WebAnalytics PDF

MarketingSherpa Report:
isbn: 978-1-932353-95-2
Copyright 2009 by MarketingSherpa Inc.
Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics
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MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .........................................................................................................................................1 Introduction...................................................................................................................................................2
The Big Picture What is the Function of Web Analytics? ............................................................................... 3 How is Analytics Being Used By Others? .............................................................................................................. 4 Chart: How would you rate your analytics setup at present? ...................................................................... 4 Chart: Incidence of Analytics Usage Among Search Marketers ................................................................... 5
Tracking .........................................................................................................................................................6
Metrics .......................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Table: Common Terms & Metrics for Web Analytics ..................................................................................... 6 Chart: What metrics are online video advertisers using? ............................................................................. 7 Picking an Analytics Program ................................................................................................................................. 9 Chart: Use of Analytics Programs Among Search Marketers........................................................................ 9 Chart: What Search Marketers Value Most in an Analytics Program........................................................ 11 Creating Trackable Marketing ............................................................................................................................... 11 Chart: When designing ads, does your organization do any of the following?...................................... 12 Tricky Tracking Flash & Rich Media ................................................................................................................ 13 Defining Conversion Creating Goals................................................................................................................ 13 Chart: ConversionOne Metric with Many Definitions ........................................................................... 13 Chart: Financial Metrics Tracked by SMB Email Marketers ....................................................................... 14
Analysis ........................................................................................................................................................15
Visitors: Who is coming to the site?..................................................................................................................... 15 Basic Segmentation & Filtering ...................................................................................................................... 15 Filtering .............................................................................................................................................................. 16 Sample-based Tracking & Analysis................................................................................................................ 16 Traffic: Where are they coming from? ................................................................................................................. 17 Chart: How do you currently attribute online ad exposures to site visitors? ......................................... 18 Chart: If you use cookies to track ad exposure among site visitors, how many days are the cookies set to last for on consumer browsers?.......................................................................................................................................... 20 Content: What are they doing on the site? .......................................................................................................... 20 Goals: Are site visitors doing what you want them to do to further your business goals?........................ 21
Dashboards, Automation & Testing .......................................................................................................21

Testing & Benchmarks ...................................................................................................................................... 22 Test Validity....................................................................................................................................................... 22 Testing Calendar................................................................................................................................................ 24
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................25 About MarketingSherpa............................................................................................................................26
1 Copyright 2002-2009 MarketingSherpa Inc. It is forbidden to copy this report in any manner. For permissions, contact service@sherpastore.com. For more copies, go to http://www.SherpaStore.com
Introduction
This guide was written as a companion piece to the Everyday Analytics webinar, and is intended to help anyone getting started with web analytics to quickly and easily grasp: 1. How to get a simple analytics program set up 2. What kind of analytics program will be the best fit, and if an advanced analytics solution is needed 3. What common problems web analysts will encounter 4. Which reports are the most useful and how to approach analysis 5. Some successful tactics for choosing the right tests Web analytics can be quite complicated when complication is necessary, but for most users, setup and reporting is fairly straight-forward and simple. New analysts need not be daunted by the infinite possibilities of most analytical programs. By focusing on specific strategic goals, its possible to methodically walk through an orderly list of taskseach of which add an additional layer of information and insight to the larger picture of what is happening on a website, or in a marketing campaign as a whole. New analysts will have to have some understanding of html coding and statistical relevance. Again, its important to know that you need not be an expert in either of these fields to be a competent analyst. By following some fairly simple instructions, its easy to get under the hood of your site and add code where needed, or apply some commonsense statistical math to find out whether the data you collect is actionable. While we do use Google Analytics for our examples, this guide does not endorse any one analytical program, and is not meant to act as a how-to guide for using any one analytics program. Rather, it simply attempts to demystify web analytics and get new analysts started down the most productive paths to gleaning actionable insights. Nobody has all the answers, but we hope we can get you asking the right questions. Tim McAtee Senior Analyst MarketingSherpa, Inc.
The Big Picture What is the Function of Web Analytics?

