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.
Perhaps your a small local brick and mortar retailer, and you’ve just launched into the exciting world of e-commerce: The art of selling your wares to the world as opposed to simply your neighborhood.
We’d hope that you’ve gone ahead and installed Google Analytics on your website so you can see how you’re doing. It’s especially simple if you are using an e-commerce platform like Volusion, as opposed to a homegrown storefront your nephew built for you.
Once installed, and sales start trickling in… How can you know where they’re coming from, and what trends it indicates?
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Here’s 3 things you should look at every Friday night/Saturday morning, so you can start to be a better E-Commerce retailer.
Content Performance : What are People Window Shopping For?
In the example in the image below, I’ve set up a “Compare to Past” view for a new online retailer showing this Month to Date performance versus Last Month to Date.
(Click the image to see it larger)
What we can learn from this report is a few things.
- Our home page views (Default.aspx) have trended up a hair, but since the Index$ is zero, it’s not contributing much to the bottom line. Maybe we need some stronger calls to action there.
- Our Shopping Cart views are down 37% since April! This should be an alarming one, especially if there’s a correlating drop in orders and revenue.
- Our Bounce Rate (which is a measure of people who look at only 1 page and leave) is simply way too high. Time to look at where your traffic is coming from, and see if you are doing a good job of selling to them once they arrive. If you’re using a shiny $100 Adwords credit, you’ll want to spend some serious time looking at your Paid Search results before starting to use your own money.
Product Trends: What’s Hot in Your Store This Month, and What’s Not
Using the same Month to Month comparison in Google Analytics that I did in the first example, we move on to looking at hot product trends for your e-commerce storefront. It will be interesting to see how these line up with your off-line results as well, and can help you to a degree with forecasting inventory, etc. This data becomes hugely important the more months of Google Analytics data you have stored up, as you can really start to identify trends.
(Again, feel free to click on the image to get a closer look.)
If you have a look, you can see what specific SKU’s are performing better than they were last month, or worse. In the back of your mind, you should know your margins on most of them, so you can start to develop an idea of whether or not you are selling the products you want to be selling, or simply your loss leaders.
Further, if you aren’t selling the ones you want to be, you’ll know it might be time to re-position them on the page, or give them a prominent home page placement.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Count Your Money. And Know Where It Comes From
Lastly, if you can only spend a few hours a week looking at web stats (or less), you need to know where your sales are coming from. In your brick and mortar store, you might see some coupons passed to you out of the Pennysaver or Sunday Paper. Someone might mention they saw your business card in the local Chinese restaurant.
On the web, we can find out the same things. Just more consistently, and without having to ask. This report, found in the Traffic Sources Section of Google Analytics, outlines where our web visitors came from, and how much they spent.
In this case, Google sent the most traffic, although it was down a bit this month. Small sample size makes the percentage look bigger than it figuratively is though.
This website doesn’t do Pay Per Click currently, so we don’t See Google/Paid. If you do, it’s one you’ll want to keep an especially close eye on, as you’ll need to carefully measure your return on investment for that ad spend.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Another interesting note is that Bing organic traffic consistently converts very well. If you’re going to do some SEO in your store, you might want to read up on Bing. They are a growing search engine, and they have the deep pockets to compete with Google. Will be a tough fight, though.
In Conclusion: Saturday Morning Web Analytics
So before you unlock the front door at 10AM Saturday morning, sit down, log in, and have a look at your e-commerce stats in Google. You can start to draw some conclusions based on the three reports above, and start top plan your work, and work your plan.
If you properly forecast using these tools, you might get yourself in a position where you are buying your product cheaper, selling it at a greater margin, and who knows… maybe even turning a small profit on shipping.
At the very least, getting good at e-commerce will keep you busy on the rainy or snowy days, when that plaza walk in traffic just isn’t popping. An hour a week Saturday AM might be just the trick to get you there.
I just installed W3Counter utilizing the WordPress plugin, and signed up for a free account. Interested to see how the free version compares to Google Analytics.
One thing is for sure. It’s in real time, whereas Google Analytics isn’t.
