Whatever the reason, anyone working for mid-to-large sized companies needs to understand that dark social is no longer just an interesting topic of conversation, but instead has become a critical tactic that needs to at least be part of the conversation when it comes to planning social media marketing strategy.

What is it?

Dark social – for those who aren’t up to speed – is social sharing that creates inbound website traffic from sources that web analytics tools like Google Analytics are not able to track. According to Simply Measured, inbound traffic typically comes from one of the following sources:

• Native Mobile Apps
• Email
• SMS/Chat

When this traffic lands on a website, analytics suites will log it as “Direct” traffic:

At last count, nearly 70% of “social” sharing took place in the dark. People don’t take linear paths to your content any longer – they share a link with a friend on Facebook Messenger that they found on Buzzfeed that got sourced from Reddit. Finding an attribution model in that mess is a hurdle to get over for marketers – you want this type of sharing taking place (and it probably is if you’re doing your job well), but you’re going to be hung out to dry come reporting time if you can’t claim ownership of any of the results. And, as apps like Snapchat and Kik continue to grow in popularity, it’s a safe bet that you’ll only have more of this traffic to deal with in the coming years.

Great. So what now?

Digital traffic attribution problems aren’t new – they’ve been an issue for search marketing for quite some time. Things like HTTPS implementation and link shortening have been causing headaches for marketing analytics practitioners for ages. This “new” problem for social traffic attribution is more a function of the maturation of social media as a whole. Welcome to the wonderful world of digital reporting, social practitioners!

So, here’s the thing. There is no silver bullet to fix direct traffic attribution from social sharing of your content. It’s a problem for every company that’s trying to track it effectively right now. What does exist are small steps you can take as a practitioner to reduce the amount of unattributable traffic hitting your website.

Here are some of the best places to start:

• Social Media Today has five outstanding tips for tracking dark social, including
  segmenting traffic out in Google Analytics, and four third-party tools for
  social marketers to add to their toolkits.
• GetSocial.io is one of the tools that Social Media Today recommends above, but it deserves its own bullet. The tool adds tracking data to your website’s URLs that allow it to track social shares through SMS, Facebook Messenger, and an assortment of other platforms. It’s a great tool for almost every social media marketer out there.
• Increase the number of social sharing buttons on your website, and tag them with UTM parameters to encourage users to share trackable links. You can then attribute those tagged pieces of traffic as social sharing, and start getting a better handle on where traffic is coming from.

Okay. My traffic is starting to sort itself out. Then what?

So long as you understand that you won’t be getting a perfect picture of attributable data, now is where you begin looking at your dark social traffic to figure out exactly what it’s doing for your business.

First off, make sure you’ve set up your analytics suite to track every bit of data you can. If this is something you need help setting up, check out our blog on measuring intent through Google Analytics.

Start assessing, month over month, how much dark social is impacting your bottom line. Are people more inclined to spend time on the site and read your content when they come from dark social sources? If you’re an eCommerce organization, how well do these users convert?

If your dark social traffic performs markedly better than, say, your paid search traffic or paid social traffic, it may be time to consider investing less in those avenues and more money into strategies that take new media into consideration. Perhaps Influencer Marketing on Snapchat or Instagram, or contests on social that promote sharing with friends.

Dark social as a means of driving conversion and awareness is only growing in popularity, so it’s critical you get a handle on it now.

The post Dark Social – The Marketer’s Guide appeared first on Portent.

These days businesses have an abundance of data at their fingertips. That makes knowing how to sift through information an essential part of every marketer’s existence.

Personally, Google Analytics (GA) has been making my professional career easier since 2007. Why only since 2007? Well, I was unaware of GA before then, so shame on me.

GA often holds the key for unlocking new growth opportunities when important performance indicators like revenue and conversions have slowed to a crawl. You simply have to know where to look.

Luckily for you, this post will cover 3 different breakdowns of GA data to help you identify new opportunities.

Assisted Conversions

What are assisted conversions?

Assisted conversions break down which channels played a role in a given conversion. They add clarity by breaking down how each channel in your purchasing process contributes to your desired outcome, which is often someone making a purchase, download, or contacting you for more information.

Where can they be found?

Go to: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions

Please note that you must have conversion tracking set up in GA in order to see assisted conversion data.

Why are assisted conversions useful?

By my very scientific calculations, 95.19% of businesses pay attention only to the online click that results in a conversion. Thing is though, that’s a terrible way to do business.

In most cases, customers navigate to a site or social media profile a number of times before making a purchase or submitting a contact form. With assisted conversions, you have data revealing the role channels such as PPC and organic search play. Say someone initially finds your business via a paid ad, later returns via an organic search result, and finally converts after navigating to the site directly. That’s a pretty common scenario that assisted conversion data fully covers.

You can also change the importance of each touch point. Giving substantial credit to the first interaction someone has with your brand, as well as the last one, or giving increasing importance to each touch point, can be easily done with the model comparison tool. If you don’t like the default attribution options, custom models can also be created within GA.

How should one use assisted conversions?

Assisted conversions can give you a useful overview of what channels are contributing to your bottom line. Select an attribution model that is right for your business and start funding each channel with an eye on how it’s performing for both last-click and assisted conversions. Areas of focus can also be derived with the help of assisted conversions.

How does this look in practice? You may be missing an opportunity to focus on a channel that is holistically helping to drive a ton of conversions. For example, if you have a $5k a month PPC budget under the assumption that it results in 10 conversions, but find that with assisted conversions PPC has a hand in 20 conversions, there may be an opportunity for further budget expansion and reach for PPC. It all depends on how you treat assisted conversions and factor them into your overall cost per acquisition.

