Google Analytics has a new feature called ‘Flow Visualization’ to help you understand how people navigate your website. You can see Flow Visualization within the Visitors and Conversion reports. It allows you to see navigation paths on a dynamic chart.
Here is an example of the Flow Visualization report and its components:
What are nodes? Nodes can represent two things:
1. The first column is a dimension that allows you to analyze how particular types of visitors navigate through your website e.g. selecting ‘Country’ shows you navigation paths for your visitors by country, selecting ‘Source’ show navigation paths for how visitors found your website.
2. To the right of the first column are the nodes which show single pages or groups of pages users have viewed within your website.
What are connections?
The connections (between the nodes) represent the navigation paths users have followed. The size of these connections is relative which means you can compare traffic volume for particular navigation paths at a glance.
Visitors Flow
The Visitors Flow report shows the different paths visitors take to navigate your website. If you have used the Navigation Summary Feature in Google Analytics and didn’t have the level of detail you required, you will like Flow Visualization because it shows all your visitor flow paths beyond the individual page.
The Flow Visualization chart is interactive; allowing you to highlight different navigation paths to see flow for those sections without losing sight of the overall navigation picture.
The Flow Visualization chart also displays percentages of traffic traveling between pages as well as raw numbers. This was not possible in the Navigation Summary report. Now you can see the actual number of visitors dropping off at particular points!
Goal Flow
Goal Flow is fantastic! You can apply Advanced Segments to visitor conversion paths. This was not possible with the standard Funnel Visualization report. Goal Flow allows you to apply the default Advanced Segments and your own Custom Segments to understand how particular segments of traffic navigate through your Conversion steps.
The one thing missing from the Goal Flow report is the ability to scroll horizontally. This means if you are looking at the report on a smaller screen for example, you have to use the arrows to navigate left and right which makes it difficult to see the entire flow chart.
Stay tuned for our second post on the new Flow Visualization feature! Get ready for more details and insights into using the Visitor Flow and Goal Flow reports.
You can now integrate Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics to access Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reports. These reports give you additional insights to improve your search engine rankings in Google.
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with information about how your website is performing in organic (free) search results on Google. This is important for SEO because you can see the number of times your website shows in results (impressions) along with clicks, giving you an indication of how relevant your website is in relation to what people are searching for.
1. Navigate to the 'Search Engine Optimization' reports under 'Traffic Sources'
2. Click on any of the report options ('Queries', 'Landing Pages' or 'Geographical Summary')
You will see the following message if you are linking the tools for the first time (please note you need to be an administrator in order to link the tools);
3. Click on the 'Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing' button
4. You will now be taken to the 'Edit Web Property Settings' page
5. Click 'Edit' under 'Webmaster Tools Settings'
6. Select the website (within Google Webmaster Tools) that you want to link to Google Analytics and click 'Save'.
7. You will be taken back to the 'Web Property Settings' tab in Google Analytics. If you would like to apply the data to additional profiles you can select them here and click the 'Apply' button.
You will now be able to access your SEO reports inside Google Analytics.
Google Analytics has added live reporting with Real-Time reports. The new reports provide a real-time view of visitors accessing your website. The data is available within 2 seconds of a visitor accessing your site.
If there is an increase in active visitors on site the ‘Right now’ number goes up and is highlighted in green. If there is a decrease the ‘Right now’ number goes down and is highlighted in pink.
Understanding the Real-Time Graph
The right hand side of the graph above (highlighted by orange border) shows the current 60 seconds of pageview activity on your website in real-time. As time passes the historical pageview activity slides left in the graph.
Pageview activity for the current 60 seconds is also shown cumulatively like a fuel tank gauge in the area of the graph above (highlighted by red border). The bar in this area of the graph moves up or down with the pageview activity as the seconds tick by. As each minute is completed the bar slides to the left and the process is repeated.
Real-Time Traffic Sources
The Real-Time Traffic Sources report gives you a snapshot of how your active visitors have found your site. This gives you an immediate picture of your paid and organic search. It also shows you which campaigns have driven visitors enabling you to act on emerging and trending channels such as Twitter, other social networks and news sites.
Real-Time Content
The Real-Time Content report shows you which pages are currently being viewed by your active visitors. You can drill down into a particular page to see traffic Medium and Source showing you how people found your website in order to access your content.
