The 6 Most Important Google Analytics Reports for Your Small Business

As a small business owner, you probably know that you need to use Google Analytics to figure out if your website is succeeding at attracting and engaging visitors. You’ve heard about Google Analytics at conferences, networking meetings, and marketing workshops for businesses like yours.

You probably signed up for Google Analytics and embedded its code into your website. For most business owners, it’s difficult to know what to look for in all of that data. So, you’re then left with the question: Now what?

That’s why, I’ve compiled a list of what Google Analytics reports you need to look at, how to access them, and what to do with the information once you review them. 

Traffic Acquisition Report

Ideally, the traffic to your website will grow over time. You can track this by using the default Google Analytics graph when you log in to see how many visitors your website received today, this week, or last month.

As important as this is, it’s more important to know where your traffic comes from so you can optimize that traffic. If a traffic source is underperforming, you can spend time fixing it. If most of your traffic comes from one place, is there a way to generate even more traffic from this source? How can you diversify?

You can find out where your website traffic comes from by going to Acquisition > Overview. For a more detailed look into what external sites bring traffic to your site, go to Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Referrals.

Source/Medium Report

If you’re investing your marketing dollars by paying for advertisements or SEO services, then you want to know what’s working. This way, you can stop paying for services that don’t work and spend more on those that do.

The Source/Medium report will give you the information you need to determine what’s working for your business, and what needs to be adjusted. This report details the "source" of your traffic (think search engines or Facebook or a Referring website) and what medium, or type of traffic, such as organic search, paid search, or referral from another website. To find this report, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

Use this report to determine which sources of traffic are generating leads and sales so you can make an informed decision about how to best adjust your marketing budget.

Mobile Performance Report

In August of 2016 Google reported that over 60% of searches were conducted on mobile. Google processes roughly 3.5 billion searches per day, that’s a lot of mobile searching and it means that you need to make sure that your mobile website is optimized for users.

Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview to see how much traffic you're getting from mobile devices, how long that traffic is staying on the site, how many pages that traffic is visiting, and how that traffic is converting into leads and sales.

SEO Reports

The Search Engine Optimization reports give you information about how people are reaching your site through Google’s search results. There are three types of SEO reports- Queries Reports, Landing Pages Reports, and Geographical Summaries reports.

• Queries reports show which Google searches resulted in the most impressions for your website. You can also see how many of those impressions resulted in clicks, which will tell you your organic search click-through rate.
  
  
• Landing Pages reports show which pages of your site are showing up in Google’s search results. This helps you to identify which webpages are ranked well and which pages need a little more work.
  
  
• Geographical Summaries reports provide general SEO metrics from different countries. This is helpful to see if your SEO traffic is coming from relevant locations.

Keep in mind that these reports only include information about SEO so they won’t tell you anything about your paid advertising campaigns, social media, or information from other search engines like Yahoo and Bing. To generate your SEO traffic reports, go to Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries and select an appropriate date range. It’s important to note that these reports can only pull data from the past 90 days. Then click the Landing pages report or the Geographical report links.

Google AdWords Traffic Reports

If you’re not advertising in Google AdWords, then you don’t need this report.

For everyone else, I recommend checking your Google AdWords Traffic reports in addition to the reports provided within AdWords. That’s because the reports in Analytics have extra information that provide insight into your visitors’ behavior on your website after clicking on your ads.

The default setting in Google Analytics for your AdWords report shows both your ad clicks and your bounce rate (how often people leave your site after viewing just one page). This information can be used to evaluate different ad copy to see which ads are driving more engaged visitors.

To generate an AdWords Traffic report, go to Acquisition > AdWords > Campaigns and select the appropriate date range.

Social Media Reports

Social Media offers a great opportunity to generate traffic to your website and therefore leads for your business. However, keeping up a strong social media campaign can be very time consuming. Thankfully, Google Analytics provides several reports that can help you track and optimize your social media marketing efforts.

You can see how visitors from all social channels interact with your website, or you can focus on trends and statistics from specific channels such as Facebook or Twitter. These reports will also show you conversions from social media.

To generate the Network Referrals social media report, go to Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals. This report will quickly show you which social networks are bringing people to your site. You can also see which of your pages are being shared most often on social media sites.

