Learning how to install Google Analytics is easy for most site owners.  It will involve getting an account with Google, and then knowing how to place some code on your website or blog.  Before you install Google Analytics, you should be aware of a couple of things:

1.  Google Analytics tracks visitors on your site, what they’re clicking on, and how they are interacting with your site.  While all of the data is anonymous, you might want to include a blurb in your Privacy Policy page that you are tracking visitors, or cookie-ing them for other things.

2.  Google Analytics will not slow down your page, or affect your SEO.  Google Analytics now has what’s called “asynchronous” code which actually goes at the top of your page in the header, instead of the footer like it did previously.  The asynchronous code allows Google to pass itself data on another “highway” that is separate from everyone/everything else.  This actually speeds up your page load time.

3.  Google Analytics is quite powerful, and does need to be modified “out-of-the-box” for peak performance.  For example, one of the first things you probably want to do is to exclude yourself and your office/company from the visitor log data.  This can inflate traffic for sites with low volume.

Installing Google Analytics:

Step 1 – create your account at www.google.com/analytics

Step 2 – set up your website – pretty easy so far

Step 3 -who is signing up for this and where do you live?  Also easy so far…

Step 4 – Accept the user agreement (you don’t need a screenshot for this, right?)

Step 5 – Add your tracking code

Notes:

1 – This is really neat, but GA will now allow you to track multiple sub-domains.  Before it was a real pain to track visitors from blog.yoursite.com over to yoursite.com.  Now, thanks to the asyncronous code, it’s gotten easier.  You will still need to do cross-domain tracking if it’s going to a completely different root domain all together.

2 – This is also a neat feature if you are engaged in a bunch of online marketing.  Google will keep track of all of the URL parameters that get passed over on banner ads, as well as tying in your Google AdWords account automatically.

3 – An advanced set of features here, but GA is getting better at tracking dynamic content (content that changes on the page, but the URL does not – makes it a challenge for page tracking software to tally up) with things like Event Tracking.

4 – Simply copy this code and paste it into your HEAD section of your site.  This is different than previously, when you would put it in the footer.  If you are using WordPress, place this code in the header.php file, or you can always download the Google Analytics plugin and give them your UA-XXXXXX number.

How To Install Google Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is a short post on how you can see the full referring url in one report in Google Analytics (GA).

The problem:

Just a quick background for people who haven’t run into this issue yet.

If you want to segment by source in GA; the referring url is cut at the domain. Which means if you got a referral from http://news.ycombinator.com/a-great-post/ you would see it in the source as http://news.ycombinator.com/. And if you have multiple urls from the same domain we cannot see which page it come from because it will be truncated at the domain.

The solution:

The solution here is to create a filter which will put all the complete referring urls in a user defined report. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to your filter settings and create a new filter

2. Select Filter type ‘Custom Filter’ and then ‘Advanced’

3. In field A- Extract A select ‘Referral’ and in the text box type ‘(.*)’. This essentially selects the entire referring url.

4. Leave field B-Extract B as it is

5. In Output to – Constructor select ‘User Defined’ and in the text box type in $A1. This will take the complete referral of field A (denoted by $A1) and put it in a user defined report.

6. Leave the rest of the settings as they are. Which means Field A required should be selected as ‘Yes’, Field B required as ‘No’, Override output field as ‘No’ and Case Sensitive as ‘No’.

After you are done it should look something like this:

Where do you see the results:

Under Visitors goto User defined and voila! You can now see a report with the referring urls

Hack: How to See The Entire Referral URL in Google Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?”  Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that.  In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”

We’re a startup too, and we know you want to be a “traffic whore.”  That’s fine – we are too – hell, we’ll link bait anything to get 2o more visits.  But as much as you want to be a traffic whore, you need to be an analytics whore too.

In fact, we like analytics so much, it’s in our name – and we have the tools to boot. (yes, that’s a photo of my iPhone…so many analytics tools I had to create a whole folder for it).  So we’re going to show you a few tools and techniques to get you to that next board meeting so you can put on a rockstar performance!