Landing Page Performance by Channel

What is a landing page according to GA?

A landing page is the page a visitor first lands on when arriving at your site.

Where can I review landing page opportunities?

Go to: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

Why is landing page data useful?

Landing page data helps marketers figure out which pages are driving people to a site and also how people are interacting with each landing page.

How should one use landing page data?

Having data on which landing pages are performing well (or poorly) helps identify opportunities for optimization. For example, let’s say one of your product pages has an extremely low eCommerce conversion rate, even though demand and cost remain equal. That’s definitely a red flag.

From there, a side-by-side comparison of the product page relative to others should be made, and you can install some click-tracking software like Crazy Egg in order to see how people are interacting with the page.

Another easy, yet pertinent, stat to review is bounce rate. If a given page has an abnormally high bounce rate relative to others in its category, you will likely want to review the meta description, title tag, URL, and content on that page. That will allow you to ensure they align perfectly with the top term, or terms, driving traffic to that page and make changes if they don’t.

Comparisons of revenue (assuming eCommerce tracking exists), time on site, sessions, new vs. returning users, and other key metrics can be easily done with a little sorting.

Goal Funnel Opportunities

What is the goal funnel in GA?

The goal funnel illustrates how visitors flow through your checkout process and eventually convert.

Where can I review the goal funnel?

Go to: Conversions > Goals > Goal Flow

Please note that you must have conversion tracking set up in GA in order to see goal flow data.

Why is goal flow data useful?

The goal flow data can highlight hang-ups and opportunities in your conversion path for specific subsets of site visitors.

Time spent improving the conversion experience can often lead to a better overall conversion rate, meaning more conversions vs. abandons once people enter the conversion funnel.

How can goal flow data be used?

Goal flow data is particularly helpful in improving your goal conversion rate. For example, let’s say you recently launched some updates to your checkout funnel and conversion volume has been lower since the launch.

Goal flow lets you look at user data such as browser, operating system, and screen resolution in order to see if a subset of users are heavily dropping out of the funnel at a specific point. You can then test to see if that step in some way is hampering the user experience for that group of visitors and make changes as needed.

Another example is understanding how mobile users interact with your site. You can review people navigating through the checkout process via mobile vs. non-mobile in order to review drop-off points in the process. If mobile has a massively larger drop-off point than desktop at one of the steps, improving the experience for mobile (less text entry required, more drop-downs used, etc.) would be a logical next step.

In Summary

As I said earlier, a little digging within Google Analytics can go a long way towards helping marketers uncover new growth opportunities. You just have to look in the right places.

And, if you feel like the recommendations within this post are just a bit too elementary for your skill level, feel free to delve into this webinar on using analytics to study audience engagement or this one on connecting your CRM & web analytics platforms, both by the brilliant and talented Michael Wiegand (you didn’t hear this praise coming from me ;) ).

The post Breaking the Sales Plateau with Google Analytics appeared first on Portent.

Yeah – me too.

Don’t get me wrong – I love GA. It’s way easier to navigate than most of the other analytics platforms out there. But just like its users, GA isn’t perfect.

As an expert on both analytics and all things brutality (I’m a big death metal fan) I’d like to call out some of the most frustrating aspects of GA, as well as solutions to work around these obstacles.

NOTE: These brutal issues will be listed from the simplest to the most complex. If you’re new to GA, start reading here. If you’re a GA wizard, feel free to scroll down to more complex topics.

Problem: Limited visuals

When you present data you want your charts to look sparkly clean. GA’s basic visuals are fine, but when you try to show multiple metrics, segments, or time intervals…things get ugly:

Looks more like a Richter scale than analytics data

Even with simple data points, the visuals in GA aren’t great:

We want sexy data visualizations, not the bare minimum. The visuals can’t be customized within GA, so we have to look elsewhere for enhancing our charts.

Solution – Microsoft Excel

Export the data into a CSV in Excel to create your own visuals. Want to pick your favorite colors? Done! Want the labels to actually be readable from a distance? Done!

If you’re lacking confidence in your Excel skills, check out my deck on visualizing analytics data in Excel. It’ll show you the basics on making kick-ass charts from your GA data.

Problem: Names of metrics and reports keep changing

One day you go into GA and try to look up how many unique visitors came to your site. But then you can’t find that metric, or other metrics, or even the Channels report where you looked yesterday.

Maybe you think you’re going crazy. It was all here yesterday!

You’re (probably) not crazy. GA decided to rename metrics and reports out of the blue. Now your unique visitors are called users, your visits are called sessions, and your Channels report is hidden under the All Traffic button. How dare they make you click one more button to find your report!

Solution: Search box

You can use the search box in the top left corner of the interface. If you need the Channels report, instead of clicking around the dropdown lists you can type it in the box:

And select the report from the results:

Note that you can also use this for finding recently viewed reports.

As for the renamed metrics, be on the lookout for announcements from GA when these changes occur. Here’s a quick list of common metrics from Google’s last renaming batch in 2014:

• Visits are now Sessions
• Visitors are now Users
• Avg. Time on Site is now Avg. Session Duration

Problem: Data sampling

When you try to look at lots of data (like millions of sessions) with several dimensions and segments, eventually you’ll hit a data wall. GA will sample your report based on less than 100% of your sessions. It usually looks like this:

This can be especially frustrating when you already clicked the button telling GA to provide your data with slower response for greater precision. Response time is exactly why the sampling occurs. GA doesn’t want to spend all day building out your report, so it provides a sample.

