The Ecommerce Expert

Successful Ecommerce Businesses Start Here

A Look at Google Multi-Channel Sales Funnels

By 3 Comments

A Look at Google Multi-Channel Sales Funnels

You cannot manage what you do not measure.

This single phrase simply can’t be ignored. Without measurement there is no gauge on progress and it becomes virtually impossible to determine if your efforts are effective at building your business and reaching your goals.

Despite this, I find it incredibly stunning how many business do not take full advantage of the analytic suites available to them. They install what they call ‘tracking’ when in fact, the information they are recording means little to maximizing the effectiveness of there overall objectives.

More specifically, determining how effective a particular channel of the business is often requires tracking visitors through what is called a funnel. In a funnel, the visitor enters at a specific point and is guided toward an end objective. That objective can be anything; a download, a contact us request, or in ecommerce—ideally a sale.

However, a visitor seldom follows a perfect liner path to a conversion. More often they start at one point, go through a series of channels along the way called micro-conversions, go back to a few earlier channels (or find new channels), then complete the final objective—the macro conversion. Each of the micro conversions play a role in the macro conversion, without them, the macro conversion doesn’t happen.

Understanding what micro conversions—or points along the way—they took to complete the objective is critical in fine tuning your marketing efforts at each step. Tracking only the last contact point of the funnel (i.e. the last page or ad the user clicked before they reached the site which in turn lead to the conversion) vs. tracking every point along the way is ineffective and leaves a lot on the table.

Let me illustrate using the following example. A visitor clicks your PPC ad but then after arriving at your site leaves at some point and does not complete the sale. They come across your Facebook page a week later, look over that, then take an offer you had on the page to download more information about a specific product via an email optin—and they leave again.

A week after that they read over the info about the product and click a bookmark they had made of your site upon one of their initial visits. This time they decide to make the purchase.

If you were only tracking from the final entry point to the end conversion you would believe that this conversion originated from a ‘direct referral’ such as a bookmark, by directly tying it into the address bar, or by another similar method—and that is true to a certain extent. The conversion did come after the directly linked to the site, but that was not where the funnel truly started.

You see, the way your customers interact with your entire sales channel, not just part of it, leads to what happens in the end. If you knew exactly which channels they interacted with before they reached the final point leading to a conversion, you could setup more fine tuned marketing efforts at each stop along the way.

Thanks to Google’s introduction of multi-channel sales funnels, the landscape has changed and we are now able to see a more complete representation of the exact path—and even timeframe—taken to a given conversion (in our example 3 weeks from beginning to end.)

Multi-channel sales funnels include tracking for but not limited to:

  • Paid and organic search (for all search engines)
  • Referral sites
  • Affiliates
  • Social networks
  • Email newsletters
  • Display ads
  • Custom campaigns that you’ve created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs
  • And more …

With this new information in front of you it is now possible to see that in fact the first contact with this new customer in our example came through your PPC advertising and not through the direct link alone—and this was approximately 3 weeks prior to the actual conversion occurring. Although initial visit did not produce a sale, it did get them interested enough to get to know your company further (through your Facebook page) and in turn, the information they downloaded after opting in to your email was what might have finally pushed them to come back (through the bookmark) and eventually buy.

Armed with this detail, you can now see that without the PPC they likely would not have started the process, and without the information you presented them with for download, they may have gone elsewhere. So each step in the process was an integral part of them making a purchase.

How do you setup and use the multi-channel sales funnels?

You don’t really need to setup multi-channel sales funnels in Google Analytics—they are a set of reports. However, although you do not need to setup anything in particular that directly relates to the reports, you do need a few things active within your Analytics account for the reports to be made available to you.

  1. You must have either Goals, or Ecommerce Tracking turned on for your website.
  2. You must be using the new version of Google Analytics (click the “New Version” link from your Analytics dashboard to activate it.)
  3. Once you’ve got those two items in place, you should now see a new tab called “My Conversions” at the top of your page within Google Analytics. Use that tab to navigate to the multi-channel funnels area.
  4. For even more detailed information about your advertising campaigns make sure you link your AdWords account to your Analytics account.

