Using Google Analytics to Analyze Not Provided Keyword Data

On October 18, 2011, Google announced that search query data for logged in users would no longer be available.  As marketers and analysts, we know that every bit of data is precious to us.  Every piece of data can have a huge impact on the major decisions we make as businesses.  So how much impact has this privacy change had on our data?  Google claimed it would only impact a small amount of data, in the 2-3% range.  Is that holding up? Let’s take a look at the impact on one of our clients:

Date Range: Oct. 18-Feb. 10. 

Total Organic Visits: 730,403

Total Not Provided: 60,138

Not Provided is responsible for about 12% of organic visits to this site, a large enough chunk to make it worth further analysis.  So, let’s try and find out a bit more about Not Provided.  First, I set up a Custom Report with all of the data I thought would give me an idea of the type of user Not Provided is.  Here’s what my report looks like.

Within my custom report I looked at only the organic traffic.  Now, I want to divide my traffic by brand keywords, non-brand keywords, and Not Provided to see if there are any commonalities.  To do this I used three different Advanced Segments.  For the first segment I included only brand terms, for the second I excluded brand terms as well as Not Provided and for the third I only included Not Provided.  I decided to look at the data starting on Nov. 1 because that is when Not Provided leveled out and the traffic became more consistent.

(Blue = Brand, Orange = Not Provided, Green = Non-Brand)

The not provided user most closely resembles the brand users.  However, remember that correlation is not causation.  Let’s take this to the next level and see what information we can glean from the landing pages.  To do this, I looked into my standard Organic Keywords report, drilled down to Not Provided and set up my secondary dimension as Landing Page.  My top five landing pages for Not Provided consist of my home page, special offers page, and major product pages.  These five landing pages account for 8,277 visits.  In other words, about 42% of Not Provided users are landing on five very branded pages. 

Now I would suggest drilling into each of the top Not Provided landing pages and then looking at what other keywords are landing on each of those pages.  This will give me an idea of what kind of keywords are bringing up that landing page and then I can guess that my Not Provided keywords are probably variations of those keywords.  After looking into the keywords that landed on my top five landing pages for Not Provided, I can see that almost all of them are brand related keywords.  In this case, my landing pages report supports my theory that a big portion of the Not Provided keywords consists of branded traffic.  From looking at the sheer quantity of other landing pages Not Provided has, I could make a pretty good guess that a lot of those are long tail keywords. 

When I saw Not Provided as my number one keyword, I got worried about all the information I couldn’t see.  However, after some analysis I can see that Not Provided doesn’t consist of a few magical keywords that I am suddenly missing out on.  Instead, I would say about half of them are brand keywords and the other half are probably long tail keywords that I wouldn’t normally give much thought to if they weren’t all clumped together in the Not Provided bucket.  

What tools are you using to gain insight into the Not Provided keywords?

Top Five Red Flags When Evaluating an Agency

Keith Kochberg, CEO of iMarketing LTD, wrote about ensuring marketing agencies are delivering what they promise, titled Top Five Ways to Tell Your Online Agency is Faking It.

To highlight, the top five red flags are:

1.       Is your agency regularly testing different opportunities?

2.       Do you get regular, detailed reports?

3.       When was the last time you were told NOT to spend money?

4.       How often do you hear from your account manager?

5.       How transparent is your monthly bill?

As a measurement agency of record, we couldn't agree more with point #2. You should see all the key metrics associated with your campaign, including the not so good ones. If you are presented with reports detailing how great the campaign is doing and never hear any bad news, or never hear that a campaign just isn't working, you should be very suspect. If your agency stammers when you ask to see targets and goals, that is also problematic. Conversely, if data is thrown at you in pieces and doesn't provide a cohesive view into your overall effort or if you are overwhelmed with data from them that can be just as troubling. 

Marketing reporting should be holistic, end-to-end and should tie marketing dollars all the way to the sale (yes, even if that sale happens offline). Censored, partial and un-timely reporting is a major cause for concern.