Analytics is not a single activity; its a series of activities that when done in sequence can show whats happening, why its happening, and where improvements are needed. There is a big difference between the three main components of web analytics, which are: Trackingcompiling large amounts of unanalyzed data, the foundation for analysis Analysislooking at the data and making hypotheses about why it is the way it is Testingcontrolled tests of analysis hypotheses to determine if a guess was correct
Analytics uses many methods to track the actions of individuals out in the real world. Short of watching over the shoulder of everyone, everywhere, web analytics is the best tool available to monitor the activity of everyone that comes in contact with your marketing. While web analytics focuses on internet behavior, it should ideally integrate with offline data for a larger analysis of the entire marketing universe. While web analytics programs are ostensibly there to show you whats happening on your website, the website is simply the destination, not the journey, and the journey is just as important. A good analyst will make sure that every possible brand touch-point, from TV ads to in-store visits, to mobile store-finder usage is somehow factored in to later actions that occur on a website. While determining causality or even correlation is not always possible, analytical models of an entire marketing universe can take advantage of data from many sources, then fill in the gaps with common sense and statistically-based inference where needed. Analysts are tasked with somewhat contradictory tasksthey must gather as much data as possible about the actions of individuals in their marketing universe in order to not draw false conclusions due to missing data, yet must also make sense of all this data by finding the needle of causality in the haystack of monitored activity. Luckily, good analytical programs make it easy to do both simultaneously. But, it still takes a savvy analyst to tap into insights that arent so obvious, or to know a false conclusion when they see one. Everyone trying to implement a web analytics program should be focusing on turning their data into actionable insights. Knowing what happened is important, but is far less interesting than knowing why it happened.
How is Analytics Being Used By Others?

We put the following question to all the online advertisers we surveyed who said they were currently engaged in some form of analytics. As you can see, the majority of analysts have a mix of software automation and hands-on work with the data. While analytics software is constantly improving and evolving to do more and more of the work for you, every website, and every marketing campaign is different. This difference means that no two analytics programs will be the same, so analysts are going to have to personalize out-of-the-box reporting.
Chart: How would you rate your analytics setup at present?
Cross-media reporting, in particular, can be difficult, since different media are often tracked by different sources, using different methodologies. A good web analytics program should be able to holistically track multiple websites, paid and natural search activity, online display advertising, email marketing, online PR and social media activity. Triggers can be set up to indicate usage by offline-exposed individuals, but this data is incomplete compared to the online tracking. Online tracking shows how many people did not take an action, as well as how many did. Online tracking of offline exposure only shows how many people did take an action.
Without the success rate of actions divided by inactions, on and off-line exposure cant be compared easily. This is why integration with offline data is important, but difficult. In another survey, we asked a sample of marketers with active search engine marketing programs whether or not they were using any analytics programs, then broke out the responses by pay-perclick search ad monthly budget and consumer target type. On average, 90% are using some form of web analytics software.
Chart: Incidence of Analytics Usage Among Search Marketers
Anyone that has a marketing web site should be engaged in some form of search marketing, and every analytics program should be able to tell you, at minimum, how much of your traffic is coming from which search engine. Knowing what keywords are generating that traffic is even more helpful. As it happens, that report comes standard in the free edition of Google Analytics.
Tracking
Metrics
Metrics are the currency of analytics, so its important to know how common metrics are defined, and to agree on what the definition of those metrics is. Following is a partial list of the most common web analytics data terms and the equations that turn these terms into metrics.
Table: Common Terms & Metrics for Web Analytics
Term Page View Visit/Session Visitors Unique Visitors Duration Referrer
Definition Number of times a page is viewed All activity of an individual visitor within time allotted for a sessionoften 30 minutes Total Sessions Total Visits from Individualsmultiple sessions not counted Time spent by an individual during a session From original to last, the string of pages a visitor visited to get to a final page Numerator Clicks Visitors that immediately leave a specific page Denominator Impressions All Visitors that only see a specific page All visitors offered the desired action Unique Impressions of
Metric (Ratio) (CTR ) Click-through Rate Bounce Rate
(CVR ) Conversion Rate or Desired action (often a sale, but (KPI) Key Performance can be anything) Indicator (VTR) View-through Rate Visitors carrying a cookie from
an un-clicked referrer
cookied referrer
By figuring out what each metric term and ratio is, you should be able to easily answer: How are people getting to my site? What are people doing when they get to my site? Are my business objectives being met by my website?
There will be a lot of metrics offered by any decent analytics program that youll never need to use, and can probably safely ignore. These additional metrics and reports are not useless; many common analytical reports were designed for website administrators, not marketers. Its important to focus on metrics and reports that speak directly to your business objectives. Websites with different objectives are judged with different yard sticks, and different media types will mean expanding the types of metrics that matter to make sense for that media type. In the following chart, we see what metrics video advertisers are using to learn about their video ad campaigns.
Chart: What metrics are online video advertisers using?
Notice that many of the basic metrics common to all online reporting are represented here, such as clicks, but additional metrics have been layered on top of the basic reporting that enable the analyst to speak about video and the way it is used. Media-appropriate metrics such as % of Video Viewed and Replays speak specifically to how consumers actually watch video. Metrics such as Engagement and Awareness Increase could be applied to any medium, but speak specifically to a marketing strategy of increasing awareness of a brand or message. Some important distinctions among metrics that often trip up inexperienced analysts are: Hits vs. Visitors vs. Unique Visitors Click-through vs. View-through Conversion is in the eye of the beholder
"Hits" refers to the number of files being called when an individual page loads. A single visitor looking at a single page will incur many hits, since each page is made up of multiple files. A normal web page will pull in an HTML file, a CSS file, and multiple jpeg or gif image files. For this reason, hits is a relatively worthless metric for marketers, and is usually only of interest to the IT workers responsible for the site. Much more informative for marketers are Visitors and Unique Visitors, since they correspond to actual people and countable sessions. Similarly, its important to be familiar with the difference between click-through and viewthrough. In both cases, an individual is exposed to an ad, and after viewing goes to the advertised website, where the click- or view-through is counted. With click-throughs, that visit to the site is immediate, because the individual clicks a link on the ad. With view-throughs, a cookie is dropped on a users browser when they see an ad, which the web site can recognize later upon a visit. Cookied individuals may finally come to the site when they perform a search to learn more about the product, or independently type in a company URL following exposure, but that visit can happen days or weeks after ad exposure. In order to get the most accurate picture of what happened, its important to factor in both immediate and latent types of attribution metrics. One of the trickiest and least-understood issues in analytics is defining conversion. Conversion rates are self-defined, and totally dependent on the analyst to create. KPIs or Key Performance Indicators can be applied to just about any measureable action on a website. A conversion event can be set to trigger when an individual buys a product on a website, or when an individual has viewed a set number of pages. These conversion events need to be weighted by the analyst for relative importance. When setting up conversion events in your analytics program, its normally possible to assign weights to the events that correspond to their importance. A lack of standardization can cause a lot of confusion, but when applied in smart ways, the data produced by an array of conversion rateseach triggered at various stages of the purchase funnelcan be incredibly informative.
Picking an Analytics Program

