Google Analytics* * Transcript. An APPSUMO + MIXERGY Production. Getting The Most Out of A Powerful Tool

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1 An APPSUMO + MIXERGY Production Google Analytics* Getting The Most Out of A Powerful Tool with Justin Cutroni Director of Digital Intelligence, WebShare * Transcript

2 GOOGLE ANALYTICS Andrew Warner: Hey, Justin, I d like to see how a power user like you uses Google Analytics, so that I get a sense of what I can do if I were using Google Analytics well. Can you show me? Justin Cutroni: Sure. Absolutely. I just wanted to bring your attention right here: we re looking at a report on Google Analytics called the Campaigns Report and this report is showing us all of our different marketing activities that are driving traffic to the site. Here s a list of all the campaigns and their names. And what s really great about this report is I m looking at how much revenue my different marketing activities are generating. Andrew Warner: Are these the actual stats for Google Store that you re showing us? Justin Cutroni: Yeah so this is actual data from Google Store. We use this in a lot of our training materials and at a lot of talks that we give. Andrew Warner: I see. And what s your connection to Google Store? Justin Cutroni: I have no personal connection, other than that I ve spent way too much money on onesies for my children. But Google is one of our biggest partners. We are a a Google Analytics certified partner --- the company I work for --- so we ve been teaching analytics for a long time and when we told them, Hey, we need something to use as a good example, they opened up the store for us. Andrew Warner: Interesting, that s great. I love looking at actual data. Justin Cutroni: Yeah, actual data makes a huge difference when you re teaching. Justin Cutroni: And to me, this is really where everyone needs to be when they re using Google Analytics, or any analytics tool for that matter. They need the ability to see what is impact for the bottom line of my business based on my marketing activities because we re spending a lot of time, money, and energy on these marketing activities. We need to understand are they paying off. And when I say paying off, I m not really so worried about traffic, I just want to know which ones are really impacting the bottom line. So, this is the goal, to get everyone to a place like this where they can look and understand how their marketing activities are actually impacting the bottom line of their business. Andrew Warner: Okay. And as you look at this report what are you seeing? You re seeing you re number one source is what? Justin Cutroni: I see my number one campaign right here--this marketing campaign- -looks like it s a display campaign for English speakers, is driving about 7,000 visits to the site, but it s generating $60 in revenue. Not so hot. Meanwhile I have this other campaign driving far less traffic but generating much more revenue. So, to me, why am I spending all of this money to generate $60, right? I ve got to be able to fix this, or do it better. So this is something I want to fix, meanwhile this other campaign, while it s not bringing as much traffic, it s generating a heck of a lot of revenue. I might want to promote this more. Spend more money here in order to generate more revenue. Andrew Warner: I see. And you know what? If I were just looking at the standard analytics report, I would think that the source that is sending me 7,223 visitors is my better source 2

3 and that s what I would want to grow and I think that the second source that is only sending a little over a thousand visitors is not doing so well. And I would probably back away and not realize that that s the more profitable source for me. So you are going to help us set this up so that we understand not just where our traffic is but also where our most valuable traffic is and how we can grow that and how we can fix the places where we are not getting very valuable traffic. Is that right? Justin Cutroni: Absolutely. My friend Katie Payne who was one of the founders of the analytics industry had a great quote. She said we need to stop tracking hits and by hits she uses the acronym, How Idiots Track Success. We need to move beyond hits. Andrew Warner: Hits, that s how idiots track success, okay. Alright. Well, I want to move beyond it, but first I d like to understand what s available to me. Can you help me understand what metrics I should be looking at, what I should know about Google Analytics here, because when I come in here I see lots of different links and I m not sure that I am as aware of what I should be aware of as you are. In fact, I know I m not. So, help me understand it. Justin Cutroni: Yeah. Absolutely. I think we are up to over 130 different reports in Google Analytics. And that s before you even customize any reports so it s completely overwhelming. And even when you log in for the first time you see a screen like this: I m showing my dashboard here. And when you look at this, instantly Google kind of pummels you with these six metrics: Visits, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and Percent of New Visits to your website. And those metrics are all useful--don t get me wrong. They definitely serve a purpose. You need to understand how much traffic you re getting. You need to understand if they re engaged. But if I m selling a product, or if I m trying to get people to sign up for something, or submit a contact form, where is that metric? By default that metric is not there. There s no metric that tells me if those activities are being completed. And so we need to move beyond these basic metrics and we need to think about: how do I align the metrics and the data in Google Analytics with my business. So the first thing I really need to do is say, what am I trying to do with my website. What is the goal I have with my website? Is it to sell a product? Is it to get a lead? Is it to engage with my visitors and have them spend a certain amount of time or to look at a certain amount of content? What is that bottom line business activity that I want to track? And once I define that, I can start using a feature in Google Analytics called Goals in order to configure Google Analytics to track those types of things. Andrew Warner: Okay. Let s take a look at this. So once you re here, what s beyond this? What s the second most important page for us to look at? Justin Cutroni: Here s where I think we get into--the first thing you need to do is set up your goals, right? You need to set up your conversion tracking so that we can then go into the other reports and say, ah, here are conversions based on where people come from, here s funnel abandonment, here s ecommerce. So let s jump into setting up a really simple goal in Google Analytics to show you guys how that works. Andrew Warner: Okay. Let s do that. Justin Cutroni: So here I am at the basic 3

