If you have a website using Google Analytics tracking, there may be reasons to filter out certain data from being reported on. Filters are applied to the information coming into your account, to manipulate the final data in order to provide more accurate reporting. These filters can be set up, for example, to exclude visits from particular IP addresses, to report only on a geo specific region or exclude traffic from a region, or even take dynamic page URLs and convert them into readable text strings.

For example, you may want to filter a profile by the visitor country or even city. You can pull the values for this filter from your Analytics report. Simply dig into a demographic report and segment it as you choose and the values given are what you would use to filter. Knowing this helps you get the filter right the first time and provides you with clear information on the metrics being reviewed.

Visitor filtering by country or city could be used for all sorts of filtering, management and analysis. Maybe you want to setup a profile that looks at your efforts in a specific city or region. Perhaps you are running a local advertising campaign and want to review local traffic patterns and the response to your local campaign. The filtering can also reveal new, potential geo targets from a specific region or country where you have a noticeable traffic source. Conversely, perhaps the international traffic is meaningless to you and you just want to filter it out all together so that your reporting is geo specific.

Another helpful filter with Google Analytics is IP filtering. This feature is a must have for any company who uses or reviews their own website frequently. Find your static IP address and then set up a filter so Google knows not to include traffic from your company network. This ensures that your stats are not inflated due to employee’s surfing habits. This also is something you should consider adding if you have any partner companies or affiliates using your website frequently.

There are two ways to create a filter in Google Analytics: using a predefined filter, or creating a custom filter.

• Predefined filters are a quick and easy way to accomplish some of the most common filtering tasks.
• Custom filters allow more advanced manipulation of data.

When a filter is created in your profile, it’s immediately applied to new data coming into your account only. A profile’s filters are applied to raw visitor data as the data is subsequently processed into the database. New filters will not review or manipulate historical data, and not able to re-filter historical or data prior to the new filter being implemented.

Whether you’re excluding your internal traffic with a simple predefined filter, or creating advanced filters to rewrite your URLs, the Analytics Filter Manager offers you a powerful way to control the data in your reports and provide you with the most accurate information to make the most of your marketing initiatives.

Filed under: Google Analytics, internet marketing by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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A significant advantage to including Google Analytics with an Adwords Campaign is the ability to gain more insight into your Adwords campaign performance. It’s easy to set up Google Analytics through the Reporting tab in the Adwords tool bar. After setting up the Analytics account and installing the urchin tracking code on each page of your site, the combined Adwords / Analytics opens up more in depth reporting on your Adwords campaigns.

Once logged into your Analytics account, on the left navigation, under Traffic Sources, you’ll see sub menus that include Adwords. Under the Adwords submenu, you’ll see 3 selections: Adwords Campaigns; Keywords Positions; Campaigns; TV Campaigns if you are running Google TV Ads campaigns.

The first report reviews how people referred from your AdWords Campaigns compare to the “average” visitor to your site. This report includes all visits from AdWords. Click an AdWords Campaign in the table to see its component Ad Groups and Keywords. The “Clicks” tab displays the AdWords cost, impression, and ROI data useful for monitoring the profitability of your AdWords Campaigns and keywords. Are you beginning to see how you can dig deeper down on your Adwords Campaign with Google Analytics?

The next report, Keywords Positions, provides information on where your AdWords ads appear on Google search results pages and how much influence does search position have on visits, conversions, and other metrics. By use this report, you can determine your optimal search position for each keyword and plan your bidding accordingly for maximum impact. Click “view result” next to any keyword to see how search position correlates with Visits, Bounce Rate, Page Views, etc…by selecting the corresponding metric from the pull down menu.

In a subsequent section on the left menu, you’ll find “Campaigns”. When you click on this, all subsequent campaigns listed in the table results are AdWords campaigns – campaigns that you have created by using the utm_campaign custom tag. You may also see “not set” which includes all other traffic to your site. Campaign performance can be a useful high-level view of the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. This report includes all traffic to your site and you can use the “Segment” pull down menu to view this traffic in different ways. For example, you can view the bounce rate of at the campaign level, or by choosing “keyword” from the pull down menu, you can get individual bounce rates for each keyword in a particular campaign.