The past year has certainly been a buyers market for anyone shopping for web analytics software programs. Ever since Google Analytics came on the scene with a basic analytics program thats free to most (websites with 5 million+ page views per month must pay to use the service), other analytics vendors have been scrambling to innovate and offer more powerful tools for less money. The thing for software shoppers to keep in mind, however, is that functionality is more important than price. Even then, the cost of an expensive analytics program is generally pretty low, especially if the payment is structured on the amount of web traffic you have, and that traffic is relatively low.
Chart: Use of Analytics Programs Among Search Marketers
While all web analytics programs are pretty good at showing whats happening on your website, different analytics programs will be better or worse at integrating with your on and off-line marketing and media. If you have a huge online advertising presence, complicated PPC search campaigns, a complicated ecommerce site, or lots of rich media and online video, youll want to find an analytics vendor that caters to you. Google Analytics, for obvious reasons, integrates very well with a Google PPC search campaign, and even with reporting on TV ads bought with Googles TV media buying service. Youll find, however, that Google Analytics may not do as well at incorporating and tracking other external data sources. The fact that Google Analytics is designed to be most beneficial to users of Googles media products should not be seen as a condemnation of the service at all. Nearly all of the cheap or free services are cheap of free for a reason. If you want an unbiased analytical platform, youll probably have to pay for it. The fact that Google offers such a good program for free, even to non-buyers of their media products, is in itself to be lauded (unless you happen to work for a competitive analytics software company). As you can see in the preceding chart, usage of Google Analytics by SEM professionals was already at 41% in 2007, and grew to 53% by 2008. Unless youre sure that Google Analytics is under-powered, or your site is likely to serve more than 5 million impressions per month, we would recommend starting with Google Analytics and then adding on additional analytics programs as needed. Theres no penalty or problem with using multiple platforms to track your website, and as long as you are prepared to handle the flood of data this will produce, more data is better than less when it comes to tracking. If, however, your company is not currently employing a skilled analytics staff, or is otherwise unable to handle a large influx of tracking data to analyze, start simple. The great thing about analytics programs is that its possible to increase the complexity of data collection and analytics as your marketing complexity and your analytical skills increase. If your marketing is hopelessly complex, you may want to consider outsourcing analytics. Setting up an analytical program can be fairly time-consuming, but once its set up and running properly, maintenance and reporting are relatively quick. As you can see in the following chart, search marketers rank the importance of analytics software attributes differently depending on the size of their budgets. Marketers with big search budgets rank ability to integrate with offline media and ability to handle complexity higher than do those with smaller budgets.
Chart: What Search Marketers Value Most in an Analytics Program
Creating Trackable Marketing

