lastminute.com finds that traditional conversion tracking significantly undervalues non-brand search

The following post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Understanding the true impact of advertising

Advertisers have a fundamental need to understand the effectiveness of their advertising. Unfortunately, determining the true impact of advertising on consumer behavior is deceptively difficult. This difficulty in measurement is especially applicable to advertising on non-brand (i.e. generic) search terms, where ROI may be driven indirectly over multiple interactions that include downstream brand search activities. Advertising effectiveness is often estimated using standard tracking processes that rely upon ‘Last Click’ attribution. However, ‘Last Click’ based tracking can significantly underestimate the true value of non-brand search advertising. This fact was recently demonstrated by lastminute.com, a leading travel brand, using a randomized experiment - the most rigorous method of measurement.

Experimental Approach

lastminute.com recently conducted an online geo-experiment to measure the effectiveness of their non-brand search advertising on Google AdWords.  The study included offline and online conversions.  The analysis used a mathematical model to account for seasonality and city-level differences in sales.  Cities were randomly assigned to either a test or a control group. The test group received non-brand search advertising during the 12 week test period, while the control group did not receive such advertising during the same period. The benefit of this approach is that it allows statements to be made regarding the causal relationship between non-brand search advertising and the volume of conversions - the real impact of the marketing spend.

Download the full lastminute.com case study here.

Findings

The results of the experiment indicate that the overall effectiveness of the non-brand search advertising is 43% greater¹ than the estimate generated by lastminute.com’s standard online tracking system.

The true impact of the non-brand search advertising is significantly larger than the ‘Last Click’ estimate because it accounts for

• upper funnel changes in user behavior that are not visible to a ‘Last Click’ tracking system, and
• the impact of non-brand search on sales from online and offline channels.

This improved understanding of the true value of non-brand search advertising has given lastminute.com the opportunity to revise their marketing strategy and make better budgeting decisions.

How can you benefit?

As proven by this study, ‘Last Click’ measurement can significantly understate the true effectiveness of search advertising. Advertisers should look to assess the performance of non-brand terms using additional metrics beyond ‘Last Click’ conversions. For example, advertisers should review the new first click conversions and assist metrics available in AdWords and Google Analytics. Ideally, advertisers will design and carry out experiments of their own to understand how non-brand search works to drive sales.

Read more about AdWords Search Funnels
Read more about Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

-- Anish Acharya, Industry Analyst, Google; Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google; Gabriel Hughes, Head of Attribution, Google; and Jon Vaver, Senior Quantitative Analyst, Google contributed to this report.

¹ This result has a 95% Bayesian confidence interval of [1.17, 1.66].

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics Team

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Kapitall Uses Content Experiments To Drive A 44% Conversion Increase

Video game entrepreneur Gaspard de Dreuzy and financial technologist Serge Kreiker had a thought: why not use the gaming experience to break the traditional online investing mold? Their idea took hold and Wall Street firm Kapitall, Inc. was born in 2008. Based in New York, Kapitall now has 15 full-time employees providing a unique online investing platform and brokerage.

Kapitall has used Google Analytics Certified Partner Empirical Path since 2011 for analytics services on its JavaScript website. The complex implementation required custom JavaScript to allow for Google Analytics tracking within the trading interface as well as on landing pages. Empirical Path implemented Google Analytics tracking directly within the Kapitall interface so that decision makers could understand pivotal actions, such as how often brokerage accounts were being funded or where in the sign-up process potential investors were dropping out.

Challenge: Refining the landing page for maximum response 

Kapitall wanted to do more than simply capture data however; they also wanted to test the content of their landing page and then optimize it by targeting visitors with messages and options that would lead to conversions. Why was creating a truly effective landing page seen to be so critical? Kapitall’s gaming-style interface enlists traders to sign up for brokerage accounts and use the site to trade stocks or create practice portfolios. Every incremental sign-up is key to the company’s success.

