Building Blocks of Digital Attribution: How to get started with Google’s attribution tools

What are the key steps to getting started with marketing attribution? Are you ready to move beyond the “last click” attribution model? How can you use Google’s tools to better understand your customer’s journey and calculate the impact of your digital marketing channels?



To help answer these questions, we’ve put together a series of webinars on attribution:

• Attribution Insights from Google and Econsultancy (4/26/2012) – watch recording here
• Building Blocks of Digital Attribution (5/24/2012) – watch recording here
• Search Attribution: AdWords Search Funnels (6/20/2012) – watch recording here
• Multi-Channel Funnels: Attribution Across Channels (8/9/2012) – watch recording here
• Attribution Modeling for Digital Success (11/2/2012) – watch recording here

If you didn’t have a chance to catch last week’s webinar on Building Blocks of Digital Attribution, it’s a great place to start your attribution journey -- you can watch the recording above. During the webinar, Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution and Multi-Channel Measurement, discussed how to lay the foundation for digital attribution. First and foremost, it’s important to get your organization ready. In our work with customers and our recent attribution research, we’ve discovered that many companies try to pursue attribution before their culture or their data is ready. In the webinar, Bill describes the steps and the potential pitfalls to make sure your company is heading in the right direction.

Second, even if the organization has taken the necessary steps culturally, it’s challenging to find the right technology, and to ensure that technology is properly implemented.








We know that finding the right technology is a challenge, which is why Google offers several great attribution tools – including AdWords Search Funnels, Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, and Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics Premium. In order to get the most out of these tools, it’s important to ensure that the basics are set up correctly.  So, during the webinar, Bill also did a live demo of how to get started with AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics Goals. The setup is quick and easy – and once it’s in place, users can start accessing rich attribution data.

Naturally, we also received a lot of great questions from the webinar participants. We weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar, so here are some responses and more pointers on getting started with attribution.







How do you define “digital attribution”?
Digital attribution is the process of assigning credit to the various online interactions your customer has before a “conversion” (conversion = making a purchase or performing some other valuable action on your site). These interactions could include display ads, paid or organic search results, email campaigns, affiliate coupon programs, social network posts, and other digital interactions. Today, many marketers by default use “last click” attribution, assigning all of the credit to the last interaction before a conversion. By understanding the full path to conversion – including early “upper funnel” touch points – and giving credit to all of those interactions, you’ll be able to budget more effectively and design better marketing campaigns.

What about attribution beyond digital channels?
Attribution is about improving the measurement of how ad spend drives conversions. To address this challenging topic, it’s important to consider all the factors that might affect conversions. These factors include the digital channels mentioned above, as well as how users interact with your brand across multiple devices, and the influence of online advertising on offline sales. This webinar series is focused on how to get the most out of digital attribution.

How do I know which interaction is the trigger for the actual conversion, out of the entire funnel?
The goal of attribution is to more accurately measure the impact of all your digital channels on sales, including how these channels interact in the path to conversion. This means acknowledging that, in most cases, there is no single “trigger” for the conversion, but rather a group of campaigns or touch points working together to help drive a conversion. So, a user might see a display ad which makes her start thinking about your product, then a few days later view an organic search result, then receive a targeted email, and finally buy your product. In this example the email was the last pre-conversion interaction, but all three interactions probably had an impact on your customer’s decision. Attribution is the process of deciding how much credit you want to give to each of those interactions.

How do I set up those tools you discussed during the webinar? Can you provide more detail for advanced setup needs?
Our help center provides very detailed information about how to get your AdWords and Analytics set up correctly, and responses to frequently asked questions. Check out our pages on:

• AdWords Conversion Tracking
• Google Analytics Goals
• Ecommerce Tracking
• Linking AdWords and Google Analytics

In addition, if you'd like more help, we recommend contacting one of our certified partners – they can assist you with all aspects of implementation, as well as with interpreting your results. You can also check out our AdWords user forum and our Google Analytics user forum to get answers to your questions.