Tools

Google Analytics (Analytics Pro) - this should go without saying, but everyone should have Google Analytics running in their site.  It’s free for chrissake.

Clicky - I run Clicky because I love the Spy feature where you can see who is on your site right now and what they are clicking on.  Yeah, it’ll freak people out.

Chartbeat – this isn’t a traditional page analysis tool. This is about what’s going on right now.  It shows you people who are currently on your site, the pages they are looking at, and the average page load time.  This is cool for when you finally hit TechCrunch or Hacker News and you want to see the traffic spike real-time.  Chartbeat is different from Clicky’s Spy feature because Chartbeat keeps track of active and inactive tabs that have your page open, so you can now see who’s actively reading (or not). On Clicky Spy, once they leave the tab (even if it’s still open), the live visitor count decreases.

Floorboard – this is our home-grown reporting engine.  We also do a lot of cookie and session tracking, so I can track the behavior of account holders (like how often they log in, what they do when they log in), or the time it takes from the minute they hit the site, until they sign up for an account.  Sometimes the data out of the database is more reliable than javascript trackers.  Build one for yourself – if you need some help, let us know.  There was also that great video from Mike McDerment over at Freshbooks on “Flight Systems”.

Pear Analytics - this is our SEO tool made for the iPhone.  (Sorry, you can’t get it anymore off of iTunes because we’re going to make a waaaay better one soon.)  Until then, you can use this free seo analysis tool.

KISS Insights (not shown) - you’re going to need a page level survey to ask people what they think about your tool or service.  KISS gets a really high response rate, so you’ll get data very quickly that you can use in your next board meeting.

CrazyEgg – this is a heatmap tool that will show you the “hotspots” on your webpage.  Are people clicking where you want them to?  The results may surprise you. (And yes, I am pimping Hiten Shah a bit here with all of his tools, but hey – they guy is doing something right.)

Userfly – this is super cheap usability testing.  They record the mouse movements of random visitors to your site.  Are they doing what you want them to do?  Did they see that forward to a friend button?  Still a little clunky on ajax and javascript stuff, but totally worth the ten bucks or whatever it is.

Update 8/24/10 - thanks to Dan Martell for tweeting this post out – I totally forgot to add Flowtown to this list of must-have tools.  Flowtown basically pulls a social profile on any email you have.  So if you have a freemium product that asks for an email to signup, they will cross-reference the emails and find out who’s on any social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), along with some basic demographics, AND who the influencers are.  Now for you advanced users, try overlaying this data with the user behavior data in your database.  Now you’re cooking

Techniques

Okay, now you have a shitload of tools – what do you do with them all?

1.  Set up goals - both Clicky and Google Analytics have the ability to set up goals – or conversion places – or places where people do the things you want them to.  This could be fill out a form, subscribe, or sign up.  For Pear, it’s those who come and run a free report with our product.  Now you can tell which traffic sources are converting the most.

2.  Take the time to add the proper tracking codes to your marketing activities - Google Analytics has a way to read special URL parameters so the data goes into the right place into the reports.  If you’re running a banner ad on Mashable, don’t tell them to link to just www.yoursite.com.  Append the URL like this:

www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=mashable&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=125x125a&utm_campaign=startups

Now you know which banners work the best, which campaign, which source, etc.  You can even play with banner copy and calls-to-action now.  Cool, right?  If you need help building that URL, go here to the Google URL builder tool.

3.  Build funnels for all of your activities – what you want to know is where people drop off during the process you take them through to sign up, pay you, or whatever it is you want from them.  If you are using the DaveMcClure AARRR concept (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) – with the exception of Referral, that’s your funnel.  Make pretty little graphs for your board meeting too, like the ones below, for every marketing activity.  If it’s hard to get some of the data, that because it is sometimes.  Don’t whimp out.  If you want, you can also try KISS Metrics to do a pretty schnazzy funnel analysis.

