Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Starting today, we’re reinstating the Back To Basics series. Each Wednesday, we’ll share a Google Analytics tip, usually something that you can try right away with your own data to gain new insights. This week, we’ll illustrate a quick way to see how many visits you get from different keyword/landing page combinations.

A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report.

There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views: followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu.

Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination.

You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table.

The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source.

That’s this week’s tip. We’ll be back next Wednesday for another Back to Basics post.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Back to Basics: Direct, referral or organic - definitions straight from the source

In your Analytics reports, you'll see some of the same entries come up again and again in your data tables. In the last Back to Basics post, we learned about 'not set' entries -- this week we'll learn what it means when you see 'direct,' 'referral' and 'organic' under the Sources column in your reports.

• (direct)[(none)] - Visitors who visited the site by typing the URL directly into their browser. 'Direct' can also refer to the visitors who clicked on the links from their bookmarks/favorites, untagged links within emails, or links from documents that don't include tracking variables (such as PDFs or Word documents).
  
  
• [referral] - Visitors referred by links on other websites. (Links that have been tagged with campaign variables won't show up as [referral] unless they happen to have been tagged with utm_medium=referral. )
  
  
• [organic] - Visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing, e.g. a Google.com search.

Once you learn where the traffic to your site is coming from, you can start analyzing the information to make intelligent decisions for your website. For example, the Referring Sites report shows you which websites have been most effective at driving people to your site -- and which ones haven't been effective. Furthermore, if you have defined as goals the key pages you want visitors to see, you can see the percentage of visits from each referral during which the visitor saw these pages. (Just click Goals tab to see your conversion rates for each goal.)

To learn more about how to spot quality traffic from your Goals tab, please refer to this earlier Back to Basics post.

Posted by Christina Park, Google Analytics Team

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Back To Basics: Comparing Days Of The Week

You probably already know that you can quickly compare two date ranges against each other simply by clicking Compare to Past. So, in the screenshot below, clicking Compare to Past will allow me to compare the current period (Mar 16 - Apr 15) with the previous period (May 16 - May 15).

Once I click Apply, I'll see the graph below. The problem, though, is that this graph is not very useful to me as a comparison tool because the days of the week don't line up.

The first day of the current period (March 16) is a Monday, so I'll use the date slider to move the first day of the previous period back to Feb 9, also a Monday. Just click the Timeline tab to see the date slider and drag the previous period (in green) to the left, one day at a time. The date will change in the text box as you drag the slider. Then, click Apply.

Once I've lined up my days, I can compare weekdays to weekdays, and weekends to weekends. For example, I can see that, except for the first Wednesday, I received more traffic on all of the Wednesdays in the previous period.

Next time you use Compare to Past, try using the date slider to adjust your previous time period. It's possible that you'll uncover new insights about your day to day traffic.


Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) - Teach People to Fish

What works better, a centralized web analytics team with deep technical knowledge, or non-expert users spread throughout an organization? This was the question faced by Amy Sample when she joined PBS Interactive as web analytics director in the fall of 2007. Amy shared her story with us in response to our call to share your web analytics story.

Implementation

PBS Interactive helps individual PBS producers and local PBS stations create and promote microsites for programming like NOVA, American Masters, and Sid the Science Kid. Amy had the difficult task of helping these managers make educated decisions about how to improve their online show sites.

When Sample came on board, she learned that PBS had standardized on a single analytics tool. This was a good first step, but few at the company were familiar with the tool and the reports it generated were not being used to take action. Producers wanted to know more about how people interacted with microsites for their programs, but they weren't sure what to focus on. At the same time, the analytics group had a hard time keeping up with demands from so many stakeholders. According to Sample "The producers wanted to dig deeper into their site data than a monthly report could provide."

Amy's response was two-fold. First, after consulting with a pilot group of producers and other members of the interactive group, she decided to deploy an installation of Google Analytics. In Sample's words "We chose Google Analytics because we had to deal with a diverse group of needs and very limited resources. We wanted a system where a user with very little training could get insights right away."