4 Google Analytics log-in screen. I m going to login with my username and password. Okay, so when I log in I see a list of accounts I have access to. And if I just choose an account here. Here I am with my profile. And I click edit it s gonna bing me into all of the settings for my profile. And here we go. These are the general settings for my website and here are my goal settings down here. And I can add a goal. Andrew Warner: Gotcha that s how we get into it. Justin Cutroni: Add a goal. And here we have our form. Justin Cutroni: So let s use an example. I m going to use an example from a store for an ecommerce website. I think we ve all been exposed to ecommerce and from a measurement perspective, it s pretty straightforward, right? We re going to talk about measuring a conversion, a transaction. But measuring a conversion, it can be anything. It can be sign-up, it can be Contact Us form, any type of form. So, if I m on a store--here I m on the Google Store, I m just going to really quickly add a product to a cart here. Okay. Let s see. Apps. Great. Google Apps t-shirt. That s what I need. I need one of those. So if I add it to my cart. I want to track how many people, after they add something to their cart, actually go through this checkout process and ultimately convert, ultimately buy this product. Here s my shopping cart. I would click the Checkout button for this store and then go through a process to checkout. So let s jump back into Google Analytics and talk about how I actually track that. Andrew Warner: Okay. And before you do that actually. How many steps are there in the process? We re just looking at Googlestore.com; it s not a store obviously that you own, we re just using it as an example. The first step in the process is that the user comes to the homepage and has to select, I think there was a drop-down menu. Justin Cutroni: Yes Andrew Warner: The second step was to pick what they wanted to buy. Justin Cutroni: Yes. Andrew Warner: The third step--actually, am I going through this right? What are the steps? Let s go back. Justin Cutroni: Well my suggestion is we really just want to track what I would call the core checkout process. So once someone starts to checkout.. Andrew Warner: Oh, I see. So I don t need to understand the steps, just the core checkout process. Justin Cutroni: Exactly. So someone moving from the shopping cart to billing, and then shipping, and then credit card info, review and finally the thank you page. Because that s really the process that we re forcing you to go through, you can browse and add products differently, based on who you are and what your needs are for the site. But no matter what you re doing, we re going to force you through that billing, shipping- -that process. And that s the one we want to measure, along with, of course, the most important part: the end, the convergence, how many people finish that. I m going to go into Google Analytics here. And I m in Google Analytics and I m viewing the profile for my store. And again, this is just an exam- 4

5 ple; this isn t really Google Analytics account for the store. Just to show you guys how to do this. You can see I ve got different tables representing different information about my website. So I have my main website information, and then I have this section called Goals. And Goals is how Google Analytics tracks conversions. They give you what they call four goals sets. And each set can have up to five goals, so there is a total of twenty goals that you can track for your website. The goal sets are really just a way to organize things in the reports and I ll show you that in a second. So let s add a quick goal for buying a product. Doesn t matter which product, this is just how many people buy a product on the store. Here I have a really basic form. And I might say my goal name is Buy Product; we give it something really descriptive, so I know in my reports what I see. And then I have to tell Google Analytics--I can skip these Activate Goal and Goal Position. Those are a little more advanced that the beginner doesn t really need to know about. They re not going to cause any problems. So now I need to tell Google Analytics what type of goal this is. And this is where Google Analytics gives you a little bit of flexibility because it knows everyone s business is a little different. We re tracking a store. A store sells products. That means people go through a process and then they get to a thank you page. And that type of goal is called a URL Destination goal, meaning you ve reached a certain URL on a website. So if I click URL Destination goal, you ll see I have a secondary form that popped up here with some more details to give about the goal. And the most important thing here is the goal URL. Now the goal URL is what is the URL for the thank you page or the receipt page. What is the URL for that page that indicates that the person has completed the process and has finished the transaction. So if you have a store, you can literally just go through the process yourself, go through all the steps and look at the URLs that you re getting. When you get that final thank you page what you want to do is, you want to go after the.com, the.org, or whatever you re extension is and grab all this junk right here, okay? And then you can give it a quick copy and jump back into Google Analytics and I see my goal URL and I paste it right in. Now, obviously I wasn t looking at the receipt page for our example, so I m just going to change this real quick and I m just going to say it was thank-you. Andrew Warner: So I don t type in the HTTP and the rest. I don t need to do that. I just say, after the.com, what s the rest of the URL that people will see when they finish the checkout process. Justin Cutroni: Yes Andrew Warner: After they ve given me their money and have finished every step along the way. Justin Cutroni: Absolutely. Yes. So grab that. The other thing you can do when you paste your specific URL in there is you can strip off a lot of the things like the query parameters, so anything after the question mark you can normally just delete all that and just have that core URL. Andrew Warner: Okay. Right. I know sometimes in my checkout process I have that question mark and the person s address and maybe their name. Don t need it. Just need the core of it. Justin Cutroni: Exactly. Andrew Warner: Okay. 5