Using Real-Time Reports in Google Analytics
Now that we have access to live visitor data inside Google Analytics, what can we use this for?
For most of us Real-Time reports are going to be a great way to kill some time. The reports are definitely addictive but it is going to be extremely hard to act on this data to make meaningful changes to the majority of websites.
However there are definitely important opportunities for you to act on these reports. If for example you are generating news or topical content you can use the Real-Time data to modify the timing of the placement of content to ensure it is viewed by visitors.
Another huge plus of these reports (that we can all enjoy) is the ability to check your tracking code is correctly installed on your website. You no longer have to wait hours for the data to process before you can check your reports to see if a particular page is being tracked correctly.
The reports also provide a great real-time reality check. You can see immediately if visitors are only staying on your website for a short time. This really highlights the need to ensure content on your website is relevant and engaging.
How are you going to use Real-Time reports? Please let us know, add your thoughts in the comments or on our Twitter or Facebook pages. The most interesting comments and ways of applying the Real-Time reports will receive a gift of Google merchandise!
Google recently announced the introduction of Social Engagement reports in Google Analytics. The new reports allow you to see Google +1 metrics along with other types of social sharing actions that are occurring on your website.
Google +1 social engagement interactions are automatically tracked by default in Google Analytics. However, as you might know most websites use social button actions from other suppliers such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and LinkedIn. That's why Google has provided a social plugin that allows us to track these additional social interactions.
By tracking social interactions in Google Analytics and using the Social Engagement reports you can gain more insights into your visitors' behaviour.
The Social Engagement reports enable you to:
1. Compare visitor engagement metrics such as visits per page, time on site and bounce rate between your socially engage visitors and your regular (not socially engaged) website visitors.
2. Analyse goal conversion rate and percentage of e-commerce transactions generated by socially engaged visits.
3. Determine which social sources are preferred by your visitors. For example, most of your users might share your content via Twitter, rather than Facebook.
4. Compare which actions are the most common for a particular source. For example, users that are social engaged using Facebook; do they use the 'like' or 'send' option more often.
5. Calculate the percentage of socially engaged visits that reached the site through a social media link and then converted.
6. Identify which content on your site is the most shared using the social actions and in which part (page) of your website these actions took place.
Most of you have been using event tracking to track social engagement interactions such as 'like', 'tweet' and 'send', among others. The method to track social interactions has a similar syntax to event tracking. The following is an example of the event method and how it should be changed using the track social method.
This tracking should occur once the social interaction is completed. It is important to differentiate between social engagement actions and clicks on links that drive people to your social media sites. A link to your Twitter profile from your website should continue being measured as an outbound link while a piece of your content being Tweeted should be tracked as a social engagement action.
This is one of the most common questions we get asked and also one of the hardest to answer. There are a lot of factors in determining how much you should be spending on your Google AdWords and I'm going to discuss a few of them here.
Setting Your Daily Budget
If you have absolutely no idea where to begin the Google traffic estimator is a good place to start. Once you have your keywords you can plug them in to the traffic estimator and Google will give you an estimate for position, volume of clicks and total daily ad spend for a bid that you provide (you can play around with a few different bids here to get an idea of how much difference the bids will make).
Disclaimer: The traffic estimator is definitely not 100% accurate and should only be used as a rough outline for where to set your daily budget limit for your campaigns.
How Much Should I Bid?
It is extremely easy to lose money on AdWords if your bidding isn't well thought through. The most important thing to figure out is how much you are making from your different keywords and use this to guide your bids. To find out the maximum bid that is still profitable you will need to know the conversion rate of the keywords and the profit per sale.
If you're running a brand new campaign then you will need to use an estimate for your conversion rate and come back to the calculation when you have some data.
Taking the example of a shop owner selling goods online, there are some very important metrics to know before we can answer the question on how much to bid:
Conversion rate = sales / clicks (How many of your clicks turn into actual sales?) Profit per sale = average order size x profit margin
Armed with this information we can now figure out the maximum price we can pay per click and not be losing money:
Max bid = conversion rate x profit per sale
Time for an example....