I also utilize Woopra, however, which has a tremendous desktop application for monitoring web traffic in real time.
So, this site is crawling with Javascript… Please try not to step on any of it….
Since I haven’t upgraded my Microsoft Office yet, I often go in search of great tools for Excel 2003 that help me crunch data, and moreover, neatly and simply present that data to persons of interest.
Today, I found this little beauty from Interactive Angle:
Using the Excel Camera Tool to Create Web Analytics Dashboards
The two examples at the bottom of this blog post are free to download and customize.
Just some really, really nice work.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
If you’re truly a small business, it’s likely that you might be dealing with 5 to 10 leads per week, as opposed to thousands. Even still, your ad spend and SEO efforts have to be measured carefully, so finding a way to accurately determine lead sources is critical. And, working with those clients after the fact needs happen in a structured manner so you can maximize your success.
Here’s 2 free business tools that will make any small business smarter, faster, and more in control.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
ZOHO CRM For Small Business
One of the premier web based CRMs on the market today, ZOHO has a free addition that up to 3 users can utilize to strategically work and manage your web leads, from inception to sale. And with support for a web based lead generation form, your leads from your website can be automatically populated in the ZOHO CRM, where they can be nurtured, and eventually turned into Accounts with Sales Opportunities.
Secondly, the web form asks you what page to send the visitor to after they have submitted data, which is the critical “next step” in setting up a Google Analytics goal, which we’ll get to in a bit.
When you’re setting up your CRM software web form, two things are important to bear in mind.’
- The form has to be quick and easy.
- The web form needs to give you all the information you need to process the lead.
Try to keep the required fields to 3 or 4, so that the end user can make their request, and be on their way. (Bear in mind, I’m writing this piece to true small businesses. Larger organizations might want more stringent web forms to start filtering out leads that could be considered non-starters.)
So something simple, like Name, Company name, e-mail address and phone number. And, possibly, you can add in a drop down list of your product and service categories so you can manage who gets the leads on the back-end. Remember, everything your potential customer types in on the form will end up in your CRM. So you can modify the form over time as you gain experience with how you want to manage the lead data in your ZOHO CRM.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Then, simply cut and paste the code ZOHO provides to you into a web page called Contact Us, or whatever suits your fancy. (Bear in mind, you will HAVE to provide ZOHO with two specific URLs: The one the form will reside on (it asks for DOMAIN, but that’s an error… They need the EXACT URL), and the page you want the visitor to see after they submit the form. This is a Thank You page. And it’s very important. Here’s why:
Google Analytics and CRM for Small Business
I hope you’re at least somewhat familiar with Google Analytics at this point. Analytics can work VERY well for a small business in determining where all those wonderful leads your CRM is accumulating are coming from, and that’s even more important than simple web stats. Just knowing how many people visit your website doesn’t cut it anymore.
PPC is getting more expensive in some cases, and SEO can be a lot of work. So let’s make sure we are getting plenty of ROI from both.
Again, if you’re truyly a small business, you might be satisfied with just a handful of qualified leads per week. So, using Google Analytics “out of the box” without any tweaking is good enough to start measuring our website success.
First off, as you know, the Google Analytics code needs to be present on every page on your website. You might have 5 pages, or you might have 50. Make sure it appears on every one, including the Contact Us and Thank You pages.
Once that’s accomplished, we need to go into your Google Analytics settings in your account, and create a Goal. That goal should be titled something like “Contact Form Completion”, or “lead Generated”, or whatever you’re comfortable with. The Goal should be URL based, with “/Thank_You.html” (or whatever your Thank You Page is) as the Goal initiator.
With that Goal in place, you now effectively study which keywords are driving traffic, and more importantly, which keywords are driving Leads.
But… what about ROI? What about the keywords that are driving SALES, and not simply leads?
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Tying Google Analytics and ZOHO CRM Together for Small Business
Now, we need to head back over to ZOHO, and create 2 new fields under leads (and then map them to Accounts, which you do when setting up the fields. This way this data will carry forward when we convert the lead to an account.)