6 Justin Cutroni: So now, when I hit Save Goal, Google Analytics is going to create a goal for me in my account. Andrew Warner: Is there anything else we need to do there on that page? Justin Cutroni: Well for now, we re going to leave it at that. That s setting up the goal. We re going to tweak it in a second when we talk about tracking the funnel and getting more detail about how people move through that. Andrew Warner: Okay. Justin Cutroni: So right now we ve got our goal configured. Now if I jump back into Google Analytics, you ll notice in my navigation I have a whole section of reports, called Goals. This section shows me a lot of aggregate data, a lot of high level data. And again, we re looking at an account that is active and they have a lot of goals set up. So let s go walk through this. When I open up the goals section I get this overview report. This is a high-level overview of all of my goals, and how many times they were completed. Here s a goal for completing order; it had 801 conversions. For goal #3 that was set up on this account, View Software Downloads, that had 6 conversions. So you can see that with Google Analytics, every time someone hits the thank you page or someone completes the process and gets to that URL that represents the end of the process, Google Analytics is going to count a goal for you. So I have a nice breakdown here of the different goals I have set up and how often they happen. So this is big aggregate data. And that s what setting up the goals will do: it will give you sort of this first step in the process of counting conversions on my website. So after we have our goals configured--obviously we can see our goals here in Google Analyticsand we can count things. I want to point out that not all of our goals have to be transaction based. So you have a website, Mixergy, and you interview folks and you get people to come to your website and absorb content, so publishing. Myself, I have a blog as well and I want people to go and read and spend time on the website, That s a completely valid business objective and something we can measure with goals as well in GA. When we set up our first goal for the Google Store, that was transaction based, people had to get to a page to complete the process. But I want to make sure that you guys understand that you can also create goals based on time or content consumption. And again, this is completely relevant to a whole section of businesses that are trying to drive engagement on the website. So I might want to say that I want to create a conversion every time someone spends more than five minutes on the website. That would be called a Time on Site Goal. You can see here I started off getting to this form the same way, but rather than choosing a URL Destination goal, I choose a Time on Site goal. Or if I m really hung up on Pages/Visit, I want a lot of people looking at a lot of content per visit, I can create a goal out of how much content people look at per visit. So pages per visit greater than seven. These are completely valid goals in Google Analytics, just like our transaction based goals and they will be tracked the same way. When someone hits seven pages, a conversion will be counted and we ll get all sorts of nice, juicy reports. Andrew Warner: I see. And so, what are those reports. I imagine one of them is what traffic source is sending you users that help 6

7 you hit your goal of pages per visit or time on site--what else would I know based on this goal? Justin Cutroni: Absolutely. So we have our general goal reports here, so we can see total conversions for all of our goals and trend those over time, as well as look at metrics like Conversion Rate. Conversion Rate normalizes it, so rather than looking at the total number of completions I can get what percentage of my traffic is converting to help me understand. You know, it s never going to 100%, but what percentage am I getting. The Total Conversions, the Conversions Rate reports are both okay. As you mentioned, looking at conversions based on where people are coming from is probably one of the most popular things, because again, I m spending time driving traffic to the website using these different type of marketing activities or relationships--how do I see that? Well I can go into the Traffic Sources report of Google Analyticsand I can look at the Campaigns Report. And the Campaigns Report is like a lot of the reports in GA. In this case it shows me the marketing campaigns that we looked at a little bit ago, at the beginning of our talk. But if you notice at the top of this report I see Goal Set 1, Goal Set 2, Ecommerce; if I click on one of these goal sets that s going to show me the goals that I configured in GA. Again, this is a little different from the one we looked at, when we were setting things up, but here are my marketing campaigns, here s my conversion rates. So what percentage of traffic from my marketing campaign converted?.03%--that s really pretty pathetic. I wouldn t really be happy with that. Whereas this campaign was converting at a much higher rate: 1.7%. As I configure all of these goals, I can use a report like the campaigns report, I can use this Goal Set tab at the top to then instantly switch and look at my conversion metrics. The great thing is almost every single report in Google Analyticshas this conversion tab. So I cannot only look at things like Marketing Campaign and what sort of percentage of traffic is converting from each of them but I can do something like look at geographic location. And look at which cities have the highest conversion rates, so let s jump into that real quick. Geographic data is in a report we call the Map Overlay Report; it s in the visitors section. So if I go to Map Overlay, I m going to get a nice visual of where all my traffic is coming from. And then look at the tabs, just like we talked about. Scroll down a little. Here s geographic by country. Let s look at Goal Set 1. Now I can see a breakdown of conversion rate based on country. And again, the most important thing to be thinking about here is not only the conversion rate for the goals that you ve created, but from a business strategy perspective, is this what you expected? If you re only targeting the United States, or if you re only targeting the United Kingdom, how does that align with what you are trying to do? Just to point out a couple of quick features of this report: I can drill down into the United States here and look at the region level--we call it state. I can even get down to the city level. Switch over to Goal Set, now I see conversions by state. So again, every report in Google Analyticsis going to have these Goal Set tabs, so you will be able to switch around and not just focus on visits, and pageviews, and things--but conversions, what are the outcomes that are happening on my website. Andrew Warner: Okay. I noticed by the way that there are columns for Completing Order, for new Software Downloads, Contact Us-- did you set those columns up because you wanted to keep track from each source how 7