Second, Sample worked with LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, to manage the complex issues PBS faced with cross-domain tracking and a complicated account structure. LunaMetrics also created training materials, hosted an on-site training for PBS staff, and conducted a series of training webinars for producers and local stations.

Applying the Data

As it turns out, despite challenges around getting resources assigned to tag pages and working out the right account structure, deploying Analytics was actually the easy part. In Sample's experience, the more challenging problem came in spreading knowledge and awareness of Analytics through the organization in a way that lets people take action on the data. "My approach has been to teach people how to fish," Sample explains, "It's been about doing training classes and one-on-one work with key practitioners, creating specific training decks by job function and getting other groups to use Analytics data in their daily activities."

Google Analytics has been a key facilitator in the transformation of PBS online. Stakeholders are no longer focused on monthly reports. Increasingly, they are using Analytics to inform actual business decisions. Here are some examples highlighted by the PBS team:

• Site Search Tracking - The PBSKIDS.org site has implemented changes as a result of insights gleaned from site search tracking that have increased traffic to the site 30% in the last year.
  
  
  
• Funnel Optimization - The PBSKIDS Island team used funnels to optimize their registration path resulting in a 3x improvement in conversion rate.
• Content Optimization - An analysis of users’ video consumption behavior on PBS.org and PBSKIDS.org led to the development of the PBS Video and PBSKIDS GO! Broadband portals. PBS went even further, basing a full 2008 PBS.org redesign on the data that indicated which content visitors access.
• Advertising Optimization - PBS' marketing group also looks at post-click behavior for their display ad campaigns to zero-in on referring sites that send high-quality traffic. They use this information to optimize successive campaigns.

Long-Term Vision

Sample's long term vision is to extend Analytics to measure engagement with PBS content both on-site and off-site. She also hopes to gauge the impact of online content on TV tune-in and track online donations, while expanding her training efforts to teach producer colleagues how to segment traffic and drill deeper into visitor behavior on their microsites.

The lesson learned is that no matter what analytics tool you're using, a well-planned deployment is only a first step. The hard part is "teaching people to fish," and making analytics data a key component in your organization's everyday business decisions.

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics Team

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Back to Basics: Free Google Analytics Tools

We've picked two free tools that anyone can use while setting up Google Analytics for your site. The tools below are pretty basic but are applicable to anyone tracking a campaign with an Analytics account.

URL Builder

The first tool we want to introduce our beginners to is the URL Builder. In order for Google Analytics to track your marketing campaigns effectively, you'll need to tag your online ads with the right information (e.g. campaign, medium and source) so that Google Analytics can track your marketing campaign and show you which activities are paying off. To help the the tagging process goes smoothly, you can use the URL Builder from our Google Analytics Help Center.

Tagging your campaign links will consist of a URL address followed by a question mark and your campaign variables. But, you won't need to worry about link syntax if you fill out the URL Builder form and press the Generate URL button. A tagged link will be generated for you and you'll be able to copy and paste it to your ad.

SiteScan

The Google Analytics SiteScan tool, created by EpikOne, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, is a very handy tool to verify that all pages on your site include the tracking code.

SiteScan picks up on some classic signs indicating that your site has improperly implemented tracking code like:

1. No data in your account. (The tracking code was either never implemented or has the wrong account number)

2. You're seeing a high bounce rate even though your site isn't a blog and has more than one page. (If you've only tagged your homepage, your Google Analytics account will be unable to identify any other pageviews from your site. )

SiteScan then reports each page in an easy-to-read CSV file after you've installed the tool. This makes it easy for you to isolate the pages with tracking problems, fix them, and effectively manage your Google Analytics Tracking Code installation.

We're constantly working on developing tools to diagnose problems associated with your account or increase the usability of Google Analytics. We hope that you find the above two tools useful and leave us a comment about any other diagnostic tools you would like to tell us about on this blog!

Posted by Christina Park, Google Analytics Team

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