OK to spend more on advertisements for sites that bring a higher average order value.
• What could be causing such bad return on sites#1 and #3?
• Mismatch between product listed on the shopping site and product listed on your landing page.
• Mismatch in pricing: you advertise one price on the shopping site and when visitors come to your site, they find a higher price.
• Ineffective bidding strategy: you are paying too much for clicks on your listed products.
• Site related issues such as slow load time.
  
• Seasonality. For example, I'm sure Christmas ornaments aren't hot sellers in the peak of summer.
  

A few other comments:

• When analyzing sales/conversion/ROI, ensure that you have all data elements included. For example, if your online business allows for phone orders, you then would want to ensure that phone order revenue and cost data are all appropriately attributed to their original sources. This is much easier said than done but there is tremendous value in doing it!
  
• Averages often don't tell the complete picture, so digging deeper into the data of each site and its categories is likely to reveal even better insights.
• The above analysis is done for a one-time period. You would want to trend this data daily, weekly and/or monthly and watch for external factors as well. For example, a weak economy is likely to have a negative impact on sales across the board.

To summarize:

1. Look for opportunities to get more out of what you are spending. Don't let your comparison shopping site ad spend be set on auto-pilot.
2. Track and analyze on-site metrics including revenue by referring site.
3. Take one more step: merge your cost data and run your ROI calculations to find what is profitable and what is not.
4. Act on your findings!

Related Posts

• Grouping of Referring Sites in Google Analytics
• Tracking E-Commerce with Google Analytics Video
  

Posted by Feras Alhlou of E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Using Google Analytics to Create an Optimization Plan

Let’s face it, your website is never really finished. Testing pages is an inexpensive way to manage a constantly shifting audience and market. It's great for:

1. Increasing ROI on your advertising
2. Teaching you about the likes and dislikes of your customers
3. Trying out alternatives used by competitors
4. Breaking down preconceptions about what works
   
5. Convincing a stubborn boss to try something new

What and where to test?

So where do you start? First you need a goal. What do you want users on your site to do? Complete a form, buy something, sign up for a newsletter? Without a goal, it's difficult to optimize, so you should be sure to define one if you haven't already.

Once you have a goal, you can use Google Analytics to identify those pages that are having the biggest negative impact on the total number of people "converting," or achieving that goal. These are the pages to test.

Top landing pages report

(Content > Top Landing Pages)

This report gives you instant insight into how well (or poorly) your landing pages are performing. You want to find pages that have both high "entrances" and a high "bounce rate." These pages are costing you a lot of visitors.

Goal visualization report

(Goals > Funnel Visualization)

The funnel visualization in Google Analytics shows you where people leave during your buying process. For example, the below report shows that 40% of the 200 potential buyers left during "Step X" in the checkout process. Average order value is $100. This means the merchant is losing up to $8,000 in revenue every month due to "Step X."

Exit pages

(Content > Top Exit Pages)

With this report, you should look for pages that are designed to sell, but have high exit rates. Using the top content report, I see that my product pages have a 35% exit rate. These pages are supposed to persuade potential customers to add products to the shopping cart, so they would be good candidates for optimization.

Having looked at these reports, there's a fair chance you've found high-impact pages that perform below average. If not, you can take a look at the "top content" report and pick a few pages that see a lot of traffic, but are poorly designed or out-of-date.

Setting up a test with Google Website Optimizer

Google has a free tool to test you pages called Google Website Optimizer. Find out more here .

Here are a few tips for using Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics together:

1. Make sure you get to see your variances in Google Analytics.

In the case of an A/B test this is relatively easy. Tag your variances with the GA code snippet and perhaps give them a unique name. For a multivariate test this requires a little bit of technical knowledge; you have add a little bit of code to your test page. You’ll find the instructions here.

2. Make a filter to exclude your test data from your other profiles
3. Create an extra profile where you only measure your test pages
4. Create Advanced Segments and extra goals in your testing profile relevant to the test. This lets you evaluate the test outcome on different visitor segments.
   

Other Resources

• GWO Techie Guide
• Website Optimizer Blog
• Website Optimizer YouTube Channel
  

Have another resource? Add a comment!