8 many people from each source were going to the Contact page or downloading software? Justin Cutroni: Exactly. I can set up up to twenty goals in Google Analytics, so obviously things that directly impact the bottom line, like completing an order, is very important, but I might want to measure a microaction, like: get to the software downloads page. Or even something as simple as submit a contact form for customer support. So I can set those up as goals as well. You have twenty so you re probably going to have a nice mix of core conversions that are directly related to the bottom line. And maybe a few ancillary, maybe microconversions or helpers. Andrew Warner: What other reports do we need to look at and know? Justin Cutroni: Well another great report related to conversion is the Funnel Visualization report. And this is measuring how people move through a conversion process, like a checkout process. So let s talk about how to set that up, and then look at the report and some of the data and what we can get out of it. Andrew Warner: Okay. Justin Cutroni: So again, just a reminder: a conversion process might be shopping cart checkout, or it might be something as simple as Contact Us. So let s use a really simple example. I like contact forms because they re a great example. They re really simple, so for the Google Store here it s customer service. Here I have a real simple form, so I put in here my first name, and general question- -sorry, Google Store. So I want to see how many people see this form, but do not actually go through and convert. So let s jump back into Google Analyticsand get this all set up. Let s make this goal a Contact Us form, so that will describe the form. It s going to be a URL Destination goal, because it describes people going through a process and reaching like a Thank You page. I m just going to make up a goal URL here, for the sake of argument: /contact-thankyou.html. So now I will know how many people will actually submit that form. Andrew Warner: Actually, if you don t mind, can you actually hit Submit on that contact form, and grab the actual URL from it? Justin Cutroni: Yes. Let s do that. That s a great idea. So: Contact Us. Andrew Warner: Once you hit Submit, that URL changes. There you go. And so now you re just going to grab the end of the URL. So, this is what we re trying to do for all of our goals, just grab the end of the URL and then let s put that actual end into GA. Justin Cutroni: Literally a Copy and Paste. Okay? So now, if we save this, I ve got a goal configured and that s going to show up as a column in all of the reports that we looked at. Now, the idea here is that I want to see the funnel: how many people progressed. If you notice below the Goal Details, I have options for a Goal Funnel. And the Goal Funnel is the steps people have to go through in order to convert. And I like to tell people that really we like to look at the defined processes on our websites, the things that we re forcing people through. Because we spend so much time, we spend marketing money driving people to the site, we spend time and effort creating content to engage you, and then we force you into this process. And usually when you re in this process, you re one or two clicks away from converting. So, 8

9 if something falls apart there, we ve wasted all that money. So this is really important to measure. If I want to create a funnel, I can tell it what are the steps in my funnel. And just like I created the goal, I m literally telling it what are the URLs, or the steps in the process. So, I could actually go back here, if I hit the Back button real quick. So, here s that form. I m going to grab this, just like I grabbed the goal URL. There s the contact form. Andrew Warner: Actually, I think the first step in the funnel might be the homepage. How do you add the homepage into it. Justin Cutroni: That s a great question. I could add the homepage in there, but that s going to make the assumption that everyone goes to the homepage and then makes the decision to try to contact me. And that might be the flow for some websites, but really the contact form can be accessed from anywhere on the site. Someone might access it from a product page, because they have a question about a product or the checkout page because they re in the checkout process and they have a question. So if your homepage is really part of the flow, then absolutely. We could totally do that. But if it isn t then I would really suggest just focusing on the core part of that process in order to measure it. But that s a great idea. Let s include the homepage in here. So I am going to grab the URL of the homepage, literally copy and paste it in here. And I m just going to give it a name so on the report it will show up. We ll call it Homepage. And then I m going to add another step: this will be the form. So if I click Customer Service here, here s our form. I m going to grab this URL as well. Go back into GA. There s my URL. There s my form. And that s all I need. I m already tracking the conversion, or the Thank You page as a goal up here, so I don t need to include it down here. So I have a really simple two-step process. Once I hit Save Goal, Google is going to create this for me. And we re going to look at a really fancy report, called the Funnel Visualization report. So I m going to jump back into Google Analytics, go back into my Goals section here, and the Funnel Visualization report is going to give me a nice visualization of the breakdown of how people are moving through the process. Here it is at the bottom: Funnel Visualization. And, let s see. Great. Now, we ve got a lot of goals set up. I have a little drop-down, to view the different types of goals that I have configured here on my account, so you can see there is a Contact Us goal, a Software Downloads goal. If it s okay, let s just focus on this one because I think it s a nice visualization. What you ll notice is that we have this path, right down the middle of the screen. And the path represents all of the steps that we have configured in our funnel. In this case it was a process where you view a category, and then you view a product, you view your shopping cart, you view your login, you place your order, and ultimately you complete. Here s your goal at the bottom. So that s the process that has been defined. Everything here is people moving into steps within that process. Everything on the right is people moving out of that process, the steps of that process. And the great thing about Google Analyticsis that red is bad, green is good. So I had 200,000+ move in and I had a lot move out. I only had 7,400 move on to step two. Once they hit step two, everyone moved on to step three, which was View Shopping Cart, but then I lost about 50%-- 56%, so I can start to see where I am losing people through this process. Now, from a business perspective, to me, this is gold. I ve gotten you all through the website, you ve 9