The fields are:
- Web Source
- Keyword
Web Source should be a pick list. Include things like:
- Google PPC
- Google Organic
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Referral
If you’re running an advertising campaign on a specific website, include that as well. You can add to this list over time. Don’t subtract from it though once you’re rolling, or you will lose data.
Keyword should simply be a free form text field.
Now, once that’s set up, we simply have a look at our completed goals in Google Analytics, and copy the info over to ZOHO. Again, this is ideal for small businesses. It would be a nightmare for organizations handling more than 10 leads a day.
Now, as you start to enter your sales and order data in to ZOHO, you’ll start to get a true feel for the ROI your website is generating, and for what advertising is really working, and what isn’t.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Despite the massive amounts of data a company can collect, a lot of it is useless without context, or simply ignored in a “forest for the trees” kind of way.
FutureWeb had a panel discussion on this issue, and some interesting points were made. Some of these include:
Bob Page, VP, analytics platform at eBay: “Most people think data itself is a byproduct of what we do,” he said… “There’s a disconnect between the data and the business value of the data.”
Very true. Scouring through the data collected in Google Analytics, Omniture, or whatever analytics data aggregator you use is pointless if you don’t know how to connect the numbers to the meaning.
So your bounce rate is 47% on one of your key landing pages… That might be good or bad. Is there an 800 number prominently displayed on that page? If so, maybe over half of those bounces called you. Then your EFFECTIVE BOUNCE RATE is really more like 23%, which is more manageable. (You can read more about measuring phone leads with web analytics here…)
“I think that web analytics, to a certain extent, needs to get easier for the masses,” John Lovett, senior partner at strategy firm Web Analytics Demystified said.
Also very true. I often ask people who is reading the analytics data in their organizations. And I try to explain to sales people why that data is important to them as well. Not just IT, and not just marketing. There’s happiness in web analytics for everyone.
No one person can ask all the right questions about the goal and purpose of a website. Therefore, no one person can be in charge of the Google Analytics data either. It has to be shared organizationally, and therefore, it has to be easy for ANYONE to understand. Avanish Kaushik is a big proponent of this philosophy in his books, and he’s absolutely right.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Web Analytics Failures for Small Business
For the purposes of my blog, which focuses on small business web analytics, I think it’s safe to say that the two points I highlighted above are deal breakers.
If an “organization’ consists of 1 to 3 people, then the data ABSOLUTELY must be easy for everyone to understand, because they are all going to have to touch it in one way or another.
And secondly, they must all know how to draw conclusions from the data, since each will have their own area of expertise, and therefor their own level of insight to extend to the discussion.
And as easy as Google Analytics is for some people to understand, it needs to get even easier to deal with before the whole small business community is served properly.
Have a question? Feel free to Contact Level Analytics, or leave a comment below.
A Must Have Tool for Microsoft Excel
If you spend any amount of time studying and manipulating data in Microsoft Excel, you know there’s things you want to do that you simply can’t. Identifying trailing spaces for example, that screw up your sorting. Or converting numbers from text into actual numeric form (i.e. “one” to 1.). Or selecting similar values in adjacent cells.
Enter ASAP Utilities, a handy little Microsoft Excel add on that does all that and more. From their website:
About ASAP Utilities
ASAP Utilities is a powerful Excel software add-in that fills the gaps in Excel, and automates frequently used tasks. Since 1999 it has grown to become probably one of the world’s most popular add-ins for MS Excel.
Time saving – speed up your work in Excel
ASAP Utilities is the product of many time-saving features and additions for Excel.
The extensive features are the result of years of experience and development, combined with the feedback from many respected users at different levels of experience. Particularly the feedback from users has been very important, and will continue to be important in further development.ASAP = As Soon As Possible
ASAP Utilities is called this way because it significantly reduces time-consuming work. ASAP is an acronym stat stands for “As Soon As Possible”. Some choose to spell it out, others tend to pronounce it “aysap”. The word utilities means something useful. Combined together ASAP Utilities stands for useful time-saving macro tools for Excel.