Conclusion

Setting up Google Analytics for your business’s website is an important step forward. However, it’s only half the battle. By running the reports listed above, you’ll get valuable insight into what’s working on your website and what needs improvement.

How Google Analytics Can Be Misleading...

I love Google Analytics, but their reports can be misleading if you don’t understand the critical concept in the article below.

In today's Check This Out, I’d love to get your input...

 

 

Why Google Analytics Reports Do Not

Match AdWords Reports

 

Out of many popular topics like Facebook advertising, email marketing, mobile website development, and a handful of others, would you believe me if I said more people want help with Google Analytics setup and reporting?  Well, it’s true.  My assumption going into the survey was that bland and boring Google Analtyics would be sitting on the rock bottom.  But it’s right at the top!
 

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to write about a topic that I’ve held back for fear that no one would find it interesting.  However, it’s a very important concept to keep in mind when you’re reviewing your Google Analytics reports.  It’ll also explain why your Google Analytics reports are often very different than your Google AdWords reports (if you’re advertising).
 
It’s call attribution.
 

What is Attribution?

Online attribution is the process of assigning credit for a website conversion, or Goal in Google Analytics. Think of it like giving credit to a salesman for closing a new client.  In that case you’re attributing the sale to one particular salesman.  The same thing happens online when a Goal is completed in Google Analytics.  The program must attribute the sale to the correct source of traffic (i.e. SEO, AdWords, Facebook referral, etc.).
 
This sounds simple until you think about the typical person surfing around online.
 
Let’s say I do a search in Google and click on one of your ads, which brings me to your website.  I read all about your amazing widget and how I would be insane if I didn’t purchase right now.  Then I leave your website. :)
 
I do a little more research into your company, I read some reviews, and find an online press release or two.  Finally, I search in Google again, but this time I use your company name, and I click on the non-paid result (the organic SEO result).  I’m already sold so I quickly make a purchase.
 
In that example, how do you think Google Analytics will handle attribution?  Does the AdWords ad get credit for the sale?  That’s how I originally found your site so that seems like a logical answer.  Or does the non-paid, organic result get credit because that’s the last action I took before purchasing?  Or do both get credit?
 
Take a guess if you’re not sure before reading on.  Don’t cheat. :)
 

How Google Analytics Handles Attribution

By default, Google Analytics uses what’s called “last click” attribution.  That means in my example, the conversion will show up as coming from the non-paid, organic search.  So it’ll look like revenue from SEO, not from the AdWords ad that originally brought me to the site!
 
Ah ha! See why I said this was a critical topic.  All this time you may have been misinterpreting your reports in Google Analytics.  Just because you’re getting all of your leads and/or sales from organic traffic, doesn’t mean your advertising is not performing.  It could be simply a case of mistaken attribution.
 
To make this even more complicated, I need to warn you that Google AdWords reporting uses “first click” attribution. That means in my example, when you run the report in Google AdWords, the sale would be attributed to the keyword and ad that was first clicked on.  So you’ll see the sale in AdWords and you’ll see the same sale in Analytics, but Analytics will be telling you the sale was generated from SEO!
uh oh… which program, Adwords or Analytics, should you trust?
 

Which Attribution Model Is Best For Your Business?

The short answer to my question above is that it depends on your business.  If most of your leads and sales are generated quickly upon the first visit, then “last click” attribution is most likely fine for you.  If you have a longer sales cycle and you know people shop around before making a purchase or contacting you, then first click might be best.  The good news is that earlier this year Google Analytics gave us the ability to report on conversions, or Goals, using 7 different attribution models.  They even let you create custom models if you really want to go nuts.  For the record, I do not recommend going nuts… Stick with the basic models.
 
To see this in action, log into your Google Analytics account and go to Conversions in the left navigation.  Then click on Attribution and then Model Comparison Tool.  You’ll see a report like the one below where you can compare different models.
 

 
I also recommend you review the Multi-Channel Funnels while you’re in the Conversions section of Google Analytics.  The most interesting reports are:

• “Time Lag” to see how many days it takes for prospects to convert.  This is where you can see if the majority of your conversions happen on the first day, or if it usually takes longer.
• “Top Conversion Paths” to see the full path to conversions.  In my previous example, this report would show “Paid Search” led to the “Organic Search” which then generated the sale.  So rather than rely on one single attribution model, you can see the entire sales path.