10 responded to my marketing, you ve done everything, but I m losing you two or three clicks before I m getting you re money or I m getting your contact info, or whatever it might be. So this is really a great place to start optimizing, or making changes. The hard thing is that Google isn t telling me that all these 1,000 people left the Place Order page for any specific reason. It doesn t have a big, shiny, red button that tells me your form is too long, or there s a trust issue on that page. It s just telling you that you re losing 1,000 out of 1,800. So, you can go tinker with that page; you might want to go make a form shorter. They might be getting a security warning on that page; they might be getting thrown. But at least knowing that this is the spot where you re having the trouble is a lot of useful information because now I can start to play with that. And again, if I can only get a few more people through that, it s going to directly impact my bottom line for conversions, whatever that conversion may be. If it was the contact form, I m going to get more contacts. Andrew Warner: Can you go up to the top of this form? I want to make sure I understand it and that everyone who is watching understands it too. So, this is for a funnel for sales completion, right? We re trying to measure how many people who end up at the top of our funnel, who have any interest at all, or at all exposed to our product, will end up coming to the bottom of the funnel, where they hand us our money and they complete their order and they get what they pay for. True? Justin Cutroni: True. Andrew Warner: Okay. So the top part of this funnel right here, on the left side shows us where people who came into the funnel are from. Some people came into the funnel from our shopping page, some of them came into the funnel from our privacy page, some of them came to us from a page that says, /googlesearch.asp... page. But this is where they all came from and we ended up with 265,838 people at the top of the funnel. Justin Cutroni: Exactly. And in this case it s 265,838 people that viewed a product category. Andrew Warner: Okay. Does that include people who came to the homepage also? Justin Cutroni: For this configuration, no. This one starts at how many people moved beyond the homepage, got to a product category page. So they might have navigated through the homepage--some of them did. We can see that here. Some of them went through the homepage and landed on the category page. A lot of people, actually the majority, entered the site onto a product category page. And if you think about marketing, usually if you re marketing products, you re selling products, you re not going to drive a lot of people to the homepage per se. You re going to drive them to something relevant. So if I m sending out an , or I m doing some marketing around my computers that I m selling, I m going to send them to the computers page, or a category page. So that s why, in this instance, we see a lot of traffic entering the site onto the product category pages. Andrew Warner: Okay. So if, for example, they re selling t-shirts, they may have a link to t-shirts on somebody s blog, on a Google related blog. A user clicks that t-shirt ad, or the buy t-shirt link, they end up in the sales funnel, directly in the t-shirt section and they are one of the 265,838 people that started at the top of the funnel. So that explains the left side of 10