Remember, you can't manage what you don't measure.

10 Must-Have Facebook Metrics

Not sure how to measure success on Facebook? Start with 10 actionable Facebook metrics to show you how your content strategy is performing (or to help create a strategy), what your editorial calendar should be and where you should focus your effort to get more fans.

1. Number of Likes

Month over month look for spikes in your growth. Not sure if you are growing your Facebook fans fast enough? Use socialbakers.com to see the percentage growth of Facebook fans for others in your category.

2. Average Interactions

Combine Content Likes and Content Comments together for an average. Increase number of Facebook posts around topics your audience is engaged in, decrease posts around those they aren't. Make immediate decisions around content strategy and editorial calendar. Watch for unusual spikes or drops.

3. Attrition Rate

Daily Unlikes/Daily Fan Count. Watch for spikes and correlate with activity on page, tells how many Facebook fans are leaving you. There is a natural ebb and flow so focus on significant changes only.

4. Internal Referrers

Tells you where the traffic to your page comes from. You want to increase exposure to your Facebook page on the other Facebook pages that bring you the most traffic.

5. External Referrers

Just like internal referrers, but tells you the external sites bringing you traffic.Focus on building more traffic from the top performers.

6. Pageviews

See if any change to your Facebook page (such as the information or the way it is presented) results in more views. Compare to pageviews on your website.

7. Impressions

Stream Views (impressions) tells you how many times did people (fans and non-fans) view a News Feed story posted by your page. Impressions is a great metric to compare other media tactics apples to apples.

8. Active Users
Tells you how many people (fans and non-fans) have interacted with or viewed your page or its posts.

9. Gender and Age
Is your Facebook content targeted to the right audience? Using the correct tone and language for your demographic? If you understand the demographics of your fans, you will know the answers.

10. City
Look for active local markets for special promotions, test marketing, etc. Or even uncover new markets.

Ideally, you will want to qualify how much money Facebook is making you. While it is "free" there is a maintenance cost in resources. Ultimately you want to have a positive ROI on your Facebook investment. It is possible, conversions can happen both on Facebook and, more typically, off Facebook on your own website. Strong call-to-actions in your Facebook posts will help drive users to action. 

We help our clients measure the success of Facebook everyday with our customized reporting solution. What gets them really excited, and what you should think about too, is including Facebook metrics in your cross-channel marketing measurement reporting. Facebook is just another tactic along with Paid Search, Organic Search, Banner ads and Direct Mail. Look at these metrics lined up side by side and really begin to see the combined success and power of your integrated marketing campaigns.  

The Case for Web Testing & Optimization

A/B Testing. Why even consider it? To put it simply: because we’re wrong – about 80% of the time, according to some estimates. We all know the Marketing Manager who fancies herself a Web designer. Or the business unit leader who can’t make up his mind on which hero image he wants to use on a banner ad landing page. What about the IT team who designs applications and functionality completely without the consumer in mind? Or the Web designer who is emotionally tied to his or her design, even though sales have plummeted after its implementation? Maybe you’ve been guilty of this behavior a few times yourself? It’s easy to do. We see something we like, and become blind to anything else. In short, we think we know best. But we don’t.

This is precisely why you should employ A/B Testing, as one tool in your marketing strategy. It won’t save you, as there are many tools needed to complete the job, but it can definitely help. Because online consumers have constantly evolving needs and expect relevant, even personalized content from the wide variety of sites and content sources they choose to visit, it’s critical that online marketers quickly identify which offers and content are relevant and compelling to their audiences.

What Is A/B Testing?

To some marketers, it’s a dirty word. To others, it’s taken on a god-like importance. And then there’s me, somewhere in the middle. Done right, A/B Testing can make a huge impact on your bottom line in a short amount of time. In a traditional A/B Test, you experiment with 2 or more versions of a design and see which performs and converts the best. Sometimes, A and B are directly competing designs served to two groups of equal number. Other times, A is the current design and serves as the control that most users see while B, which might be more experimental, is served only to a small percentage of users until it has proven itself worthy of full exposure.

