What You Can Learn from John

I’m going to tell you a story about e-commerce store owner John and e-commerce store owner Chris. Both John and Chris decided to invest heavily in online marketing for their stores through several channels: comparison shopping engines (Shopping.com, Shopzilla, etc), Pay-per-click engines (AdWords, MSN, Yahoo) and some in-house e-mail specials to voluntary subscribers.

John is interested in measuring the performance of each channel while Chris simply hopes these campaign generate sales. Because John wants to be successful he is tagging all of his links so he can more closely monitor the campaigns performances in Google Analytics.

Tagging Links Pays Dividends to your Campaigns

Because he tagged all his links John discovers after the first month that Shopzilla generated heavy traffic but no sales and AdWords, Shopping.com and MSN all lead to several orders. Yahoo didn’t generate any sales but did lead to several e-mail opt-ins which he is tracking under Goal 2. Armed with this information John decided to stop using Shopzilla, and instead allocated those marketing funds towards AdWords, Shopping.com and MSN.

Chris is not tagging his links so he is unable to evaluate each channels performance like John was and spends the same amount each month on every channel. He doesn’t know that his money to Shopzilla is going down the toilet!

Don’t want to be like Chris? I didn’t think so!

What is Link Tagging in Google Analytics?

In short link tagging is adding special characters to the end of your URLs that will allows you to identify the traffic that uses it. You can easily tag your links with Google’s URL Toolbuilder. Google will ask you to specify the following things for tagging (three are required):

Campaign Source (referrer: google, msn, shopping.com)
Campaign Medium (marketing medium: cpc, ppc, email, banner)
Campaign Term (identify paid keywords here for Yahoo and MSN) optional
Campaign Content (used to differentiate between two competing ads) optional
Campaign Name (product, slogan, date)

To continue with our example John is preparing to tag his links for a Shopping.com feed he will be using. He decides to enter the following:

Campaign Source: shopping
Campaign Medium: ppc (since he is paying her click he is labeling it as ppc)
Campaign Term: not used
Campaign Content: not used
Campaign Name: q42009fx (this is his internal campaign tracking code).

Entering these variables in the Google URL builder with the page www.johnswebsite.com/product1.html he would end up with:

http://www.johnswebsite.com/product1.html ?utm_source=shopping&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=q42009fx

All set! In Excel for his shopping feed he could quickly append ?utm_source=shopping&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=q42009fx to all the product urls and have everything tagged.

What Does Link Tagging Actually Do?

When a link is tagged that means it will show up in Google Analytics under the variables you specified. So John would see the following if he looked at his Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources report after receiving traffic from these links:

This gives John the ability to monitor his traffic quality from Shopping.com: bounce rates, time on site, revenue, conversion rate, etc. Since everything is tagged he can easily view all channels performance to compare and contrast as illustrated from the earlier example.

What Should You Tag?

Almost everything! Here is a list to get you started (by no means exhaustive)

Shopping Engines
Google Base
Yahoo Paid Search
Bing Paid Search
E-mails (newsletters, blasts, signature links, etc)
Forum banners
Direct Mail Campaigns (using a vanity url with .htaccess redirect)

Tag, track and review your campaigns at least quarterly – if not monthly, for optimal profits. Good luck!

Tweet This Post

Why Analytics?

Analytics is an integral key to online success – without it you might as well close up shop now. Yes, it is that important. Let me make it clear: IT IS THAT IMPORTANT.
What exactly is analytics? Well, it has many definitions depending on who you ask but for this post we will define it simply as:

The proper collection, reporting and review of visitor interactions throughout your website to improve performance & satisfaction.

What does analytics tell you?

From a top level view:
1. What is working in your business, website & message
2. What isn’t working in your business, website & message

When you ask the right questions and use the right analytics tools you quickly discover:

1. Why your AdWords or PPC campaigns are having trouble
2. Where your most valuable customers are coming from (and how to get more)
3. What online advertising channels are wasting your money
4. How your e-mail campaigns measure up and what to improve
5. What landing pages are working and the ones that need immediate help

And much more.

What analytics tools should you be using?

Well there are quite a few out there but I will touch briefly on several that I have used and work well:

Google Analytics – Well known as the best free in-depth analytics tool with many powerful features including AdWords linking, motion charts and custom reports just to name a few! X-cart has an option for enabling this so be sure that is turned on. Unfortunately that doesn’t really cover it – if you want to ensure your coverage just request your Free 7-Point Analytics Audit Report.

Web Logs – Your web logs provide a great source of data but you need to use a good log analyzer to really uncover the important stuff. Web log storming is a great tool and I’m sure there are some good free ones out there.

Statcounter.com – Great ‘hit counter’ resource. Statcounter shows you (in somewhat real time) each visitor and what they clicked on. Helps you quickly uncover any error pages or problems with your site. They have a free and paid version. (You can’t track HTTPS pages with the free version).

ClickTale.com – Lets you see your visitors’ mouse movements like you were at their computer! Their javascript tag captures visitor interaction on your site and plays it back as a movie so you can see how they moved around your site. Great for evaluating landing pages and overall usability. They offer both a free version and paid.

Crazyegg.com – Crazy egg is a ‘lighter’ version of clicktale in that it shows you where users clicked (even if it is not a link – great for discovering things visitors mistake as clickable) and generates heatmaps based on this data.

That covers collecting & reporting but those two alone won’t improve your website. You need to review your data. This can be difficult at first and you can definitely fall prey to information overload – but we will try to sidestep that.

Reviewing Your Analytics Data

The most important concept to grasp with analytics is to ask questions. You need to become a master detective that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame if you wish to generate more sales. Use the data to try and answer those questions. The more specific your question – the more actionable you can be on that data. Let’s do an example:

Question: What is my conversion rate?
Answer: .75%. This doesn’t help us much yet. It is safe to say that whatever this number is you want to improve it, so let’s ask a more specific question.

Question: What is my organic traffic conversion rate?
Answer: .50%. Now we are getting somewhere – this tells us right away that something needs to be investigated with your organic traffic because the conversion rate is 50% lower than your sites average.

This will lead us to another question

Question: What are the individual search engine conversion rates?
Answer:
Google: .10%
Bing: .70%
Yahoo: .70%

Holy cow what is going on with my Google traffic? What keywords are generating the most traffic from Google? What are the top landing pages from Google? Do they match well? – These questions would hone in directly to an actionable problem that you can now address.

Key Takeaway From Play 1

Ask specific questions to uncover what has worked (and what hasn’t) so far in order to build your marketing strategy around this information. At the very least – even if you can’t make use of it or don’t understand your data now you should still be collecting it. That way when you can (or hire someone else who can) analyze your data you have plenty of history to review.

Tweet This Post