Does adding all this code to my website affect the site speed at all?
If the code is installed correctly by following the directions outlined on our help center pages (see above for links), it should not impact your site speed, or have only a very tiny impact. Setting up goals and conversion tracking will provide much richer data on how users arrive at your site and whether they’re doing what you want them to do once they get there. With that knowledge, you’ll be able to improve your marketing programs and your website.

What are some sample use cases for “event” goals?
A goal or a conversion can be more than just a purchase. Indeed, you can define multiple “micro-conversions” that represent various actions that are important to your business. So, you might use event goals to keep track of when a PDF was downloaded, or when a user watched a video or played an audio clip. Each of these “events” could be tied to goals that are of value to you. You can find more detail about event tracking in this article on the Google Developers site.

Why do I need to set up conversion tracking and goals? Can’t Google Analytics track without conversions?
It is possible to see some useful information without conversions, but defining conversions helps you measure what's important, rather than just general behavior. Plus, after you have these conversion tools set up in Analytics and AdWords, you’ll be able to access Multi-Channel Funnels, Flow Visualization, and Conversion Reporting in Google Analytics, as well as Search Funnels and Conversion Optimizer in AdWords. It’s quick and easy to get started, and it’s much more useful to look at a user’s path if you know that they’ve reached your desired end point and performed an action that’s valuable to your business.

Marketing attribution is a complex but very rewarding process – we hope that these tools and webinars will help you to get started.

Happy analyzing, and hope you'll join us for the next webinar in the series!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Conversion and Attribution

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Marketing Attribution: Questions and Answers

Last week, we hosted a webinar on marketing attribution. We had a lively discussion about our recent attribution whitepaper, and we looked at Google’s solutions for attribution -- including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics, and the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium. During the webinar, many of you wrote in with great questions, and we’ve provided answers below to some of the top questions.

If you weren’t able to join us last week, you can view a recording of the webinar here.

Questions & Answers:
Q: How can I learn more about getting started with attribution using Google’s tools?
A:This webinar was the first in a series on attribution -- please watch the blog for updates and registration information for our next webinar, “Building Blocks of Digital Attribution.” In the meantime, read on for some more tips.

Q: Where can I learn more about setting up conversions?
A: Setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics is one of the most valuable things you can do to make your reports actionable and meaningful, and getting these set up properly will allow you to use Google’s attribution solutions. There are resources available in the help center to help you set up goals and ecommerce tracking. You can also view the recording of our recent “Reaching your goals with Google Analytics” webinar.

Q: When should I use AdWords Search Funnels compared to Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels? 
A: Both tools can give you insight into how your customers ultimately end up converting on your site. If you are using AdWords Conversion Tracking today, Search Funnels is available without any additional configuration. You can see the interactions your customers have with your search ads leading up to conversion, including both clicks and impressions. However, you can only see these interactions for paid search on Google AdWords.

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics allows you to analyze traffic sources beyond search, including display, social, email, referrals, affiliates and more - putting your conversion path data in a broader context. Using these reports requires installing Google Analytics tracking code on your site, and setting up goals and/or ecommerce tracking (see links above) -- once these are set up, Multi-Channel Funnels reports work automatically. Note that you  are not able to analyze search ad impressions in Multi-Channel Funnels.

Watch this blog for updates on future webinars in our attribution series that will provide more details on Search Funnels and Multi-Channel Funnels.

Q: How much of an impact does the use of multiple devices have in skewing the numbers we see in these reports? 
A: Mobile and other devices are becoming increasingly important. Multi-Channel Funnels will report on conversion paths that take place on a single device, but not across devices. For example, if a user visited your site on a mobile phone, and then completed a purchase in a desktop browser, those interactions would not be included in the same conversion path.

Q: Can I report on both AdWords Keyword and Matched Search Queries in Google Analytics?
A: You have the option to view either the AdWords Keyword or the Matched Search Query by choosing these dimensions in the data table. Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling support a wide range of AdWords and non-AdWords dimensions for reporting and creating attribution modeling rules.