Looking at the conversion tracking data from my campaigns I can see that 4% of my clicks are becoming sales. My average order value is $150 and there's a 25% margin on my products.
Max CPC = 4% (conversion rate) x$150 (average order value) x25% (margin) Max CPC = $1.50
The most I can spend per click and not be losing money is $1.50.
Total Profit
In the example above, if I pay $1.50 per click I will break even on my AdWords campaign. This is not exactly ideal and the only one you'll be making happy would be Google!
The less you pay per click the higher your profit per click will be but profit per click is not what we want to maximise - we want to maximise the total profit of the account.
If I pay $0.05 per click I will receive a huge profit per click but the chances are I'm not going to be getting many clicks. To find the highest total profit we need to be balancing the profit per click with the volume of clicks the campaigns are generating.
Given the number of factors involved in this balance (quality score, bid price, cpc, conversion rate, position, Google's algorithm) it is not possible to give a perfect answer.
This problem becomes more complicated when we start to factor in the fact that my conversion rate is different across different keywords. What if my shop sells a wide variety of different products all with different profit margins?
Here it starts to get complex and unfortunately there is no simple way to manage accounts like this. Time is needed to set this up but that doesn't mean it should be ignored! Setting AdWords campaigns with the ability to measure the total profit at keyword/product level means that you will be increasing your ROI and you'll be able to blow your competition out of the water!
Tweak Your Bids
The answer is tweaking your bids and ensure you bid below $1.50. I would suggest starting with a bid at 50% of your maximum and measure the results. So if we were to bid $0.75 we know we are not going to be breaking even, but we are likely to receive a steady amount of traffic to the website.
From here we can begin to look at conversions for individual keywords and even start to modify bids based on the conversion rate of individual keywords. The best way to get started it to setup AdWords conversion tracking or import your Google Analytics goals.
A Channel is a particular Source and Medium combination in Google Analytics. You need to understand this before you can use Multi-Channel Funnels correctly.
Examples of Channels include:
Google / CPC: your traffic coming from paid searches on Google
Bing / Organic: your traffic coming from free searches on Bing
Newsletter / Email: your traffic coming from your email newsletter campaign
Advertising / Offline: your traffic coming from your print ads
Website / Referral: your traffic coming from links on other websites
You can navigate to your All Traffic Sources report (under 'Traffic Sources'). Each row will represent a channel that will potentially be displayed in your Multi-Channel Funnels reports.
Think of a Channel as a defined marketing initiative that you can use to drive leads, sales or brand awareness.
Types of Attribution
Attribution = Who or What Gets Credit for a Conversion
There are different ways to attribute conversions to your individual marketing initiatives. There are three forms of attribution:
The most common form of attribution is last click attribution where the last method of accessing your website is attributed the credit for the conversion.
First click attribution where the first method of accessing your site is attributed the credit for the conversion.
Multi-touch (or multi-attribution) where we look at the different ways people access your site before converting.
A scale or attribution model can also be applied in order to give more credit to the last method and sometimes first method of accessing your site.
Multi-Channel Funnels: The Reports
Overview Report
This report provides a summary of total conversions for each Channel and the number of Assisted Conversions. Assisted Conversions are conversions where a visitor did not convert the first time they accessed your site but came back to your site via another source/medium and then converted.
By default you will be viewing all your goal conversions but you can also select individual goals.
Multi-Channel Mix
Multi-Channel Mix in the overview report allows you to select different Channels to see which Channels work in combination with one another. You can select particular Channels to see the overlap to see which combinations achieve the most conversions.
Assisted Conversions
By default the Assisted Conversions report shows you the number of Assisted Conversions compared to last interaction conversions. By comparing Assisted to Last Interaction you can see if a particular Channel performed better by influencing or closing conversions.
Google has also introduced a new metric called Assisted / Last Interaction Conversions (the last column on the right) which is a ratio comparing Assisted to Last Interaction conversions. A figure above 1.5 indicates the channel is better at Assisting and a figure approaching 0 indicates the Channel is better at closing conversions.
You can also use the same report to compare First Interaction Conversions to Last Interaction Conversions. Just click 'First Interaction Analysis' at the top of the report. You will now see which Channels are converting the first time somebody visits your site – the number of visitors converting immediately after accessing your site via a particular Channel.