11 the top of the funnel. The right side of the top of the funnel is what? These are people that moved on to where? Justin Cutroni: Right. Well, they can move on to a lot of different places. The way that we have the funnel set up here is that you go into the product category deeper and start to view specific individual products. The people who did not do that are the people who exited the website. So out of the 258,431 that did not go deeper, 138,553 left the website. To me that s really depressing because I want people to go deeper. Some people went to the homepage. It may be that that product category was not for them and they re using the homepage as a navigation element. It looks like some people did searches on the website; they might have used the onsite search feature. So a majority of the people that didn t go any deeper into the website, they didn t even look at a second page, they actually exited the website all together, which is not what we want on our websites. For sure. Andrew Warner: So if I understand this funnel right, we ve got Product Categories as the top, the entrance into this purchase process. The next step is to look at a specific product and if I look at this data, out of 265,838 people roughly 7,400 people said, yeah, I like the product enough to take a look at a specific product, not just the t-shirt category, but a specific green t-shirt within that category. Only 3% did that. Justin Cutroni: Yes. Andrew Warner: Okay. And what s the next step after that? Justin Cutroni: In this funnel, the next step after that is after they viewed a product, they went into their shopping cart. So more than likely you hit the Add button and it adds the product to your cart. And most ecommerce stores, including the store we re looking at, will show you a summary of what s in your cart. If you ve got any other products, or whatever it may be, you ll see a summary. So View Shopping Cart. We actually have some people that came into this step from other spots because it may be that you were not on a product page when you entered your shopping cart. It may be that someone went to a different section of the site that was not product related and then went to their cart. But a lot of people went into viewing their cart. We got a few more and then we lost a bunch. We lost a bunch and again, if you look on the right, you see that some of them exited the website and some of them went on to other pages, which might not be bad. Some of them might have gone to a different product or different category to add different things in, so this doesn t worry me too much. It s more after you view your cart, are you moving further into the funnel later on. So if you look below that, now this is getting more into the checkout process, right? How many people are logging into their account. Andrew Warner: Let me ask a question going back a little bit, if you would scroll up to the top. A little further up actually, not all the way to the top. I see that you have one process in here that has 100%. Why is that? How do you get 100% of the people to convert and move on to the next step? Justin Cutroni: Sometimes that is a pure result of the way your website works. It may be that everyone that views a certain product on a site, as soon as they hit a certain button or take a certain action, they automatically go to the next step. It depends on the func- 11

12 tionality. It may be that you can t go anywhere else other than between step A and B. Again, a lot of the funnel really depends on your website and how it works. And looking at it within the context of how does my website operate. Everyone s website is slightly different. And obviously when we were setting up the goals and when we were setting up funnels, we were plucking the URLs on our site. So when you re in this report you really want to make sure that you re using it in the context of: how does my website work? Is it possible for someone to leave the funnel in a certain way and go on to a different place? That will help you really put a lot of understanding around the data that you are looking at. Andrew Warner: Okay, And when you showed us earlier how to create that funnel, do we have to set up every page within the process? Do we have to add that into the funnel creation process? Justin Cutroni: Yes. So here we are back into our Goal settings along with our Funnel. Again, let s use ecommerce. If your ecommerce is Billing, Shipping, Payment, Thank You, you would have to change this to be the billing step. You would have step two be the shipping step. Step three would be your payment, for example--just making some stuff up here. And obviously the goal would be Thank You. So it s really flexible because everyone s website is going to operate a little differently. If you have a three-step process and then a Thank You page, your Thank You page would be the goal and then the three steps would be the three steps in your process. Now it might be that your checkout process has five steps. It might be Billing, Shipping, Payment, Review and then Thank You. You can add another step here, if you need to, in order to expand the form to meet your exact process. Last I checked you could have funnels that went up to seven, eight, nine, up to ten steps. It is flexible enough for some really complicated lead-generation websites. They have longer processes that require a lot of information about buying habits or demographic information or things like that. So you can make the funnel as long as you need it to be. Andrew Warner: And here s the money question. Going back to the funnel, we see this and we want to improve it to get more orders. Where do we start? Do we start by improving the conversions on the bottom of the funnel or should we start by improving the conversions at the top or somewhere in between? How do we get more people that come to the top of the funnel to end up at the bottom of the funnel and either download our video or give us their address or maybe even, hopefully even, whip out their credit cards and buy from us? Where do we start? Justin Cutroni: I like to look at the bottom of the funnel: Place Order. I am one click away from getting dollars, but I am losing 60%. Of this 1,883, sixty percent are bailing out. That s one click. If I can get 80 of those users back and an average order value of maybe $100, that might be $8,000. When you re so close to the end of the funnel, I d really like to make things better here. So I would look at the bottom of your funnel and I would try to find the steps that are leaking a lot of people, that a lot of people are leaving from. Try to go through your own process. What s happening there? Again, this doesn t tell me a lot of the why. I can look at some things here and try to understand if a lot of people are going to the Returns page; they might have concerns about the return policy. Things like that. It doesn t tell me exactly why, but at 12