OK, that’s probably more than enough Google Analytics reporting info for one day.  The key takeaway is to always be aware of how Google Analytics (or any other tool you use) is attributing conversions in your reports.  And if you’re receiving reports from a marketing company, then make sure it’s clear how their tool is handling attribution.  Different attribution models can show vastly different results, which can lead to vastly different decisions about where to focus your marketing budget.

Online Marketing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

 

I love old Clint Eastwood western movies.  They were always on TV when I was growing up and I would instantly get sucked into a ~3 hour movie, along with all those commercials.  Hey, I figure there were worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I've probably watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly about 10 times by now.  To be honest I can't always tell which one of Clint's movies I'm watching until they reintroduce it after a commercial.  They all include gunfights, signature one liners from Clint, and some timely, precision tobacco spitting.  My kind of movie. :)

Even if you haven't watched the movie, you can probably guess there's a good guy, a bad guy, and an ugly guy.  I'll spare you the details and jump right into how this relates to online marketing.  In my experience, online marketing plays all 3 of those roles: Good, Bad, and Ugly.

 

 

The Good

 

The good is usually what draws businesses to online marketing in the first place: It's affordable.  In some cases, it's downright free.  For example, any business looking for local customers can set up and optimize a Google+ Local page and within about a month get free exposure in Google's local business results.  No upfront fees.  No ongoing fees.  No fancy software to learn.  Just free exposure when local customers are searching for you.  Hard to beat free when it comes to driving new business!

Even advertising is usually more affordable online versus offline.  With Google AdWords you only pay per click so there is no big upfront investment like there is with TV, print or radio ads.

Of course, affordability isn't the only reason online marketing is good, but I think that gets the point across just fine.  Now let's look at the bad...

The Bad

The bad news is that online marketing is always changing!  Just when you think you've mastered search engine optimization (SEO), Google will go and change their algorithm.  Or just when you've built up a hefty Facebook audience, Zuckerberg decides to tweak their EdgeRank algorithm so you have to pay to get your posts in front of your prospects and customers.

Scroll through this list of Google algorithm changes to see just how frequently the search engine landscape changes.  Trust me, it's nearly impossible to keep up, and I do this for a living.  There's just no way a business owner can stay on top of all the trends and best practices without help.

And Google is just the tip of the iceberg... Have you looked at all the options available with online marketing?  Talk about overwhelming.  There's SEO, local SEO, search advertising, display advertising, Facebook advertising, email marketing, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, press release services, website conversion optimization, tracking and website analytics.  I could go on and on but you get the point.

Now, let's turn to the ugly side of online marketing...

The Ugly

First, there's the glut of information available.  There are books, blogs, articles, videos, and podcasts published online daily.  Some of it is sound advice.  Some of it is applicable for certain types of businesses.  And some of it outdated, or simply inaccurate.  Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible for a business owner to know who or what to pay attention to, which leads to poor marketing decisions.

Second, there are many low quality (and even unethical in my opinion) online marketing providers.  For example, I've talked to many business owners who paid and lost thousands to an SEO company that guaranteed #1 rankings.   My spam folder is full of these prospecting emails so I know how tempting it can be for businesses.  However, the reality is that no one can guarantee #1 rankings. As soon as you see or hear that phrase, run away, hang up, or click delete. That's a red flag that you're not dealing with a reputable company.

Digital Marketing "Summer Tune-Up" (3 Simple Questions)

 

Before summer speeds by and we’re officially into the fall season, I recommend taking some time now to tune up your marketing so you have a strong finish to 2015. Before we know it, the holiday season will be here… and then with the blink of an eye, the ball will drop in Times Square.

 

To help you assess your digital marketing and make fast improvements I put together the following 3-question “summer tune-up.”

 

Question 1: Where Can You Get More Website Traffic?

First, look at what’s already working and find ways to improve those campaigns.  What are you doing now that is driving traffic to your website? For example, if SEO is working (generating leads and sales), then determine how you can improve your current rankings and expand to even more relevant keywords.