Solution(s):

1. Purchase GA Premium to eliminate almost all sampling from your reports. You put down the cash and GA will work harder to bring you all of your data. But Premium costs $100,000+, so let’s assume that isn’t possible.
2. Slim your report down to the essentials. Strip away extra segments and dimensions to obtain the largest sample possible.
3. Worst case scenario – split the time interval into smaller parts and move the data into one Excel file. This is crazy annoying, but it technically works.

Problem: Traffic segments aren’t accessible in all reports

Custom segments are a fantastic way to view specific parts of your data. They’re easy to implement; click on the top ribbon, find (or create) the one you need, and you’re good to go!

But if you venture to the Multi-Channel Funnels report, you’re screwed:

Same goes for the Goal Funnel report:

C’mon GA! What’s up with that?

Solution: Write Google an expletive-filled letter of complaint

I’m kidding of course. But you’d think by now this would be consistent across the entire interface. Until then we have to wait for the GA team to mercifully give us access to the segment ribbon on these reports.

Problem: Report filters lack “or” logic option

Let’s say you want to view all of your pages based around your site’s newsletter. The URLs contain either the word “mail” or “newsletter”. You can make a report filter to find URLs for mail, but when you want a filter to also capture newsletter…uh oh:

We can only select “and”, meaning that the URLs would have to include both of those words. In this scenario the filters wouldn’t work.

Brutal.

Solution: Regular Expressions (RegEx)

This nifty language can help you access any combination of dimensions you’d want in a report. It even has a character that represents the word “or”, the vertical bar | (that’s not a lowercase L, or an uppercase i, but a vertical bar |).

If you select RegEx in the filter options, now we can create our filter with one condition:

New to RegEx? No problem! Here’s a handy cheat sheet, as well as this free RegEx testing tool to verify whether or not your expressions are capturing what you need.

Problem: Multi-Channel Funnels revenue consistency to other reports

My colleague Michael Wiegand brought this one up. When you go to the Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) report, direct traffic is awarded conversions differently than every other GA report. Google has their reasons but I’ll make it simple:

If a conversion takes place from a direct visit, in the MCF report the direct channel is awarded with the conversion. Every other GA report defers the conversion to the last non-direct visit from the user who just converted.

For example, here’s revenue in the Channels report:

Then the same profile in the MCF report:

They both add up to the same total revenue, but the distribution is inconsistent.

Some argue that this is more accurate since direct traffic is not ignored. But it creates an inconsistency when using multiple reports.

Solution: Less emphasis on last-click attribution

This brutal situation is an important lesson for all analytics users: last-click is not the only attribution model. Michael has an excellent post on the flaws viewing conversions with only last-click attribution.

Go play around in the Attribution Model Comparison tool to get more thorough insights on how your channels contribute to your conversions.

Next time you start to have a meltdown while in GA, just remember many issues on the platform have solutions. Even if there isn’t a current fix, Google updates the platform at least once per year to help solve these issues.

But don’t hesitate to take a screenshot of an issue and tweet them “WTF?” – they need the feedback.

The post How to Solve 6 Brutal Problems in Google Analytics appeared first on Portent.

During the webinar, I made mention of several links and resources that would be available afterward. Here’s the link bundle containing everything:

http://portent.co/measuring-intent

If you don’t have time for either of those things, I’ve also provided a bare bones transcript of the webinar here for your reading pleasure!

Intro

In your traditional marketing funnel you have three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Those map neatly to your Google analytics reports: acquisition, behavior, and conversion.

The top and bottom of the funnel are incredibly easy to measure. In fact, they aren’t even dependent on your Analytics setup. If you have log files for your server, you can figure out how many people came to your site. Your cart software can show you just how many people purchased on your site.

The middle of your funnel is incredibly hard to measure. Why? Because at bare minimum it requires customization through event tracking. But even if you set up robust event tracking in your Analytics platform, it’s still hard to determine what pushes someone over the edge from visitor to customer.

Today we’re going to talk about: mapping out intent indicators on your site, setting up event tracking, and ultimately building an intent scoring model that you can use for remarketing purposes.

Intent indicators

Do you have blog articles on your site? Do you have videos on your site? Then you have intent indicators.

Go through your site to find any action a potential customer could take that you don’t consider a conversion.

It’s almost like a content audit, but you’re taking  stock of activities instead.

Grading activities

This is the fun part. Once you’ve got every possible non-conversion activity in a list, rank them from least perceived intent to most perceived intent.

If you work in house, do this twice: once for you and once for your potential customers.

If you work at an agency, do this three times: once for you, once for your client and once for your potential customers.

When you’re done, take the average for each interaction.

Congratulations! You’ve just created the scaffolding for your intent model.

Then it’s all about deciding what constitutes high, medium and low intent. Since the average value of an action among these 7 activities is 3.5, look at it in terms of 1 activity, 3 activities and 5 activities.

Once you have these scoring ranges setup, that becomes the framework for your remarketing campaigns.

Setting up event tracking

Now the issue becomes, do you have a way to measure all of these activities? If they don’t have unique page views on your site associated with them, then you probably don’t.

This is where Google Tag Manager can save your bacon (or bacon-like meat substitute).

A few tags in Google Tag Manager will give you programmatic click tracking on every page of your site with automatic events being passed into Google Analytics associated with those.