You will notice the ratio is now called First / Last Interaction Conversions. A figure above 1.5 indicates the Channel is better at converting on the first visit to your site. A figure approaching 0 indicates the Channel will require visitors to come back again before they are likely to convert.
Ways to View Channels
So far we have looked at Source/Medium as a Channel, but you also have the option of just viewing the Source or the Medium. So rather than seeing different rows for organic traffic from Google, Bing and Yahoo, you can select ‘Medium’ and they will be aggregated together as one row called organic.
Another option is to view Channels by keywords, campaign names and AdWords metrics, including matched search query, campaign, ad group and placement URL.
There is also the option to group Channels. This allows you to combine Channels to simplify your reports. Selecting ‘Default Traffic Groups’ will give you aggregated groups such as: organic search, email, paid advertising, direct, referral, social network, etc.
Default Traffic Groups allows you to quickly see and assess methods of accessing your site overall. You can also define your own Custom Channel Groups for example if you wanted to compare your offline and online campaigns or compare your search advertising to your display advertising.
Define your own Custom Channel Groups:
View your Custom Channel Groups in reports:
Top Conversion Paths
This report shows you the different ways people access your site that lead to conversions and provides insights into the Channel Paths (sequence of interactions) visitors use prior to converting. You can see the total conversions for each path and the dollar value associated with the conversion.
There are also other ways to view the Channels, you can for example select ‘Source Path’ and 'Medium Path' or you can use your own Channel Groups as noted previously.
Time Lag
This report shows you how long it took people to convert, for example;
0 Days = they came to your site and converted on the same day
1 Day = they came to your site and the next day they converted
2 Days = they came to your site and converted 2 days later
etc.
The Time Lag report also provides a comparison of conversions to Conversion Value. You might for example see some Time Frames where more visitors convert but for a lower value or vice versa.
Multi-Channel Funnels including the Time Lag report work on data for the last 30 days leading to a visitor’s conversion. This means if someone visits your site in January, then comes back in March and converts, the original channel from January will not be shown in the report. In this case only the Channel for March will be counted.
Path Length
This report allows you to quickly see how many conversions resulted from one or more Channel Interactions. So you can see whether visitors require Multiple Channels to convert or if they convert after accessing your site via a single Channel.
You can also see the conversion value and the difference between the two, just like in the Time Lag report.
In Conclusion
Multi-Channel Funnels are a major advance in understanding the effect and interactions of your different marketing initiatives.
It is important to be aware that these reports only provide insights for conversions. You must have goals or e-commerce tracking set up in order to take advantage of the reports. You will not be able to use Multi-Channel Funnels for interactions when people do not convert.
The reports do not include View-Through Conversions that is available within AdWords. If a someone sees your Ad but does not click on it they will not be included in these reports.
It is also important to remember that the data you see is only for the last 30 days prior to the conversion. Hopefully this will increase in the future.
The Google Analytics team recently announced Multi-Channel Funnels which has been released as a limited pilot to a small number of Google Analytics accounts. As Google Analytics Certified Partners we have been testing the new reports but Google has asked us to point out they do not have any plans and have not given us a timeline for a full launch of the reports.
Once you are tracking conversions or e-commerce transactions in Google Analytics, one of the main problems is understanding how to attribute a conversions or sale to more than one source and medium.
Google Analytics has used last click attribution, which means that actions and conversions are credited to the last method of accessing your site.
For example;
Somebody performs a search on Google and clicks on your organic (free) search result. A few days later they access your site again, but this time they came via another website (partner.com) and then they convert.
The credit for the conversion goes to the last method of accessing your site, in this example the credit goes to the website and not the original search on Google.
Multi-Attribution Funnels in Google Analytics aim to solve this problem by presenting us with the complete view of the ways people are finding our site before they convert.
Example continued;
Taking our previous example, if we were to look at the same scenario using Multi-Channel Funnels we will see that the visitor did convert after coming via the other website (partner.com), but we will also be able to look back and also see that the original search on Google did in-fact contribute to the conversion.
This means we now have multi-attribution and can begin to see the impacts and cross-effects of our different marketing campaigns (or channels) on our conversions.
One of the new multi-attribution reports (called 'Top Conversion Paths');
