Today was a day of highs and lows. I enjoyed checking out the Google Analytics
reports and watching the traffic on my blog increase as everything synched up
perfectly. In my mind, I was transforming into an Analytics Ninja!
We were asked to set up some goals and use Google Analytics to see
how well, or not, our blog sites were meeting them. There are four types of
goals and they are all pretty straightforward:
- A URL Destination Goal
- A Time on Site Goal
- A Pages Per Visit Goal
- An Event Goal
The goals I set for my blog page were pretty simple. I wanted to set
some benchmarks for Time on Site and Pages per Visit, and I wanted to track an
"event," which in this case was the number of people who played the “Hanukkah
song” video in my previous post. Google Analytics is set up to
track pages, but not things that occur within pages, like embedded video. Video
is generally a good way to increase Time on Site, especially if it is
compelling or, such as in the case of a tutorial, useful and illustrative of a
concept.
Goals are pretty important to people who are trying to accomplish
something with their web site. Leading visitors to a purchase or getting them
to fill out a form are two easy goals you can set up, or maybe you just want
them to spend a designated amount of time on the site, which is really all I
had hoped to accomplish. Not all goals necessarily lead to a purchase, as it
really depends on the nature and purpose of the Web site. I wanted people who
found Her Online Space to linger a while.
Things were going so well for me.
And then...I got cocky. I couldn't leave well enough alone. I wanted to challenge myself, and post a video to
track an "event," simply, the number of people who hit play. Anyway, it crossed my threshold of
knowledge and it quickly went south. Being a newbie to analytics, I have no
business messing with HTML code. Really, I don't. There is a little code
manipulation required to track the "event" and somehow I made error after error and, well, it just wouldn't work. Be my guest and watch the video, but I
can't tell if you were there or not (at least at the time this blog post was
published). Though a little defeated, I tried to keep it in perspective.
I set a Time on Site goal at four minutes since the video clip was
about that long, and determined that a logical Pages Per Visit goal was three
pages, hopeful that people would not only check out the video, but also some
previous posts. When I looked at the goal completions on December 3, I had 20 total goal completions, 10 each for Time on Site and Pages Per Visit and a 0
for Video Plays for disappointing but obvious reasons.
As a marketing professional, it is important that I at least know the language of analytics. As more aspects of business move online, it only makes
sense to know how to interpret the success or failure of various campaigns.
Analytics is how you do that. Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik would like us
all to be Analytics Ninjas. Personally, I am hoping for maybe yellow or orange
belt status.
I was inspired by some additional information on this very topic. Vaughan
(2012), writing for Hubspot's inbound marketing blog, suggests that its prudent
for marketers to remember that web analytics is not the complete picture and
that "marketers really need much richer data to understand the performance
of their marketing campaigns, something that web analytics alone can't
provide." Naturally, the measurable metrics available on Google Analytics
or other platforms are useful in telling us how a web site performs in a
technical way. Knowing things like the clickstreams, the funnels, and the
duration on site is useful. But it is the job of the marketing professional to interpret this data in a meaningful way. The marketer
looks at all the data, across multiple channels (including some that are not
online) and makes adjustments in strategy to positively impact ROI.
The bottom line is this. If you have a web site, or manage one, you
need to know how it all works together. The most basic metrics of time on site,
page views, traffic sources and bounce rate are helpful but only if you know
how to apply them to make good business decisions. Leavy (2011), writing for
Entrepreneur, suggests five simple things you should be able to know from your
web site analytics.
1. Do people already know you, and how are they finding you, and
why?
2. Are you bringing in potential, qualified customers?
3. Is your social media presence bringing people to your web site?
4. Are visitors "bouncing" from your home page, and if so,
why?
5. Are they visiting the right pages and getting the information
they need to "convert?"
Any marketing professional worth her salt is interested in improving
sales, impressions, awareness...whatever the case may be. It is critical to be
aware of all of the useful elements in the tool box, and the possibilities of
analytics-based decision making.
Marketing used to be accomplished by the old “spray and pray” method,
where you spend a lot of money putting out a lot of information to the masses, never
really being sure it was working.
Heffernan (2010) describes old-style advertising as unaccountable and
that “companies are slowly but determinedly moving from unaccountable media
advertising to traceable, analyzable results.” And that is exactly what is happening
in the online ad environment where you can view instant analytics and make changes
to improve the message, the channels and the audience.
I can't say I'll be applying for any web analytics jobs soon and I
should probably avoid messing with any code. But, I do forge ahead with the
confidence that I have a functional understanding of the foundation of this
discipline and how I can apply it to my marketing campaigns.
References:
Google Analytics. (n.d.). About goals. Retrieved December 2, 2012
from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012040
Heffernan, M. (2010, June 10).
Spray and pray: Why does anyone still buy advertising? CBC Moneywatch.
Retrieved on December 2, 2012 from http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-44340243/spray-and-pray-why-does-anyone-still-buy-advertising/
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