Posts

How To Set Up Google Analytics Accounts, Properties & Views

/in /by

The setup process is well documented by Google and other websites, so here we will discuss the strategies behind setting these up.

Account

This is the highest level and is the umbrella that houses your Properties and Views. You are limited to 100 Properties within an Account. Very rarely will you need to exceed this limit unless you are an agency or have tons of random domains. Although the latter probably contains SEO issues as well. Our advice is to start with a single Account and read on.

Properties

Here is where the strategy begins. Properties are typically used for a single website address. Often marketers will setup a separate Property for sub-domains as well. Our advice is to track all traffic under a single Property utilizing different Views UNLESS:

  • You want to limit login access to different data sets (You cannot do this for Views)
  • Traffic between sub-domains does not happen, so they are independent and visitors do not cross between them

Views

View filters allow some pretty granular targeting so we opt to use different Views when we can. The biggest problem is that Google Analytics restricts you to just 25 Views. To start we always recommend a Raw Data View that is completely unfiltered. This may help diagnose website issues down the line. From there we will discuss how we want to see our data. Here are some questions we typically ask to determine if a View is needed:

  • Do we need to replace URLs to better group webpages?
  • Do we have very specific site sections, such as News or Sports, that we want to easily see separately?
  • Are we focused on a particular traffic source?

Remember that Views are NOT retroactive and often you can utilize Advanced Segments for many of these reports. Typically we only advise different Views if you need to rewrite URLs (your or any other data for that matter). If not, Advanced Segments should do the trick, AND they ARE retroactive!

How to Set Up Google Analytics

/in /by

Over the last few weeks we have encountered several businesses that either do not have web analytics of any kind or they have analytics implemented but not well. This is an issue that is near and dear to my heart as a data geek but also as a marketer in general. How is it possible to know what is working and what is not when you don’t have proper tracking in place? So in the interest of making everyone smarter and better at tracking we have decided to do a six-part blog series that covers everything you will need to develop a strategy for setting up Google Analytics from start to finish. There are a million blog posts out there about the tactics of setup, but with this series we are trying to explain the how’s and why’s so you can develop a killer analytics strategy to get the actionable data you need!

How to Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics Settings in Google Tag Manager

/in , /by

Do you have similar Google Analytics settings that you keep having to enter each and every time you enter a new tag in Google Tag Manager? Well fret not as Google has saved the day for you with “Google Analytics Settings” as a variable inside of Google Tag Manager. This variable allows you to set all of the typical settings you used to set at the tag level, but now you can save yourself some time by doing it once at the variable level.

How Do Google Analytics Settings Help?

Great question and I’m not so sure I would ever use them. Why? Well there are times when you may want to set the same Custom Dimension across every GA fire. Or, more likely, the cookie domain status field. The big thing to remember here is that whatever you set at the variable level will then be applied EVERY TIME a tag with that variable fires. If you want to set these to be more specific at the tag level then you can do that by selecting the “Enable overriding settings in this tag” option.

A Common Issue This Doesn’t Solve: Tracking Code

While using Google Analytics Settings variables will help make field settings easier they do not help with the problem of having different Universal Analytics account numbers per domain. Typically we will use a “Lookup Table” to serve up the right UA-### based on the hostname a user is accessing the site from. So for instance staging.bluefinstrategy.com vs. www.bluefinstrategy.com (please tell me you have different Universal Analytics accounts for these?!?!). This is important when you have tons of different Google Analytics Events and other things that you’d like to track. Why? Well, typically you’ll want to test them on a staging environment first then push them to production. Instead of having to change the tag when you do that push using a variable allows for the tag to work automatically on both domains!

Both the tactics above allow you to replicate settings using variables and should speed the entry of new Universal Analytics tags within Google Tag Manager. Happy Tagging!

You’re Doing Google Analytics Wrong

/in /by

I’ve had a few conversations the last few months where someone told me that we couldn’t tag something a certain way because Google Analytics isn’t set up to do it that way. And no, I’m not talking about personally identifiable information here. You must be able to think outside the box and break free from what everyone else is doing to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your web data!

Event Tracking

“Action means an Action”

An “Action” was defined to me by the person I was chatting with as the ‘exact action the user takes’. Therefore all of his event actions were labeled as “Click”. My argument was; well, if the event fired didn’t they click? Why do you need to know that? Instead why not use the field to answer better questions, such as Page URL, Click URL, Button/Link Type, etc. See, Google Analytics Event Tracking allows you to put whatever you’d like in those fields (except only an integer for Value of course), so why not take advantage of the flexibility they are offering? How many reports will you pull to see “Event Action=Click” vs. “Event Action=Page URL”. With the former there is no actionable data, but the latter allows you to know which pages may be driving the most clicks. Again, there are a ton of different use cases here, but just don’t get bogged down into thinking you have to follow Google’s naming conventions as law.