This sounds overly simple, but do not skip this step!  It’s easy to overlook these easy opportunities to improve your marketing because they are typically not very exciting.  Personally, I find it hard to rally behind “doing more of what we’re already doing,” but the reality is that it’s by far the cheapest and most effective option.

Expanding into new territory is nearly always more expensive and more time consuming so focus on what’s already working first.  Then once you’ve maxed out a particular marketing tactic, then review your options to expand.

Second, assess what’s missing.  What are you not doing that could be driving traffic to your website? For example, if you’re using AdWords Search advertising, then consider expanding to Bing Ads to get even more exposure when your prospects are searching in Bing or Yahoo.  Or if you’re advertising in AdWords and Bing, then look into launching an ad campaign on Facebook.

 

Question 2: How Can You Increase Your Website Conversions?

Driving traffic to your website is only half the battle in digital marketing, yet it’s where most businesses invest most of their time and resources.

The second half, which is arguably the more important half, is converting that traffic into leads and sales.

Consider this example.  One business invests in marketing to drive 1,000 visitors to their website and converts 1% into customers.  A competitor invests half as much to get 500 visitors , but their website converts 2% into customers. Both businesses generate 10 customers, but the competitor invested only half as much to get the same number of customers!  If everything else is equal then the competitor is twice as profitable and can now afford to invest to drive even more traffic.

Can you see now how important it is to focus on improving your website conversions?

Now let’s review your website.  Do you have what’s called a “lead magnet” to capture contact information from website visitors?  A lead magnet is a free offer (report, white paper, video, coupon).

Note that a lead magnet is not an email newsletter subscription!  Email newsletters are not as compelling all by themselves and only a very very small percentage of your visitors will sign up.  Instead of an offering your email newsletter directly, offer a report that provides information or reveals a secret your ideal prospect needs to know. And when people opt-in for this report, they’ll also receive a subscription to your email newsletter.

If you already have a lead magnet, then take a closer look at it.  Could you make it more compelling? Can you offer more lead magnets that more closely match each of your different customer avatars?

 

Question 3: How Can You Improve Your Digital Marketing Tracking?

I’m not going to waste time in this article explaining the importance of tracking. Most people know it’s critical.  The problem is many businesses don’t take the time to set it up correctly, which means they can’t accurately measure the results of their marketing campaigns.

Here are the 3 key components you need to track your digital marketing:

1. Google Analytics to measure visitors and their activity on your website
   
   
2. Phone tracking to measure number of calls for each of your marketing channels
   
   
3. CRM (customer relationship management) tracking to measure leads and sales for each of your marketing channels

If you’re missing any of the components above, then set them up in the order they are listed.

The thing about tracking is it’s not retroactive.  That means if you’re investing in marketing now without tracking, then there is no way to determine which campaigns were profitable and which were losing money.  Only after you set up tracking can you start to calculate your return on investment (ROI).  That’s why I always recommend businesses get their tracking set up as soon as possible.

Google Releases New Tools For AdMob Including Full Google Analytics Integration

Today, Google will announce new features for its mobile ad platform AdMob at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The new features are powered by Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
Rather than having to access AdMob and Analytics from separate interfaces, app developers can now get performance reporting from the AdMob home screen and a new Analyze tab right within AdMob. On the Analyze tab a dropdown menu, shown in the screenshot below, allows users to switch between the full set of reporting for individual apps.

The home screen features a combination of reporting from both platforms and provides a snapshot of conversion and monetization performance, including from in-app purchases.

Google also launched content experiments with Google Tag Manager for apps. The feature will allow marketers to test changes such as in-app promotions and menu layouts in their apps on a subset of users. Testing results will then be available through the Google Analytics reporting interface.

Use Google Analytics To Create Campaigns, Not Just Track Them

We all know that analytics are good for understanding how a visitor behaved on your website — what pages they looked at, what buttons they clicked or what keywords they used to find you. You can also use analytics to track campaigns like email blasts and paid advertising.  That’s pretty basic stuff.

What many beginning marketers and small business owners don’t know is that you can use analytics data to create an online marketing campaign.

Analytics can answer some of the key questions you might ask when you want to create a campaign: Who are you targeting? Where do they live? When should you start your campaign?