More often than not, those who become customers don’t simply follow a straight line path to a resulting conversion. With the various channels available to them today they may click an ad, visit one of your social media pages, follow your tweets, read your emails, and more. If you knew precisely the route they took to generate the final conversion you have more power to optimize your marketing at each point along the way—increasing your opportunity of closing more sales. That’s what multi-channel sales funnels do for your business.

Image Search Keyword Tracking With Google Analytics

By 5 Comments

I recently had a question from a user of my Simple Google Analytics zen cart module about how to differentiate between searches and keywords that come from Google Image Search vs. those that come from other Google search channels. As of this writing, Google will automatically log referrers from its image search engine; however, it lumps all keywords into one lump source as ‘(not_set’).

To get a more detailed keyword breakdown you need to customize the code you use within your Google Analytics tracking script.

The method I will describe here works for anyone using Google Analytics on their site regardless of how it is implemented.

The first thing you have to do in order to get this to work is to be running either the ga.js or the Asychronous version of the tracking script.

Depending on which version of the tracking script you have chosen you’ll then need to customize it with one of the following snippets, adding it to what you already have. Be aware that the order and placement of this code within the original tracking script is very important.

If you are using the ga.js version of the tracking script you’ll need to add the following lines of code (highlighted in bold) to that.

If you are using the ga.js tracking script your additions would look like this:




Doing this should breakout the individual searches by keyword so you have a more complete picture of what is happening with regard to the traffic that comes from Google Image Search.

Google help also offers more information on customizing search engines and referral traffic with your analytics tracking script.

Have you tried this method or have another way of doing it? I’d love to hear it. Post a comment below to join the discussion.

The Future of Analytic Tracking in Jeopardy

By 8 Comments

First it was Microsoft IE (starting with IE version 9 which will include ‘Tracking Protection Lists’) that announced they will include a new ‘easier’ setting to block unwanted tracking by websites you visit.

Now Firefox just announced that version 4.1 of their browser will prevent it (they are calling it ‘Do Not Track‘) as well and Google Chrome recently building in features that enable blocking (dubbed ‘Keep My Opt-Outs Out‘).

Yes, it is true, any user who wanted to block tracking in the past could do it by adjusting a few setting indicating not to accept cookie from certain sites. But this information was largely ‘hidden from view’ (not easily accessible if you didn’t know where to find it first). It was possible, but the majority of non-techies did not do it.

The new changes are going to make the ability to do this a lot easier going forward, and once you make the changes they are going to ‘stick’ this time (settings are permanent and deleting cookies will have no impact on the preferred status.)

These new changes come in response to a December 2010 Federal Trade Commission recommendation that all Web browsers add do not track features to enhance online surfer privacy.

Firefox’s ‘Do Not Track’ feature will attempt to use headers passed by the browser to alert potential sites of a visitors request to be eliminated from any tracking that could be used for OBA (Online Behavioral Advertising.) One caveat to both the Google and Firefox’s tracking blocking tools at the moment is that they only pertain to advertising companies that offer opt-out options, and advertisers have been slow to add such options themselves. IE9 is different and is said to allow the user to block any and all tracking no matter the opt-in / opt-out policy of the site in question.

The addition of such systems will no doubt have an impact on what sites begin to see from an analytical perspective, and this could mean big changes in the way you track the effectiveness of your business online. In fact, some lawmakers worry such laws could hurt the economy of the Internet. With little ability to track visits, it will become difficult to determine what works to generate the best return for a company and even harder for them to present their message accurately to the most targeted audience.

Going forward and with privacy laws getting stricter it looks like the ability to ‘opt out’ of tracking will be not only simple, but—although not currently—could be the default setting on a browser in the future (meaning that it would not require any interaction on the part of the client to stop the tracking—rather, it would be the norm and they would have to ‘turn it on’ if they wanted to be tracked.)

I understand giving users the freedom to elect whether to be tracked or not. We do that now however to some degree. Maybe making it easier to do that isn’t the answer. Couldn’t we just do better at explaining to them how to prevent it within their current browsers? Just a thought.