Campaign Tracking Variables

“Cost Per Click Advertising”

Campaign Tracking Variables are tough ones, because they do inherently drive a lot of out of the box reports within GA. However, you’re not necessarily handcuffed, especially outside the Pay Per Click walls. For instance, we usually only tag PPC advertising with the “cpc” medium, which is what Google does out of the box. But AdWords is not the only “Cost Per Click” medium in the world. You might be using display ads or social feeds to drive visitors and every time they click you get charged. For me, I’d like to see them all differently as separate line times, so I create separate “Mediums” for them. But alas, grouping is not lost. If you’d still like the group them in an easy report BUT have the flexibility to see them separately Google offers you Custom Channel Groupings. This gem allows you to group inbound traffic in any way you see fit while not losing the granularity you might need to make very specific decisions. This doesn’t just apply to “Mediums” but all of the other ‘UTM’ variables Google provides.

So don’t let someone tell you that “Goofle doesn’t work that way”. It can and it will. Google Analytics is a tool for you to use as you see best to make actionable decisions for your website. Any time you go to tag something just ask yourself, “Will I ever make a marketing or design decision based on this field?” If the answer is no, then get granular!

Internal Campaign Tracking

/in /by

Campaign Tracking Variables are a great tool to evaluate how various traffic sources perform on your website after arriving. However, that is their limitation and where they should stop; upon arrival. Too many times we take a stroll through the Campaigns or Source reports and start to see some odd items that immediately send the color red to the top of the flag pole!

How to use Campaign Tracking Variables

We covered this subject in-depth already, but for the sake of this post we wanted to remind our readers that Campaign Tracking Variables are simply for tracking external traffic that arrive on your website. This may be PPC traffic, Email links, or referral traffic. Basically if you have access to touch the destination URL it should absolutely have campaign tracking variable on it.

Tracking Visitors Interactions on Your Website

Google Analytics Event Tracking ParametersDo not, under any circumstance, ever use campaign tracking variables to track internal campaigns. Your internal ads, upsell areas, sliders, etc should not have any “utm” variables attached the the URL. Instead you should be using Event Tracking. Google Analytics Event Tracking tags allow for three fields (well, technically 4 if you count ‘value’) that you can enter any text you’d like. These fields are called Category, Action and Label (optional). So for instance, maybe your Category is “Internal Advertising” and then your Action is “300×250 Red Upsell Ad” and your Label could be {{Page Path}} (notes what page the visitor was on when they clicked. These events are tracked in a separate way and do not overwrite the previous Campaign Tracking Variables used to enter the site, therefore you can even attribute these clicks to the different campaigns you are tracking upon site entry.

When To Use What

Here’s a quick and handy guide on a few common instances of when to use which tracking method:

Campaign Tracking Variables

  • Pay Per Click ads (if not auto-tagged)
  • Email Marketing links
  • Text links on referring website

Event Tracking Tags

  • Internal advertising campaigns
  • Call To Action (CTA) buttons
  • External links that point to other domains from your site

How to run simple AB testing programs with Google Analytics

/in , /by

AB testing can sound daunting at times. I suspect this is why so many organizations have yet to conduct much testing of their own. So in the light of the new year and resolution setting here’s to a 2017 full of ab testing!

Step number one of AB Testing: Plan

We have already discussed what to ab test previously, but once you have that idea you need to enact a plan to implement it. For our article we’re going to assume that you’re testing easy things, such as button colors or page layout changes. These are typically easy things for a marketer to do within their content management system and it’s the first place to start when dipping your toe into the AB testing game. Here are some quick things to keep in mind:

  • Start with small and easy changes
  • Consider starting with either a page at the end or beginning of your conversion funnel
  • Have one or two page variations, but no more than that

How to setup an ab test in Google Analytics

Setting Up Google ExperiementsOnce you create an experiment you have a bunch of quick and easy settings to get you up and running. If you already have goals set up in GA (and if you don’t call us immediately) you can select them via a dropdown for your test conversion. Then, you must decide if you want all traffic to the original page to be part of the AB test or just some. We would typically recommend just doing 100%. In the Advanced Settings we would advise when you’re first starting to distribute traffic evenly across all variants. When Google starts deciding, especially with low volume, it can get wacky very quickly. For example, at 100 sessions, if the Original saw 25 conversions and Variant 1 saw 15 Google would start showing Original more often. But 10 conversions isn’t hard to make up and in our example it’d be just 10% of the sessions!

The next step is implementing your page variants. It’s as simple as entering the URLs of the pages. So the Original URL is the page as it currently exists and the variants are your competitors. It’s literally that simple. Once you enter these pages and click “next” Google Analytics will give you code to place on the Original page. There are tons of different content management systems out there, but for WordPress you can simply edit the header.php file:
google experiments in wordpress
…Or you can use a plugin such as Simple Content Experiments. Again, your content management system should have some sort of way to implement the GA Experiments code in the head tag somewhere, just ask your development team.