4.  Segment, segment, segment – Google Analytics made the advanced segmentation module just for you.  Want to know out of all of your new visitors, how many went to page X AND page Y?  Create a segment.  Or maybe you want to know how many visitors stayed at least 2 minutes, AND visited at least 2 pages (one of Dave’s acquisition examples).  See how we segmented our top performing organic keywords using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics together.

5.  Test, test, test – you want to be split testing your copy, landing pages and anything that gets a user to try your tool, or ultimately pay for it.  You might have to test different pricing structures, or even test certain features with cohorts of users.  You want to develop your code in a way where it is “test friendly” too….Rails has a plugin called “A/Bingo” made by the guy who invented the Bingo Card Creator.  There may be others out there, but in case there aren’t, you can try Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce.

6.  Know your CPL, and if you have a paywall, know your CPA – your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) is a great way to measure what marketing activities are working and which are not.  Without doing this exercise, you may be tempted to stay with the cheaper form of marketing, even though it performs the worst.  Now what should your CPA be?  That’s up to you and your board to decide, and probably will be based loosely on what you know about the Lifetime Value of your typical customer or subscriber.  Your CPL, however, should never really exceed about 15% of the CPA limit.  That means if your CPA limit is $10 (you’re willing to spend $10 to acquire a paying customer), then you should see what marketing activities are giving you leads at $1.50 or less.

Wow!  Now you can go back to the boardroom with some real insights and data to make decisions!  And that’s what your investors want – they want to know what you learned from your experiments in trying to find a repeatable, scalable business model.  We’re by no means the experts here, but if we can help you, please reach out to me – ryan at pearanalytics dot com.  Oh, also be sure to read Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Startups: Get All The Analytics You Can is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is an instructional post for advanced use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to uncover insights about organic keywords driving traffic to your website.  It’s a bit long, but bear with me – the results will be valuable to you

If you’ve been using Google Analytics, then you might be familiar with all of the new changes in the past year, like asynchronous code, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and much more.  Equally, Google has been making quite a few upgrades to Webmaster Tools as well.  They now show you things like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, links to your site, and now search queries.

We’re going to show you how to combine the search query data from Webmaster Tools and conversion data from Analytics to uncover which of your organic keywords are performing the best, and how to determine which keywords you should focus on ranking higher.

Step 1 – log into your Webmaster Tools account.  If you don’t have one, you’ll need to sign up and paste a meta tag on your site to identify yourself.  Once logged in, go to “Your site on the web > Search queries.”  You should see a screen like the one below. (Click on any image to enlarge it).

This table is showing you all of the search queries that are driving clicks to your website.  Much like paid search, you see Impressions (number of times Google showed your listing in the SERPs), Clicks (self-explanatory), CTR (click-through rate) and the Average Position.  Sort the data by the CTR column first.  This shows you your most successful keywords where folks are most likely to click on your listing.  You can even select the “+” next to the keyword and see which pages are being listed in the SERP (search engine results page).

Step 2 – favorite your top keywords by highest CTR first.  You can also favorite words that have an Average Position between 1 and 10, since these are words you rank on the first page for.  What you are really interested in here is the number of Impressions for each word.  You’ll want to use the data from Google Analytics to see how many visits you are getting from this word to determine the CTR, which is going to vary from Webmaster Tools (WMT).

Step 3 – now go into your Google Analytics account and get a keyword report by going to “Traffic Sources > Keywords.”  Be sure the date range selected is the same as  what was selected in Webmaster Tools (very important!).  Now you can see how many visits each keyword has brought to the site.  Your keyword list should come close to the list you sorted in WMT.

Step 4- determine the goal you have set for your website.  It could be a goal you set, or even a particular page that was viewed.  For Pear, we’re interested in any new visitors who came through on a particular organic search term (like “free seo analysis”) AND ran a free report (which means they viewed the /free-seo-report/* page).  Now I just went in and set up an Advanced Segment to figure this out

Now we know the following information:

• How many impressions for “free seo analysis” from WMT;
• The average ranking for “free seo analysis”
• how many new visits we received from “free seo analysis”
• how many of those visitors did what we wanted them to, which is run a free report