You can even pinpoint what content will resonate with your audience and combine that with the who, when and where. Using data to craft campaigns means you’re not just guessing — and guessing is gambling. I’m not saying there’s no place in marketing for the gamble; but sometimes, we need the safe campaign success to build us up to the point where we can take that gamble.

Collecting The Data

As we figure out what data to collect, I like to build a document that will start to take shape as an outline for an ad campaign. I set a time period that seems representative of the season I want to target. If I’m targeting Spring Break Travelers to Florida, I look at data from that same time period over the last two to three years.
My major sections are:

• Timing Target: What time of year are you looking to book, sell, etc.? (If there is no timing target, just leave this alone.)
• Top Converting Traffic Sources: Look at the All Traffic report under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics.
• Best Converting Landing Page: Look at the Landing Pages report under Behavior –> Site Content and view it with Ecommerce info sorted by transactions descending.
• Highest Visit Count Landing Page: Look at same report as above, but sorted by Visits descending.
• Top 3 Keywords Driving Conversions: This is trickier because we live in “Not Provided” land. You will need to use PPC or Webmaster Tools Search Query data to help you get an idea of keyword phrases that convert.
• Top 3 Converting States/Cities/Metros: Under Audience –> Geo –> Locations, look at cities or states and Ecommerce, then sort by transactions descending.
• Male/Female Conversion Ratio: Under Audience, look at Demographics and then Gender. Apply the Ecommerce info and sort by transactions descending to see who converts more.
• Top Converting Age Group Demographic: Under Audience, look at Demographics and then Age. Again, apply the Ecommerce info and sort by transactions descending.
• Purchase/Booking Window: This is somewhat difficult to gauge in Google Analytics. I recommend looking at Time to Purchase under Conversions –> Ecommerce. The tricky piece is attribution — if you are looking at “Last Click Attribution,” which is the default and where many beginners or small business owners start — then a majority of your conversions will be on Day 0. The reality is that, for a novice or beginner with analytics, this number is likely something you know from dealing with customers and sales or from an internal reservation or sales software you use.

I then take this data and build a campaign. I start with source. A campaign that focuses on Search Engines as a source begins with a different strategy than a campaign that focuses on social media or email marketing.
Once I’ve determined source, I look for content. I look at landing pages, keywords, and demographics to flesh out the best targeted content for my campaign. My last step is to determine how far ahead of time I need to promote this campaign (if at all). If you’re targeting a holiday or a specific season and your purchase or booking window is long (say 30+ days), then you need to plan your campaign timing accordingly.

Let’s build a campaign with example data now:

Metric	Target
Timing Target	Spring Break – Feb 20 to March 31
Top Converting Traffic Source(s)	Email Marketing
Best Converting Landing Page	/rental/blue-swayed-shoes/
Highest Visit Volume Landing Page	/rental/
Top 3 Keywords Driving Conversions	key west vacation rentals, vacation rentals in key west, key west rentals
Top 2 Converting States/Cities/Metros	New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania
Male/Female Conversion Ratio	7:10
Top Converting Age Group	35-44
Purchase/Booking Window	35-45 Days

Now, I’m ready to build my campaign and most of my questions are answered — all using analytics. I can build an email blast with information that caters to women who like a 3-bedroom rental in Key West. Likely, they have a family and are looking to ship about 45 days or so from arrival. Knowing my purchase windows tells me when to start my campaign. This one in particular should be online by January 20 at the latest and run until early to mid-March.

If the best converting rental is already booked, my job is to find rentals nearby that have a similar size, look, feel, location and cost. This allows me to book similar units with a fairly targeted strategy. If you use a CMS software or collect customer demographics, you can segment your email list by age, gender and location. We use PARDOT, but there are others out there that will do a great job, as well.

Now, you have a model and a direction in which to go to start building your first online marketing campaign that originates outside of the “create an email blast for everyone” or “put up some PPC ads.” Your campaign could target Social Media, or even a specific platform such as Pinterest. Successful campaigns are built on what you know about your audience and how you can craft your “story” to hit home with them. Using Analytics to collect this data should get you started in the right direction.