How these changes will affect things going forward like PPC advertising, split testing, and more is yet to be determined and only time will reveal that answer.

What are your thoughts on the ability to easily block tracking on websites using these upcoming tools? I would love to hear them.

Google Introduces Weighted Sort

By Leave a Comment

If you want to fine tune your website in an effort to increase sales you absolutely must pay attention to what your website analytics is telling you. In short, you must know where your problem spots are if you are going to be able to correct them.

Now, there are a number of website metrics that should be focused on in an effort to uncover problems. One of them is your bounce rate — both website wide, and on individual pages throughout the site.

Now, don’t confuse bounce rates with exit rates. The two represent different items. A bounce rate can be defined as follows:

Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. Or in other another way of saying it is the percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

It goes without saying that ideally you want your bounce rate as low as possible.

To determine where you have problems associated with bounce rate it is best to drill down on a per page level and determine which pages produce the highest bounce rate. Until now, doing this worked similar to the following: you locate the content sections of your site within analytics, you click the bounce rate column to sort from highest bounce rate to lowest, you are presented with a list of pages from 100% bounce rate to lowest and then you start to scan / scroll / analyze those returned based on what is really important and indicates a problem area.

The initial results returned using this method are useless. You get pages with 100% bounce rate that really don’t indicate a problem spot and for the most part are only listed at the top because of their ‘100%’ measurement. Now, you might be asking how can a page with a 100% bounce rate not be a problem. I’ll provide you with a brief example of this very concept.

One visitor arrives at a page deep within the site (we’ll say the contact page) and then bounces leaving analytics with a 100% bounce rate. One thousand visitors arrive at the home page and 500 bounce leaving a 50% bounce rate for the home page. Although the visitor who arrived at the contact us page resulted in a 100% bounce rate, the more important bounce rate to pay attention to is the bounce rate of the home page. Why? More visitors arrived at the home page than the contact page and thus, the ‘weight’ of the bounce for the home page is more of an indicator of a problem point on the site. Think of it as working with a “larger data sample.”

Having provided this example it now becomes clear that the past sorting method offered by Google Analytics did little to quickly provide the information needed to help make decisions fast. Yes, you could get to it, but even after sorting you had to wade through pages of information to really find those pages that should get attention.

All that has changed with the addition of weighted sort in Google Analytics. Weighted sort enables you to now drill down on previously useless sort results based on the ‘weight’ each page (in this example) has over others on the site. This provides more relevant results faster and thus makes it easier to determine where to focus your attention when attempting to improve your website.

You can read more about the new feature and how to use it here:
//analytics.blogspot.com/2010/08/introducing-weighted-sort.html

80 Google Website Optimizer Tests for Ecommerce Sites

By 1 Comment

For those of you have have not seen these yet I thought I’d post links to two very nice articles on what you can do to utilize the power of Google’s Website Optimizer.

Google’s Website optimizer is a powerful tool that enables you to increase the conversion of your website using testing methods such as Multivariate and traditional A/B split testing. When setup and utilized correctly, Website Optimizer gives you the ability to discover what really works to turn visitors into sales (or just about any other action you are seeking from your audience). No more guessing.

For any of you have have already tried your hand at “manual” split testing, you know it can be tedious, time consuming, and down right tough to keep track of all the possible combination’s that are put together for any given test. That process is made much simpler with the use of Website Optimizer.

The instructions for setting up optimizer are easy to follow and do a great job for even newbies on helping them get up and running (although if your cart requires programming to integrate the code into the pages you may need the help of your technical team).

One article circulated last year and was titled 55 Google Website Optimizer Tips and Tricks.

The other surfaced February 23 of this year as a “sequel” to that original post and it is titled 25 Google Website Optimizer Tips for Better Product Pages.

Together these articles combine to provide a total of 80 different tests you should consider running on your site. I highly recommend reading them and keeping them on your bookmarked list for future reference.

About

The Ecommerce Expert offers products and services that help move ecommerce businesses toward growth and success. Our products and services help store owners maximize their ROI, decreasing expenses and increasing revenue. The net result is sustainable growth and stability with above average results.