What To Measure: A How-To Guide

What to Measure
A How-to Guide

Joy Brazelle
11/23/2011

Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 2
Are They Finding You Online? ....................................................................................................................... 3
What to Measure: ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Visitor .................................................................................................................................................... 3
Traffic Sources....................................................................................................................................... 5
Opportunities ............................................................................................................................................ 8
Social Media .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Search Engines ...................................................................................................................................... 9
Quantifying Opportunities ........................................................................................................................ 9
Keyword Research Tools ....................................................................................................................... 9
Are They Finding What They Need? ........................................................................................................... 11
What to Measure .................................................................................................................................... 11
Average page views per visitor ........................................................................................................... 11
Success by Visit Number ..................................................................................................................... 12
Number of Paths ................................................................................................................................. 13
Onsite search ...................................................................................................................................... 14
Bounce ................................................................................................................................................ 14
Are They Converting?.................................................................................................................................. 15
What to Measure .................................................................................................................................... 15
Conversion rate Overall ...................................................................................................................... 15
Conversion rate by type of Conversion............................................................................................... 15
Conversions by Traffic Source ............................................................................................................. 16
Paid Visitor Conversions ..................................................................................................................... 16
Abandoned Conversions ..................................................................................................................... 17
How Do They See You Online? .................................................................................................................... 18
Competitive Information Sites ................................................................................................................ 18
Alexa.................................................................................................................................................... 18
Compete.............................................................................................................................................. 19
Other Resources.................................................................................................................................. 20

1

Introduction
This document is a follow up to the presentation, ‘Web Analytics for B2B – Why Does It Matter?’ for the
Business Marketing Association – Carolinas.

This document explains how to find key metrics using Google Analytics. Unless otherwise stated all of
the instructions are based on using the new version of Google Analytics.

2

Are They Finding You Online?
What to Measure:
• Visitors
o All Visitors
o Registered Visitors
o Paid Visitors
• Traffic Sources
o Traffic Type
• Opportunities

Visitor

All Visitors

When you log into Google Analytics and click ‘View Reports’ the Visitors metric displays in the gray bar.

To see metrics and behavior of groups of visitors based on specific characteristics, use the Advanced
Segments.

3

Registered Visitors

If you have your registration thank you page set as a goal, you can use the Goal option in Advanced
Segments. Otherwise use the Page option and type the URL of your thank you page.

Paid Visitors
Unique destination URLs are a common way to ensure your paid media can be tracked. If you are using
the Google Analytic tracking parameters your destination URL may look something like this:

www.mywebsite.com/utm_campaign=fall_event_2011&utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&ut
m_term=web analytics

Use a parameter that is appended to every one of your destination URLs to define the paid search
(without the value).

utm_source=

4

Check the boxes to display the segments in the reports:

Traffic Sources

Google Analytics breaks the traffic sources down into the following categories:

5

Since Social Media is not a category by default, you can use the Advanced Segment function to create
the Social Media category. Add multiple ‘OR’ statements to include all popular social media sites, as
well as any industry specific social media sites.

Search Engines

Click Traffic Sources, then Sources then All Traffic to see all referrers (including search engines). Natural
search results show the search engine name/organic.

The old version of Google Analytics breaks out the search engines without the categorization
(organic/referral) and gives you the ability to easily see the percentage by search engine.

6

Keywords

Keywords are broken out by organic and paid. To see the natural (not paid) keywords, click Traffic
Sources, then Search, then Organic.

Traffic Types

It is useful to know if visitors are getting to your site by searching on your brand name or if your site is
optimized for other keywords.

To find this out, export the organic keyword reports to CSV. Highlight the row that contains the
headings (row 7) and click the Data tab, then Filter.

7

Click the down arrow next to Keyword, then Text Filters, then Does Not Contain.
Type in your brand name:

The bottom left corner of the spreadsheet will show how many records are not brand-aware. Reviewing
the non-brand aware keywords will show the keywords your site is well optimized for.