Just as your website needs to be designed to move your KPIs, your external marketing needs to be designed to work in concert with the metrics that are most appropriate for your marketing goals. Too often, marketers build ads before they figure out what the ads should do. As an analyst, you can do your organization a huge favor by working with creative teams from the start to build ads that are designed to address specific goals. You can then make sure these goals are aligned with the website and that they are measured properly. By creating trackable marketing, its far easier to understand and properly attribute the traffic coming to your site. With that data, you can create closed-loop marketing and help the creative teams better understand what works at each level of conversion, from driving awareness to selling product, and what doesnt.
Chart: When designing ads, does your organization do any of the following?
Online advertising is relatively easy to track and most analytical software packages are designed to easily fold in layers of online marketing data such as email click-throughs, PPC keyword clicks, and banner ad clicks. Depending on the program and the reporting needed, you may need to tag the ads the same way you tag the site, or program an ad to drop a cookie on a viewers browser to signify exposure. These digital trails are relatively easy to create with good software, and can dramatically speed up the process of analysis. Some marketing cant be so easily tracked, but low tech methods of traffic attribution are always possible. When driving traffic from an online sponsorship, magazine ad, TV ad, or any other hard to track source, you can simply create unique URL paths, or even unique phone numbers. Whenever possible, you should try to find opportunities for closed-loop data matches, even if they occur outside of the website. Some examples are in-store pick-ups of online orders, email coupon redemptions, or matching cookie exposures to online warranty sign-ups.
Tricky Tracking Flash & Rich Media

Newer, more interactive programming languages such as Flash websites and applications, dynamic AJAX pages, or rich media ads usually need custom coding to be tracked. In much the same way that you need to create your own definitions for conversion or KPIs, youll need to decide for yourself what to consider a page view or how to track and value other non-standard actions, such as a video rewind. If you are building large websites or complicated applications in flash, make sure you have the time and/or money to invest in more complicated analytics.
Defining Conversion Creating Goals

As weve said, analytics programs do a lot of the work for you when it comes to tracking the elements in your site, but you still have to define your KPIs and create conversion goals yourself. Every site has different conversion goals, and not all conversion goals are equally important. Youll want to create multiple goals, then weight them, assign dollar values to them, or organize a progression of goals with a corresponding funnel visualization report. When we surveyed email marketers, all of whom are doing the exact same thing, there was a significant amount of disagreement between them about how conversion should be calculated. When presenting conversion figures, make sure you explain to your audience how the conversion figure has been calculated. If you end up comparing two conversion rate figures, you can cause major analytical errors by comparing conversion rates that have been calculated differently.
Chart: ConversionOne Metric with Many Definitions
In order to track conversion events, you need a website structure that allows for accurate tracking. More robust analytics programs like Omnitures can factor far more data into tracking than the free programs that rely on html tags. In addition to showing that a user went to a page, Omniture can capture data input by a user on that page. Since analytics programs like Google Analytics can only record a page visit, its really important to structure HTML websites with a different page for every possible conversion event trigger. A good rule of thumb for simple websites with simple reporting is to make sure your site has unique thank you pages at the conclusion of each conversion activity. This way, if a customer buys product A for $5, they get the product A thank you page and ping the $5 conversion event counter, while product B buyers that spend $100 get the product B thank you page and ping the $100 conversion event counter. Setting up proper conversion goals is the most important part of setting up an analytics program, so take the time to get it right. If the average customer that comes to your site takes a long time or multiple visits to convert, make sure youre not limiting your definition of conversion to the activities of a single users web session. As you can see in the chart below, 23% of email marketers are tracking the customer lifetime value of their email list members, vs. the 53% that track immediate sales.
Chart: Financial Metrics Tracked by SMB Email Marketers
Strategically speaking, tracking individuals over time with either cookie data, email address, or site registration may make more sense, because it can give a better idea of how the marketing program works over time. If it takes 20 emails and 4 visits to the website, condensing the lifetime of marketing touches and individual sees into that single conversion metric can help in two ways; your conversion rates will be higher, painting a better and more realistic story for how effective your marketing is, and higher conversion rates are easier to test (more on this in the testing section).
Analysis
Initially, analysis can be daunting. The huge range of reports that are available from even the simpler analytical programs can make it difficult to determine where to start first. Breaking down what you need to know into simple, methodical steps that address areas you can easily fix is the best way to start. Start by answering these simple questions: Visitors: Who is coming to the site? Traffic: Where are they coming from? Content: What are they doing on the site? Goals: Are site visitors doing what you want them to do to further your business goals?
Visitors: Who is coming to the site?