Approach: Split testing to identify a winning landing page 

Kapitall understood that there was little point in making one-off ad hoc responses to analytics insights, or doing before-and-after comparisons that would inevitably be confounded by differences in the before and after audiences. Empirical Path recommended taking their analytics efforts to the next level with a closed-loop solution to eliminate complications and identify the best page version. 

The team proposed automated experiments to compare different versions of the landing page to see which performed best among a random sample of visitors. To accomplish this, Empirical Path first set Google Analytics’ Event Tracking and Custom Variables on brokerage accounts to distinguish current customers from traders. The team then designed Content Experiments in Google Analytics to understand which version of the landing page drove the greatest number of sign-ups.

Results: A new landing page with proven success

The outcomes from the test were illuminating, clearly identifying that the Angry Birds landing page was most effective. The winning version showed a dramatic increase in sign-ups of 44 percent and a 98 percent probability that this version would continue to beat the original. “Kapitall was impressed by how quickly Content Experiments was able to zero in on the Angry Birds version,” says Jim Snyder, principal at Empirical Path Consulting. “Having the ability  to quickly surface the best performing version directly resulted in attracting more investors at a faster rate, and that was a huge value-add to Kapitall.” Thanks to the split testing approach, Kapitall possesses valuable insights into the perfect blend of messaging and creative elements to optimize the page. With the strongest version now implemented, Kapitall is able to realize the true power of its online real estate. 

View the entire case study as a PDF here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

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Gilt embraces insights from Analytics at an enterprise level

A little over a year ago we launched Google Analytics Premium to help better meet the needs of our enterprise users. In that time we’ve been happily surprised by the warm reception and how companies have been using Google Analytics Premium to look at data in a new way. Below is a case study from Gilt, on how Google Analytics Premium has spread the love of data across their company, they leveraged the increased number of custom variables to power their predictive modeling, and used unsampled data to remove uncertainty from test results.

Gilt Groupe is an innovative online shopping destination offering its members special access to the most inspiring merchandise and experiences available. Gilt provides instant insider access to top designer brands at up to 60% off retail. Products span fashion, decor, artisanal ingredients, travel experiences, and unique activities in a growing list of cities. The bottom line for Gilt is that Google Analytics Premium has provided the ability to make better, faster data-driven decisions at every single level of the organization. Read the full case study.

“Google Analytics Premium has given everyone at Gilt quick, easy access to insights about our business. It has enabled true ‘self-service’ data across the company.”  

  - Ana Kravitz, Web Analytics Senior Manager

    Gilt Groupe

Google Analytics Premium provides enterprise level analytics with access to more data, flexibility and 24/7 support. The benefits of Premium are guaranteed SLA’s on data collection, reporting and processing times. Premium accounts also get an increase in the number of hits per month, an additional 50 custom variables, and access to unsampled data. Premium accounts also gain access to customer support including an implementation review, quality assurance, training, and a dedicated account manager.

Google Analytics Premium is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Looking towards 2013 Google Analytics Premium will continue to expand our product and services to meet the variety of Analytics enterprise customer needs. We’ll soon be popping up in 7 more countries: Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

If you would like to learn more about Google Analytics Premium and how it can help your business, contact the Google Analytics sales team or one of our Google Analytics Premium Authorized Resellers.

Clancy Childs
Google Analytics Premium Team

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Google Tag Manager: Webinar, GoPro case study, and product updates

Just over a month ago, we launched Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags—including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing and more—with just a few clicks. Since then, we’ve released the product in 35 languages, we’ve added new tagging capabilities for Google Analytics, and we’ve been hard at work building more enhancements.