Most people struggle with managers, bosses or clients that tend to ask for you to get the job done yesterday, which of course is often difficult to pull off. ASAP Utilities doesn’t allow you to travel back in time but it can certainly help you to speed up your work in Excel.
Here’s a screen shot of some of my favorite functions. They’re great for creating affiliate datafeeds quickly and easily, and tidying up some mat or text.
Shareasale Merchants: Get A Better Understanding of Your Affiliate Traffic with Google Analytics
If you’re a small e-commerce merchant utilizing Shareasale for your affiliate tracking, you’ve probably realized by now that you can gain some useful intelligence through the Merchant dashboard there. At the same time, it really leaves you making value judgments based on click throughs and, of course, sales numbers.
You can certainly make a strong argument that sales revenue is the strongest piece of evidence in the value of an affiliate relationship. It would be tough to argue against that.
At the same time, if you want to take a look at the value of your affiliate program as a whole, it’s worth looking at other statistics. For example, is your affiliate base driving quality traffic as a group? Are visitors passed to you through your affiliates looking at more pages than your average visitor, or less? And, what product categories are being viewed by your affiliate traffic? Does it match your creative, or are your affiliate driven visitors scatter shopping?
A Special Note to Shareasale Affiliates
Your privacy is of paramount concern to Shareasale, and obviously, to you. Below, I will describe methods for merchants to segment SAS referral traffic. PLEASE NOTE: These methodologies do not expose keywords, referral pages, or, in fact, individual affiliates. Instead, it gives a HOLISTIC view of Shareasale referral traffic. Rest assured, I am mindful of affiliate concerns in this area, and therefore will not be going into detail publicly on how to spy on affiliates.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
Setting up a Custom Segment in Google Analytics to Study Affiliate Traffic
To effectively study your Shareasale affiliate traffic, we need to set up a custom segment inside Google Analytics. When logged into your account, simply look in the left hand column under My Customizations for Advanced Segments. Click there, and you’ll get a dialog where you can create a new Advanced Segment.
Under Traffic Sources, drag Referral Path into the box, and then utilize the drop down to make the Condition ‘Contains’. Start typing /r.cfm and it should give you a dialog to select exactly that, assuming your Shareasale affiliates have sent you traffic since you installed Google Analytics. This diagram illustrates that option:
Name the Segment Affiliate Traffic (or whatever suits your fancy), hit Save Segment, and you’re ready to rock.
Studying the Affiliate Traffic Report
Once you’re back at your Google Analytics dashboard, towards the top right you’ll see the option called Advanced Segments. You can select 1 at a time, or if you select 2, you’ll automatically get the 2 you selected plus ALL traffic. I’m not sure why this is. It’s a better question for Google.
However, if you simply select your new segment, all of your reporting will ONLY show traffic from your Shareasale affiliates. Again, it’s in general, and not for a specific affiliate, etc.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
So here you can look at your affiliate programs bounce rates, total page views, top landing pages, etc. Almost all of the information you study for your own marketing efforts, except for keywords, referral pages (it’s all Shareasale… not the affiliate websites) and a few others. This is a good thing. Your affiliates don’t want you knowing EVERYTHING they are doing. Some merchants might use that data in nefarious ways, and that erodes trust across the entire affiliate marketing channel.
A Few Caveats for Shareasale Merchants
There’s no guarantee that ALL of your Shareasale referrals will show here. Certain affiliates will do things with the referral URL that will preclude this methodology from working properly. And that doesn’t mean they are doing something wrong, or acting in a bad way. They all have their own mechanics for sending traffic. Browsers can strip referral information as well, so it might not be the affiliate at all.
Overall though, it should give you a good view of your affiliate program health.
And, if you are tracking e-commerce conversions and revenue with Google Analytics, you will see these figures included in this reporting as well.
Please feel free to Contact Us if you need help, or have a question.
The Math of Everything
I’m adding a new category of posts here at Level Analytics in order to give me a little broader set of things to blog about.
I certainly have a lot left to say about web analytics and small business analytics, but I thought I’d add in some other kinds of math. Perhaps studying the math behind my hobbies… fishing for example… or baseball and sports.