You want to look at visitor type to see if the right people are coming to your site (i.e. those who are interested in your product and might actually convert to a sale at some pointnot just burn through your PPC budget without buying anything). The first metric to check to find out if the right people are coming to the site are conversion and bounce rates. If bounce rates are high, meaning people leave almost immediately after arriving on the site, theres clearly a disconnect between why people are coming to your site and what your site has to offer. In order to understand if this is happening because your website needs work or your marketing is simply attracting the wrong kind of people, youll need to dig further.
Basic Segmentation & Filtering
Segmentation is the process of separating the aggregate data into discrete pieces for comparison, such as: Converters vs. Non-Converters Ad-group A clickers vs. Ad-group B clickers New visitors vs. Repeat visitors
Segmentation is generally going to be the first step in determining why something is happening. If youre experiencing high bounce rates youll want to start by segmenting your data. The three groups above are the most common ways to segment when looking for easy comparisons. Regardless of the segmentation strategy you use, what youre trying to find out is this: if you isolate site visitors that convert vs. those that dont, what variables exist that differentiate them, and can these variables be fixed to get rid of the non-converters or turn them into converters? If clickers from ad-group A are converting, but clickers from ad-group B are not, its possible that there is something misleading about the copy of ad-group B. For example, if an ad says click for a free sample but upon clicking the individual finds that the free sample is dependent on a purchase, they are likely to bounce and not convert. The easy fix is to change the ad text to say free sample of X with purchase of Y. Another possibility is that your landing page could use some work. If conversion rates are low across the board, its likely that visitors are giving up somewhere in the process. Take a look at an exit page report to see which page visitors are abandoning the site from. That page may be the culprit. If you have a lot of repeat visitors that are not converting, yet new visitors are, ask yourself why. It may be that your own employees are using the website, being counted as repeat visitors, and artificially driving up the visitor count. Its not uncommon for employees to use the company website as their browser home page. This means your home page will show way more visits than any other page on your website, yet also show a very high bounce-rate, since the employees will open the browser, load the page, but then immediately leave the page to do whatever else they came online to do. In cases like these, rather than segment your analysis to separate out employees, it may make more sense to filter them out of your data set altogether.
Filtering
Filtering is the process of excluding certain visitors from the data entirely. The most common use for filtering is to remove your own employees, but you may also want to filter traffic from other countries, or even from automated spider or bot traffic. If filtering out your own employees is the problem, the organization may want to maintain a completely separate website for themcreate one site that caters just to your organizations employees, and one that is specifically for marketing purposes. However, not every organization has these kinds of resources, which means its up to the analyst to adjust their data. The easiest way to filter individuals is by IP address. By blocking the IP addresses of all corporate offices, its possible to ensure that usage coming from these offices doesnt show up in the data. However, for companies with large, external sales teams that access the site often, or companies that have a lot of remote workers, filtering out internal traffic can get very complicated very quickly.
Sample-based Tracking & Analysis
Panels
Web analytics programs can tell you how many people use your website by counting each and every user of the sitethis is known as census-level reporting. Some information about the visitors to a website cant be gathered at the census level. For information like demographics, its necessary to rely on a sample. A sample is when you take the information from a random fraction of the total visitors, and then project their information onto the larger total group. Some analytics programs have rudimentary demographic reporting built in to their standard reports. Google Analytics can give you some aggregate level demographics, such as the language of your site visitors. Quantcasts analytics program offers very simplistic analytics reports, but because they maintain a large panel of users for whom they collect lots of demographic information, they can give you fairly in-depth demographic reporting. Surveys Another common tactic to find out more about your website users is the exit survey. Using JavaScript, you can launch a survey to a small sample of your site visitors as they leave the site in order to find out who they are as individuals. You can also specifically survey purchasers with a post-purchase email survey, or specifically survey those who immediately bounce from the site. By doing this, you can get far more indepth insights into who is coming to your site, what it is about your website or product they like or dislike, and how they differ in by segment in aggregate or as individuals.
Traffic: Where are they coming from?