What Isn’t It?

It isn’t the answer to everything, it won’t single-handedly turn your business around and it can be over-used and abused. It will provide you with what most likely works in said scenario, but it won’t tell you why. Unlike focus groups, surveys or other direct consumer feedback, A/B Testing doesn’t provide a direct window into a consumer’s mind. There are no thought bubbles that pop up in your analysis tool that tell you what consumers were thinking when they clicked “Start for free.” So you’ll never know why the visitors who saw design B decided to take the desired action 85% of the time vs. those who saw design A and only took the desired action 15% of the time. You will simply know that in this particular test, design B converted better.

For deeper qualitative analysis, you must have a comprehensive marketing communications strategy in place that could include other tools, such as focus groups, online communities, surveys and usability studies that allow you to interact directly with your consumers.

Again - What are the benefits?

A/B testing has 3 benefits:

• It measures actual behavior of your consumers under real-world conditions. You can confidently conclude that if version B sells more than version A, then version B is the way to go.
• It eliminates internal conflict by encouraging factual, data-driven decisions rather than decisions based on gut feelings and opinions.
• You can develop an archive of learnings, which can be applied to other similar areas of your website. In other words, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Lost in a Sea of Reports!

Marketing has always been challenged with measuring results. Historically, traditional marketing efforts such as print, radio, and TV advertising produced little measurement data – let’s call this the “data pond”. Marketers would use very basic fishing tools such as Excel to try and catch any results that could help them demonstrate value. It was manageable and frankly since the data was directional at best, fishing in this data pond for results was fairly simple and the reports were small and very basic. Stay with me!

As one-to-one marketing tactics such as direct mail and email became popular, database marketing and email service companies began to spring up in the hopes of marketers being able to actually begin to measure the results of their marketing investments. As a result of these types of tactics, the data pond began to swell into a lake with more data and more reports starting to appear resulting in a marketing picture that began to lose its focus.

Today, the proliferation of the Web has transformed the once small data pond into a giant sea of data. The Web is a data producing machine and this vastness of data combined with the complex marketing ecosystem that marketers face today results in huge volumes of disparate reports. This raging sea of data has left marketers and marketing agencies feeling ship-wrecked in their ability to demonstrate value and results to key stakeholders.

The reason for this is pretty simple when you think about it. Marketers and marketing agencies are still using the same basic fishing tools from the pond like Excel and PowerPoint to try and catch key marketing intelligence. This lack of sophistication creates a very expensive fishing expedition involving manually piecing together data from a myriad of reports which is very expensive and simply doesn’t allow marketers to understand the real value of their marketing efforts leaving them feeling ship-wrecked.

To solve this problem, organizations must implement a core marketing measurement strategy designed to navigate the sea of data. Our four-step approach to building a marketing measurement strategy gives organizations the right marketing measurement process – a “fish finder” if you will – to begin to collectively understand and transform this vast data sea into marketing intelligence.

While having a process (a fish finder) tells you where to go, you need to be equipped with more than a fishing pole for the pond. Our Focus Point solution is designed to collect and organization this vast sea of data into a defined marketing measurement solution eliminating the vast number of reports and confusion that exist today.

Our Decision Dashboards provide marketers and agencies a customized, sophisticated and easy to understand reporting giving them the ability to “focus” on what tactics are working, where customers and prospects are coming from, and what marketing investment is yielding the greatest ROI.

This proven approach is transforming our client’s ability to navigate the marketing waters of today. Contact Us today for a free measurement assessment and demonstration of our Focus Point solution if you are ready to start navigating the sea of marketing data and delivering tangible marketing results.

ROI = Return on Investment or Return on Ignorance?

If you look closely, most marketing organizations have fallen into the “herd” mentality blindly following the latest trends that are hot in today’s marketing ecosystem. The leader of this herd is whoever is beating the loudest drum creating attention to the “next big thing” that will transform your marketing strategy.

