Our blog

If you’ve looked at your Google Analytics keyword list in the last year or so, you may have run across two unusual keywords: (not set) and (not provided). For many of you, these may even be your most popular keywords – by far.

If that seems odd to you, don’t worry. Despite what you may be thinking, your customers aren’t going to search engines and typing in the exact words “(not set)” or “(not provided),” parentheses and all! But what are they doing? How are these specific keywords sending visitors to your site when you’ve done nothing to attract them? Let’s take a closer look.

When we do our company reporting each month, we exclude branded keywords, in order to better understand how the people who don’t already know about us are finding our company. Rather than putting more effort into attracting those who are already interested, we need to make sure we capture the traffic that “doesn’t realize they need us.”

To do so, we have to clear out all of that branded noise in order to see what these people are actually searching. We wrote about how to do this a few years back (see Google analytics tip: how are prospects finding your site? filtering out branded keywords.), but the method we mentioned then involves typing in keywords one by one to create an advanced filter. Excluding branded keywords one at a time can be a long, arduous process. However, there is a much more efficient method, one that relies on Regular Expressions rather than a simple search.

We’ve explained before how coupling Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments with other criteria can help you to create time-saving shortcuts, but what exactly ARE Advanced Segments? To understand, let’s look at them in light of New Visitors (site traffic).

A while ago, we wrote about the very important task of using internal search results to improve your website. In the previous post, we focused mainly on the importance of looking at which search terms are being used in your site’s internal search. In this post, however, we’d like to take it one step further and break down Google Analytics’ entire Site Search reports section, since there’s a lot of valuable information hidden in there.

If you’ve ever worked in Google Analytics, there’s no doubt that you’ve seen the Bounce Rate stat or heard others refer to it. But what exactly is a Bounce Rate?

A Bounce Rate is a way of measuring users who visited a page on your site, but left before exploring the site any further.

However, an Exit Rate measures something similar – users who came across a page while browsing on the website and opted to leave the site rather than continue further. Users who bounced and users who exited were both on the website and then left. So what’s the difference?

This week, we have a guest post from Whereoware’s Director of Marketing, Teya Flick. In addition to managing marketing for Whereoware itself, Teya has a wide breadth of experience in strategy, email marketing, SEO, PPC, + other activities dependent on Google Analytics reporting. Here, she shares some of the key Google Analytics features you should be paying attention to in 2013.

You may have heard it said that there are “no shortcuts to the top,” but Google is making a good effort to prove that adage incorrect. Their aptly named “Shortcuts” feature was designed with one goal in mind: to help you see your data the way you want in record time.

Shortcuts allow you to easily jump to information you want to see (with any filters, segments, and other customizations already in place) without having to tweak settings to get it right. You get peace of mind, knowing you’re comparing apples to apples, without worrying that you’ve missed a step when reapplying your filters. After all, if you’ve done it right once, why repeat the process?

By now you’ve set goals in Google Analytics, and learned how to track your sales funnel, for maximum impact. These are very important steps, but the process is not complete; without a way to interpret these goals and funnels, you’re not actually learning anything from what you’ve done. This is where goal reports come in.

A few weeks ago, the world was entranced by the competitions and results of the 2012 Olympics. While most of us will never run a 4-minute mile or do a backflip off of a diving board, there is something we can learn from these athletes. Whether it was beating a world record, making it to the medal stand, or even just getting to the Olympics in the first place, all of these athletes began with goals.

Unlike the Olympics, the competitive ‘sport’ of business allows you to be measured against yourself, not others. Rather than aiming for an objective medal, YOU can decide what defines success and what defines failure. The first way to do that is to figure out what’s important to you.

Direct and assisted conversions are two ways of looking at how a company made revenue. What’s the difference? Let’s use a typical e-commerce website as an example.

At its core, e-commerce is about maximizing profit. Knowing which products are most profitable and/or most popular can help you to make more informed decisions about both your website and product lines. The new version of Google Analytics makes it simple to find the information you need.

So you want to start tracking your marketing efforts. Setting up tools like Google Analytics is a great way to stay on top of your data and ultimately on top of your marketing efforts. Unique visits, conversions, and bounce rates are great places to start…but what if you don’t know what those things mean? Never fear, Whereoware is here to help!

A few weeks ago, we wrote about hidden gems in the new version of Google Analytics. One of the most valuable of these is the new “Real Time Reporting” option, which is still in beta, but is so feature-rich that it deserves its own separate blog post. So, without further ado, let’s explore.