To help you get the most out of Google Tag Manager, we’ve scheduled a webinar next week with Product Manager Laura Holmes to walk through the tool and go over implementation basics:

Webinar: Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Register: goo.gl/YTulu

We’ve also been hearing great feedback from our users, including GoPro, the world’s leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras and digital devices. With the growing popularity of GoPro products and accompanying complexity of their digital marketing activities, GoPro found itself with dozens of tags measuring countless engagement activities across its web properties. It was critical to find a way to implement and maintain marketing tags that would scale with the marketing organization. Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Tag Manager specialist, led a comprehensive migration to Google Tag Manager -- and GoPro stakeholders were delighted with the results:

“Google Tag Manager centralizes our tags into a single location that gives our marketing and analytics teams the flexibility to make tagging updates within minutes without burdening IT.”
- Lee Topar, Director of Online Marketing, GoPro

Download the full case study.

We hope you’ll join us at the webinar next Tuesday the 13th. If you’re not able to attend, we’ll be posting a recording of the webinar about a week afterwards here on the blog and on YouTube, and you can also read more about Google Tag Manager on the website or the help center.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager

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How Posadas uses Event Tracking to analyze conversion funnel abandonment

One of the most important features you have access to in Google Analytics is the conversion funnel, which is particularly useful for analyzing your website’s efficiency in converting visitors into customers. Using the conversion funnel, you can easily find optimization points that will help you generate more profit for your business, perhaps without even increasing your advertising budget.

However, conversion funnels show aggregated data of all traffic flowing through them. That is, it does not let you make a differential analysis by product.

Posadas, the largest hotel chain in Mexico, with hotels in Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., Argentina and Chile, decided to adapt their Google Analytics implementation to segment the traffic flowing through the conversion funnel and make a differentiated analysis for each of their more than 100 hotels. In addition to segmenting traffic flow by product, Posadas was able to enrich the abandonment analysis by uncovering the opportunity cost of letting people leave the process before completing a transaction.

The conversion process is simple, it starts with a search for room availability in one of Posadas’ travel destinations. The search results provide a list of rooms for which the visitor can request an instant quote. After selecting the preferred room, the visitor proceeds to make the payment and complete the reservation.

Conversion Funnel:

• Step 1: Check room availability
• Step 2: Request an instant quote
• Step 3: Reservation payment

To get more details about this process, Event Tracking was implemented for step 1 and 2 of the conversion funnel by calling the function _trackEvent() while loading both pages.

The _trackEvent function has 5 parameters:

_trackEvent (category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

However, in this case we decided to use only two parameters for step 1:

• Category:  "Availability"
• Action: The unique identifier for the hotel being searched

_trackEvent ('Availability ', Hotel_Id)

and three parameters in step 2:

• Category: "Quote"
• Action: The unique identifier for the hotel being quoted
• Value: the total amount of the quote

_trackEvent ('Quote ', Hotel_Id, '', Quote_Value)

Of course, in the final step of the funnel —the sale— the e-commerce tracking code is implemented, so there’s no need to use Event Tracking as the reserved hotel Id and the final reservation cost are already tracked.

With this customized implementation, Posadas was able to get a data matrix that shows the differences in traffic flow for each of the steps, for each hotel. They were also able to look at the differences between quoted prices and actual revenue. In this matrix, Posadas can look for significant fluctuations in traffic and money amounts and discover potential optimization points with more detail than they might find in the standard conversion funnel report.

Abandonment matrix showing percentage of dropouts and the difference between quoted prices and actual revenue for each hotel

To further improve their analytics, Posadas decided to implement a survey to get feedback from their visitors and find out why they abandon the process in each of the high fluctuation points. After identifying significant fluctuation points and receiving feedback directly from their customers, they are able to make sound decisions when optimizing for particular hotels, perhaps by experimenting with specific sales promotions or pricing policies.

Monica Herrero, eCommerce & Online Marketing Manager at Posadas says:

"Analyzing the behavior of our visitors at this level of detail has many benefits. The first is the ability to track the differences in traffic flow through the conversion process separately for each of our hotels. We realized that there are some hotels that consistently show excellent conversion rates, but these special cases were hiding behind the average showed in the standard funnel report. The second benefit is finding the exact points in the funnel that we must optimize, which are different for each hotel. And the third benefit is discovering the reasons why our visitors abandon the process. 