In the left menu navigation, below “Campaigns” you find “Ad versions”. This report provides information on how your AdWords ads (and other types of ads that you have tagged with the utm_content tag) compare against each other. Ads with high clickthrough rates show that the copy is effective at getting the user to click, whereas a high bounce rates, for example, would indicate the landing pages is not connecting with the keyword term of the searcher or is not consistent with what the ad promises.

Like all good marketing initiatives, measuring and reporting on the effectiveness of your efforts is crucial to determining the ROI of your marketing dollars. With Google Adwords, combined with the power of Google Analytics, you have the ability to quantify and analyze your marketing spend for maximum impact and optimal performance.

Filed under: Google Adwords, Google Analytics by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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What are your website’s goals? Google Analytics can help you define and measure your website goals. Whether it is an email / sales lead capture, a document download or an e-commerce transaction, Google Analytics Goal Setting and metrics can measure your site performance.

At its core, a goal is just the page your visitor sees in completing a goal. For example, it could be a specific page on your website that you want the visitor to visit or the page that is displayed when a visitor has completed a process like a download or ecommerce transaction. A goal is literally the URL of page that visitors see after completing a goal. As Google Analytics counts a successful goal achievement, the goal meter counts each time a pageview for the ‘goal’ page is hit.

A few things to keep in mind before setting up your goal funnel in Google Analytics:

• The goal name: Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals of your reports. Examples of goal names might include “email sign-up” or “article download”, or “Contact us”.
• Defining the funnel: You can specify up to 10 pages in a defined funnel. In using a funnel to define the goal end results can help you determine where visitors drop out during the path to completing a conversion goal.
• The goal value: With Google Analytics, you can assigned a goal value to calculate goal ROI, value per conversion and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often a visitor who reaches the goal becomes a customer. If, for example, you close 10% of people filled in the contact us form, and your average transaction is $1000, you might assign $100 to your “Contact Us” goal.

Creating A Google Analytics Goal

Here’s how to get started in setting up a Google Analytics Goal:
• Under the profile which you will be creating goals, click ‘Edit’ under the ‘Actions’ column.
• Under the ‘Goals’ section, select one of the 4 sets of goals. Each set contains up to five goals. Click ‘Add goal.’ You can create up to 20 goals if you use all four sets.
• Enter an easy to recognize name for the goal so that you can easily recognize it when viewing reports.
• Turn the goal ‘On’ or ‘Off.’ In selecting the ‘On’ positions, Google Analytics will track this conversion goal. Turning it ‘Off’ will only make the goal inactive without deleting it. This is especially ideal if you are running a short term promotion or time sensitive campaign.
• Select the goal’s position. The pull-down menu lets you select a goal’s position from within a set so that you can control the order in which it appears from the ‘Goals’ tab in your reports, can move a goal from one position to another within a single set, or move a goal from one set to another set from within the same profile.
• Decide one of the three types of goals you want. This can be URL Destination, Time on Site, or Pages/Visit. Typically the Destination URL is the page the visitors reaches after completing an action like a download, contact us thank you page or an ecommerce transaction.
• Once you select the radio button for the goal type, a field for ‘Goal Details’ should appear.

The Sales Funnel – Are Your Visitors Following the Path?

For e-commerce sites or sales leads sites, the objective of the site’s sales process should be to drive visitors down a “specific and intended path” guiding them all the way to end result- a sale or contact information capture.

In creating and leading visitors down a path of pages or steps gives users direction. The direction you provide provides prospects with information in the decision making process. This builds customer rapport which in turn builds confidence and leads to more sales.

The purpose of a path or funnel is to provide customers with direction so that they do not aimlessly wander through your site and you miss out on dissatisfied visitors and and lost sales opportunities. If you want them to buy or contact you, you need to take the visitor and lead them by showing them the way.

Google Analytics Funnel tracking is used, then, to measure how effective a particulars process is at leading your visitor down an intended path then converting that visitor into a goal – a sale or contact information.

Funnels provide a detailed path analysis mapping out where in the sales process you have problems or leaks in your sales funnel. Like roadblocks, funnel leakage are pages in the sales cycle where visitors are leaving the sales process or sales steps and preventing your visitors from buying or signing up. Funnels provide a visual roadmap for defining and addressing sections of the site that need adjustment and attention to move more visitors along the sales path. Funnels help focus and refine the sales process and lead to an increase the defined goal conversion process as mentioned above in setting up Google Analytics goals.

Contact us today if you need help with Google Analytics Goal and Funnel set up and implementation of Google Site Analytics.

Filed under: Google Analytics, internet marketing by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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Google Analytics provides metrics of your traffic under the Traffic Report on the left side menu. The Traffic Source Overview provides you an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie-chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. “Direct Traffic” is visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. “Referring Sites” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. “Search Engines” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result.

In this section of the report you’ll also see top keywords which have driven traffic to your website. Drilling down further on the Keyword Report section, you can analyze in greater detail all the keywords that drive traffic to your site. In this report you can also select a metric from the pull down menu, just above the list of keywords to gain insight into the segments by search engine (source) or any factor you select from the pull down menu. Use the pull down menu to segment referrals for keywords by city, visitor type, language type, browser type, landing pages or other marketing segmented factors. From this information you can learn:

• What keywords are bringing users to the site
• What landing pages are those keywords bringing users to
• What source is directing traffic through those keywords (Google, Yahoo, Bing, PPC Campaign etc.)
• How qualified is the traffic that is coming from those keywords

There are many things this information can tell you such as:

• Conversion Process: To see what stage of the buying process users are at when they reach a certain page. Longer, multi-keywords phrases usually denote a readiness to buy/convert whereas shorter search phrases typically indicate a research phase.
• Traffic Quality Evaluation: If you’re drawing qualified traffic in through keywords that you’ve optimized for, but are not converting or continuing to have a high bounce rate, you could be going after the wrong keywords.
• Webpage Usability: Once you know what keywords visitors are using to arrive on your site, you can modify or amend the pages to fit their goals and searches.
• Keyword Considerations: There could be keywords that you never thought of in this list. Take them into account when deciding how to further optimize a page or whether to add a new page.

You can use this data to target keywords that will result in higher conversions. You should be able to tweak your content on the website and inbound links to allow for specific targeting of more effective keywords. The keywords report can then be used in evaluation of your SEO efforts and performance.

If visitors coming in on a certain keyword are generating high bounce rates this could mean that the content of your web page is not connecting with the searchers want or need. See our previous posting on bounce rates. You would then take action to ensure the webpage content is made more relevant for that keyword to reduce bounce rates and increase conversion.

The Keyword Report can also determine which words are associated with your company or product / service offering. If certain keywords are considered irrelevant, marketing efforts can be directed to disconnect with these keywords and focus on more relevant ones. This is especially important to see which words searchers associate with your company rather than just your personal “gut feel”. In this way, the Keyword Reports help you make more informed marketing decisions based on data rather than speculation.

Please visit our website if you are interested in more in depth Google Web Analytics training.

Filed under: Google Analytics, internet marketing by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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Registration for Google I/O 2010 conference has opened, avid Google developers rush to sign up for this event possibly missing a nice key point.

This latest site under the Google umbrella is running on top of the Coldfusion Platform, and leveraging the Fusebox framework. These technologies combine to really produce fast, effective, clean code that is maintainable. It is good to see a company like Google, taking advantage of Coldfusion’s productivity benefits.

Filed under: Google, web design, web development by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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The Google Analytics Dashboard is like the dashboard of your car. The Google Analytics (GA) Dashboard provides you with the high level overview of your site. Like an executive summary, the GA Dashboard provides you a high level snapshot of what’s happening with your website.  The Dashboard provides you with at-a-glance marketing, traffic and performance reports in one easy to read interface. Like the “check engine” light on your car dashboard that indicates troubles with your engine, the GA Dashboard alerts you that something about the performance of your website requires attention. The website issues can then be diagnosed with further troubleshooting in the specific areas of the GA Dashboard.

In subsequent posts we’ll dig deeper on the power of these tools, bit for now, here are a few of the things that are seen on the GA Dashboard once you log in and access a specific website being tracked:

• Date Ranges – At the top right of the Dashboard you’ll find the date ranges setting. This range will defaults to last 30 days, but you can easily be changes to longer or shorter periods, and can set up comparison date ranges.

• Site Usage – Beneath the date range, you’ll see a header that says Site Usage, with six small charts underneath. Under Site Usage, you’ll find quick information on various site traffic statistics for the time period shown in the main chart. Each one has an individual chart:

• Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session.
• Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site, telling how many times the pages on your site has been viewed.
• Pages/visit signifies how many pages, on average, users view when they visit your site.
• Bounce Rate indicates the percentage of users who left the site after viewing only one page of your site.
• Avg. Time on Site shows the average length of time a user spends on your site.
• New Visits shows the percentage of new users to your site; those who have not visited your site before.

Beneath the Site Usage Table, you’ll see 4 more sections or headers that include Visitors / Map Overlay / Traffic Sources Overview / Content Overview:

• Visitors – Indicates how many people came to your site and how extensively did they interact with your content? From the traffic overview you can drill down and view the characteristics of different visitor segments and examine the different factors that make up visit quality.
• Map Overlay – With this map you can see volume (visits, pageviews) and quality (pageviews per visit, conversion rates, per visit value, etc) metrics by geographic region. You can select a metric from the pull-down menu above the map. Click on any region to zoom into the next level.
• Traffic Source Overview: This report provides an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie-chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. “Direct Traffic” is visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. “Referring Sites” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. “Search Engines” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result page.
• Content Overview - This report provides an overview of pageview volume and lists the pages (Top Content) that were most responsible for driving pageviews. Entrance Points allows you to monitor the bounce rates for your most important landing pages.

Some other helpful Google Tools and Menus found on the initial Google Analytics Dashboard include:

• Main Menu – This is found at the top left side of the Dashboard. This provides you with sub menus of more in depth reporting tools and analysis of your Google Analytics.
• Custom Reporting Tools and My Customization – More on this later, but for now appreciate that Google Analytics can be tailored to create custom reports for you individual goals and site needs.
• Help Resources – Common to all reports, if you need to refresh what information or report you are looking at, these offer some quick reminders as well as help point you in the right direction for how to use the data you’re looking at.

Also note that the Google Analytics Dashboard is a customizable collection of report summaries. You can add or remove reports from the Dashboard view. To add a report to this Dashboard, first navigate to the report and then click “Add to Dashboard” at top left (directly below the report title). Change the position of reports in the Dashboard by clicking and dragging them. To remove a report summary from the Dashboard, click “remove” on the report summary. Click “view report” on the report summary to navigate to the full report.

Now that you know what the dashboard can do for your website, the next posts will dive deeper into extracting more information to power up your website performance. If you need immediate help with Google Analytics Consulting, contact us today!

Filed under: Google Analytics, internet marketing by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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Dear Friends,

The staff of Think Profits.com wishes you a Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays.  We have gone green this year by extending our Season’s Greetings electronically.  It is our hope this time of year that we all come together to celebrate in unity each other’s existence and beliefs.

It is our seasonal wish that we find it in ourselves to respect and help each other.  This year, Think Profits.com donated to charities and foundations including the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the BC Sports Hall of Fame Charity Dinner, Ride to Conquer Cancer, Autism Speaks Canada, Breast Cancer Foundation, and the Brian Jessel Charity Fashion Gala which donates the proceeds to VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation and BC Women’s Hospital.

Best wishes to you and your loved ones during this festive holiday season, and here’s to a successful 2010!

From your Think Profits.com team

Season's Greetings From Your Think Profits.com Team

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As we have been writing about with these posts, Google Analytics is a powerful tool to help with your site targeting, traffic improvement and conversion. If you are ready to use Google Analytics, you will need to set up an account with them. If you already have a Pay Per Click account with Google or Gmail, you can use that and will enable you to integrate it with your other Google services. In fact, if you already use Google Adwords, you can set up and integrate Analytics directly with your PPC account.

Here’s how you can start with Google Analytics:

1. If you have a Google account, use your email address and password to sign in. If you have an Adwords Account, sign into your Adwords account and click on the reporting tab to navigate to Analytics.
2. If you don’t have a Google account, go to Google Analytics to open an account with Sign Up Now, to the left of the sign-in box, just below the Access Analytics button. You may want to book mark this page as you will want to return to it frequently to check your Google Analytics reports later on.
3. In the next window, once you’ve signed in, input the website address / URL of the site you wish to track and analyze with Google Analytics.
4. Give the site an account name that is easy to remember. If you will be tracking multiple sites, you may want to give the name of the site or the URL as the account name
5. Select the country your site is based in, or the country it is serving. Then select the appropriate time zone. Click continue to go to the next page.
6. In the next window, provide your contact information and click continue.
7. In the next window, read and accept the Google Analytics terms of service.
8. Click Create New Account. Google will then provide you with a snippet of code – the Google Analytics (GA) code. Copy this code as you will need to insert it into your website on each page that you want Google to track and report on.
9. Insert the GA code onto every page you want tracked, analyzed and reporting on. Insert the GA code at the bottom of the page before the </body> tag, just above the </html> page. If you have a webmaster or technical support person who updates your pages, you can have them add the code to each page you want tracking information on. If you use templates, insert the code into them as well.
10. Once the code is inserted you will then want to save the pages, and then uploaded the pages to your site. Within 24 hours, your GA account will begin receiving tracking information about your site and its performance. More on that later.