Goal values

Once the events are flowing into Google Analytics, you can configure goals around them and assign dollar values to those goals.

Don’t worry, these aren’t real dollar values but just a vehicle to get your new event scoring model into Google Analytics and have it start aggregating scores on each visitor.

Building your intent segments

Over time the goal values will build up leaving you with the ability to bucket visitors in three different segments based on their level of intent.

Remarketing based on intent

Thanks to Analytics and its seamless integration with AdWords, you’re able to import your segments as remarketing lists.

Then you can build campaigns around the visitor’s level of intent and serve them up appropriate content.

The post Webinar Recap: Measuring Intent With Google Analytics appeared first on Portent.

That kind of integration is the holy grail of web analytics — truly closed-loop reporting, from the time a visitor first hits your website, to when they become a lead and, ultimately, a paying customer.

Here at Portent, we use HubSpot for marketing automation and as a checkpoint before our leads are passed into our CRM — Salesforce. So, naturally, we were chomping at the bit to integrate.

Researching the HubSpot integration

If you’ve ever looked into this kind of integration before, Google’s documentation for integrating with popular CRMs is non-existent. There really are no best practices for this. It’s the wild west out there.

A lot of reputable folks have written about integrating with Salesforce, but nobody framed it within the scope of a pre-Salesforce marketing automation pitstop. So I had to cobble an approach together from a few sources.

Finding a Unique Identifier

I started at e-nor’s blog. They wrote an excellent post last year on integrating with Salesforce before UA came out of BETA.

In it, they describe the process of reading Google’s __utma cookie and passing that value into Salesforce as a Visitor Id and into GA as a Custom Variable.

That got my creative juices flowing. If they were reading the __utma cookie, why couldn’t I read another cookie for the same purpose?

Leveraging Google Tag Manager

But this roll-out would be a real pain in the neck if I couldn’t do it programmatically. (I was envisioning a scenario where I’d have to ask my developers to insert an additional piece of script every time a new landing page went up.) Nope, I needed to use Google Tag Manager (GTM) for this.

That’s where Justin Cutroni came in. He wrote an amazing walkthrough on specifying a User ID with Google Tag Manager.

Essentially, you can define a macro in GTM that scrapes a First Party Cookie set on your site and repurpose it in any tags you want to fire, not just User ID.

Putting the pieces together

That got me thinking: HubSpot has its own tracking pixel. Are they already setting an ID in a cookie that I could scrape?

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. The answer is yes! They are!

They set a cookie called hutk — a 2-year cookie. And it already gets passed into HubSpot along with every form submission:

From there, it was easy to set a macro in GTM to scrape it:

Then, I pass that value into GA as either a User ID (shown below) or as a Custom Dimension:

The beautiful results

This is what it looks like when it’s all said and done. (I’ve passed in the hutk as a Custom Dimension in this example.)

The same ID associated with my form submission on the site can be tied back to my sessions that led up to that action:

So what’s next?

The possibilities are endless, really. But two things I’m really looking forward to are:

Lead scoring

Sorting our HubSpot contacts into buckets by lead quality and passing that information back into GA keying on the UID. You can do this by going to Admin > Data Import in GA and using either the User Data or Custom Data options:

PII Viewer

David Simpson launched a Chrome Extension that allows you to take any data exports from HubSpot or any other CRM and inject information back into the analytics UI without actually passing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) into GA — which would violate their terms of service.

Notice now that I can see a user’s email address alongside their behavior in GA. Really powerful stuff!

The post Integrating Google Analytics & HubSpot appeared first on Portent.

Search Engine Land broke the story, Google themselves confirmed it:

“Today, we are extending our efforts to keep search secure by removing the query from the referrer on ad clicks originating from SSL searches on Google.com.”

Queries, Not Keywords

Marin Software’s CMO Matt Ackley — on the heels of the report — quickly made the distinction between search query data and keyword data noting:

“Keyword data and search query data are not the same thing. If Google stops passing the full set of referrer data on paid search clicks, this will impact search queries, not keywords. Platforms that rely on Keyword IDs, as Marin does, would not have their bidding capabilities disrupted.”

Google’s statement corroborated that, mentioning:

“For generating reports or automating keyword management with query data, we suggest using the AdWords API Search Query Performance report or the AdWords Scripts Report service.”

So if it’ll still be available via API — and we “will continue to have access to … the AdWords search terms report and the Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries report” — what’s the problem?

Google Analytics Implications

Well, for one, we’ve probably seen the last of the Matched Search Query dimension in Google Analytics. If they’re indeed removing the query from the referrer, that’ll mean it won’t come across to GA as a part of AdWords auto-tagging.

Matched Search Query can be applied to numerous insightful GA reports, including GA’s powerful Multi-Channel Funnels suite — the only place where you can discover how a given paid query impacts performance of non-paid channels:

Tumbling CPCs

Google’s party line on this has been to bill it as “security enhancements for search users.”

But if they really cared about user security, this would’ve happened a lot sooner.

What’s actually going on then?

I’m convinced it is part of a broader effort by Google to shore up falling CPCs. They’ve been chipping away at this over the past few years.

In their most recent earnings report, they spelled it out for their shareholders:

“Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth quarter of 2012 and decreased approximately 2% over the third quarter of 2013.”

So they’re stopping the bleeding. How?

Look closely at what they’ve done of late:

• Introducing Enhanced Campaigns — Taking away Tablet bid granularity. They’re getting those clicks at Desktop rates now.
• Putting Emphasis on PLAs — Feed-driven performance without a clear 1:1 relationship between products and non-branded queries. Susceptible to repeated comparison-shopping clicks.