Estimated Total Conversions: New insights for the multi-screen world

People are constantly connected, using multiple devices throughout the day to shop, communicate and stay entertained.  A September 2013 study of multi-device consumers found that over 90% move sequentially between several screens for everyday activities like booking a hotel or shopping for electronics.

As consumers are increasingly on the go and switching between devices, marketers are telling us they want to see a more complete and accurate picture of how their online advertising drives conversions.  Conversions can come in many forms: visits to stores, phone calls, app downloads, website sales or purchases made after consulting various devices.  Getting better insight into these complex purchase paths can help you optimize your online advertising and allocate budget more effectively.

Introducing Estimated Total Conversions

Today, we are introducing Estimated Total Conversions for search ads on Google.com.  This is an exciting first step to give marketers more insight into how AdWords drives conversions for your business by showing you both the conversions you see today, like online sales, as well as an estimate of conversions that take multiple devices to complete.  Over time, we’ll be adding other conversion types like phone calls and store visits as well as conversions from ads on our search and display network.

Estimated Total Conversions will provide you with a holistic view of all of the conversions driven by your Google search advertising that can be used to make important decisions like how much to bid and how to assign budget across your various marketing channels.  For the last few years, many sophisticated advertisers have been using their own analysis to get to these insights.  Today, we are beginning to bring this level of insight and measurement to all advertisers.

Estimated cross-device conversions

Estimated cross-device conversions is the first new conversion type to launch as part of Estimated Total Conversions. Cross-device conversions start as a click on a search ad on Google.com on one device and end as a conversion on another device (or in a different web browser on the same device).

For example, say someone shops for “blue jeans” on her mobile phone while waiting for the morning train.  She clicks on a mobile ad for ABC Blue Jeans.  When she gets to her office, she goes directly to the ABC website to make a purchase.  This is an example of a cross-device conversion.  We calculate cross-device conversions using a sample of data from users who signed into multiple devices. 

Estimated cross-device conversions will begin rolling out globally to all AdWords advertisers starting today and continuing over the next few weeks. To see these new statistics, you’ll need AdWords conversion tracking and a sufficient volume of conversions on which to base a reliable estimate.

In the last few months, we’ve analyzed data across thousands of AdWords advertisers to learn more about cross-device conversion patterns.

When advertisers in the travel industry use AdWords estimated cross-device conversions, they are able to measure 8% more conversions, on average, than they did before.  In addition, they can now measure 33% more conversions that originated on a mobile phone and later converted on different device.  This helps them attribute all those sales -- from customers who searched for flights and hotels on their mobile phones and then made a purchase from another device -- to the right ad.

Similarly, other verticals, like entertainment and retail are also seeing positive results.  Businesses in these industries are now able to measure 12% and 7% more conversions, respectively, than they could before using Estimated Total Conversions.

Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager at American Apparel noted that, "We always knew our online ad investment was influencing conversions across devices, but we didn't know how to begin estimating these numbers. Once we saw that 5.3% more conversions could be attributed to cross-device conversions in AdWords, we knew we could more accurately calculate the value we were receiving from each ad click.  We also learned that mobile ads are driving 16% more conversions than we thought, so we are now investing more into this channel to gain more sales.”

More results from other verticals can be seen below.

Paving the way for marketers to measure the full value of their online advertising

We are committed to helping you gain insight into the new conversion types that are part of a constantly connected, multi-screen world so that you can make the best advertising decisions possible. In addition to cross-device conversions, both phone calls and store visits will be included as part of Estimated Total Conversions in the coming months. These are important conversions to consider — people make more than 40M calls to businesses each month directly from Google ads and are often looking for physical store locations when they search on Google, particularly on the go.

The PPC Experiment You Never Dare Run

A question that PPC account managers frequently have to deal with is, “Why are we paying for this traffic? Aren’t we going to get that traffic anyway?”
It’s a fair question, even if it is completely annoying to hear for the twentieth time by the twentieth new accounting manager you’ve had to break in. No matter what data you present, no matter how perfectly your charts demonstrate perfect, positive correlation between ad spend, revenues and profits, they never seem satisfied with your answer.
“Fine,” you say. “Let’s try an experiment. We call it the PPC nuclear option.”
“The nuclear option?” the accountant gasps. ”What’s that?”
“Well,” you continue obligingly, “We take all our PPC ad campaigns offline for a few months, and see what the true impact on our bottom line looks like. I just need you to sign off on it here….”
That usually ends the discussion — at least until next month’s AdWords and Bing Ads bills come due.

