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If your small business relies on local consumers to survive, here’s 3 things you can do to better understand your customers by utilizing Google Analytics on your website.
So you’re a small local business, struggling to get foot traffic in the door, and even more so, struggling to understand what is bringing in the customers you DO get. You’ve hired a web designer, or built a small website yourself. Maybe you’ve outsourced some Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or read some blog posts on it and played around a bit yourself.
It’s Tuesday afternoon. The store is empty, and you have a little time to focus on growing the business. Here’s three things you can do that will help you grow your local business short term AND long term.
Google Analytics for Local Small Business
Free and effective, Google Analytics is step one to understanding what might be bringing people to your front door. Go sign up for it, install it, and let it do it’s thing. It takes a little bit for it to collect a meaningful amount of data, especially if your website is receiving low traffic, but the insights you will gain into your small business will be plentiful if you’re patient.
If you require assistance, we can help: Contact Small Business Analytics Consulting.
Now that that’s done, and we’re waiting for data, what do we do now?
Segment Your Local Web Traffic
How far do you think people are willing to drive to come see you? If you can answer that question, you can create a Custom Segment in Google Analytics that allows you to view web visitors from just those areas. If it’s an entire State, you use the Region parameter. If you live in a larger state, you can pick out specific cities and towns near your store using the City parameter.
The importance of this is twofold.
1.) You can answer the question: “If I get 50 people on my new website a day, why isn’t my brick and mortar store traffic picking up?” By utilizing the segment filtering, you might find that most of those 50 web visitors live way outside your service/shopping area. Then it’s time to go talk to your SEO about localizing your website.
2.) You can find out what local people are searching for. If all of your local traffic is for a few certain key terms, you can make some determinations about which of your products and services SHOULD be the most popular with people walking in the door. That helps you plan inventory levels, and as a small business owner, you know EXACTLY how important that is.
Set Up Email Reports in Google Analytics
Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve installed Google Analytics, and we’ve set up one segment (and please do more! It’s a sandbox, you’re not going to hurt anything). And as the days go on, we’re collecting good, actionable data. One problem remains though. Someone needs to, you know, look at it.
Sometimes all of our best intentions simply aren’t enough to keep us on task. Sometimes we forget to log into Google Analytics for a few weeks. Or a month. Or longer.
So how do we assure we look at our web data at timely intervals?
My recommendation is to pick 3 reports that mean something to you, and have them emailed from Google on a morning every week that you know you have time. If Tuesdays are tortuously slow, pick Tuesdays. If you like Sunday AM’s for learning something new, then Sunday it is.
Yes, I know. You don’t always open your email either. But with the email reports sitting there every week nagging you, you’re bound to look more frequently. And that’s important.
A Brief B2B Social Media Survey
I’m curious as to what the “general feeling” is amongst B2B marketers and social media, so I’ve come up with a brief survey: B2B Social Media Survey.
If you would all be so kind as to forward this to anyone you know in a B2B marketing position, I would be forever grateful.
Of course, I will be sharing results here on the blog.
Thanks as always!
Web Analytics, when set up and segmented correctly, can provide critical data across entire organizations. Are you taking more from your numbers than just marketing results?
I got reading some comments posted on Avinash Kaushik’s blog (5 + 4 Actionable Tips To Kick Web Data Analysis Up A Notch, Or Two
Read more: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/07/actionable-tips-web-data-metrics-analysis.html#ixzz0vBPW59Xg), and it really got me thinking about how I perceive web analytics as far as scope and need.
I think I’ve been pigeon holing analytics usefulness to determining the value of an AdWords campaign, or that of a Twitter conversation, or our SEO efforts. At the end of the day, web analytics can be useful to an entire organization. Let’s have a look:
Using Web Analytics to Gauge Customer Service Load
Every once in a while, your organization might sell a bum product. It just happens. We can expect then that we’re going to get bombarded with inquiries as to how to fix the product, install the product, or return the product (GASP!).
Perhaps it might be wise to set up a segment of folks that searched for that product on your website, or maybe got into your FAQ section and looked at data regarding the product. Over time, we’ll be able to see trends, perhaps timelines from point of purchase to failure, or maybe as simple as understanding how many of your customers are struggling with the product in one way or another.
Then, we can pull in external data from Facebook or Twitter, and see if the overall reaction to it is negative.
Do you need to beef up your call center this weekend? Do you need to send out a letter (remember those?) or email to people who have bought the product recently?