With these three pieces of information we were able to improve our site and our sales strategies, which led to an 18% increase of our conversion rate on average, and an increase of up to 88% for some specific hotels. 

Understanding why people leave your site before converting and trying to retain them can be a challenging endeavor, but the benefit of doing so is highly worthwhile.”

As always, we invite you to try new ways to use the features Google Analytics provides, and to share those experiences with us.

Published by Enrique Quevedo, Google Analytics Latin America

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How One Online Food Retailer Increased E-commerce Sales By 70% In Key Regions

LaTienda is an award-winning, family-owned business supporting artisanal firms in Spain. The firm works with small family-run businesses, many of which are dedicated to centuries-old food-making traditions. 

With warehouses in Williamsburg, Virginia and Alicante, Spain, the company ships hundreds of thousands of orders throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

LaTienda’s brand equity is built on its fundamental commitment to the customer experience. They guarantee a positive experience for its customers – quality products delivered in excellent condition, or they will replace or refund the purchase. 

Overall, they had been seeing great success with their online orders, though they wanted to continue looking for opportunities to grow sales. To assist with this, they worked with WebStrategies, located nearby in Virginia. 

They knew that a key product category in particular required more expensive shipping methods if it was too far from LaTienda’s Virginia warehouse. Their challenge was to understand the impact on sales of varying shipping rates for this subset of products. 

LaTienda grouped visitors into two regions: Region A visitors were close enough to the warehouse to always get reasonable shipping costs. Region B visitors were everywhere else, and had to use a more expensive shipping method for the key product category.

WebStrategies wanted to measure the impact on sales whenever one of the key products was placed in the cart. To measure this, they installed Event Tracking to the “Add To Cart” buttons on every product page. 

They then used Advanced Segments Custom Reports to separate visitors in Region A from Region B, and drilled down to view performance by product category. Sure enough, visitors from Region B were found to be 48% less likely to purchase if they placed an item from the key product category in their cart, which raised total shipping costs. 

To combat this effect, LaTienda.com implemented a less expensive, flat rate shipping model in region B and monitored sales. After the test, the rate at which Region B visitors completed the shopping cart were found to have increased by nearly 70%.

Just to be sure, they checked to see if there was a similar increase in conversion rate for Region A visitors, and found that it did not fluctuate more than 3.4% over the same time period. The analysis confirmed that product shipping rates greatly impacted shopping cart behavior, and used data to measure the results of a key business decision. 

Check out the full case study as a PDF download, and see additional success stories in our analytics case studies and success stories section.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

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How WBC Used Advanced Segments To Boost E-commerce Conversion Rate By More Than 12%

Established in 1989, WBC is the UK’s largest supplier of hamper, deli and drinks packaging to independent retailers. As the website is the company’s main business generation tool, it is essential that it promote their range of 850 products in the most attractive and accessible way possible. 

With a view to redesigning their e-commerce site and increasing the number of sales it generates, WBC was keen to understand how web traffic interacted with the site, and where potential improvements could be made.

Following an audit of their implementation, WBC’s search engine marketing agency, Periscopix, began tracking micro-conversions such as brochure downloads and crucial interaction data like on-site search tracking. Using advanced segmentation, they found that a high conversion rate for loyal customers was hiding a very low conversion rate for users completely new to WBC.

Aesthetically, the changes Periscopix proposed were subtle and focussed on two main areas: showcasing the range of products stocked by WBC and imposing a sense of authority in the marketplace. Using Google Analytics, Periscopix identified WBC’s most popular products. These were given prominence in the center of the homepage. The previously under-utilised right-hand side was optimised to feature media that previously had been hidden deeper in the site.