The PPC Nuclear Option — For Real!

I won’t bore you with the juicy details of how it came about (unless you promise to buy me a drink next time we meet), but the long and short of it is that I am now in the middle of a real-life PPC nuclear option experiment.
Campaigns that had been running for a few years were taken offline abruptly three months ago, and we are just about to put them back online. The website is now relying completely on referral and organic search traffic. The website itself and all downstream processes have remained virtually unchanged.
I thought it would be interesting to make a few simple observations at this point in the experiment. I’ll save deeper analysis for a later date, after we’ve put the campaigns back online.
Observation #1: Greater Than Expected Decline In Keyword Conversion Performance

Keyword conversion performance  before and after the “PPC Nuclear Option” was detonated.

Before we detonated the nuclear option, we were aware we’d lose substantial traffic to the site because about 70% of our traffic was coming from paid traffic sources. What we didn’t know was how our brand keywords or our highest ranking keywords (which were also part of the URL) would fare.
In the chart above, I’ve summarized the before and after conversion volumes for most important keywords that have driven conversions and was surprised by some of the results. We looked at our brand keywords, keywords that were prominent on the site and which appeared in our website URL, as well as our most productive non-brand keywords.
Branded Keywords - Our client’s brand is not a household name and there’s not a lot of search volume associated with it, so our brand keywords have never been our largest source of search conversions. They do, however, rank highly and so we were surprised to see conversion volume on them drop by 28%. We figured, based on earlier studies on brand keyword cannibalization, that we’d see only 10-15% drop in conversion volume for our high-ranking brand terms.
What would account for a greater than expected decline in brand term performance? I have a hunch that our Google GDN display ad campaigns may have been providing a lift while they were running, but since we are not a famous brand, that halo effect only lasted while our display ad campaigns were running. If my theory is correct, we should expect to observe an uplift once we start advertising again. Stay tuned.
URL Keywords – Our next best performers were keywords that literally described our products and which appeared in our website URL. These keywords have generally been at or near the top of the organic search listings, and they perform more like brand terms than generic keywords. We were most surprised that these would have dropped by a whopping 59%.
Non-Brand Keywords – We were also astounded at how deeply the PPC nuclear option demolished the performance of our best non-brand keywords, which dropped pretty near to zero.
Clearly, this client is too dependent on paid search on its most important terms.
Observation #2: Organic Traffic Needs To Contribute More Search Volume

After taking PPC campaigns offline, online organic and referral traffic remain.

This Google Analytics graph shows all search traffic from 2009 through 2013, and to my last point, demonstrates a highly unbalanced mix of online traffic sources, since 75% of their visitor traffic dropped when the nuclear option was detonated. I don’t know what the perfect ratios should be for organic to paid search traffic, but in general, I think most of us would agree that, over time, the mix should start to skew toward more unpaid sources of traffic and rely less on paid traffic.
Of course, figuring this out didn’t require taking the nuclear option because the data has been there the whole time. It does certainly lay bare the situation unambiguously, however. The accounting manager will love this data, and so will the SEO team (that doesn’t exist at the moment) because it shows how even modest investments in SEO can be justified financially.
Observation #3: Friendly “Ghost Clicks”

Google Analytics reports a small amount of PPC ad “ghost clicks” even after taking campaigns offline.

Even two months after taking the campaigns offline, we are still getting visitors from “ghost clicks.” Most ghost clicks happen when a visitor types your URL into their browser after first clicking on your ad. When they start typing the URL, their browser cache types ahead for them, showing them your URL along with your original URL tracking variables. We observed about 4% of our visitors coming in this way, but they represent only about 1% of the original ad click volume.
I don’t know what a good “ghost click” ratio might be, but I’d like it to be higher because that means that our site was so memorable that people typed it into their browser rather than doing a new search.
Observation #4: Unfriendly “Ghost Clicks”
I’ve observed that not all PPC Ad ghost clicks are friendly. In some cases, they may be competitors doing deep dives on your site for whatever nefarious purposes they have in mind. Here’s my evidence of unfriendly ghost clicks:

Hmmm… Lots of visits all of a sudden from PPC ad ghost clicks. Does not look like a friendly ghost to me.