Even if we don’t have a specific product we need to be concerned about, we can still gauge trends in views of our FAQ’s, Return Policy pages, or Contact Us forms. We can gain insight into what our Call Centers, electronic customer service, or shipping and receiving departments might be experiencing in the coming weeks.
Web Analytics and the IT Department
….or, in many cases, your IT guy.
As businesses grow, websites grow. Infrastructure grows. And overhead grows. Perhaps we can use a combination of our own web analytics and some external sources to help our IT departments prepare for an onslaught of seasonal web traffic. Or an increased demand for a video or PDF download.
If you’ve been tracking your website for several years, you’ll understand some of the seasonality of your products. You can share this data with accounting, purchasing, IT and others to help prepare them for increased workload, purchasing requests, or cash flow. (Yeah… maybe even less cash flow, depending…)
But if you’re website is new, or you just installed web analytics recently, you don’t have access to that.
Enter Google Insights.
Google Insights offers a historical look at searches over time. Enter your search term (Widgets, in our case. All imaginary companies sell some kind of widget.), and Google will let you know it’s popularity (scaled against ALL searches) and it’s hot times of year.
Key things to consider:
- Is your product set rising or waning in the eyes of searchers?
- Do your products have a seasonality that you aren’t taking advantage of?
- Add some colors/sizes to your Insight queries. Are you carrying the right ones?
That will help everyone, from purchasing to IT. We get to use GOOD data in order to forecast.
Takeaways
I hope we learn to utilize our data to forecast more than just sales. While sales are the lifeblood of any organization, the backbone (customer service and operations) requires our support as well.
As I mentioned in my comment on Avinash’s blog, marketers effect EVERY aspect of an organization. By looking deeper into the numbers, we can recognize that impact, and be better internal customers.
Missing your Audience with Twitter
Maybe it has something to do with our desire to be appreciated and accepted.
Or, maybe Twitter just gives us the opportunity to make our web traffic grow, and we utilize it to do that. Regardless of our purpose with our websites. We just want the eyeballs.
Level Analytics is essentially targeting small businesses in need of assistance with their web analytics. At least, that’s my stated goal when I wake up each morning. I want to be in front of small businesses, perhaps having them contact me for consultation, Google Analytics set up… whatever.
And yet whenever I create a new blog post, and tweet about it, I tend to use the#measure hashtag. The only possible outcome of that is drawing attention from other web analysts. It’s not drawing in my core audience at all.
So, what’s the purpose? Why do I try to attract what, at the end of the day, is my competition as well as colleagues?
We Need to Feel Accepted
Short of driving the goals I have set up, which is lead generation and some affiliate marketing, it must be that I want kudos. We all do. We look at the success of an Avinash, or a KISSmetrics and how they use Twitter, and we think “Hey! I can do that”. You might also note that at that level of success, hashtags aren’t important to them anymore, but I digress…
So when I feel like I’m not grabbing my core audience, I try to grab the low hanging fruit. And it makes the web stats LOOK better….. but….
Bad Hashtags Give Bad Web Stats
Being a new site (roughly 6 months), my stats are pretty low. I don’t see a ton of page views every day. And what I’m finding is that the page views I am getting aren’t mostly from the people I want to be getting them from.
So maybe Avinash is having a slow day and he drops in. So what? I’m not looking for a job, and he’s not likely to learn much here.
So I’ve given him a bad experience perhaps. And he’s put a notch in my analytics bedpost. +1 visit. I haven’t accomplished anything though. He’s not likely to need my services professionally, and it’s likely he’s seen all the ads running here. There aren’t too many small business web analytics products he’s not aware of.
And my ads are meant for my CORE AUDIENCE. Not him. Not most other web analysts either. They’re meant for small business people.
I might end up with 200 visits from Twitter this month. And if they’re all web analysts, I’ve failed on my stated mission. And I’m going to see a lower conversion rate than it really is. If only 20 visits are from actual perspective customers, than I would have to multiply my conversion rate times 5.
In Conclusion
I’m going to re-think my Twittering. I need to find better hashtags, and really seek out my core audience.
Right after this post. Because this one is totally getting #measure. It might even get an @avinashkaushik.
When you get here, please say something nice below, so I can feel validated, and then get on with the work of growing my core audience. I know they’re out there. I’ve just been Fail Whale Missing on Twitter is all.