13 least it s telling me: hey, there s a problem here. You should check out this step. Then once I get my funnel, my process, tuned in then I can focus on how do I drive more people into it. How can I maybe tweak the layout of my site to have people add more things to their cart. Make my buttons big and green or something like that. Andrew Warner: And I can think of lots of different ways to at least experiment and figure out what will improve that number. We have their address because they have logged in and I can them and say, hey, you dropped out of my process. What did I do to lose you, to lose your confidence? Or, as you said earlier, experiment with the onsite, on-page information. Maybe even offer a guarantee on the page. Maybe offer some kind of security assurance and tweak it and then come back here and see if we ve made an impact. Justin Cutroni: Exactly. Experimentation is really the next step in web analytics. It s critical. And without getting too into it, there are plenty of free tools out there now to help aid in experimentation. Things like Google Website Optimizer, Optimizely. Those are the ones that really then allow you to say, well, I m not the expert, I m going to let my customers decide what is the best fix here. And show them an A version and a B version, or maybe A, B, and C--multiple versions. And let them choose by measuring conversions on my site through those tests. Andrew Warner: Now I understand what s happening on my site with the traffic that s coming to my site. Can you help me understand where my traffic is coming from and how it s ending up on my site before it gets to the top of the funnel? Justin Cutroni: Absolutely. And this is something we started to look at at the beginning when we talked about different campaigns and we saw some revenue from the campaigns. And to me, this is probably my favorite part of any analytics tool because understanding traffic source really aligns with marketing strategy and relationships I am trying to foster to drive traffic to the site. We have this whole section of Google Analyticscalled Traffic Sources and this is all about where people are coming from. We re going to get into campaigns and how to track marketing campaigns, but before we do that I want to show you some of the default ways Google will track where people come from. When we think about traffic sources in Google Analytics, there are three default buckets and each one of those default buckets has a report. The first report I will show you is Direct Traffic and this is people coming directly to the website. They sit down and they type in or whatever your URL might be. So these are people coming directly to the website. From a business perspective, this means they usually have some sort of brand recognition. If you are a major global corporation doing a lot of offline marketing initiatives--super Bowl commercials, billboards in New York City, and things like that--you are driving brand. You are helping people learn about you. That is going to drive a lot of recognition and in turn could drive a lot of traffic. But this is people coming directly to the website. Again, I can see trended over time my direct traffic to the site. And again, I ve got my goal tabs so I can measure convergence, based on direct traffic. Now, direct traffic usually means brain recognition and that s usually a result of what am I doing to push my brand either online or offline. So that s one of the default buckets. The second default bucket in terms of where are people coming from is called 13

14 Referring Sites. These are just sites out there on the Internet that have a link back to your site. So if I write on my blog, hey, I got interviewed by Andrew on Mixergy; you should totally check out his site, and I put a link up there, I would appear as a referral website to your website. Here we have a list of domains that are driving traffic, in this case, back to the Google Store. Now if I actually click on one of these domains, I can actually drill in and see what are the pages that have links back to my site. Here I can see on the YouTube website there s the About YouTube page has a link. And there are all these other pages. Obviously for your data you can go in and explore what are these pages on other people s sites and keep in mind: do I know this person? Am I expecting a link from them? Or is this something that I just have no idea what it is? You can use this little icon here and if you click on that little icon it will open the actual page up in a new window. So you can see what that actual page is. Oh, look. On YouTube they have a link to merchandise where you can buy their products. So that s why we were seeing YouTube as a referral and specifically this page has a link. The insight here is, first of all, do I know this website and was I expecting it? And if I don t, maybe I should form a better relationship with them. And if this is driving a lot of traffic--and even more importantly, goals. Right? If I m getting a lot of goals. I can see how many conversions I m getting from all these sites. Maybe I should reach out to this person and say, hey, your audience is great. Your driving a lot of really good traffic to my website. Let s work something out here. How can we work something out in order to create more traffic back to me? Because the audience is really converting the way that I want them to. Andrew Warner: I see. And in this case it looks like YouTube is sending a lot of orders over to the Google Store. The Google Store might want to reach out to YouTube and ask for more promotion, maybe give away free t- shirts to top video creators as a way of drumming up more business. YouTube is clearly a good source. You want to do more business with them. Justin Cutroni: Exactly. Yes. So that s the second bucket of traffic, referring websites. The third bucket of traffic is what we call Search Engines and I m pretty sure we ve all heard of search engines. We divide search engine into two groups when it comes to analytics. There s organic search and there s paid search. You probably know the difference. Paid search is Google ad words, or Bing and Yahoo have their own paid versions as well. For organic and paid traffic we obviously do things very differently to optimize those. With paid traffic we re bidding on keywords and we re spending money for clicks. As with organic traffic we re building really great content and we re structuring it well so spiders can index it, so we separate those two buckets. So in the search engines report, I see a list of all the engines driving traffic. Again, it s the same report layout, so I get my standard metrics like Traffic, and engagement metrics like Pages/Visit and Avg. Time on Site. I can switch over to conversions and see which search engines are converting more than others. So how does this align with my strategy? Am I getting a lot of orders from the search engines I m focusing on or is there a search engine there that I m spending a lot of time and money on and it s just not converting. To take one step back here. I m looking at aggregate across all search engines. Here, if you look at the top, I can look at non-paid, or organic search; and I can look at paid search here. So I can switch. Now I m just looking at paid search. If I m spend- 14