Q: Can you add your own models to the Attribution Modeling Tool or they are all built in? 
A: You can create and save custom models in the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium. Custom models allow you to create rules that adjust credit based on attributes like the traffic source (e.g. search vs. direct), position (first, middle, last) the level of engagement driven (time on site and page depth), and timing (how much time prior to conversion).

Q: How do advertisers take action on attribution data?
A: Attribution data can help advertisers identify marketing efforts that may be undervalued or overvalued under models such as the last click, so they can adjust their marketing programs. For example, a general keyword like “shoes” may show fewer conversions compared to a more specific, branded term for a type of shoe on a last click basis. However, applying a model that gives some credit for searches prior to the last click may show that “shoes” is credited with more conversion value. When making optimization decisions around which keywords to invest in or cut, advertisers can look at multiple models, and then experiment with investing in keywords that show higher value under alternative models. Similar methods apply to channels like display, social, email, and affiliates. This can help identify areas of opportunity that are missed when using only the last click.

Happy Analyzing!


Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, Google Analytics team

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Webinar: Marketing Attribution: Insights from Google Analytics and Econsultancy

Please join us next Thursday for a webinar on marketing attribution featuring Bill Kee, our Product Manager for Attribution, and Stefan Tornquist, VP for Research at Econsultancy.

Stefan will talk about insights from the recent Attribution whitepaper by Econsultancy and Google Analytics, and Bill will discuss Google’s approach to attribution and some of the tools we offer, including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. Plus, he’ll demo the Attribution Modeling Tool in Google Analytics Premium.





We'll also provide a few tips for how to get started with attribution. This webinar will be the first in a series on attribution -- so please stay tuned for future installments!

Date: Thursday, April 26
Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET
Click here to register

We hope you’ll be able to join the live webinar, but for those who can’t make it, we’ll be sharing a recording after the event.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

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Better results, (still) early adoption: Marketing attribution in a complex digital landscape

Today, we’re sharing some research on marketing attribution that we conducted in partnership with Econsultancy, a leading digital market research firm. The insights -- Marketing Attribution: Valuing the Customer Journey -- provide a snapshot of how marketers and agencies are conducting attribution, the impact it has, and the barriers holding them back.

If you’re not familiar with digital attribution, it’s about distributing credit to all of the elements of your digital marketing program, so you can gauge the impact of customer marketing interactions on your sales results and make more accurate investment decisions. Here are a few snippets from the report that we found interesting:

It’s still a new craft, but early results show positive impact
Although digital attribution is still relatively new -- 83% of practitioners we surveyed have been using it for less than 2 years -- it clearly has a positive impact on businesses that employ it. 72% agree that it leads to better budget allocations, 63% gained a better understanding of how digital channels work together, and 58% had clearer insights into their audience: 

Attribution leads to improved ROI, better budgeting

Last click attribution dominates; agencies are leading the way in experimentation
Most digital marketers run multiple campaigns, each with different strategies and objectives. For instance, display campaigns that are designed to generate awareness will have a different impact on sales than paid search campaigns designed to bring in buyers. Yet most marketers today still use attribution models that do not account for these differences in strategy. Although only 14% of respondents consider “last click” attribution to be “very effective,” it remains common; most likely because marketers haven't yet found or mastered the right attribution tools. Digital marketing agencies have done more with sophisticated attribution methods and technologies:



Robust attribution leads to confident digital decisions
For organizations that use attribution, it often leads to greater confidence in marketing choices: if you know the impact of your programs, it’s easier to budget for them. As one online retailer commented, “Attribution was the missing piece to our campaign analysis. Now we don’t run a campaign without learning something about how our marketing affects the buying cycle, and then testing to see whether it applies in the long run.”

Performing marketing attribution with Google
Here at Google we spend our time building intuitive tools to make measurement easier, so that you can really use your data to make smarter decisions. That’s why we provide several important tools for marketing attribution, including Search Funnels in AdWords and Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. And check out our Attribution Modeling tool in Google Analytics Premium, which includes five standard attribution models plus a custom model builder, so you can create and customize attribution models in minutes, and see data instantly. Learn more in our Attribution Playbook.