In both cases, Google has taken control and insight away from the advertiser, while bolstering click cost and volume through attractive (and unavoidable) ad products for consumers.

A (not provided) Tomorrow

How is the query data related to Enhanced Campaigns and PLAs? Well, it’s not — on the surface.

But query data in Google Analytics makes for much more intelligent advertisers. A query that does well in terms of CTR in AdWords might not do well in terms of engagement and sales on your site. Informed advertisers build negative keyword lists through this, which kills volume for Google, raises Quality Scores, and in turn, lowers CPCs for advertisers.

I think they’re testing the waters with how much information they can take away from advertisers without it negatively affecting our willingness to spend. Don’t be surprised if the query information is just phase one in Google obfuscating keyword information in the referrer.

The advertiser in me hopes I’m wrong, the conspiracy theorist in me fears I’m right.

Ultimately, Google answers to two people above all: searchers and shareholders. Advertisers will always come in a distant third.

The post (not provided) for Advertisers™ Beta appeared first on Portent.

The demise of keywords and the rise of Not Provided have made our job more difficult, but it is not impossible. I am going to review various techniques I use to look at analytics to find how my SEO updates have improved the site. This will help your clients break through the mumbo jumbo and finally understand your worth.

Rankings… Not so much

Search rankings are the first thing asked about when trying to figure out how well your SEO is performing, but it is not that simple.

There are many factors that make rankings less than useful.

1. Personalization –  Search engines personalize your search results based on what they know about you. They know what you have searched for on the web, your web browsing history, who your friends are and where you live. Big brother anyone?

Even if you check your rankings with no personalization, it’s not the same as what you customers will see. Most of them will have some sort of personalized results.

2. Localization – Even if you clear all your personal information out of your browser, search engines still know where your computer is and provide you localized results so you can find the closest Starbucks. Also, if you are using a service to pull your rankings for you, they will use different IP addresses each time they scrape the search engine results pages. This means that Google will give you results based on the location of that IP. This causes fluctuations each time they grab your current rankings.

3. Not tracking the relevant keywords – You may be tracking 500+ keywords, but out of those, how many are actually sending traffic to your site and converting? With that many keywords you will likely be overwhelmed and confused. Instead, you want to keep it simple and focused.

First, figure out the broad keywords that are most important to your site. Then get more focused and find some of the more specific, mid to long-tail, keywords that directly relate to your content.

What you can use rankings for

All these factors make tracking rankings less accurate, but you can still use rankings to help you get a high-level view of how you are doing on certain keywords and see how your site is trending over time. You can also watch your rankings to alert you of major problems (like Google manual penalties). Just do us all a favor and don’t make them your main KPI.

Look for big trends in site traffic

One of the most important metrics you want to look at is the amount of traffic that you are bringing to the site through your SEO efforts. You can find this information on the Organic Search Traffic report in Google Analytics. The problem with this report is that it is hard to see what is going on with it just by looking at it. You can look at the graph at top to see if traffic is going up over time, but it doesn’t tell you what is going on. You need to dig deeper.

Compare date ranges

First, look for short term changes first by comparing this month with the previous month. Are you doing better than the previous month? How well are you doing compared to last year?

It’s great to see how you are improving from month to month, but you need to be careful when looking at this, since you will eventually run into seasonality issues. For example, if your site does well during the Christmas season and you compare traffic in January to December you are going to see your traffic numbers decrease, but this doesn’t mean that your SEO is doing bad. It would be better to look at improvement year over year.

Look for spikes and drops in traffic

Sometimes you will see abnormal increases or decreases in traffic during the month. These will stand out visually on the graph. You can usually find out what caused the spike by looking for the landing page that drove the additional traffic. Finding out what happened is important so you can let the client know what is going on and so you can continue to increase traffic in the future.

Look beyond Analytics

If you can’t figure out why there was increase traffic to a particular page or section by peering into the Google Analytics crystal ball, then it is time to put on that detective hat on, dive a little deeper, and look elsewhere for clues.

Here are some good places to start your search for clues:

1. Changes to the Site – Even small changes to the site can sometimes have big results. Find out what was changed and when. This can at least give you an idea of what pages to focus on.
2. Look for Holidays/Events/Seasonal Trends – Look at last year’s data to see if it had the same swing. If so, it might be a seasonal trend for your industry. Also look for big shopping holidays or for big industry or sporting events.
3. Social Media – Look at the social profiles of the site and see if there was any activity during that time. If you see a spike of social referrals it can help you pinpoint it to a certain event.
4. Sales/Specials – Is the company having a big sale or special? This often brings additional direct and organic traffic to the site.
5. Other Advertising –  Was there any old school advertising done? Radio, TV, newspaper, mailers, billboard ads, etc. are still effective. Look for spikes when that advertising campaign started.
6. News/Press – If there was any news about the company (good or bad) it can definitely send more people to the site.
7. Ask the Client – You don’t have to waste all your time chasing down everything. Go ahead and ask the client. They might actually know what is going on.

Filter results

After looking at the big picture and seeing the general trends you want to dig deeper and look for specific results related to your past optimization efforts. To find those pages you worked on you will have to look at them as a group and compare them to the rest of the site. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating an segment that allows you to filter your results and see just want you want.

Creating an advanced segment

When looking for SEO changes, it is best to create a segment that looks at organic landing pages and whatever that visitor did afterwards.