I can also take it one step further, and actually see how many visitors who find our site from a particular keyword, actually come BACK and engage with us further.  That’s pretty valuable, because now I can really figure out which keywords I want to put time and energy into to rank higher, and drive more traffic from.  So I create a simple funnel analysis for each of my Top 10 keywords, like this:

With this information, I can do several things to improve the CTR, or on-page conversions, such as:

• make sure my title tag and meta description are in line with the keywords I’m targeting.  Maybe they are not stimulated by the wording to click on our listing?
• dynamically generate the H1 tag on the home page to match the keywords the user searched for.  So if they searched for “free website seo analysis”, my H1 changes to that when they reach the target landing page.
• I can test and modify the page to get the user to analyze their site.  That’s why we removed the email and sign up requirement.

Now you are empowered to go and do this for your website!  Your first try at this may take you the better part of an afternoon, but you can set up some automation to get the data easier next time (i.e. favorites in WMT, advanced segments in Analytics, etc.)

Mashup: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics Provide Powerful Insights is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

We’ve been using the heck out of the annotation feature in Google Analytics, and here’s why: because we can correlate traffic to activity.

For the most part, it’s going to be your marketing activities. But it could be things like you were on vacation from date A to date B, and maybe that’s why your traffic went down. Or maybe your server was down on Friday morning, and that’s why your traffic came to a screeching halt.

I’ve also been annotating when we send emails out to our user base as well, even though MailChimp does a good job of tying into Google Analytics – I’d rather just roll over the note on the graph, rather than have to pinpoint the date range, and then go and look at the Visitor Sources.

To add a note, simply roll over the date you wish to add a note to, and then click the “Create new annotation.” It’s quite simple. Other folks who have access to your account can also add notes, and it will track who said what.  While it does allow you to add multiple notes on a single date, it does not allow you to create a note over a date range.  Bummer.  That would be useful if for instance you did a direct mail drop over a 3 or 4 day period, right?  Maybe they’ll add that later, but for now you just have to hack it by putting a note for “direct mail start” and another note for “direct mail end” or something like that.

Either way, it’s a pretty cool feature, if I do say so myself.

Why You Should Use the Annotation Feature in Google Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

I’m real big on measurement. And I mean BIG. Without data, you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure, you have no real insights to your business as to what marketing is working for you, and what’s not.

Whether you are spending a small fortune on marketing and advertising, or nothing at all, I’m going to show you 5 cost-effective ways to get more insights from your prospects and your customers to help grow your sales.

1. Web Traffic
If you are not looking at the traffic that visits your website, you should start today (that’s an order!). We can debate if you should use a server-based solution such as AWStats, or a javascript-based solution, such as Google Analytics, but that’s another blog post. I am going to recommend 2 products to you that are both javascript-based, and let you decide.

Google Analytics – this is a FREE but very powerful tool. You can literally install Google Analytics in less than five minutes, and start collecting data. You can segment your visitors, say comparing paid traffic to organic traffic, or traffic from one city to another. Their advanced segmentation and motion chart features are fantastic, but take a bit of wizardry to completely understand how they work.

Clicky – this is a paid tool, but does have a FREE limited version. Clicky offers real-time data, iPhone accessibility, and a “spy” tool where you can see what visitors are doing on your website in real-time. But primarily, Clicky is very easy to use.

I like to make the analogy that Google Analytics is like buying a bike in a box that you have to take home and assemble, where Clicky is already assembled and ready to ride.

Now, if you don’t have enough traffic coming to your site to measure, well, that’s another problem, and you’re going to need to run this FREE Website Analyzer to determine why you can’t be found on search engines.

2. Task Completion Rate
So now you have some analytics on your site. What are you looking for in all of those wonderful looking Google Analytics, or Clicky dashboards? You’re probably getting excited with “average time on site”, or “average this”, or “average that”. Beware of averages – they lie! While the dashboards are nice, they tell you little about what the visitor did, and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. So while we do have “conversion rates”, I would like to stress the importance of “task completion rates”, or the ability for a visitor to actually complete the task they set out to do. This can easily uncover some usability issues with your site.