Entry Pages/Landing Pages

To see which pages visitors are entering your site on, click Content, Site Content, and then Landing
Pages. The bottom right corner of the screen shows you how many entry pages there are.

Opportunities
Based on your findings, several opportunities may exist to increase traffic and therefore increase
revenue.

8

Social Media
If there is no or a very small percentage of traffic from the Social Media category, you can increase your
participation in social media.

Search Engines
If a high percentage of your traffic is brand-aware, focus on optimizing your site for some non-branded
terms.

If the majority of your traffic is coming from Google, optimize for Yahoo and Bing.

If the majority of traffic is entering at your home page, optimize all pages of your site to increase the
likelihood they will be found by the search engines.

Experiment with buying keywords. Make sure to set up campaigns so they are trackable in your
analytics by using parameters in your destination URLs.

Quantifying Opportunities

It is possible to quantify the potential revenue to make the case to optimize your site based on the
findings from your analytics. First, you need to know the estimated search volume. Then you need to
apply conversion rates from your site and your sales process. To be able to complete the calculation,
you will need the following data points:

Estimated number of searches – use keyword research tools to find this
Conversion rate onsite – The percentage of visitors who complete an online registration or other lead
capture form.
Conversion rate – The percentage of web leads that convert to actual sales. This can be captured in your
CRM or other marketing database.
Annual revenue – This can be captured in your CRM or other marketing database.

Keyword Research Tools
The following are free tools that provide estimates of search volume for keywords.

Google
http://googletrafficestimator.com/
Google Keyword Tool provides information for organic search.
Google Traffic Estimator provides information for paid search including estimated number of searches
and costs.

9

Google Traffic Estimator

Keyword Discovery
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
Keyword Discovery provides information about all the major search engines.

Sample Calculation:
In this example, a simple analysis finds that by optimizing for a non-brand keyword, there is a potential
for an additional 100,000 visitors. The web site’s current conversion rate is 4%. Four percent of all
visitors complete a registration form on the site. The company tracks the web lead to sales statistic in
their CRM. The conversion rate for this is 2%. They also track lifetime value in their CRM. So they are
able to calculate that the average annual revenue is $5,000.

Number of web leads

Number of potential new visitors (estimated number of searches) X conversion rate onsite

For example: 100,000 x 4% = 4,000

10

Web lead to sales

Number of web leads x conversion rate

For example: 4,000 x 2% = 80

Annual revenue

Leads x annual average revenue

For example: 80 x $5,000 = $400,000

Based on this example if this company acts on its findings, there is a potential of an increase in revenue
of $400,000/year.

Are They Finding What They Need?
What to Measure

• Page views per visit
• Success by visit number (frequency)
• Paths
• Onsite search
• Bounce

Average page views per visitor

11

When you log into Google Analytics and click ‘View Reports’ the Pages/Visit display. This can be a
deceiving number. You will want to look at this metric in combination with some other metrics to
confirm that a high number of page views per visit is a good thing.

Success by Visit Number

The next place to look to determine if your visitors are having a good experience on your site and
succeeding at finding what they are looking for is the Frequency & Recency Report.

Click Visitors, Behavior, then click Frequency & Recency. Make sure the Registered Traffic and All Visits
segments are active in the report.

You will see the conversion rate:

What the report below shows is almost half of the visitors who convert (fill out a registration form) are
successful in their first visit. However when you look at the All Visits data, you see that 64% of the
visitors never return to your site.

12

Number of Paths

The number of paths is easy to find in enterprise tools like Adobe/Omniture. Click Paths, Pages, then
click Full Paths. The total number of unique paths displays at the bottom right of the page. You can
compare the total number of paths to the total visitors.

You can also see from this report the percentage of total traffic that the top 10 paths account for.

In Google Analytics you can use the Visitor Flow report to get a sense of how all of the visitors are
navigating through your site. Click Visitors, then Visitor Flow Report. The report below shows that there
are 19,400 visits. Of those, 7,970 exited after only seeing one page.