That’s it for implementation. If you want to do simple AB tests any marketer with a good CMS could have a test up and running in a matter of hours. So what then are you waiting for? Get to testing and watch your website conversions skyrocket!

Helpful Google Analytics Custom Reports

/in /by

google analytics custom reportsCustom reports within Google Analytics are not as widely used as they should be. We won’t discuss the setting up of customer reports as Google’s already done that for you here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1151300?hl=en. However, we’ll walk you through three reports that we typically set up immediately when gaining access to a client’s Google Analytics account.

Dimension: Hostname

The hostname is the domain that fired the GA code. Why is this necessary? Well often times there are development or staging sites where we get everything set up before pushing a site live. The hostname report can show us if those sites are still firing GA code or if we have not properly removed them. Other times it may be nice to see what subdomains are getting the most engagement.

Dimension: Hour of Day

This report is pretty self explanatory, but we have used this report a TON to see when site engagement or conversions are highest. This can help you find out when to increase marketing spends and also help to target visitors more effectively.

Dimension: Day of Week

Similar to the hour of the day, the day of week can help target your marketing spends much more effectively. Does your audience typically engage throughout the week or do conversions happen more often on the weekends? This report can also help to dictate when to launch new website additions to ensure any issues would have the least impact.

There are so many more amazing custom reports, but if you’re just getting started these are three that can help you immediately. Happy reporting!

Setting Up Your Analytics Profiles

/in /by

Have you deleted an analytics profile? We analysts cringe at that thought for one huge reason; historical data trending. We have experienced a handful of clients over this last year who, for a myriad of reasons, deleted profiles or started anew. Below are a few quick tips in setting up analytics for your website that will eliminate the need to do such a thing again!

Setting Up Analytics Raw Data Profiles

This is job number one. Any time you have an account in Google Analytics you should have a raw & unfiltered profile that just keeps on truckin’ and collecting data as it comes in. This is helpful for a few reasons. First off, if you run into site issues it’s much easier to track them down without the filters getting in the way. Secondly, sometimes filters are too restrictive and it is then necessary to run an Advanced Segment against the raw data profile to see what went wrong! But don’t forget that best practice though is to make sure your goals make their way to the Raw Data Profile as well!

Profile vs. Advanced Segment

Remember that a Profile starts collecting data the day you set it up. Therefore it inherently removes the ability to review historical trends. Advanced segments are so powerful these days that it often removes the need to create a separate Profile. All you do is apply the Advanced Segment to your filtered profile and away you go. I would say that 95% of the sites we have worked with can get away with having 2 Profiles, Raw Data and IP filtered, simply because of Advanced Segments. However, if you need to restrict user access to data then new profiles it is!
If you’re considering removing a Profile or just starting from scratch take a look at Advanced Segments before you do so and you just might find that they solve all the world’s (analytics setup) problems!

Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Variables

/in /by

Tracking your marketing campaigns is imperative to success, mostly so you’re not spending advertising dollars on underperforming mediums. However many websites go without the use of campaign tracking variables. Now, every analytics platform has a campaign tracking component of some kind but today we will focus on the Google Analytics side of the fence, as that is the most popular.

What are campaign tracking variables?

Campaign Tracking Variables in Google Analytics allow you to track any inbound link to your website with specific variables that give you insight into how visitors who clicked it behaved on your site. These variables allow you to put each visit into a particular bucket and then even group them so you can tell if one particular group of ads performed better or if a particular website you’re advertising on performed worse. Below we will outline each variable available to you:

Campaign

This is the overarching umbrella of your group of ads. Is it a “Fall Sale”? Perhaps it is simply “Widget Awareness”. Or maybe it’s just a “General Branding” campaign. You have full control over what to name these, but be sure that you use the same name for ALL ads within the group.

Source

This describes where the ad or link is placed. “Facebook”, “Twitter”, “News Sentinel Daily”? Where does the ad or link actually exist where the visitors can click on it? Now, this is straight forward for the examples I mentioned previously, but what about an Ad Network or an Email? Typically I will use the name of the Network or the Email Provider as I may change Networks or Providers down the line and this distinction helps me see who may have done better.

Medium

This is all about the type of ad or link you are using. Is it a banner, ppc, text link, email? This one should be very broad and contain a large portion of your ads. For instance, I wouldn’t recommend using “banner” and then “flash banner”. We’ll talk about how to distinguish between ads in the “Content” section below.

Content

This is where you can really go crazy. I typically use the “Content” field to describe the actual ad. Is it a “728×90-Blue” banner ad? Is it the “header-logo” in an email? Speaking of emails, maybe you need to denote multiple emails within one campaign, so maybe you expand on the previous example by saying “header-logo-sign-up-email”. These can be whatever you want them to be, but they should speak to what exactly the ad is all about.