Posted by Tim Bakker and Janco Klijnstra of Traffic4u, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Tips and Tools for Expanding Keywords Lists

You can use Google Analytics to find the best keywords and shift budget to the highest converting keywords, but what if you're looking to expand your keyword lists? In this post, we are going to look at how you can leverage other free Google tools to optimize your marketing campaigns beyond Google Analytics.

1) Take a look at the best performing keywords from your Google Analytics Keyword Report.

2) Input these keywords, along with your site's URL, into the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords not currently in your AdWords campaign. Suggestions from this tool are particularly useful because they're specific to the site and keywords you define, and are based on actual, past Google queries.

3) For each keyword identified, you can then use Google Insights for Search -- a tool that allows you to see trends in what the world is searching for -- to see where regional interest is highest and better optimize through geotargeting.

You can also enter your top-performing keywords from Google Analytics directly into Google Insights for Search to identify the top-related and rising searches. This can help you expand your keyword lists and keep them current by staying abreast of related search trends.

These are just a few examples of how you can capitalize on the many Google tools available for improving your website ROI, so start expanding and optimizing your possibilities today!

Posted by Lauren Usui, Insights for Search Team

Urchin 6.5 is now available

After months of intensive development, we are excited to announce the release of Urchin 6.5, which contains a much asked-for new feature: AdWords integration. That's right -- Urchin can now automatically pull your AdWords cost-per-click data and integrate it into your reports, giving you the same kind of powerful search marketing analysis found in Google Analytics. No more manual downloading and processing!

How does it work?

Simple. Log in to Urchin 6.5, enter your AdWords account information and save it. Urchin will tap into the AdWords API on a daily basis, process your data, and build your reports. The cost data and ROI metrics you need to optimize your AdWords spend will be ready in Urchin anytime you need them.

Anything else new about Urchin 6.5?

Yes, there are lots of new features and bug fixes. Among these, Urchin 6.5 features improved geo-database functions, a improved configuration-manager utility, and updated Help Center articles. Urchin 6.5 also recognizes the latest browsers and platforms like Chrome and Android.

How do I get it?

As always, Urchin is exclusively licensed through our network of authorized distributors. The software itself, which can be run in demo-mode for up to 30 days, is available at www.urchin.com.

So, what is Urchin, again?

For those of you who grew up on Google Analytics (so to speak), Urchin is the run-it-yourself software-based version from which Google Analytics was originally born. The products are not identical, but are similar in scope and function. The primary differences are (1) Urchin runs on your own servers, so you keep all your data in-house, and (2) Urchin is not free -- it costs US$2995, which includes reporting for up to 1000 domains.

What's in Urchin's future?

More exciting features and an improved user interface, plus more ways to analyze your search engine marketing data. Stay tuned!

Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Team

Analytics, AdWords, and Big Spenders

In the spirit of the holidays, we would like to offer tips on how to increase visibility into your e-commerce performance and your advertising spend using Google Analytics. For many, seasonality influences purchasing decisions and affects business revenues. Analytics can help keep a close eye on your advertising spend and e-commerce trends to run a cost conscious business.

We recommend 3 simple methods captured in the videos below. You can find these videos and more on the new Google Analytics Youtube Channel.

1. Use Google Analytics to track your e-commerce activity. As an e-commerce site, you likely want to know who is visiting your site and the goods they are purchasing. By enabling E-commerce tracking on your site, Google Analytics will provide vital metrics including overall revenue, revenue per product, average transaction amount, and more.

Coupled with our Motion Charts feature, you can easily see how the the products trend over time by various dimensions including: revenue, quantity, and average price.

2. Identify your high spenders to better target your website promotions and ad spend. With additional information on ROI for keywords and spending trends, you can focus your efforts on the traffic you care about the most.

3. Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to track ROI, Revenue per Click, campaign and keywords performance. Added benefits include drilling down to the ad campaign, ad group, and keyword levels for goals conversions and e-commerce transactions.

And don't forget, even a few minutes a day with Google Analytics can help your website.

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

How do I actually use Analytics to optimize AdWords?

Google Analytics is full of insights that can benefit your AdWords account, and your business. To help you make the most of this information, we've started an introductory video series called “Google Analytics in 60 Seconds.” The first two videos explain two easy ways to refine your targeting. You can find them below and as part of the Google Analytics Conversion University playlist.