15 ing lots of money on Yahoo, I got one visit. Not so good. If I m spending lots of money on Google, I can see I m getting lots of traffic; it s converting at above.25%. I would want to see over time if it s improving, or what s happening there. So a really easy way for me to look at paid versus non-paid search engine traffic. Those are the three default buckets. And again, think about the context: what am I doing from a business perspective? Now I want to jump in and talk about campaigns, because marketing campaigns are something different. Direct Traffic, Referring Websites, those are things that kind of happen on a whim or you might not have a lot of control over those, but with marketing campaigns, this is how do I track a marketing activity that I am actively doing, whether it s , display ads, or something like that. To track campaigns in Google Analytics, there s actually very little configuration that you have to do. They re are no settings, like you have with goal settings. All of the configuration actually happen within the campaigns themselves. And we use this process called Link-tagging in order to track our marketing activities. Now I m going to pull up something called to Google URL Builder. I am in the Google Analyticshelp center. If you just do a quick search for URL builder, you ll be able to find this form. The URL Builder helps me modify the links that I use in my marketing activities. So let s talk about for a minute; I think a lot of people know about marketing. You usually have a list of either customers or prospects and you might send them an once a week or once a month depending on what you are trying to accomplish on the business side of things. And when you send out that there is usually some type of call-toaction in that click here to read more, click here to view products. There is some link back to your website. To track , and to be honest, to track all marketing campaigns, what we need to do is we need to modify that link that is in the . That s called link-tagging and almost every analytics tool on the planet uses this process. This is Google Analyticsway of doing that. So here is this URL builder; it s going to help me modify that link that appears in my . If I am the Google Store the first thing I need to put it in is the URL of where I want the person to land on my website. So I m just going to type that in and let s say for the sake of argument that I want to drive people to the homepage. Now I get to tell Google Analyticsa little bit more about this link. Where is this link appearing? Is it in an ? If so, what kind of ? What is this s goal, or objective? And Google Analyticslet s me define five pieces of information, in this case, about the . The first thing I can do is I can specify what is my campaign name. What type of campaign is this? Let s say, for the sake of argument, this is the spring sale. Spring is coming up; I am trying to liquidate some old winter hats or something. So I am literally just going to type in the name of the marketing campaign I m going to be running, so Spring Sale. And you can use whatever you want. My only suggestion here is to avoid white spaces and stick to alphanumeric characters. When I show you what happens, that data will be a little bit cleaner to see. Andrew Warner: So avoid the spacebar when I am typing in there. Justin Cutroni: Exactly. That s my campaign. Now I can tell Google Analyticswhat type of marketing campaign this is. And we call that the Medium and the Medium describes how we are pushing the message out there. What mechanism am I using. And we have lots of different ways to communicate now. 15

16 There s , display ads, paid search, Twitter, Facebook--I don t know. Whatever the social network d jour is today. But we have lots of mechanisms to reach out to our audience and that s what we describe here. So I m literally going to type in because then it can tell me how much traffic I am getting from . And then I m going to describe what s called the Source. The source goes along with the medium and gives me a little more context; it tells me a little bit more about what type of . So this might be--in this example I typed in CustomerList. I might be sending this to all of my existing customers. What I ve done is I ve given my campaign a name. I ve told Google Analyticswhat s the mechanism in order to push this message out and then I ve given it a little more information and said that it s my customer list. Now if I click Generate URL, Google magically spits out a URL. It s got my, if you can see here, it s got the URL of where I want the person to land, but then you ll notice it s got all of this other gobbly guck, right? From a technical jargon perspective we call these query parameters and you can see it kind of makes sense. It s got medium and it s got , so it s taken the values that I specified and it s just put them into the right format so Google Analyticscan grab this data. So what I do is I then take this URL, copy it, and I put it into my . If there s a big, green button and it s an html , this would be the link that s behind that big, green button. Andrew Warner: I see. And I ve seen this actually from my sponsors too. When they buy advertising on my website they give me a link that s not directly to their homepage, it s a link to the homepage with all that data after it. And that is because they want to understand that the traffic is coming from me and they want to understand which campaign it s a part of. And I ve noticed they use a campaign term often, entrepreneur, so that they know that they are targeting entrepreneurs and that way they can measure what their success rate is with entrepreneurs that are coming from Andrew s site and so on. Justin Cutroni: Yes. Absolutely. That s a great, real life example. What happens is when someone clicks on this link in an , they are going to land on your website. And it s going to look just like the homepage, the only difference is all of the parameters will be at the end of the URL. So it looks something like this. What happens on the backend though is Google Analytics, when it runs on this page, it s actually going to pick up all of this information and it s going to pass it on to GA. Now, whatever I do during my visit: if I buy a product, if I look at a certain page, if I fill out a contact form, it s going to get attributed, literally, to this information that s in the URL. If you had to guess, Andrew, which report in Google Analytics you would find your campaign names, it s probably pretty easy, right? The Campaigns report. If I go right over to my campaign report, I m going to see a list of all of the campaigns that I created and put out there, whether it s by or display ads. Let s look. We have a table here--oh, look; it s Spring Sale, which I just defined. Fall Sale. And here are a bunch of other campaigns that are all appearing here on the list. So, literally, obviously this is not a lot of data because this is an example that I m giving you, but you can see in the Spring Sale not only the traffic but also if you go over here to my goal tabs, now I m looking at my conversions. Now were getting to that place where we were at the beginning of our conversation this morning, where I m seeing conversions based on marketing 16