Term

Typically you will never use this field unless you are doing PPC on a non-Google property OR if you’re using a shady third-party who won’t give you the keywords they are using to run your PPC campaign (fire them immediately if this is the case). However, if you do need to use this field, it is specifically for defining the keywords of a pay per click ad campaign.

Campaign Tracking Variables in action

Create a tracking url

The easiest thing I can tell you is to simply visit Google’s URL Builder. However, I use a spreadsheet that automatically calculates the tracking url based on some formulas. This spreadsheet is great when I’m doing more than one link. Plus, it allows me to keep track of every link I use.

Naming your variables

Naming each variable the same thing is absolutely imperative. Even something as simple as “email” vs. “e-mail” will show up as separate line items. So in order to keep track of them I typically create a simple spreadsheet to ensure I use the same naming conventions.

Viewing campaign reports

Each of the sections above represent individual reports (eg: There’s a “Campaign” report, “Medium” report, etc), however you may also combine them together. For instance, How did all the “Mediums” within one particular “Campaign” perform? Or which “Sources” drove the worst conversion for particular ad “Content”?

Campaign Tracking Variable Planning

In addition to the spreadsheet I mentioned above you should first sit down and think through all of your marketing means and ensure you have a plan for how to track them all. That plan should then be put into your spreadsheet and never change the course from your naming conventions. You can’t change anything once it’s in Google, so this planning is incredibly important, as is ensuring you use the same naming conventions.

At the end of the day you should have this mantra… if I can control the link there should always be campaign tracking variables on it! If not, you’ll be blindly throwing darts at the wall!

Big Data and why you won’t use it, yet

/in , /by

Big data was going to revolutionize your marketing efforts. But according to an eMarketer report only 5% of businesses say that it is fundamentally changing the way they do business. How could that be? We have all the data we would ever need to micro-target our customers with the right message at the right time! The problem is lack of strategy and lack of understanding of how to actually use this wealth of knowledge. Above all else, many businesses do not have a data collection engine set up to track audience behavior and customer preferences. But fear not, help is here. Below are some common pitfalls and how you can start using Big Data to grow your business.

No Strategy, no gains

In “The Art of War” Sun Tzu talks at great length about devising a strategy to defeat an enemy. While the tactics may change from battle to battle, the fundamentals do not. Having an in-depth digital strategy allows you to focus your messaging and target the right customers but much of the data either has yet to be unlocked OR just isn’t being collected. For instance, with Google Analytics you can easily see where visitors come from. You can then see which states or cities perform the best OR perhaps which cities buy particular products. With this data you can retarget those customers with messaging around promotions or sales for said products. That sounds good in theory, but you have to sit down and map it out. You need to say “For Miami, FL visitors we want to show rain jackets” and “For Denver, CO visitors we want to show heavy coats”. But Big Data goes beyond that. What time of year do we show these messages? What about to customers who have already purchased a rain jacket or heavy coat? How long ago did they purchase? When do customers typically repurchase these jackets? This is the heart of Big Data. The ability to micro-target these audiences and spot trends. But the data itself won’t do anything. You need to interpret the data and have a ready-made message to display to the audience. Many firms are not built to handle this type of strategy in addition to just not having the time. Bringing in a third party digital strategist, such as those from Bluefin Strategy, can help you develop these strategies and messaging schemes to micro-target your audience and increase your bottom line!

I don’t Understand

As I mentioned above, there is a severe lack of understanding as to what Big Data can and will do for your company. It’s not your fault, there’s a million things Big Data can provide and you need to focus on running the business. Once you have a strategy of who your targets are and what their behavior is you can begin to show the messaging. But how? Do you do it on your site? What about in banner ads? Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising? What about offline through direct mail? There are multiple channels that allow you to take advantage of this amazing data source but understanding how to utilize them is paramount to success. The best strategy in the world will fall flat on its face if you’re not using the right medium to get the message out. Just as a financial advisor gives you investment options, a digital strategist can help you with placement options to ensure your message reaches the right audience at the right time.

So why won’t you use this, yet?

You will, eventually. Many businesses need to collect the proper data first. So step one is ensuring your web analytics is setup to collect the right data about your visitors and customers. Step two is to devise your strategy by developing audience segments and their needs. Step three is to develop messaging to each audience segment for various times of year or buying cycles. Step four is to implement the messaging to the audience using the mediums and tactics that make the most sense for each audience. Step five… success! It isn’t that difficult when you have the right tools and the right partners. A simple evaluation and strategy to get you started doesn’t cost much (maybe a couple thousand bucks), but it can reap huge rewards! Talk to a digital strategist to determine the most effective use of your data and to make sure you have all of the right pieces in place to thrive online!