Periscopix ran an A/B test on the homepage for three months. This resulted in a 2.2% increase in homepage engagement and a boost to the e-commerce conversion rate by 12.2%. WBC have now committed to redesigning the website, with the homepage variation proposed by Periscopix forming the cornerstone of this new structure. 

Read the entire WBC case study and see additional success stories in our analytics case studies and success stories section.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

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Learn How Google Analytics Helped BuildDirect Increase Sales By 50%

BuildDirect operates in over 100 countries and aims to simplify the sourcing of materials for its customers. As a virtual organization they credit much of their success to savvy use of online marketing and advertising. 

With a comprehensive marketing mix of search advertising, email newsletters and conversion optimization BuildDirect uses Google Analytics insights to get more value for every dollar they spend on marketing. Read a brief summary of the techniques BuildDirect used and results achieved below:

Linking AdWords to Analytics enabled BuildDirect to increase search marketing conversions by 37%

By importing AdWords data for analysis, BuildDirect found that long tail keywords helped drive users closer to the products they were actually looking for. This resulted in a better user experience as visitors needed to do less site navigation, and took less clicks to complete a sale. Now, long-tail keywords perform three times better than regular keywords 

Campaign Tagging led to a doubling of email conversion rates 

Tagging links in different email creatives helped BuildDirect discover which versions drove the most customer conversions -  doubling the conversion rates of their email campaigns. Additionally, BuildDirect uncovered that customers who bought a sample were most likely to return and purchase if if they were subsequently shown highly relevant messages. 

Improved Site Usability resulted in 100% increase in sample orders and 50% increase in sales

By reducing the steps from cart to payment confirmation from three steps to one, BuildDirect was able to increase sample orders by 100%. Using the In-Page Analytics feature BuildDirect could understand what content users were actively engaged in so they could make better decisions to prioritize, improved or eliminate pages and refine the checkout procedure. 

Be sure to read the full case study [PDF link] to learn all the techniques BuildDirect used to maximize their marketing spend. 

Posted by the Google Analytics team

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How Two Nonprofits Improve Their Site Performance With Google Analytics

At Google, we’re proud that our products are used by nonprofits to help them better achieve their objectives and improve the world. We believe that data holds amazing power for all types of organizations and it’s inspiring to see some forward-thinking nonprofits live at the edge of adoption. Today we’d like to share two brief case studies we’ve published: how the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) are using Google Analytics. Links to the full case studies are included after each summary if you’d like to dive deeper.

By tailoring the features of Google Analytics, LunaMetrics helps PBS increase conversions and visits by 30%

Top Notch Programming, The Public Broadcasting System’s interactive arm, helps individual PBS producers and local PBS stations create and promote each section within PBS.org for programs such as NOVA, American Masters, and Sid the Science Kid. A selection of web analytics tools had been installed, but these proved difficult to maintain and use. PBS wanted to develop a coordinated approach to analysis and reporting that would inform their future strategic decisions.

Led by Web Analytics Director Amy Sample, the team at PBS needed a cohesive system across the entire enterprise, and for this they turned to Google Analytics. In addition to top-level analysis of PBS.org and PBSKids.org, they also hoped to implement a solution that would allow producers of individual programs to see only the data on those pages and microsites that related to their own shows. It was critical to have a solution that gave Amy the over-arching view she needed, and the microcosm view that each producer needed. To meet these requirements, LunaMetrics devised a custom technical solution for PBS that expanded their existing standard implementation. 

Google Analytics has been a key facilitator in the transformation of PBS online. The tool enables reporting that is robust, tailored and meaningful, which means that stakeholders are no longer focused on static monthly reports. Instead, they are increasingly able to use analytics to inform  critical and timely business decisions on a day-to-day basis. Analysis of search engine trends led to an increase in PBS traffic by 30% during the first year after implementation. PBS also used valuable conversion funnel data to optimize the registration path in PBSKids; this activity increased conversions by one-third. Furthermore, since Google Analytics was set up to allow PBS to evaluate the way users consumed video, the broadcaster created two new portals: PBS Video and PBSKIDS Go!