1. Open the Advanced Segment panel and click the “Create New Segment” button
2. Write the name of your new segment
3. Define your filter to Include the pages that your segment matches
4. Set the segment to track Users which allows you to track multiple visits
5. Define Sequence Start to include the First User Interaction
6. Add Step 1 set the dimension to Landing Page and set the filter to “Matches Regex” and use a regular expression that matches the pages you want to track.
7. Add a filter to look only at visits whose Medium exactly matches Organic
8. Save the segment and test it out by looking at the Behavior >Site Content >Landing Pages report to see if the correct pages show up. If not, then adjust your regular expression or add other filters as necessary.

That’s it, now you have an Advanced Segment that shows only organic users that first landed on the pages you want to look at.

This segments helps you see how these pages helped bring people to the site and how well they converted. You can use it on almost all reports in GA.

Look at those landing pages

One nifty way to see your ongoing progress is to look at the number of organic landing pages that get at least one visit during the month. When you see this number going up, it means that your SERP visibility is growing and that you are generally improving your rankings.

To see this, look at the bottom of the Landing Page report and see how total many pages are included. Then you can compare this to the previous year or right before you started working on the site.

Not all keyword data is lost

Next, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to find out what keywords are ranking for what pages. This isn’t as good as the previous keyword data we used to have before Not Provided. Just know that this data is highly sampled, so don’t look at the traffic numbers too closely, just look what keywords each page is ranking for.

When looking at these keywords, it gives you an idea of what the page is currently optimized for. If you are still not seeing the keyword that you are targeting, then you know you have more work to do.

Track conversions

Getting more traffic is great, but if you are not selling more products or getting more transactions, then you need to take a look to what you are doing.

Pay attention to transactions and revenue to see if they are going up along with your traffic. If not, you may have some other problems. Also take a close look at your conversion rate, this can tell you if your are sending the right audience to the site or if you have other problems. If you are consistently increasing both traffic and revenue, your client will have no problems with sending you those checks.

You can also take a look at assisted conversions and other attributions models to get a fuller picture on how your organic traffic is affecting the site.

Do you have any other ways to track success of your SEO efforts? Please leave a comment below so we can discuss.

The post Rankings Aren’t All That: How to Really Track SEO Improvements appeared first on Portent.

Photo by Jase Curtis.

I was the kid who sorted out Skittles by color.

My favorite flavor was lime, which they’ve since changed to green apple — an atrocity if you ask me.

That isn’t my point today, but I think it’s influenced how I work as a marketer.

Google Analytics has done a lot of work around their segmentation tool.

I won’t give you the 101 on it. I’ll leave that to Justin Cutroni. He wrote a fantastic piece on the new parts of the tool in July.

Much like the Skittles rainbow, you can learn a lot about your site’s marketing mix by segmenting the various colorful, tasty pieces out and consuming them individually.

How do I create a segment?

Simple.

In nearly any analytics report, click the down arrow just underneath the ribbon under the report title:

Then, click the lovely “Create new segment” button:

You’ll get a really intimidating screen like this:

But don’t worry, I’ll have a screen cap of the exact settings for each segment later on.

Hit me the with segments!

Here are 5 Google Analytics custom segments I find particularly useful these days.

1. New mobile visitors

Questions answered by this segment:

• What do the most demanding visitors in the mobile segment do on my site?
• How is my new adaptive or responsive mobile experience doing?

How to build this segment:

Ways to use this segment:

Compare it against All Visits to see if you’re over/under average Engagement and Conversion Rate.

Use it to see which devices folks are on when they get a first impression of your site.

2. Two purchases over 90 days

Questions answered by this segment:

• What products are your most loyal customers buying?
• Which products do I remarket to past purchasers?

How to build this segment:

Ways to use this segment:

Go to the Product Performance report and set City as your secondary dimension.

Hone in on products sold to someone in a podunk town. Chances are it was the same person. It’ll show you which products they purchased.

And the timeline will show you how quickly they came back to buy the second item.

Are folks buying a device and coming back later for accessories? Buying a guitar and coming back later for a case? This is all super insightful when you do remarketing to past purchasers.

3. Best 4th level page

Questions answered by this segment:

• What do visitors who deeply research my product or service look like?
• What channels drive these visitors?
• What other pages are they looking at?

How to build this segment:

Making this segment requires some research. Go to the Content Drilldown report and click on the top one in the list until you get down several levels:

Then build your segment around your most popular page down a few levels:

Ways to use this segment:

Go to your All Traffic report and see how people are reaching this popular deeper page on the site and what actions they’re taking.

Use that knowledge to discern whether you should move the page further up in your site hierarchy to help folks reach it easier.

4. Top non-brand paid keyword

Questions answered by this segment:

• With organic keyword data going away – How do subsequent organic visitors, who clicked on a paid ad previously, interact with my site?

How to build this segment:

This one will also require some research. Go the AdWords Keywords report and look for your top non-brand keyword by visits or by revenue, whichever you prefer:

Use that to build your segment:

Ways to use this segment:

Drill down to organic traffic once the segment is applied and set landing page as your secondary dimension.

You’ll get all kinds of great insights into entry points and engagement based on organic search visits that are at least tied to a specific search query somewhere in the click stream:

Then you could rinse and repeat this process for your Top 5-10 Non-Brand paid keywords to get more insights.

5. Returning social visitors

Questions answered by this segment:

• Is the money you’re investing in Facebook curation and Twitter interaction paying off?
• What other marketing channels does social influence?