Finding out what external websites or referring links your traffic is coming to your website from is a fairly straightforward process, and is included standard in most analytical programs. A good habit to get into is to look at incoming links and note any that show dramatic change week over week. One of the more interesting reports is IP tracking for businesses. If, for example, someone accesses your website from within the office of a prospective customer, the IP tracking visitor report will show that. Quantcast offers a free version of this report with limited capabilities. Other paid services like Demandbase do a pretty amazing job of telling you exactly where your website visitors are coming from by matching the IP address of your website visitors to individual companies, and even providing contact information for your sales force to follow up on if they choose to. Figuring out which of your online marketing tactics website visitors clicked to get to your site is also fairly straightforward, assuming you have already made sure all your email, search and online advertising is trackable via direct click. More difficult is factoring in an indirect visit by using a cookie, or visits driven from offline marketing with unique paths to your website. What gets really complicated is attributing exposure to your various marketing tactics when they were exposed to multiple exposures of different ads on multiple media. How, for example, do you attribute a sale to an individual who first came to the website from a unique URL used in a TV ad, again from a paid search ad, then finally converted after clicking
an offer in an email newsletter? There is no easy answer to this question, and just as analysts must assign weights to the various conversion goals on their website, its necessary to assign weights to the various ad exposures among converters. Judging by the following chart there is still quite a bit of confusion as to how to go about doing this.
Chart: How do you currently attribute online ad exposures to site visitors?
Even when analysts go to great lengths to factor in all assumed exposures, clicks, and latent view-through exposures, there will still be some error in the estimation. Unfortunately, theres simply not much that marketers can do about this. Assumed exposures (i.e. untrackable TV ad exposures) just arent possible to track, and even online exposures are difficult. According to a study on cookie deletion by comScore, 31% of the individuals they tracked for a month deleted the cookies on their browser at some point. For analysts trying to make sense of long purchase cycles, during which an individual may visit a site many times over a period of months before purchasing, this can be frustrating. At some point, analysts must simply accept a certain amount of uncertainty and smooth it over mathematically with statistical models that incorporate the hard data that does exist. Among the marketers we surveyed, most cookies have a life of only 30 days, after which they expire and are automatically deleted from users browsers. The second most common length of time set for cookies was 90 days, while a few rather optimistic marketers kept cookies active for as long as 365 days.
Chart: If you use cookies to track ad exposure among site visitors, how many days are the cookies set to last for on consumer browsers?
When deciding on the lifespan of cookies for your own marketing campaigns, you should probably make the lifespan slightly longer than your average purchase cycle, then factor in an assumed rate of cookie deletion.
Content: What are they doing on the site?

The most common report for figuring out what people are doing on your website is to run a click-path analysis. This report will show the average path taken through the various pages on your website from start to finish. An interesting variant on this report is to segment by source. By doing so, you can see how interest in the content on your site varies by where the individuals arrived at your site from. This knowledge can be used to streamline your website or inform the copy of your ads in order to target each source with the most relevant information to them. A similar method is to look at time-spent. Websites with only a few pages will often have little variation between segmented click-paths. A better metric in these cases is time-spent, since it serves as a more accurate indicator of the content that caught an individuals attention.
Actions that trigger upper-funnel conversion events can be particularly interesting when compared vs. source or segment. Are visitors accessing your website on an iPhone overwhelmingly winding up on the store locator page? Are clickers from copy stressing discounts buying one product, while searchers using branded keywords are buying another? There are myriad applications for this type of report, and nearly infinite applications for the information gathered. Finally, if you cant figure out what your website users are or arent doing on your website, ask them. Exit and post-sales surveys can easily multi-task as vehicles for learning more about what the intent of the user is when using your website.
Goals: Are site visitors doing what you want them to do to further your business goals?
In the end, everything boils down to this. All your other reports are simply building the case for whether or not the variables they measure are helping or hindering your business goals. Once all your other reports are in place, you want to start grading performance of every variable you can possibly control or affectfigure out which sources, or combination of marketing materials result in the best conversion rates. You can use this data to adjust marketing spend in favor of high-conversion options. If you are just getting started with analytics, its important to remember that its probably going to take some time for enough data to build up to be useful. High traffic sites will have shorter waits, since larger volumes of users and high conversion rates will result in statistically significant levels of data faster. Be careful not to make decisions based on conversions until youre absolutely sure that the data is meaningful. Most analytical programs will automatically indicate whether data has reached a level of statistical significance indicating that the data is actionable, but just in case, we have included a statistical relevance tester along with this document. Its important that analysts set expectations within the organization for how long it will take to get enough data, and equally important for impatient marketers not to rush the process.
Dashboards, Automation & Testing