Location, Location, Location
Now, you no longer are flying blind when you target your campaign by location in AdWords. Use the Map Overlay report and location data within Analytics to see, geographically, where your visitors are coming from – or where they aren’t coming from. You can then use this information to refine your AdWords marketing with location-targeted campaigns to build your business.




Note: You can also use the recently launched Geographic Performance report within AdWords to see similar information, but it currently does not have a visual component nor includes some of the metrics available in Analytics, such as time on site and bounce rate.


Improve Your Placement Targeting
The Google content network is the largest contextual advertising network in the world, comprised of high-quality websites, news pages, and blogs that partner with Google to display targeted AdWords ads. And within AdWords, you can hand-pick which sites you'd like your ads to run on by creating a placement-targeted campaign. But how do you know which sites to pick? If you knew which sites were already sending you high value traffic, why not run your ads on these sites? This video will show you how to use Google Analytics to identify the best sites by using the Referring Sites report.




More to come!
There are a number of easy and effective ways to use Google Analytics with AdWords – whether you want to identify the best keywords, save money on bidding, expand your business or refine your campaigns – and we’ll post more of these videos soon!

Posted by Stephanie Hsu, Google Analytics Team

Practitioner Post: Adwords Auto-Tagging and URL Redirects

Recently, I watched all 5 seasons of Angel on DVD, and now I'm watching all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I realize that I'm going backwards, but I just had to know Angel's back story.) If you've watched the shows, you know that the character Angel starts off as one thing and ends up as something completely different.

URL redirects are like Angel in this respect; they start off as one thing and end up as something else. In the process, Adwords auto-tagging (the "gclid") frequently gets "slain". Let's look at how we can address the resulting reporting problems.

First, a quick review of the back story.

Adwords auto-tagging makes it possible for you to see Adwords information in your Google Analytics reports without manually tagging each keyword. You simply enable auto-tagging in your Adwords account. The auto-tagging option is located on the My Account tab, on the Account Preferences page (click image to enlarge):


If you select this option, Adwords automatically appends a "gclid" parameter to your destination URLs:

www.example.com/?gclid=123xyz

If you already have query parameters in your URL, it will look something like this:

www.example.com/?param=a&gclid=123xyz

(Note that in the first example, "gclid" is preceded by a "?" and in the second example, it is preceded by a "&". Remember this distinction because it will be important later on.)

What if you're also using a third-party tracking system such as DoubleClick, or your destination URL redirects to a second or even third URL before Adwords users arrive on your site? Will the gclid be retained or get slain?

That depends on the tracking system or behavior of your redirects. This is a very important question to address before you enable auto-tagging.

Some redirects strip the gclid. While Google Analytics still records the visit and the subsequent user activity, it doesn't have the information necessary to properly attribute the visit to your Google ad. As a result, some of this traffic will be included in the "direct" category while other visits may show up as "not set". Furthermore, your Adwords Campaigns report in Google Analytics may show cost metrics, but your visits columns may show zeros (click image to enlarge):


Ugh! Can you prevent this from happening?

Absolutely! Performing a simple test before you enable auto-tagging will ensure that you receive valuable information on your Google campaign performance. Here are the steps for two URL scenarios:

Scenario 1
If your destination URL has no query parameters and looks something like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/:

1. Paste this URL in your browser's address bar, but before you press Enter, append "?gclid=test" to the end, like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/?gclid=test.
   
   
2. Now press Enter.
   
   
3. If the gclid is present on the final landing page URL, you're golden. If not, keep reading to learn about your alternatives.

Scenario 2
If your destination URL already has query parameters and looks something like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/?param=a&param2=b:

1. Paste this URL in your browser's address bar and before pressing Enter, append "&gclid=test" to the end, like this: www.i_will_redirect_you.com/?param=a&param2=b&gclid=test.
   
   (This is why the "?" and the "&" distinction were important to note earlier. It's a matter of URL syntax. Luckily, auto-tagging knows the difference.)
   
   
2. Press Enter.
   
   
3. If the gclid is still there, you're in good shape, and need only to enable auto-tagging. If not, what are your options? Read on.