Why would we, all of a sudden, get hundreds of PPC ad ghost clicks when our campaigns are clearly turned off? My first guess was that someone accidentally turned them on; but no, that wasn’t it. I dug one level deeper in Google Analytics and found that all the clicks were coming, on different days, from different locations.

Who clicks from Beverly Hills, Little Ferry and Trinidad? Jet setter, perhaps?

Using my best TV detective deduction skills to develop a profile of the perp, I see that the clicks come from Beverly Hills, CA and Little Ferry, NJ. Both are pretty affluent suburbs. I also see clicks from Trinidad. Could this be a rich jet-setting venture capitalist trying to discover our secret sauce? If so, I’ll bet they are also reading my column; so to you I say, “I know who you are, and I saw what you did.”
Observation #5: Google Analytics’ Accounting For Paid Search Clicks Is Excellent
I had a weird observation when looking at my paid search clicks versus my analytics data. Google Analytics was reporting 7% more clicks than we actually paid for from all our paid traffic sources. I know that Analytics and AdWords account for clicks differently and that Google Analytics reports clicks (suspicious or otherwise), but I never took notice of how great the difference was.
I ran an AdWords invalid clicks report and subtracted those from my Google Analytics total, and found that the number of clicks from our paid search campaigns matched up almost perfectly (99.1% match) with the clicks Google Analytics reported receiving.
An added surprise was my discovery that Google AdWords continues to credit invalid clicks to the account even after turning off all spend. It wasn’t a large amount, but it was a very pleasant surprise nonetheless to see additions to our account balances.

Questions About The PPC Nuclear Option?

I’ve touched on just a few of my own casual observations from this unplanned PPC nuclear option experiment, but there are so many other observations to be made as we bring this campaign back to life. If you are curious about any part of our experiment, and have questions of your own, please leave a comment below, and I’ll see if we can get an answer for you.

Google Adds Enhanced Campaigns Bid Adjustment Reporting To Google Analytics

Google announced today that Bid Adjustments reports for AdWords enhanced campaigns are now included in Google Analytics.
The reporting, found in the Advertising section under Traffic Sources in Analytics, are designed to help advertisers analyze the performance of each bid adjustment within a campaign — by device, location and time of day.
You’ll notice in the Google-provided screenshot example above, there are columns for Revenue and Ecommerce Conversion Rate in the Summary view. These metrics are available when Ecommerce tracking is enabled in Google Analtyics, allowing you to analyze bid adjustment performance by ROI. However, when you look at your own reporting, you may see that the Summary view only shows goal results and that the columns for Revenue and Ecommerce Conversion Rate appear under the Ecommerce view instead.

See the full Impact of Unclicked Display and Video Ad Impressions using Google Analytics

Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising.

Thanks to Adwords integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting.

GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that Google cannot guarantee access, but will do there best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see help center article.

Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature.

How does Display fit on the conversion path?
By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions.



In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen.

With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing.

• Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them.
• Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal.
• If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads.

How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path?
In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad.


Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping.



Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints
You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model.

We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your TrueView video ads fully? Just create a custom segment using one of our new dimensions, TrueView. The full list of new dimensions is:

• Above the Fold: This dimension uses the Google Active View measurement solution. The value is “Yes” if the ad was in the visible area of the screen when the page was loaded.
• Video Played Percent: The value can be “>=25%”, “>=50%”, “>=75%”, and “100%”, allowing you to see how much of a video ad was watched.
• TrueView: If a user has watched more than 30 seconds of an ad, or watched the ad completely, this will have a value of “Yes.” This is a payable event.

Enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics
Once we have whitelisted your account, please ensure you have successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. Linking accounts takes just a few moments. Under ‘Data Sources’ > ‘AdWords’ you can then see an entry for each linked AdWords account. In the row there is a toggle switch named ‘GDN Impression Reports’, which turns the display impression data from the Google Display Network On and Off. Data is recorded from the time the switch is turned On.


We hope these new tools will help you understand the full impact of your display campaigns through Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution. Sign up today for GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics.