Group items tagged

 @Avinash Kaushik has a unique ability to make analytics human. I don't share many analytics posts with you, as I don't want to scare you off. But I fear I may be underestimating you.

Here are ten very good ways to get to know your visitors through Google Analytics. I believe you will be energized and excited if you open these reports in your own Google Analytics account.

This is a great way to start appreciating your visitors in ways that will make your site more successful.

Retargeting Emails - Do E-commerce customers like or loathe them? March 10th, 2011Leave a commentGo to comments By Charles Nicolls, SeeWhy At SeeWhy, when we first launched our remarketing service in 2009, Randy Stross wrote a piece about email remarketing in The New York Times suggesting that while remarketing might be a great idea for ecommerce websites, it's not a great idea for consumers. He likened emails following up on abandoned shopping carts to a salesman chasing you down the street if you didn't buy from his store. There are major differences, of course. We've long argued that remarketing emails, when done well, not only drive conversions but also build brand trust. They can deliver great service and provide customers with the confidence to return to buy-either online, by phone or in store. If Randy was right and customers universally resented the intrusion, then these emails wouldn't work. In aiming to answer the question more substantively, I turned to data, and specifically email marketing benchmarks. The key metrics to look at to determine whether customers like or loathe remarketing emails are: the recovery rate the open rate the clickthrough rate the unsubscribe rate Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming: Remarketing, when done well, is appreciated by customers. Here's the evidence: (1) The recovery rate The recovery rate is the percentage of visitors that abandon shopping carts, and remarketed visitors thatthen return and purchase following remarketing. At SeeWhy, we measure recovery rates across all our customers, and currently the average is 20 percent. So, one in five shopping cart abandoners come back and buy, having being remarketed. In some cases, the recovery rate is as high as 50 percent. Moreover, when remarketed customers buy, they spend on average 55 percent more than customers who didn't abandon their shopping carts. (2) The open rate The average email open rate for remarketing emails is currently 46 percent, m

The greatest threat to the accuracy of your analytics data is inconsistent implementation. Too often, Javascript "Tags" are left off of some pages, put on some pages twice or simply implemented wrong. And, as your site changes, more inconsistencies are created.

This affects more than just analytics tools. Advertising networks, ratings and review systems, user feedback systems and more rely on properly implemented javascript tags.

The promise of "Tag Managers" is that you can put one set of code on all of your pages, and then control, monitor and edit the javascript for all of these tags in one place, using rules to determine which tags get placed on which pages. It's another way for marketing to monitor the implementation of online systems without being beholden to IT.

Yay!

So, how are the biggest ecommerce companies using Tag Managers? Here's your answer.

For those students of analytics, here is a basic primer in how to look at those noodle-like graphs that Google Analytics and other packages prepare for you. There are some mines to be avoided and Stephane points them out artfully.

 @KISSmetrics - Google Analytics has become a very important tool in helping us diagnose your site and increase conversions. I'm spending much more of my time showing businesses how to setup Google Analytics to give them amazing insights into their visitors. This list is pretty intense, but if you're getting up the learning curve on GA, it can't be beat.

Using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer together

If Google Analytics is your thing, Ian hits the highlights of v5

PayPal is a preferred method of payment for many of your visitors. Even if you've got a merchant account and gateway all setup, you should consider PayPal as an alternative source.

However, measuring transactions through PayPal is problematic. Or it was.

Here is an excellent post on how to configure your PayPal account and Google Analytics for full-transaction tracking, includkng Ecommerce tracking.

Interesting Videos for beginners. Includes Google Analytics and Web Optimizer how-tos.

Save Bookmark

Great source for Web Analytics resources.

Save Bookmark

Great primer on regular expressions for Google Analytics. You don't have to be a programmer to get something from regular expressions.

Google Analytics can intimidate business managers, but it really is a tool to help business managers answer important questions. This overview from @lisabarone gives you  an idea of some of the good questions you can be asking your Web team to help you guide your online investments.

Part 2 of Stéphane Hamel's Web Analytics primer. Warning: Beware of averages in time series.

We're getting into some pretty deep stuff in part three of Stéphane Hamel's analytics primier. However, he saves the day with some simple definitions of when we can call something a trend.

 @GaelBreton Advanced Segments are very helpful. I recently created a video showing you one way to define them in a way that even managers will get.

For those that want to drill down on Advanced Segments in Google Analytics, here is a survey of several segments you may find interesting.

Article comparing Google Analytics and Omniture

The analytics at one of our clients indicated that some 40% of the visitors did not have Javascript enabled. This was a shock, and something we hadn't seen before. We needed a way to verify that the analytics was reporting accurately.

Our development team found this interesting approach to setting up a test of how Javascript is used by your audience.

This is a great tour of Google Analytics' best features, some of which may be new to you.

When we dig into a site's analytics, we try a number of different approaches to the data. Sometimes interesting things pop out, and sometimes the data looks "as expected."

This is an analysis we are going to start adding to our analysis: Heatmap of Conversions by Hour of Day. We will modify it for our ecommerce clients (as we track Revenue per Visit, or RPV).

You might try this and see if there is an interesting pattern in your data.

Why Google Analytics is as good a choice as Omniture