How to build this segment:

Since there’s no way in the segmentation tool to just check Yes or No for a social visitor, you’ll need to specify social networks by name in a Regular Expression under the Source field:

How to use this segment:

Look at the landing pages that people are returning to after they discover you through a social source. That gives you a fantastic look at which pages are really sticky and reusable resources for people.

For us, our Content Inventory post and Title Maker tool are huge.

Have you made any segments with this tool? What do you think of these ones?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post 5 Delicious Analytics Custom Segments: Taste the Rainbow appeared first on Portent.

You’ve heard the saying “content is king!” so many times by now that it’s become a joke. A joke that isn’t funny and doesn’t even accurately depict the real role of content. Content is what your visitors see when they come to your site. It’s how you engage with them. It is the key to building long-term authority for the sites you work on. It’s what they remember about you. Content isn’t king. It doesn’t rule over other elements of the site. Content is the whole darn kingdom.

Okay, that’s great, content is a fiefdom, Rebecca, but what’s your point? My point is that if we need to take all of the content we create seriously, that means measuring the data, learning from what we’ve done, and tweaking and making improvements for future content projects. To that end, my co-worker, the Google Analytics Whisperer Michael Wiegand, and I designed this Big Content Real-Time Dashboard to help you do just that for your 10% content. And we’re giving you the template. For free. Download it here. (If you don’t know how to install a dashboard template, hold off on downloading it until you’ve reviewed the how-to at the end of this post.)

Hang on. 10% content? What’s that?!? There’s a great post about it here so I won’t go into too many details, but basically, 10% content is what we Portentites call the bigger, riskier pieces of content that can help draw attention to your brand, improve your reputation, and add lasting value to your site. Here at Portent, we’re increasingly focusing on producing some really awesome 10% content for our clients and we wanted an easy way to measure our success – or failure – starting right at the moment we begin our outreach campaign and through the lifecycle of the content piece. So we created a comprehensive dashboard.

Big Content Real-Time Dashboard

You’ll find help on how to install and set-up your dashboard at the bottom of this post. But first, let’s take a closer look at the elements – what Google Analytics (GA) calls “widgets” – that make up this Big Content dashboard masterpiece and why they are important things to record and track.

Active vs. Static

There are both active and static elements to the dashboard.

The active ones are real-time and will change by the second. The static elements are dependent on the date range you have set. The real-time measurements will be important to monitor during your campaign to get an idea about how well your outreach is working. For example, if your active visitors on-site suddenly falls from 100 to 0, it might be time for a new tweet or Facebook post to get the content back in front of potential consumers.

The static elements will be important to measure over the lifecycle of the content piece. These metrics will give you an idea of how your content performs in relation to all of the other content on your site. You’ll be able to use the insight you gather to make improvements and tweaks for your next big piece of content. You can also use it to prove the value of the content to decision makers within your organization or your clients’ companies. You know what happens when they start to see the impact of big content? You get to do more. Booyah!

Goal Completions

Front and center on the Real-Time Dashboard is a widget that shows your goal completions. By default the dashboard has all goal completions set. That means that any goals you’ve set site-wide will be measured on the specific piece of content this dashboard is measuring. We’ve put it first on the dashboard interface because it can have the most impact on proving the value of the big content you’ve produced.

Depending on the objective of your piece of content, you might want to only measure for a project-specific goal, though, especially if you’re working to improve brand awareness rather than get conversions. In that case, you’ll want to make Engaged Visitors your goal, which means you’ll have to create a goal just for this piece of content. Here’s how you can do that:

Setting Goals

An engaged visitor is a visitor who spends more time than average on the site. To determine what that means, you have to first find how long your average visitor spends on the site as a baseline measurement.  Check out the Audience > Overview report. The Avg. Visit Duration is the metric that gives you the site-wide measurement.

Next, you’ll need to create your new goal. In order to do this, visit the Admin > View Goals section and click “Create Goal”:

Choose anywhere from 2x – 10x your average visit duration for the goal setting, depending on what you believe will represent a truly engaged visitor:

Active Visitors

The next real-time widget is your Active Visitors which shows you how many visitors are currently on your site. As I stated before, measuring this regularly can give you a good idea of when you might need to refresh your outreach efforts. It will also help you monitor how much traffic you’re getting from each outreach element and inform you of the best places to expend more time, energy, and resources.

Active Visitors by Source

Next up, you’ll find another real-time widget, the Active Visitors by Source widget. Keeping your eye on this metric will help you understand where your current traffic is coming from. Understanding this will help you make on-the-fly tweaks to your outreach strategy as you determine what’s working and what isn’t.

Active Visitors by New vs. Returning

The New vs. Returning widget will give you a real-time look at what kind of consumer is currently active on your piece of content. If there are lots of new visitors, you know that your outreach is working to effectively drive traffic to the site. A lot of returning visitors, on the other hand, can be indicative that your piece of content is acquiring “content evangelists” – essentially that your content is engaging enough to draw people back to the site.

Active Visitors by Location

The Active Visitors by Location is another real-time widget that can help boost your content campaign. Keeping an eye on this data can help you understand the regional appeal of your content, where people are consuming it, and help give you some ideas to shift your outreach resources.

Pageviews in the Last 30 Minutes

The final real-time widget is the Pageviews in the Last 30 minutes graph. This gives you a look at how your content is performing within a fairly short window. It’s helpful if you can’t monitor the dashboard 24/7 to at least get a 30-minute window into the not-so-distant past. By comparing this chart to your outreach efforts, you can glean some pretty valuable information on how each element of your outreach plan is working. For example, if you know that someone influential has tweeted about your content, you can keep an eye on your pageviews to get an understanding about just how much impact a single tweet from an influencer really can have. If it’s a lot, you can configure future outreach plans to have more social outreach and less email.