Of course, calling it the MATH OF EVERYTHING gives me a lot of space to expand. But make no mistake… This will be a far cry from the THEORY OF EVERYTHING. I dabble in physics, but not much.
Website Heat Maps for Small Business
Staring at Google Analytics all day will tell you part of the story on how your website is performing. But what it won’t tell you is what your visitors are doing on specific pages. For example, if your sales landing page (meaning the info page leading up to a potential customer taking action) is getting read, has an ok bounce rate, and maybe holds the visitor’s attention for 3 minutes. (3 minutes, by the way, is a crazy long time.)
But what really happened during that visit? What specifically did the consumer read?
Very difficult (in fact, darned near impossible) to tell from traditional web analytics methods. So, we need to look at heat maps.
Heat maps function in a number of different ways. They can track eye movements, or mouse movements of your web visitors to determine the efficacy of your page layouts, or if your color schemes are popping your call to actions, or whatever.
Those two methods are expensive though, and the average small business may not have those resources available to them. I was fortunate to bump into AttentionWizard, which 
uses statistical computer modeling to mimic the “gazing patterns” of your web visitors. In other words, what are they actually looking at when they are visiting your web site. Don’t forget, a Page View doesn’t necessarily equate to the visitor “seeing” what you want them to.
So AttentionWizard models that for you.
Can AttentionWizard Really Tell What Visitors Are Seeing?
But is it accurate? And what can it tell you?
From their website:
AttentionWizard results are 75%+ correlated with eye tracking and mouse tracking approaches. The algorithm is optimized for fast computation. Slightly higher accuracy can be achieved by more compute-intensive algorithms, but these can take several hours to produce a result.
AttentionWizard heatmaps also tend to produce more focused hotspots because they are designed to simulate where the brain’s awareness is highest. By contrast, eye tracking and mouse tracking images tend to have more ghost-like halos that are simply the result of movements between the actual points of interest.
AttentionWizard is not a substitute for landing page testing. It can not evaluate the effectiveness of your sales copy, the strength of your brand or value proposition, the pricing of your product or service, the professionalism of your landing page design, or the Web visitor’s psychological reactions to the specific color scheme you have chosen. But it can help you to improve the quality of your landing page, to make sure that the call-to-action is clear, and to make sure that other visual elements do not distract from the stated conversion goals.
So, we can glean some good info from these reports, but we need to remember that it won’t tell the whole story. Like is our copy any good. Or have we picked a color scheme that expresses our main goals. Etc, etc.
Let’s look at my home page here as an example.
A Heatmap/Eyeball Predictive Modeling Study of LevelAnalytics.com
For starters, we should remember that I’m discussing a blog home page here. My main goal is to get people to read what’s here. Since I don’t sell a service, I’m trying to emphasize articles, and not sales pitches. So while you’re reading this, imagine your key AdWords landing page. Which, by the way, should be the first page you try this with.
Here’s my homepage:
My goal here is pretty clear. Click “Read More” and, well, read more. My LinkedIn button is prominent too. I like making new business acquaintances. But I wonder… Is that what my visitors are looking at?
The heatmap/eyeball model:
Uh oh. Let me run out to my site and see what happens when I click where people are looking….
Driving Real Data From Heat Map Predictive Modeling
So what happens if I click on the “hot spots”. Well, people go to the homepage, or they get a pop up picture. That’s NOT my intended result, is it?
So we need to chew on this modeled data, and see if real data supports it. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can use a feature called Site Overlay that can map this out for you. Once you log in, it’s in the Content Section. It will show you what percentage of people clicked on what links.
In my case, it was pretty accurate. It showed that the Home Page link was the most popular (one of the two big hot spots in the AttenetionWizard map), but that no one had clicked on the other hot spot. The WordPress logo. But, I’m willing to bet AttentionWizard is correct. I’m sure almost everyone looked at it.
So the real data is a combination of the predictive against the actual results. We can plan a new layout to work better, in the meantime, checking our copy for important keywords and strong calls to action.
Head over to AttentionWizard and try it today. Like any good drug… the first one is free 