The new interface of Google Analytics has been live for a few months now and we have discovered some great features that weren’t heavily promoted in the initial excitement.

These “hidden gems” have been right under your nose, providing brand new information on your data or perhaps just a new way of looking at the same old numbers. Here are some of our favorite innovations.

By now, you know that Google Analytics can be used for many types of analyses, from pinpointing referral sources to uncovering which keywords your customers are looking for. But if you’re an ecommerce site, you may be missing out on one of the most important features – Google Analytics’ ability to take stock of revenue stats using ecommerce tracking.

Sounds great, but how?

We’ve talked about the benefits of working social media into both your website and email campaigns. With any luck, the two efforts will play off of each other, encouraging site visitors to sign up for emails and driving email recipients to your site. But how do you know if your social media efforts are having any effect?

Some important social metrics can’t be measured by Google Analytics, such as the number of comments on your blog posts, number of followers who are sharing your content or the number of followers who like your content. The Google Analytics platform, however, is a great place to look for information on the effects of social on your website.

If you’ve gone to an ecommerce website in the last decade, there’s a good chance you’ve used a site’s internal search. Web designers have gotten wise to the fact that many customers know exactly that they’re searching for and don’t want to browse through products to find it. That’s why most sites, nowadays, have an internal search bar.

Your customers are using internal search. Why aren’t you?

 You may have noticed that Google has rolled out changes across many of their platforms recently. One area that this affects is Google Analytics. While it’s very different from the old version, these changes are largely for the better.

To access the new interface, log in to your account and click “New Version” at the top right of your screen next to your email address.

Digital marketing has long been cursed with attributing conversion to the last action a user took. For example, if a customer arrives at your site via organic search and then makes a purchase, most platforms (including Google Analytics) attributed this credit solely to SEO success. While this does tell you that the person ended up converting because of your SEO strategy, it doesn’t show you the complete picture.

Often times, it’s difficult to get a sense of a site’s performance when you’re flipping back and forth between stats on said performance and an image of the layout itself. Google Analytics’ “In-Page Analytics” feature, a floating overlay that shows layers helpful statistics on top of a real-time image of a page, is a handy way to view both at once.

If you are like most companies, most of your organic search comes from branded terms, aka people who have already heard of your company. You can get a lot more insight if you filter out the branded terms and see how true prospects are finding you.

The how to:

Not every person has a good memory. Sometimes it’s hard to remember names or faces, or even where you put your keys in the morning. So it’s no surprise that while juggling the many pieces that go into making a successful ecommerce business, people often tend to forget what their previous moves were.

Google Analytics provides the perfect examples of this, both of the problem and a resolution. We all like seeing positive changes in our data, whether it’s an increase in visits, conversions, time on site, etc. But unless you can figure what happened at that moment in time that may have caused the change, you’ll never be able to replicate it to achieve the same results.

Google Analytics allows you to track where your customers are coming from. In your account, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ bar on the left hand side (1.), and it will show you an ‘Overview’ of traffic coming to your site. Information on the different sources is displayed prominently on the screen (2.).

Google shows that there are three different ways customers ended up on your site, but what exactly do these mean? We’ll use a coffee shop example to explain.

Picture this: it's a Monday morning, and you're going about your usual business of monitoring activity on the company website. You comb through the information on Google Analytics. The landing and exit pages are trending in a predictable pattern, your AdWords campaigns are doing well, and most factors appear to be normal. However, the Google Analytics pageview graph shows an inexplicable bump in last week’s data…an increase in homepage visits.

A co-worker suggests that this may be a fluke occurrence, with consumers making purchases in anticipation of the weekend's activities. However, neither of you can recall this type of increase in weeks past – was it there, but less pronounced? The only way to tell if this is anything out of the ordinary is to compare this week's numbers to those from previous weeks. Google Analytics has a handy built-in feature which will allow you to compare data between any time periods.

Comparing dates, step by step...

Every time we turn around someone is asking us about mobile. It is obviously in the forefront of many people’s mind and rightly so. Mobile traffic is growing at light speed. According to study by Cisco, it is estimated that global mobile web traffic grew 159% in 2010. That is 4.2 times faster than standard broadband traffic. The study predicts by 2015, smartphones and tablets will make up just over 30% of the mobile market.

So we know that optimizing your site for mobile is important, but how important is it to you right now? Google Analytics makes it super easy for you to find that out. You can see the number of people using mobile devices to access your website, where they are coming from and what they are doing on your site, allowing you to make decisions based on actual usage, instead of guessing.