Join us for an Attribution Hangout
If you’re available this Friday, April 6, at 9:00am PDT, please join Bill Kee, Product Manager for Attribution, and Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate, for a Google+ Hangout. Bill will talk about the research and give a demo of the Attribution tool in Google Analytics Premium, as well as discussing Multi-Channel Funnels and AdWords Search Funnels, two complementary features.

To watch the Hangout on Air, tune into Justin’s Google+ Page on Friday. If you have a question that you would like us to discuss, please enter it in this this form -- and we’ll invite five of you to join the Hangout live to ask your questions.

We look forward to seeing you at the Hangout on Friday!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

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3 last-minute Analytics tips for the holiday season

If you're a marketing professional, you've probably spent months preparing your holiday campaigns. But have you focused so much on great creative that you've neglected your measurement plan? Don’t despair: there’s still time to make the most of your holiday marketing and measurement. Here’s some food for thought to help you make sure your Analytics is adding value this season and setting you up for success next year.

1. Stuffing your stockings: all the best treats for your marketing funnel

Online shoppers are increasingly taking a considered, comparative approach to making purchases. Consumers are now consulting an average of 10.7 sources when making a buying decision - double the rate of 2010. That means that all steps of the marketing funnel are more important than ever. So make sure to take all the steps to conversion into account when measuring your campaigns this season.

With Multi-Channel Funnels reports in the new version of Google Analytics, you can see not just the last click prior to conversion, but also how earlier interactions influenced the purchase decision. For instance, your customer may have clicked on an organic search link immediately prior to purchasing, but in the weeks before to the purchase, he clicked on a display ad, followed links from a post on a social network, and later visited your site directly. With Multi-Channel Funnels, you can see these earlier assists and take this influence into account when optimizing campaigns throughout the holiday season. You’ll also have a rich set of data to plan next year’s campaigns, as you can plan around those channels that drive awareness and consideration earlier in the purchase process.




2. Jingle bells, mobile’s ringing

It’s hard to overstate the enormity of the mobile opportunity this holiday season as consumers turn to smartphones and tablets for both product research and purchases. Mobile searches have grown dramatically in the last two years, and it’s predicted that 44% of searches for last-minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices.

Providing a great mobile experience is now expected, or you will lose customers. With mobile reporting in Google Analytics, you can see how users are able (or not able) to make purchase decisions. You can segment visitors based on criteria like device types and operating systems. For instance, you can compare if there are different conversion rate for iOS and Android, and make adjustments accordingly. Google offers resources to help you make your site mobile-ready, so you can take action if you find roadblocks. Finally, when measuring your marketing channels, make sure to take mobile ads into account. You can get deeper insights by segmenting out mobile advertising using the recently updated AdWords reports in Google Analytics.

3. Follow Santa’s sleigh in real time

You may have time-sensitive marketing events planned this quarter - whether it’s a daily deal marketing program, viral content that suddenly takes off, or even press coverage. Data that arrives days or even hours later is too late to make decisions during the fast-paced holiday season. With Real-Time reporting in Google Analytics, you can see the impact of these events within seconds. This can be particularly useful for social media efforts. If you post a tweet linking to your site, for example, you can see the immediate visits resulting from the post, and engage in the conversation with your customers. You can also use Real-Time to monitor the immediate impact of email offers and other campaigns that offer customers deals to purchase quickly.

So, grab those reindeer reins and have a great holiday season with Google Analytics. Best wishes for very merry marketing measurement!

Posted by Bill Kee, Google Analytics team

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Optimize Engagement using AddThis and ShareThis with Analytics

Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this year we introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with any social plugin installed on your site - after all, what can be measured can also be improved and optimized!

MilkADeal started using Google Analytics earlier this year. It is a company in Malaysia that has benefited greatly from using Social Plugin Analytics. By using these new reports, they are able to uncover insights and create significant business process improvements. As reported in the New Straits Times, "In particular, the newly introduced social interaction tracking tool...We've been using it only in the last couple of weeks but we have seen an increase of almost 60% in social interaction visitors to our site," said Wilson Quah, founder of MilkADeal."