If the gclid is not retained during your test, you're not out of luck. Here are a couple of suggestions:

Suggestion 1. Ask your friendly admins or third-party contact to please configure their servers to pass the gclid. If you're not sure what this means, don't worry, your server admin does. It's like repeating something in a foreign language you don't speak. If your pronunciation is good, a native speaker will understand you and all will be perfecto!

Suggestion 2. If suggestion 1 isn't possible, you'll need to manually tag your destination URLs instead of enabling auto-tagging. (This is one of the very few circumstances in which you should manually tag destination URLs in AdWords.)

The best way to get started with manual tagging is to use the online URL Builder. You'll need to fill in your landing page URL and fill in the campaign name, source, medium, and term (keyword). Then, press "Generate URL" and you'll have a URL that will correctly report campaign information to Google Analytics.

You probably already know how to use this tool based on an earlier post we made, but here is an example followed by step-by-step instructions on a recommended way to use i:


Step 1. Put the final landing page URL in the Website URL field. The reasoning behind this is that since the gclid is stripped by the redirects, the manual tags will most likely be stripped as well. In our example above, www.example.com is the URL to which Adwords users are redirected.

Step 2. Fill in each of the additional fields as follows:

• Campaign Source: "google" in lower case
  
  
• Campaign Medium: "cpc" for cost-per-click campaigns or "cpm" for our cost-per-impression campaign model
  
  
• Campaign Term: fill in your AdWords keyword
  
  
• Campaign Content: if tagging your keywords individually, leave this field BLANK. If you're only tracking Google ad unit performance, as in the case of running a campaign that is running exclusively on our content network, fill in an ad unit identifier, such as a text ad's headline or the name you've given your display ads.
  
  
• Campaign Name: this is the name of the campaign you've set up in the Google ad system. Assuming you've linked your Google Analytics and Adwords accounts, it is important to type in the campaign name exactly as it appears in our ad system. Otherwise, the Clicks tab of the Adwords Campaigns report in Google Analytics will have multiple entries for the same campaign. Cost information such as impressions and clicks will be listed next to the campaigns that are running in our ad system, while visit information will be listed next to the campaign names you've typed into the URL Builder, and that would just be confusing!
  

When you generate the URL, you will end up with something like this, personalized with your keyword and campaign, etc.:

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=keyword&utm_campaign=Adwords%2BCampaign%2BA

Once a person clicks on an ad and finishes her journey through the land of redirects, she'll see the URL above in their address bar. Also, in the case of third-party redirects, this is the URL you'll want to send to your vendor to convert into tracking tags.

If you're running a campaign with many keywords, here's a helpful tip: Only use the URL Builder for the first URL. Then, use Excel's handy "concatenation" function to create an Excel worksheet that generates the rest automatically.

Even if your campaigns are free of redirects, it's still a good idea to test for auto-tagging compatibility before enabling it. You may still need to have that cryptic conversation with your server admins about "configuring the server to pass the gclid." In any case, never use auto-tagging and manual tagging in the same Adwords account. Even though your users won't be affected, your Google Analytics reports will not be accurate and you'll spend more time trying to make sense of the numbers than optimizing your Google campaigns.

As always, happy tracking! And now back to Buffy…

Posted by James Tipton, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics and Ad Planner

Since the announcements of Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner last week, we've gotten lots of interest from agencies and advertisers excited about the opportunity to expand their media plans to sites that they might have overlooked before. But we've also noticed some confusion as to how Google Analytics data might be used in those products, and we'd like to clear that up.

Google Analytics doesn't share individual, site-level information with Google Trends for Websites or Google Ad Planner. These products gather data from multiple sources, then check the data against anonymous, aggregate, industry benchmarking data within Google Analytics. This helps Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner calibrate category data and correct for under- or over-reporting in certain verticals. The benchmarking data comes from Google Analytics customers who've chosen to share their data in aggregate (see our earlier blog post).

Your data confidentiality is important to us, and we're committed to preserving your trust in us.

You can check out Google Trends for Websites for yourself here or sign up for the Google Ad Planner beta here. More information is available on the Trends for Websites Help page and on the Google Ad Planner Help Center.

Posted by Brett Crosby, Google Analytics Team