Filed under: Google Analytics, internet marketing by ThinkProfits.com Inc.
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Here at Think Profits.com, internet marketing is a way of life. Using organic search engine optimization techniques to secure top search engine rankings with Google, Yahoo, and Bing, we strive to garner online recognition for your specific business or organization.

With a long list of satisfied customers already, we are extremely excited to be adding to the list. With new clients Great Northern Insulation, Clinical Sleep Solutions and realtor Larry Rahn Think Profits’ proven search engine optimization system continues to grow in popularity and prestige.

Larry Rahn, or Mr. Real Estate, has been specializing in real estate for over 18 years. Working with buyers and sellers in Downtown Vancouver, Yaletown, Coal Harbour, and new developments in the False Creek area, Mr. Real Estate knows properties. Whether working with first time buyers or seasoned investors, Larry works hard to make you feel comfortable with your purchases. Through savvy negotiation skills you will not pay more than you are comfortable spending on any property. Now teamed with Think Profits, Mr. Real Estate will be the first choice realtor servicing downtown Vancouver.

Clinical Sleep Solutions is the first of its kind in Canada. Offering sleep therapy solutions for sufferers of sleep apnea, Clinical Sleep Solutions services the greater Vancouver area and lower mainland. Starting with a sleep apnea diagnosis, reviewing client questionnaires, examining overnight pulse oximetry results, as well as observing overnight sleep footage, Clinical Sleep Solutions also offer a free 30 day therapy trial to help get you on your way to a better night’s rest. Also on offer is their cutting edge light therapy. Light therapy involves light exposure for 15 to 60 minutes per day. This therapy helps to rewire your circadian rhythm with low doses of non-UV light exposure.

Great Northern Insulation has been the Ontario insulation leader for over 29 years. Certified partners with ecoEnergy, a government run agency, celebrity contractor Mike Holmes, and Foam Masters, Great Northern Insulation is your first choice for insulation. Offering free home insulation assessments, GNI can pinpoint insulation trouble areas and will recommend ways to fix it to save you money. GNI provides existing home insulation top ups, insulation removal, and spray foam insulation for air leakages. They also conduct thermal energy audits in accordance with Canadian and Ontario government sponsored programs, using infrared photography to identify where air is escaping your home.

Industry leaders in their own right, our new clients will receive outstanding internet marketing and search engine optimization. Think Profits strives to achieve high ranking search results for all our clients. Developing and maintaining web pages for numerous clients not only in Vancouver, but nationwide and internationally, at Think Profits.com we are excited to see our business grow through trusted client testimonials and new client relationships.

Here’s looking forward to a great new year!

Cheers,

Think Profits Team

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Chicago, IL

It was a whirlwind of a day at SES Chicago 2009 on Day 1.

Google announced 2 major initiatives today and everyone’s abuzz and realigning their services to respond.

1. Context, segmentation and keywords tree reporting are now available from Google Analytics – If you don’t have one setup for your website, we can help you to measure and achieve your Internet Marketing goals! Click here to Contact Us.
2. Real-time Search Recency has been unleashed based on the latest updates on Twitter, Facebook and other social media providers – If you don’t have a strategy for your Social Media, let us do it right for you. Click here to Contact Us.

Traditional Search Relevancy now has a counterpart in Social Media for Real-time Search Recency.

We are working diligently in the front lines to make sure that we remain in the know and harness our skills to manage your Internet Marketing.

Later in the evening my team and I got together to enjoy some incredible home grown music at Buddy Guy’s Legends, a world-famous Blues club in downtown Chicago.

Day 2 is next!

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