By clicking the + Step you see that of the 11,500 visitors who saw more than one page on the site, only
2,570 left after viewing the two pages on the site. Of those visitors only 2,890 leave and 8,880 continue
on to another page.

13

Onsite search

Understanding what visitors are actually searching for when they get to your site is a great way to find
ideas for new content. If your site gives visitors ability to search and your search results display in the
URL, you can use Google Analytics to report on what visitors are searching for.

Click Content, Site Search, and then click Search Terms.

Bounce

Bounce is the measure of visitors who only saw one page on your site.

When you log into Google Analytics and click ‘View Reports’ the Bounce Rate displays.

A more useful view of bounce rate is by page. Click on Content, Site Content, and then click Pages.

This report is useful for many reasons. First, it shows your most popular content since it is sorted by
Pageviews most to least. But it also shows bounce rate (percentage of visitors who only saw that page
on the site) and exit percentage (saw other pages on the site but exited from that page).

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Are They Converting?
What to Measure
• Conversion Rate
o Overall
o By type of conversion
o By traffic source
o Paid visitor
• Abandoned Conversions

Conversion rate Overall

If you have several different forms on your site, you will want to be able to measure your overall
conversion rate, everyone who filled out a form on your site. To create a segment that captures all of
the conversions, use the Page option and include the part of the URL that is common to all thank you
pages.

For example, if your site has the following thank you pages:

www.mywebsite.com/thank_you_1 (for the short form)
www.mywebsite.com/thank_you_2 (for the contact form)
www.mywebsite.com/thank_you_3 (for the long form)

You would use thank_you when creating the segment.

Conversion rate by type of Conversion

You will also want to be able to analyze the performance of each individual form. To do this you will
need to create segments or goals for each of the unique pages (thank_you_1, thank_you_2 and
thank_you_3).

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To configure goals, go to the Account Administration screen by clicking the gears icon in the orange bar
on every screen. You can use the goal values to create segments to view details of each form.

Conversions by Traffic Source

Because the new version of Google Analytics gives such granular detail about the traffic sources, it can
be helpful to switch to the old version to see a more high level view of the traffic sources of the
conversions.

Paid Visitor Conversions

Using the Paid Visitor segment, you can see the conversion rate as well as determine the return on your
ad speng. Click on Conversions, Goals, then click Overview.

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To calculate return on ad spend (ROAS), it is simply revenue divided by ad spend.
To calculate return on investment (ROI), it is revenue minus ad spend divided by ad spend.

Abandoned Conversions

When you configure your goals you can also create a goal funnel. The goal funnel contains all of the
pages to a conversion. To view your goal funnel in the reports, click Conversions, Goals and then click
Funnel Visualization. You can see conversion rate for each step, as well as where visitors who did not
convert went.

.

17

How Do They See You Online?
There are many free tools available that will enable you to see how your web site is perceived online.
The tools show how your site is described, what are similar sites and how you stack up against your
competition.

Competitive Information Sites

Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo

Typing your domain into the Site Info tab on Alexa.com will display a wealth of information about how
your site is perceived online.

In addition to getting information about how your site is described and hot it ranks, you also see:

• The Alexa Traffic Rank will show how popular the site is compared to yours, including Reach,
Pageviews and more.
• Search Analytics will show you which terms your competition is using to get traffic.
• The Audience data will show you what kind of visitors your competition is attracting.
• The Contact Info will show you the contact information found on your site
• The Reviews will display any Alexa reviews that have been posted
• Related Links displays a list of web sites that are perceived to be similar to your site

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• The Clickstream data will show you where your competition is getting traffic from affiliate
programs and partners.

Compete
www.Compete.com

Typing your domain into Compete.com shows traffic stats, perceived competitors, as well as a
description of your site.

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Other Resources
Quantcast – www.Quantcast.com
Quantcast provides free direct audience measurement for all website owners including traffic,
demographics, business, lifestyle, interests and more.

Spyfu – www.Spyfu.com
Spyfu is a good resource to see competition for both paid and organic search.

SERP – Search engine result pages
Who else shows up for search terms you are well optimized for?

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