Piwik: Going for the Goals
I finally got around to installing Piwik on this blog. I’m a hardcore Google Analytics user, so I had to be beat over the head with a crow bar to try something else that’s “full function”. Especially since it requires installing server side software.
Anyways, it installed easily, and I immediately began setting up goals.
My strategy here was to use Piwik slightly differently than I use Google Analytics. I decided I would focus on the Affiliate Marketing/Revenue generating portion of the site, as opposed to Newsletter sign Ups or Request Information. So here’s the first two goals I set up:
These are new goals, so there are no conversions yet (as you can see). They essentially track clicks on my Adsense ads and Shareasale ads. In the future, I’ll detail how to set these goals up to work for you.
The big disadvantage I see over Google Analytics currently is the inability to segment visitors. I love to use segmenting to get a detailed look at specific sets of visitors. Since I’m running both Piwik and Google Analytics now, I still have that data available to me. If however I wanted to move away from GA completely, I’d have a hard time living without Custom Segments.
The interface in Piwik is intuitive, and easy to digest. It works in real time (with the use of your “Reload” browser button), so it’s theoretically a replacement for Woopra if I wanted to do away with that.
The Big Advantage of Piwik over Google Analytics
There seems to be two kinds of webmasters in this world. Those who hate Google, and those that love them. With Piwik, you’re hiding conversion and search data from Google (kind of*). Since all the data is stored in a SQL (MySql) database on a server of your own choosing, you have hard core access to it. And Google doesn’t.
While I don’t necessarily think that the Google haters are “tin foil hatters”, I’ve always operated under the assumption that Google has many, many ways to collect that data, even if I’m not overtly giving it to them. So I don’t buy into the anti-Google Analytics argument.
However, there are plenty of folks that do. And Piwik is a great solution for them.
Google Webmaster Tools will tell you flat out if your meta title and description writing is making you or breaking you.
If you’re using Google Analytics, you might as well sign up for a Google Webmaster account as well. Amongst the advantages are easy submission of an XML or RSS sitemap, page load speed data, and the topic of this blog post: Data on effectiveness of your website metatags.
In the image below, I show examples from my kayak fishing blog. It should be noted that I’ve been very busy this year, so I haven’t been fishing much, and as a result not posting to the blog all that much. So I’ve taken some SEO hits.
At the same time, the data in the image clearly shows the following:
1.) The number of times my pages have come up in Google search results (SERPs) in the last 30 days.
2.) The keywords that are generating the most impressions.
3.) The number of times that Google users have clicked on my pages in the SERPs.
Here’s the data:
Now, if you had to guess which of my pages had the best meta title and descriptions, what would you go with? Clearly, the CTR (click through rate) for “niagara escarpment” and “freshwater kayak fishing” are the best. Both of them get clicked through over 14% of the time when a searcher sees them on Google search pages.
So that’s a good place to start. But what pages are winning those visitors for me? For that, we have to drill down with the + next to the keyword. Here’s what we find:
For “niagara escarpment”, we see that a blog post I did about the formation of the Great Lakes is the one that pops for that keyword. The second listing there is for a map image of the escarpment. So likely that one is coming from Google Image search.
Depending on your vertical, and the purpose of your website, that may or may not have much value to you.
Using the Data to Get More Website Traffic
Here’s your takeaway.
Clearly, I need to write a better Title and Description for the REI Kayak page. That one could be a money maker for me, but with a CTR of under 1%, I’m leaving all that cash on the table.
880 times that page has been available to Google searchers, and yet only 12 of them have dropped in on me. Time to sharpen the pencil, and write copy that sells.
The Title and Description meta tags are most likely what searchers see in Google. The Blue Hyperlink in the search results is often your Title Tag, and the text underneath is likely to be your Meta Description.
So you can argue that it’s the most important text to consider when designing a new web page.
So go get a Google Webmaster account, and find out if your SEO efforts are generating opportunities, and further, whether or not your SEO efforts are generating VISITORS.
SEO is wasted if you rank in the top 5, yet no one clicks the link. So the exercise detailed above is crucial for every small business looking to grow via the web.
Great WordPress Web Analytics Plug In
I just installed another very cool little web analytics plug in called On Site Google Analytics. The premise is simple.
The plugin places an attractive stripe at the bottom of your website which, once you connect the plugin to your Google Analytics account, uses the API to display key page metrics to logged in admins as you navigate your own site.