By optimizing the instrumentation of a few buttons on their site, MilkADeal is able to achieve better engagement, a big boost in number of high quality referrals, and better outcomes! Today, we are happy to announce that our partners, AddThis and ShareThis, are making this social plugin analysis even easier. Just as the +1 button is automatically instrumented for you by the Google+ team, publishers using AddThis and ShareThis will now have first class integrations with Social Plugin Analytics!

“Providing real-time analytics to 10 million domains each month, we see what big data can do every day. Integrating AddThis social signals into Google Analytics is a big win for publishers. We’re excited to contribute social sharing insight where it can be viewed in context of the GA interface.”

Will Meyer, VP of Publisher Products, Clearspring

“At ShareThis, we work to provide our publisher network of one million+ websites with actionable analytics on their social activity. It's great to see Google paving the way for the entire industry to derive meaningful insights from the social Web and we're incredibly pleased to be a launch partner."

Kurt Abrahamson, CEO, ShareThis

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!

Posted by Ilya Grigorik, Google Analytics team

Update: AddToAny users will also be happy to know that their social buttons are automatically instrumented to work with event tracking and social plugin analytics!

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Measuring and optimising Fairmont's social media efforts with Google Analytics

Social media is a great way for marketers to spread awareness about their products, stay in touch with and interact with their loyal customers. Barbara Pezzi, Director of Web Analytics and Search Optimization, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, is back to share with us how Fairmont measure and analyse their social media efforts with Google Analytics. By using a combination of campaign tracking parameters and advanced segments (which can be used in combinations with social plugin analytics), Barbara is able to assess which social media campaigns work the best for generating bookings.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

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Improvements in Custom Reports: Better builder, more metrics, and custom navigation

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gilles Roux, an Analytics engineer will discuss some recent improvements to custom reporting in Google Analytics.

Creating custom reports in Google Analytics is a great way to answer specific questions about how users interact with your website or keep track of the metrics that really matter to you.

Since releasing the new Analytics earlier this year you have sent us lots of great feedback. Thank You! We have been hard at work integrating some of your suggestions and adding new features that will make custom reports more useful and easier to use.

Simplified custom report builder

The custom report builder has an updated look and feel that simplifies the process of creating and editing custom reports. The sections are now clearly labeled, with optional settings at the end, and the metric groups are shown on a single page without the need to switch tabs. We have also added the ability to quickly reorder metrics and dimensions using drag and drop. We hope these improvements will help you create reports that look just the way you want, in just a few minutes.

More metrics and dimensions!

We know - when it comes to analyzing your website usage, the more metrics the better. That’s why we have enabled 45 additional metrics and dimensions inside custom reports. These cover a wide variety of areas such as mobile, social, goals, site search, e-commerce and advertising. All metrics and dimensions are now organized in categories to make the list more manageable.

When viewing a custom report that has an explorer tab, you will now be able to select a secondary dimensions, which can be useful to perform a deeper analysis of your data without having to make changes to the custom report.

Custom navigation

The custom reports overview page is the central place to view and manage all your custom reports. You will now notice a ‘New Category’ button to create your own categories, in which you can group related custom reports. You will also be able to reorder reports, for example to make sure that your most important ones are conveniently shown at the top of the navigation.

We hope these improvements will help you create powerful reports that are targeted to the specificities of your site. As always, please don't hesitate to send us feedback, and expect more features in the near future.

Posted by Gilles Roux, Google Analytics Team

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Custom Variables: Fairmont and Swissotel use-cases

The introduction of custom variables to Google Analytics opened up many possibilities in measurement for site owners. It allows you to extend the dimensions tracked by Google Analytics to include facets that are meaningful to your business. For example, wouldn’t you like to know how your logged in members behaved differently than your casual visitors? Or which categories of content your visitors are consuming?

Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics and Search Optimisation, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, has been kind enough to share her use-cases for the different types of custom variables. Head on over to the APAC Conversion Room blog to find out more about:

• Visitor-level custom variables: Swissotel were able to segment their visitors based on membership levels, understand their preferences, and then target their marketing efforts accordingly.
• Session-level custom variables: Fairmont measured which booking method (i.e. single vs multiple) was more popular on their booking engine; and were able to understand which method appealed to which types of customers.
• Page-level custom variables: Swissotel used page-level custom variables to group pages according to the language of the content. With these groupings they were able to conveniently analyse the behaviour patterns and preferences of visitors according to the language of content consumed.