I highly recommend using a FREE site-level survey called the 4Q. Four simple questions that measures how they liked the website from 1-10, the purpose of their visit, if they were able to complete their task or not, and an open ended comment.

3. Customer Leads and Sales
How do you currently track your lead pipeline? Do you know what your close ratio is? I just saw customer service guru Jack Daley speak, and he spouted some interesting data. If you contact a lead 2 times, you have a 5% probability of making a sale. If you contact a lead 12 times or more, you have an 80% probability of making a sale. The real eye-opener is that the majority of sales folks were contacting leads much less than 12 times, and in fact, the percentage that do is single digit.

Secondly, you need to be able to track every lead, the source of the lead, and if they converted to a sale. If you knew this, then you can start to compare quality of leads, such as do your paid search leads close faster than word-of-mouth leads? Or, do leads from direct mail result in a higher gross sale than newspaper ads?

The good news is that there are some tools to help you along. What you need is a simple CRM (Client Relationship Management) System. If you want to use a web application, try Zoho for FREE, or as little as $12 per month. Then there is Sugar CRM, the open source platform that you can download and configure on your own server. The app is FREE, but you will likely need to pay for a Sugar developer to get the tool working the way you want – unless their out-of-the-box solution fits your needs. Lastly, you could always try Salesforce.com, which has some great features like being able to link to your Google AdWords campaigns. The tool is relatively affordable when you start off, but if you are keeping tons of data, then it can get expensive.

4. Email Campaigns
I sure hope you are not trying to email hundreds of people a promo through your Outlook, Entourage or Mozilla email client. If you are, STOP! I have some better tools for you to try:

Constant Contact – you may have heard of these guys, since they have probably been around the longest. Surprisingly, they are not ahead of the curve when it comes to features compared to some other competitors. Their big thing is that they have an affiliate program. Big whoop. You need sales, not puny commissions of some email marketing tool. CC will charge you by the size of your list, and not by how many emails you send out.

Mail Chimp – these guys have tons of great information on how to properly set up and send an email to your prospects with all kinds of white papers and instructions. They even provide opt-in forms for your website that are completely customizable. Sending your first email is a bit of a hassle since they want to know exactly where you got your emails from, so expect about a 3-day wait to send your first email since they have to approve it.

Campaign Monitor – these guys have some neat features such as checking your email against over 20 mail clients so you can see what it will look like before you send it out. It will even convert a web-page to and HTML email if you want, and will even integrate into your Google Analytics account. They are also strict on the first email sent out. If you get more than a 0.02% complaint rate, they will disable your account. Pricing with them is a bit different. It’s $5 per email, plus $0.01 per recipient.

5. Net Promoter Score
This is undoubtedly the most important question you can ask your customer: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The score is from 0 to 10, where 9′s and 10′s are your “promoters”, 7′s and 8′s are your “passives”, and the rest are your “detractors”. You can read the book “The Ultimate Question” by Fred Reichheld for more information on how to apply this.

So there you have it – 5 ways to start measuring some things that will improve your marketing performance, and that won’t break the bank.

5 Ways a Small Business Can Improve Marketing Performance Through Measurement is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

Below is a video tutorial of an example of how you can correlate offline media efforts to web traffic, and essentially understand the effectiveness of your offline media.

I use Clicky Web Analytics to help measure the the effectiveness of offline media because it can track visitors down to the street level. All of the other analytics tools I have used only go to the city level. (caveat: this isn’t exact, so don’t knocking on people’s doors or anything! Use this for relative measure of density in areas of a city).

How can marketers use this data? Well, I can drop a direct mail piece and a few days later see if I have a concentration of visitors in the neighborhoods the piece was dropped. You can do the same thing with billboards as well, although it may be more beneficial to place the boards in the areas with the most concentration (or least if you are after brand awareness). This could even work great for a nation-wide television campaign, to where you could follow-up with direct response marketing to the areas with the highest concentration of visitors.

Anyway, watch this short video and if you’re not already using this tool, get Clicky!

How To Track The Effectiveness of Your Offline Media is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.