I’m currently trying to clarify with James Charlesworth of SEOATL.com (an Atlanta, GA based SEO and Analytics firm) what particular user levels get this info, but if it indeed is published for authors as well, we’re talking about a very valuable tool. Here’s what the stripe looks like:
(click for a larger view)
Make Your WordPress Authors Better
As you can see, key information is displayed to logged in users, including popularity of pages, what sites referred readers to them, and keywords used to find them in the search engines. And this all comes without having to explain to them how to use Google Analytics.
Hopefully, they will get the feel for what works and what doesn’t work over time, and then without having to understand the intricacies of SEO, they can develop a writing style that works for the HUMANS and the SEARCH ENGINES.
That’s full of win for a webmaster.
I’m on record, online and offline, of saying that segmenting your visits in Google Analytics using the Custom Segment feature is singly the most important thing you can do when you create an account.
Mass data is simply horrifying to work with, and in the end, you will learn nothing for your efforts. It’s possible to understand, to a degree, WHAT your traffic does if you simply look at All Visits, but it’s near impossible to start postulating as to WHY it does what it does.
Today, we’ll look at a very specific Custom Segment I’ve created. Quote Abandonment.
Setting A Google Analytics Segment To See Goal Abandonment
In B2B Web Analytics, understanding what drives traffic to your lead capture form, then converts those visits into qualified leads is paramount. Our SEOs, marketers, and webmasters spend a lot of time ensuring that happens. We then, need to explain to them where it breaks down along the way. And, more often than not, it will break down along the way.
So what we want to pick out here are the folks that actually VIEWED your quote request form, but then amazingly didn’t fill it out. The nerve.
So, here’s how we set up the Custom Segment in Google Analytics (click for a larger view):
We drag the Page View parameter to our first box, and then make the Condition “Matches Exactly” from the drop down. Your Value field should then start to fill out itself. Select the name of your page that contains the Lead Form you want to measure. If you have more than one form you want to measure in this particular Custom Segment, then add and OR condition, and rinse/repeat for the second, third, fourth etc pages you want to measure.
Note: To get full effect, set up a different Custom Segment for each page you want to measure, as opposed to lumping a bunch together.
Then, we add our AND argument, which in this case is simply Goal1 Completions. We have Goal 1 set up to measure page views of our Thank You For Contacting Us page. In other words, the page that displays to the user when they successfully fill out our form. Set that Condition to Less Than 1.
Name your Segment. I called ours “Quote Abandonment”. Then, Test the segment, or simply save and apply it.
Working With Google Analytics to Understand Funnel Failure
Now that we have our segment created, we select it, and get to work solving all the world’s problems. At least as they relate to people that get to your Quote form, but then AMAZINGLY don’t fill it out.
First, let’s have a look at how these “failures” start. In the image below, I show the traffic sources and some statistics of our customers that are teetering on the edge. I blanked out the keywords because, well, they’re good keywords, and NO, you can’t have them (click for larger view).
There’s some good stuff here. Let’ s…analyse…
- 5,471 people thought about being our new friend, but then didn’t pull the trigger. At least not on the quote form.
- 5% of those people were “Direct” visits. They likely already knew who we were before they got here.
- A whopping 91% came through search engines, paid or otherwise.
Some things to think about:
- Do these percentages match up with your overall traffic source percentages?
- If your referral traffic is often failing, what sites are they coming from? Just untargeted, or is there a deeper problem?
- Is your PPC traffic getting there and failing? That’s especially frustrating. Do your ads convey anything about your sales process? Or were your visitors expecting e-commerce?
- Goal Conversion Rate can be greater than zero, even for the abandons. This means they completed another action that we deemed worthy of note, such as using a simpler form, or exceeding X numbers of page views, etc. Avanish Kaushik outlines Micro and Macro Goal set up very well at his blog here: Web Analytics 101. So we see even the abandons are not total losses.
- A lot of our Quote Completion victims…errrrr…customers definitely complete more than one of our Goal identifiers.
- The ratio of Completions to Abandons is RELATIVELY stable despite the keyword they used to find us.
From here, you need to start putting it into context of your own business goals, your vertical, and scale it to the market conditions you are working with.
But by quickly identifying where you are failing with the low hanging fruit (they’ve expressed interest… they’re at your lead gen form….), you can take steps to pull them in a little harder, and a little faster.
Go make this custom segment right now. You won’t regret it.