We would also love to hear how you use custom variables. If you have any tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments of Barbara’s articles.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

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Using The Wrong Tracking Code Can Cost You $500k a Year

This is a guest post from Tom Critchlow who is an excel ninja, data geek, analytics nerd and head of search for Distilled, a London & Seattle based search agency. Tom provides a cautionary tale on the importance of keeping your site up to date.

This blog post title may appear sensational but I assure you that it's not (much...). I recently spotted an issue with a client's e-commerce website which was costing them £100,000 / month in revenue (~$150,000). The fix took 5 minutes. Even more surprisingly, since I've been on the lookout for this issue I've spotted it on quite a significant number of websites. Hence why I got in touch with the Google guys and asked if I could talk about this in front of as many people as possible to try and spread awareness!

1) Graph of Win

Firstly, let's take a quick look at a pretty graph. This is comparing revenue month on month before and after the fix was made:

Note the increased revenue! :-) Everyone loves increased revenue. For those with beady eyes you will have spotted that this isn't total revenue on the site but it's just IE8 users. What's going on here?

2) The Issue

Before I delve into the issue, let me first give you a little background. When you enter private information online, such as your credit card details, you want to be sure that you're transmitting the information over a secure connection. You can usually tell you're on a secure connection to a website if the page URL begins with https:// instead of http://

Making webpages secure, however, is more resource intensive and so most websites only make their most important pages secure (though Gmail now always uses https:// by default). This means that when you browse a website, for example http://www.amazon.com you will browse around product pages which are all located on http:// URLs. When you want to actually purchase something from the site however you transition over to secure URLs such as https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cart/view.html

This is standard practice for e-commerce websites and when you move through the buying funnel you should inevitably transition at some point from a non-secure page (http://) to a secure page (https://).

Now, the issue I'm talking about in this post is with the client's site. The site uses Google Analytics however unfortunately they were using the old version of the code and were using the same piece of code across all pages of their site. The code they were using looked a little like this:

Unfortunately, this means that their secure checkout pages such as https://www.example.com/checkout/payment contained non-secure elements - namely the URL call to "http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js". Browsers like Chrome and Firefox don't display a warning but Internet Explorer 8 produced the following security warning when users transitioned from the non-secure (http://) pages to the secure (https://) pages. This error looks like this:

Pretty scary huh! Unsurprisingly this was causing almost all users browsing in Internet Explorer 8 to abandon the shopping process. Since Internet Explorer 8 is one of the most popular browsers on the web this was a huge amount of revenue they were missing out on!

3) How To Fix It

This issue arose because of a non-secure HTTP call within a very old version of the Google Analytics tracking code. The fix for this is very simple - just install the new code! The new code is more versatile than the old code and works both on http:// pages and https:// pages so you don't need to worry about using a different code on secure and non-secure pages. The new code looks a little like this:

There's a complete run-through here on using this new code here and specific migration advice.

And that's it! It's a simple fix but one that can have significant impact on your bottom line. I repeat what I said at the top of the post - I've seen plenty of sites that suffer from this issue so it's really not as rare as you might think!

I should point out here that the Google Analytics code has been able to handle HTTPS and HTTP pages properly since well before the asynchronous code was released, but plenty of sites are still using very old legacy code, which is why this is still an issue for some sites. Also, it's not just the Google Analytics code which can cause problems! Any non-secure elements on a page can cause a security warning so double check your code carefully.