Pageviews

This is a static measurement and will give you an idea about how many people visited your piece of content over a specific amount of time. It’s a valuable metric for determining the overall appeal of a piece of content throughout its lifecycle.

Uniques

This will measure the number of unique visitors your big content garners over a specific time period and is useful for determining the overall reach of the content. Essentially, it allows you to know how many unique pairs of eyes landed on your big content.

Uniques by Source and Visitor Type

Next, the static Uniques by Source and Visitor Type graph is a simple way to determine how many unique visitors your piece of content drew over a specified amount of time and from which sources. This metric can be vital in understanding what outreach worked, who your content appealed to, and how you can tailor future content campaigns for maximum effectiveness and success. The blue and green in each bar is the New vs. Returning breakdown we discussed earlier.

Avg. Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit Rate

Finally, you have static widgets Avg. Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit Rate. Keeping an eye on these over the lifecycle of your big content can help you understand how site visitors responded to the content in comparison to all other content on the page. Are they staying on the site longer? Are they continuing on to other content? Did they just stop by for that piece and then leave? The better you understand how the public interacted with your big content, the more you can do to tailor it to your reader the next time you create a piece.

Installing and Configuring the Dashboard

Installation

Installing this dashboard is a fairly straightforward process. Simply open up your GA page and then cut and paste the following link into your browser’s location bar—aka the spot where URLs usually go: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1068218

You will be prompted to add it to a profile. Add it to the profile where you’ll be staging your big content.

Configuration

Since this is meant to be used for a single piece of content, all the widgets in the dashboard will need to be configured to the page on your site you want to measure.

In this case, I’m measuring our Title Maker.

Make sure you set every widget in the dashboard to only show the page exactly matching your URL:

The post The Big Content Real-Time Dashboard Template appeared first on Portent.

At Portent, we’re pretty big fans of Dashboards in Google Analytics. We’ve made a few. So here’s another for all of you writers out there; it surfaces the stuff that’s most important to you, so you don’t have to sort through a zillion different screens to get to the stuff about your blog.

So with that, let’s hop into it:

The Blogger Dashboard

The first thing the dashboard does is filter the information so that it only pulls information related to your blog. I’m not saying other stuff on the site isn’t useful, but if you’re a writer, you’re probably more concerned with the interaction your articles are getting, and less about how the sales pages are converting.

(The filter is the one part that might need to be customized so be sure to check out the video at the bottom of the post that shows you how to do that.)

Visits, views, and all those number things

While the dashboard is focused mostly on content stuff, there are some numbers that you’ll want to pay attention to. These are pretty straight forward, but just in case, here’s what they are telling you:

Next to that, you have the “New Visits vs Visits.” This shows you the number of people coming to your site for the first time vs returning visitors.

Unfortunately, readers doing things like switching devices, clearing their history, or switching browsers will screw this part up, so it’s important just to look at this graph from a high-level point of view. I have this set up as a line graph for that reason; this way you can focus more on trends and less on the literal numbers.

More graphs and numbers

There are more graphs as you go down the left-hand side of the dashboard. These are breaking down where your visits are coming from. The first is “Visits by Medium.” This is breaking down how people are getting to your site.

The next thing we have is referrals. This way you can see which social networks and which other websites are driving the most traffic.

The last thing we have is the On-Site Social Actions widget. This is cool but only covers Google+ data without special markup.

Using the dashboard for content

The main thing you’re probably looking to do with Google Analytics is to figure out which content is performing, consequently that’s where most of the real estate in the dashboard is focused.

The sections that focus on the actual articles are the “Top Landing Pages” and “Top Landing Pages from Social Media” sections.

These are sorting the most popular articles by channel so, at a glance, you can see which articles are getting the most overall visits and the most visits from Social Media.

You can also quickly see the average time spent on page. This way, if you see an article is getting a lot of traffic but only a few seconds average time on page, you know that people probably aren’t reading. This could be the time to revisit that article and make it more engaging, if possible. More importantly, you can see what works and what doesn’t.

The keywords!

The last section is the “Top Organic Keywords.” It shows you which terms people typed into Google to get to your site. This can be an excellent source for content ideas and show you opportunities that you might have missed otherwise.

Is this all?

Absolutely not! This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn more about Google Analytics or ignore the other sections. In fact, one of the most helpful things about the dashboard is that if you click on any widget’s title, it’ll take you the relevant section within Analytics, so you can go as deep into to the data as you’d like.

Setting it up

To use the dashboard, the first step is clicking on the link below and selecting the site you want to use it with:

The Blogger Dashboard

The second step is customizing it so it only shows the blog traffic. The dashboard is set up to only show you analytics for the pages that contain the word “blog” so if your site is set up with a “blog” sub-folder (like https://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/blog/), you’re all set.

If you have it a folder named something else (like eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/buzz/) or a subdomain (like blog.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net) you’ll need to customize each widget. To do that, just follow the directions outlined in the video below.

Also, if you want to filter out branded searches from the “Top Organic Keywords” section (for example your company name or an author name), the video goes over that, too.

Did I miss anything? If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, just let me know in the comments below. If you have a really amazing suggestion, I’ll probably add it!

The post The Blogger Dashboard: Google Analytics for Writers appeared first on Portent.