Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [257]
Build additional segments based on content that you have on the site and actions available to visitors (videos, downloads, forms, and so on). This will provide insight into the tendencies of visitors while they are on the site.
Build segments based on the content of your website. This is especially effective if you have multiple product categories. By contrasting categories against each other and evaluating based on conversions, you will be able to see the profitable categories against those that simply attract large numbers of visitors.
Remember not to be distracted by the big numbers. The most important thing in segmenting is to associate a group of visitors by a common denominator to the goal and then compare and contrast other segments in order to find the best-performing trends.
Chapter 21
Week 18: Analyze for Action
Now that you have gained a proper perspective on analytics, it is time to put that perspective into practice. Apply your business goals to the data, and find the knowledge you need to manage your website more effectively. Get your segments from last week ready—this week everything comes together to give you a true picture of your marketing campaigns and how to improve them.
Chapter Contents
Monday: Set Up Goals and Analysis in Google Analytics
Tuesday: Analyze by Segments
Wednesday: Analyze Segmented Search Terms and Bounce Rates
Thursday: Segment Content
Friday: Turn Your Analysis into Action!
Monday: Set Up Goals and Analysis in Google Analytics
Throughout this entire book, I have been preaching to track your conversions and goals as the means of truly measuring success. This chapter will focus on the steps to accomplish that. In today’s section, I will cover how to set up your goals and track conversions, because they are separate actions within Google Analytics.
For purposes of example, I will use Google Analytics for setting up goals and conversions. There are a few reasons for doing this. First, it’s free. It’s hard to beat a price tag like that. I held out for years, because I didn’t want to admit that Google’s analytics product was going to be the top in the industry, but the improvements made over the recent years have changed my mind. Second, the tool has the ability to segment. Very few analytics programs offer the ability to segment nearly every aspect of the visitor experience. The speed, ability to create segments on the fly, and ability to develop custom segments is beyond comparison and beats many of the expensive, high-level analytics programs available. Third, the levels of knowledge required to get set up and begin to gain actionable data is very low. You don’t have to be an advanced programmer, and you don’t need advanced training in analytics to begin setting up reports and analysis on your own. The accessibility of the program is very high when compared to others. Fourth, it is pervasive. Because of the price tag (it’s free!), I have found that most people I speak with are using Google Analytics, even when they have already purchased another analytics program. They use them together, because Google Analytics is easier and provides more understandable reports, and the other more expensive, more complicated systems are just that—more expensive and complicated.
Marketers and business owners just want to get their reports and get back to business. They don’t want to be burdened with figuring out complicated tracking scripts and setup schemes and finding out that the functionality they need costs more and requires hundreds to thousands of additional investment and setup dollars.
Set Up Your Goals
Here I’ll walk you through the steps to set up goals in the most recent edition of Google Analytics. You’ll need to log into a Google Analytics account to follow along, and you’ll need to be able to identify a specific page on your website that is served only when a visitor takes an action that you’ve set as a goal. In