4) How to Diagnose This Issue (simple)

If you're wondering if your site suffers from this problem there's a quite easy way of checking by looking at your conversion rate segmented by browser:

Setting up these custom segments is really easy, but to make it even easier I've set them up for you and all you need to do is click these links to add both these segments directly into your Google Analytics account:

Internet Explorer 8 Users

Non-Internet Explorer 8 Users

Then browse to your conversion rate report and select the segments from your custom segments:

5) How to Diagnose This Issue (advanced)

Of course, the issue I'm talking about in this post is only a specific issue and plenty of other issues may well exist like it. The underlying principle is that segmenting your funnel is a useful thing to do so that you can see if a specific visitor type are not converting or there is a specific drop-off point for them. Unfortunately there isn't a way of segmenting your funnel within Google Analytics at the moment but there are a few advanced ways of getting around this. For example:

• ROI Revolution have a method for segmenting on the fly. Unfortunately this method doesn't let you check custom date ranges.
• LunaMetrics have a way of segmenting the funnel using goals. Unfortunately this method won't let you capture historical data.
• Analytics Ninja has a way of segmenting using advanced segments. Unfortunately this method only let's you track up to a maximum of 3 funnel steps at a time.

None of these methods quite does what I want it to so I'm presenting a 4th option here:

Step 1 - Identify your funnel steps

This is fairly straightforward, all you need to do is understand what the URLs look like for your funnel. For example, let's say our funnel looks like this:

1. http://www.example.com/cart/availability
2. http://www.example.com/cart/details
3. http://www.example.com/cart/extras/
4. http://www.example.com/book/check/
5. https://www.example.com/book/payment/
6. https://www.example.com/book/confirm/

Step 2 - Create some regex

This is getting slightly more complex, however, assuming that all your URLs are exact match (rather than head match or something more complicated) the regex to create is this:

^/cart/availability$|^/cart/details$|^/cart/extras/$|^/book/check/$|^/book/payment/$|^/book/confirm/$

Where we generate this string as follows:

• ^/url1/$ - this matches the exact URL contained between ^ and $
• | - separate each URL with a pipe, this OR matches any of the statements in the string

For a more complete (and very pretty) guide to using regex in Google Analytics download this PDF.

Step 3 - Enter this regex in the top content report

In the top content report copy and paste this regex into the filter box:

This will then filter the top content report to only show you visits to one of the above pages in your funnel. Now we can see the drop off between steps like we can in the regular funnel.

Step 4 - Add custom segments & export to Excel

Now, we add whichever custom segments we want (for example IE8 users like above). This gives us each step of the funnel and the visits to each step broken down by segments:

Unfortunately this data is a little bit difficult to analyse as it doesn't give us the drop off percentage. So, to make this data easier to process and analyse export it to Excel. This will allow us to create a nice little table like this (very minimal excel magic required!):

This is an improvement over the simple diagnosis above because it not only shows us that IE8 users are not converting as well as users from other browsers, but it even tells us the exact step where it's a problem (the cell highlighted in red in the image). Looking back at the URLs we've identified we see that this drop off percentage is the same step where a user transitions from HTTP to HTTPS.

Note: The super-observant among you may have noticed that there is a potential discrepancy here. The warning message that IE8 throws up allows the user to select the option to only view secure elements on the HTTPS page. If the user selects this option then theoretically the user could still carry on through the site and complete the purchase. This visit and the revenue from this purchase wouldn't be tracked in Google Analytics since the HTTP Google Analytics call is blocked by the browser. So the extra £100,000 / month could in theory only be a reported increase in revenue. In reality however we found that the true bottom line still increased by over £30,000 per month as a result of this change. This implies that displaying the pop-up still has a drastic effect on conversion rates.

6) Conclusion

So what have we learned? The key lessons here are as follows:

• Keep your GA code up to date
• Use advanced segments to monitor conversion rate between browsers
• Always perform browser testing to ensure your website functions for all browsers

Remember, the HTTP/HTTPS issue applies equally to all URL calls so even if you use the up-to-date Google Analytics tracking code some other non-secure element on the page might be costing you revenue so always make sure that your website is functioning perfectly across all browsers. If you don't, you might end up losing £360,000 ($500,000) a year or more!

Thanks Tom for a thorough look at how to avoid this problem. And to echo Tom's advice, we encourage everyone to move to the newest version of the GA tracking code. You can follow more analytics insights and online marketing tips at the Distilled Blog or follow Tom on Twitter.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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