Once all tracking for the site is functioning properly, obvious issues have been ironed out, and external marketing is tracked in some fashion, its time to set up a dashboard to monitor vital stats, and create individualized reports for the appropriate parties within the organization. Aside from keeping an eye on how everything on the website is working, one of the most important functions of the web analyst is to have the common sense to get important data into the hands of those who can affect positive change. That means that the analyst needs to understand who within the organization values what information.
Most of the time, the website will chug along with little drama. However, keeping an eye on the key indicators to watch for unexplainable changes is an important function of the dashboard. By setting up an easily observable view of your most important metrics its possible to quickly dive deeper when strange movement occurs. When this happens its important to understand why, but otherwise it can usually be left alone Rather than check the dashboard all the time, you can create weekly reports that get emailed automatically to everyone that needs to see the info throughout the organization. In a small B2B organization, the sales team may want to see an IP address report that shows the companies that are visiting the site. The CFO may want to see a report of sales by product. In a larger organization, the marketing team may want to see a comparison of how many direct URL entries came in from one TV ad vs. another. The possibilities are fairly endless. By customizing and automating the data that each team within the organization sees, it ensures that those with the most immediate knowledge of the drivers behind the data make the call as to whether action must be taken. If, for example, a print ad runs with a special offer URL, the marketing team and analyst must work together to 1. be aware that the ad is running and watch for traffic and 2. take action if traffic is unexpectedly low or high. Automating weekly reporting via email frees up the analyst for the important work of controlled testing. The marketing team may notice that one TV ad seems to be performing better than another, but they do not have enough data to be sure. Rather than act immediately, they should bring the hypothesis to the analyst, who can control for external factors and run controlled tests to determine if the difference is real or not. In the absence of external teams bringing hypotheses to an analyst to test, the analyst will need to take the initiative to isolate problem areas first and try to fix them.
Testing & Benchmarks
What to test depends on where your marketing needs work. For example, if conversion rates are low, test the website content, and if click rates are low, test the advertising. Hold off on tests that will only provide tiny incremental improvement and focus on the tests that are most likely to yield large increases in sales or conversion. These will generally be the variables that are the closest to the actual sale, such as landing page forms or copy. Tests that look at variables like browser resolution are helpful, but generally only result in small improvements to the user experience, and tiny improvements to the bottom line. When deciding what to test, one helpful piece of information is to know what normal is by establishing benchmarks. Google Analytics offers some benchmarks comparing traffic data to other websites that it deems similar to your own. MarketingSherpa offers some industry specific benchmark rates for conversion as well, which can be found at sherpastore.com. As you grow your internal data-set, you should begin establishing internal benchmarks of your own.
Test Validity
Controlled scientific tests are not the same as the best guess (hypothesis) of an informed analyst. In a controlled test, all variables but the test variable should be identicalthis rarely happens in
real life, so pains must be taken to control for any differentiating non-test variables. The same people should be doing the same thing at the same time, with one difference in the experience left to influence behavior. When the Winner of a test wins by a small margin, that test is rarely predictive of future success by the winner due to random variancethis is why statistical significance testing is so important. The laws of statistics tell us that sample size (the number of instances in a test) and the difference delta (rate A minus rate B) are the two biggest factors in determining how predictive the results of a test will be. A test with group A winning 3 times and group B winning 7 times will not be predictive of anything. The same test performed again would likely have completely different results because only 10 instances are observed. If group A wins 3 times, and group B wins 70 times, that would be predictive, because the difference delta is large enough that we can be 99% sure that random variance is not to blame. This is why time is such an important variable when testing. Youll need to allow enough time to pass to ensure that you get enough data for statistical relevance, assuming a very small difference, such as a conversion rate of 3% vs. 4%. For this reason, its much more practical to test radically different concepts. The more different the concepts tested are, the greater the difference is likely to be, and the less time and data you will need to collect statistically significant, predictive results. If the variable your test is isolating is incredibly subtle, it could easily take years to achieve predictive results. Many analytics programs have statistical testing built in to their interface, but its up to you, the analyst, to understand their meaning and manage the expectations of others within the organization. Using the included stat tester tool you can plug in the differences you expect or are seeing early on in order to predict how much data, and how long it will take to collect that data, in order to plan your testing schedule realistically.
Testing Calendar
The more tests you run at once, the longer it will take for any of them to finish. If you create a testing schedule and focus on one test at a time, its easier to stay productive and continue to adapt to changing market conditions. You can use the schedule below as a rough guide, but should adapt to the circumstances of your own site. If you have extremely high volume of site visitors, you can speed up the testing schedule, or partition your visitors into multiple simultaneous tests. For websites with very little traffic, you may need to take more time than we suggest or run fewer tests.
Month 1
Allow time for data to collect. Ideally, wait for at least 100 unique KPI events, per KPI event on the site (5 KPIs = 500 events) Make sure reporting is accurate and unambiguous. Set benchmarks. If different systems report different numbers, find out why and whether to incorporate variance or fix. Isolate weak spots in the conversion funnel. If clicks are low and conversions high, plan ad copy test. If clicks are high and conversion low, plan landing page test or exit survey. Repeat Month 3 testing strategy, but refine further Once marketing is doing a good job of getting people to the site, and the site is doing a good job of converting them to sale, look for small ways to incrementally improve the user experience.
Month 2
Month 3
Month 4 Month 5
Conclusion
Web analytics has a lot of moving parts, but by taking the time to organize all the tasks that go into it, it can be quite manageable. Everyone should start by breaking down analytic tasks into manageable chunks that are spread over a period of weeks or months. As you figure out what to track, spread the net as wide as possible, tracking everything that seems applicable. But, once you get into analysis, quickly drill down to a few key metrics and focus on actionable reporting. Once the analytics framework is in place, work with others in the organization to test discrete pieces of the overall marketing campaign, in an order that takes into account the relative importance of the test on the bottom line. Big tests, and tests of elements closest to the point of sale, will always be most likely to yield the most profound results. As an analyst, always be looking for meaning. Its important to know what happened, but its more important to know why it happened. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed, break down reporting requirements into: Traffic where is it coming from and which traffic is best? Content is it doing its job or can it be better? Conversion are there broken links in the chain from awareness to sale?
Its very important to document analytics requirements and share them with all involved parties. The website is used by everyone a little differently, so no one person can know everything that goes on. Its up to the analyst to act as a liaison between all the involved parties. For example: the tech department helps with coding and informs of changes to site; marketing supplies campaign dates and goals; and sales supplies offline lead and sale data. Analytics should ensure that all parties are working towards non-conflicting goals, and are paying attention to the right metrics. Finally, dont bite off more than you can chew. Its fine to start small and add layers of complexity over time. Theres nothing wrong with practicing on a free analytics program before graduating to the big leagues if and when it makes sense to upgrade. The same goes for testing and reporting. Simple tests and tightly focused reports are far more likely to provide useful information. Where you should invest the most time and energy is ensuring that tracking is accurate and conversion goals are set up correctly to accurately reflect the consumer path to purchase.
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MarketingSherpa Report:

Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Dashboards, Automation & Testing .......................................................................................................21

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

The Big Picture What is the Function of Web Analytics?

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

How is Analytics Being Used By Others?

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Term Page View Visit/Session Visitors Unique Visitors Duration Referrer

Metric (Ratio) (CTR ) Click-through Rate Bounce Rate

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Picking an Analytics Program

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Chart: What Search Marketers Value Most in an Analytics Program

Creating Trackable Marketing

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Tricky Tracking Flash & Rich Media

Defining Conversion Creating Goals

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Visitors: Who is coming to the site?

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Traffic: Where are they coming from?

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Content: What are they doing on the site?

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

Dashboards, Automation & Testing

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

MarketingSherpas Guide to Getting Started with Web Analytics

About MarketingSherpa LLC

Sign up for newsletters at www.MarketingSherpa.com.

San Jose - August 7, 2009 Los Angeles - August 11, 2009

Austin, TX - November 17, 2009

Practical Reports For You From MarketingSherpa

MarketingSherpa 2009 Social Media Marketing & PR

MarketingSherpa Marketing With Video Report: Online, TV & Mobile

MarketingSherpa 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide

Practical Reports For You From MarketingSherpa

MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Report

Landing Page Handbook 2008

Plus MarketingSherpa Toolkits:

Entry to the Library of Real-Life Marketing...

A practical, extensive, easy-to-search, fact-based, online resource for marketers.

5 good reasons to sign up:

To Find out more go to:

Join today for the discounted introductory annual price of

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