In our haste to follow the latest and greatest, we fail to focus on what we should be focused on – Return on Investment. Marketers often venture into new marketing tactics with little or no knowledge and are suddenly disappointed in the result. Call me crazy but this ROI equation feels more like Return on Ignorance.

I am often asked questions such as this:
“I got a million impressions last year through banner ads – is that good?”
“My bounce rate is 55% on my website – is that bad?”
“I had 20,000 hits to my website last month – what do you think”

Besides the fact that the word “hits” is a term from the 90’s, my response is simple – “How does it make you feel?” The reality is that questions such as these have dominated the area of marketing since marketing began – simply looking at pieces of information that are directional at best in an attempt to determine marketing value.

I truly believe that marketers today aren’t afraid of the real ROI equation – Return on Investment. With the global economy being what it is, the need to demonstrate value and return has never been greater! The problem, I believe, is that marketers simply don’t know how to accomplish this.

Understand that I believe we marketers can do the ROI math. The real challenge however is capturing the responses that marketing generates in a consistent and centralized fashion. If this were to happen, marketers could begin to monetize the value of these responses, identify the expense it took to generate this marketing value, and deliver an ROI.

At Alight Interactive, our core competency is built around marketing measurement. We help our clients utilize the Web as centralized marketing response mouse trap through our web analytics management services. Our web analytics and marketing measurement experts integrate directly with our clients marketing and agency teams to provide a holistic tracking and measurement solution. This approach brings together all of the skill sets required to successfully monetize the value of marketing.

Contact Us today for a free marketing measurement assessment and learn how we can help you begin to monetize the value of your marketing investment.

Google Analytics vs. Adobe (Omniture) SiteCatalyst – A Quick Comparison

I was recently contacted by a web analyst at a leading sporting goods retailer.  He was gathering opinions from industry leaders on the increasingly popular debate - Omniture vs. Google Analytics.

While both products provide the basic elements needed in any web analytics software, let’s breakdown what I shared with this individual which outlines the key elements most organizations need to make a decision.

Key Element	Our View	Winner
Software Cost	Google Analytics is a free product versus a pricing model from Omniture built on pageview volume and users.	Google Analytics
Implementation Time & Cost	One of the biggest reasons to use Google Analytics is the ease of implementation. The account creation and base code implementation process is very simple.  See our cost savings post for an industry leading consumer goods client.	Google Analytics
Speed and User Interface	Google Analytics user interface is far more simple to navigate and much more responsive.	Google Analytics
User Pathing	Omniture SiteCatalyst stores all of its web analytics data in a highly relational model that allows analysts to understand virtually any path a user takes through the site.  Google Analytics only tracks a before and after click path.	Omniture
Custom Tracking	Omniture SiteCatalyst outperforms Google Analytics ability to track custom measurement variables.  However, the implementation is very complex and very expense.  And the reality is that Google Analytics has rapidly evolve their ability to compete here at a much lower cost.	Google Analytics
Campaign Tracking	Google Analytics does a better job of knowing where inbound traffic to your website should be categorized and the implementation of tracking is much easier.  See our post on Campaign Tracking.	Google Analytics
Ecommerce Tracking	Omniture SiteCatalyst outperforms Google Analytics here because of it stores its data.  Pathing is an important part of high volume Ecommerce websites and Google Analytics has some room to grow here.	Omniture
Goal Tracking	Google Analytics wins here because of the simplicity in setup and implementation.  Omniture SiteCatalyst requires extra coding and increased implementation costs.	Google Analytics

By no means is this a comprehensive list however it is a high-level check list that makes Google Analytics the better choice for most organizations. 

At Alight Interactive, we specialize in both platforms and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each product.  We don’t get paid to say good things about either platform and enjoy having this discussion. Contact Us today for a free web analytics assessment and answer any questions you might have.