Read the full PBS case study here.

SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) chooses Google Analytics and masters the art of metrics

In 1995, SFMOMA was one of the first museums to launch an institutional website. SFMOMA.org offers a fluid space of exploration in which visitors can easily navigate an online collection of more than 9,000 artworks and a rich archive of studio and video content. The site also has an online store and a detailed calendar of exhibitions and events. 

Their primary goal was to develop rich, dynamic content that engages visitors and keeps them coming back to the website as well as the physical museum. SFMOMA’s website receives nearly four times the number of visits than the physical museum. Providing compelling digital content that visitors want was as critical as hosting popular exhibitions.

Google Analytics Certified Partner E-Nor helped SFMOMA connect key business objectives to a robust web analytics strategy and recommended Google Analytics as the best solution for their needs. As a result of the switch to Google Analytics with a thorough implementation plan, SFMOMA saw a tremendous increase in available insights about their online presence. They realized a 15% gain in traffic accuracy, and so were more willing to make decisions based on the data. 

They could clearly see what content users liked best, and made changes and improvements to their website to keep them coming back. Their marketing campaigns were tied to sales and other goal conversions, and so they could optimize accordingly.

All this new data is helping produce valuable insights on how the website is used and what marketing efforts and website designs are delivering results. SFMOMA is now prepared to continue its online leadership thanks to careful planning and strategy coupled with an expert use of the advanced features in Google Analytics.

Read the full SFMOMA case study here.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

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How Nissan Uses Ecommerce Tracking Without Directly Selling Online

This post originally appeared on the Google Analytics Japan blog.

Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking allows online merchants to measure items sold and tie those results back to their digital marketing activities. But did you know that it can also be used to track non e-commerce activity?

Nissan Motor Company does just this. Nissan operates in the automobile industry, and owns a network of websites designed to help consumers around the world decide which Nissan vehicle they would like to purchase.

Nissan uses e-commerce tracking whenever a visitor submits a request for a test drive or a brochure. They treat each request as if a car were sold, and record details such as the model, colour, transmission type, and location of the vehicles people inquire after. A traditional Google Analytics implementation for a non e-commerce site would simply use goals to measure conversions. So why did Nissan opt to use e-commerce tracking instead?

They wanted to be able to measure more information about each inquiry within their Google Analytics reports. By implementing e-commerce tracking they are now able to pass additional information to their Google Analytics account, such as the category, colour, and model of car the visitor was interested in. Nissan's Global Marketing Strategy Division then analyses this information to understand which vehicles are in hot demand in each market; it then feeds those insights to their manufacturing plants across the globe to ensure that there is enough supply to satisfy demand. 

One of the benefits of Google Analytics is that you can decide who should have access to your suite of reports. Nissan’s Global Division uses this feature to decentralise access to their different market operations, allowing each country manager to log into Google Analytics and quickly assess the popularity of different models for their market. Nissan employed a Google Analytics Certified Partner in Japan, Ayudante, to help set up their account profiles and custom reports that could then be accessed by each of the country managers.

Nissan’s Global Marketing Strategy division says there are 3 key benefits they gain from Google Analytics as a whole:

1. It is easy to assess product popularity globally and by market. The user experience is seamless and there was no complex setup necessary.
2. Custom reports allow you to easily view complex information in one view. It dramatically reduces the time to summarize multiple reports, document it, and share it within the organisation.
3. Google Analytics gives them access to timely information, which allows for better decision making.

Even if you are a non e-commerce site, you should explore e-commerce tracking as a means of measuring more information about the products or services your visitors are inquiring about. Then share that information with your wider marketing and product teams so that they can make effective decisions to maximise sales.

Posted by Noriyuki Ouchi, Google Analytics Solutions Consultant, Google Japan and Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

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