Using Web Analytics To Temper Emotion
As web analysts, we often present data to people (be they Hippos, sales teams, or whomever) who have a significant amount of emotional investment in the results our analysis is trying to explain. Perhaps their commission relies on lead generation, or they are performance based and the bottom line is everything to them.
That emotion, however, can really skew the way the data is read. If we look outside of the meeting room, I can find an example of this that really hits home for me. And that’s simply that I carry the burden of being a lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan. We’re mired in our 18th consecutive losing season, and our Front Office is relatively new. They’ve only been drafting and trading for a few years of that 18, and they weren’t given a heck of a lot to work with when they took over.
It’s fair to say that any fan base has an emotional investment in a team. That’s what makes them fans. So, the fans are stuck dealing with constant losing, and more recently, the trading of some VERY popular players in order to stock up the farm system. To some, that’s even worse than the losing.
At the same time, they seem to feel that the team would be “far better off” if we had kept those players. But does the math back up those claims? Let’s find out.
Here’s our current line up (most nights), and their statistics (click for a bigger view):
The Buccos: 2010
Yeah. That’s a losing ball club currently. I know. But what about if we had the guys we traded?
The Best Buccos of the 2000s?
Wait a minute…. Could it be that our current team:
- Has 7 more home runs?
- A 50 point edge in OPS?
- A 30 point edge in Slugging?
- 30 more stolen bases?
- A 15 point higher batting average?
But… a lot of emotional fans want those guys back. And you could make a strong analytical argument that it would be a BAD idea. Because we haven’t even factored in the improved farm system we’ve built in the meantime as a result of some of those deals.
So How Does This Help Me At Work?
Simple. As an analyst, you are armed to the teeth with numbers. You can use them to point out that folks might be looking at things incorrectly based solely on emotion.
A sales reps sales are down? Show them that there really hasn’t been a change in the web leads in his territory.
Revenue is slipping? Traffic patterns might be the same anyways. What else could be the problem.
Brand recognition is down? Use analytics tools to show why that might be.
You have more and better data than almost anyone in the organization to determine the cause of all sorts of symptoms in the business world. Use it to diffuse emotionally charged direction taking, and make smarter, safer business decisions based on it.
Oh… and by the way. As for my Buccos?
Just wait til next year…..
At What Price Privacy?
Recently, Google has rolled out the option to use a Secure form of search at httpS://google.com.
While certainly all the buzz about Facebook’s inability to secure user information has created a new and intense look at web privacy, we have to wonder if we’re heading down the path of “unintended consequences” for increased security.
For example, if the average consumer decides to regularly use SSL protected search, the webmaster of the store or blog they are visiting won’t receive valuable information about that visit, such as what advertisement the visitor clicked on, or what website they were referred over by.
Yes, this adds some additional anonymity for the visitor. But what is it going to cost them in the long run?
Simple. Money.
Less Knowledge Equals Higher Customer Acquisition Costs
If a webmaster doesn’t know which of his ads are working, he has no way to associate a return on investment to that ad spend. That’s going to result in a lot of trial and error. And if the store is spending more money on advertising as a result, you can be sure that at some point, the consumer is going to end up paying a lions share if not all of that bill.
More Knowledge Equals a Better User Experience
Webmasters also use the data afforded to us to enhance your user experience. So if 1,000 people come to my site in May, looking for Blue Widgets (based on the search term they typed in), and we only carry red and green ones, you can bet your bottom dollar we’re going to go out and get us some blue widgets to sell you the next time you’re on our site.
That, my friends, is called customer service.
More Power (Read: All Power) to Google
Out of the box, the SSL search will prevent Google Analytics from functioning to it’s highest design standards. We can assume though that Google would find a way to give it’s AdWords advertisers and Google Analytics users another means of getting this data. After all, Google still knows what you typed in that search box. They’re just trending towards being unwilling to share it.
So end game is this: Google Analytics could be “fixed” to still share this info, by attaching it more deeply to the Google databases. But… All of Google’s analytics space competitors are left holding… well… nothing. They will be unable to present the data.
Want to know how the competitors are feeling about this? Have a look. Clicky Pretty Much Hates It
In Conclusion
If you’re a webmaster, be prepared to do a little more guessing again soon.
If you’re a consumer, be prepared to absorb some additional advertising costs in your retail prices.
If you’re a Google Analytics competitor? Just… be prepared.
