Tip: Goals without e-commerce

Friday, June 30, 2006

We recently posted about what a visit is worth and the importance of setting goals in determining a visit's value. We often get asked, "How do I come up with goal values if my site is not an e-commerce site?" The answer: you can probably come up with intelligent values for your own set of goals. For example, if you know that 1 out of every 100 PDF downloads on your site results in a $500 sale, you can assign a value of $5 to that download. Other examples of goals are newsletter sign-ups, product sales, and visits to your "contact us" page.

Once you have defined a value for these pages (which you can set in the Goal Value field within your Goal Settings page), you can better conceptualize the value of your website and your online advertising. Then you can explain it to others with data, to back up any marketing or design choices you make. You can also measure the success of your design or marketing experiments, by observing goal values to find out what works best.

To learn more, take a look at the Conversion University article "Monetizing Non-Ecommerce Sites."

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team Permalink  |  Links to this post

New report added: AdWords Keyword Positions

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Yesterday we added another report tailored specifically to AdWords users. The new report called AdWords Keyword Positions displays search position correlated with visits and conversions for each of your keywords. Drill down on any keyword to see its display position. Positions T1 through T3 indicate that your ad was promoted to the top of the search results page. Positions 1 through 8 indicate placement or location in the right-hand column of ads with 1 being the top position. 9 through 16 indicate the same on the second page of ads and so on. Here's an example of the position distribution of clicks on ads for searches on the keyword Google Pen in our account:



AdWords Keywords Positions is useful for advertisers in determining the value of your keywords and bid amounts in relation to your ad's actual position or rank on Google search results pages. This report can be used in conjunction with the Position Preference feature in AdWords to optimize around ad position in the following way: the AdWords Keyword Positions report in Google Analytics shows conversion rates and CTR for a keyword's results position -- and then, with Position Preference in AdWords, you can select that position as a target. We hope you find this level of integration between AdWords and Analytics to be useful.

You'll see data in this new report if:

• Your AdWords and Analytics accounts are linked
• You've turned on Auto-tagging in your AdWords account settings

One more thing: if you don't yet have a Google Analytics account, we've cleared out the waiting list for invitations. Once you've signed up within a few days you should get an email message with an invitation code.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team Permalink  |  Links to this post

What's a visit worth?

Thursday, June 22, 2006

What is the average value of a visit from a certain website worth to you? Can you, for instance, measure the average value of a visit to your site from someone who clicks on your AdWords ad as compared to someone who gets to your website by typing your URL directly into their browser? (See google[cpc] versus direct[none] in the image below - click to enlarge.)

The answer can be found in the sometimes overlooked $/Visits column found in the Google Analytics conversion reports, including Campaign Conversion, Source Conversion, Overall Keyword Conversion and CPC vs Organic Conversion. In fact, because this metric is found in so many reports, you can compare per-visit values for organic search referrals, paid keywords, CPC campaigns -- and almost anything else you can think of. It's a great comparison metric that can help you shift your marketing budget to high-performing traffic sources and keywords.





To calculate $/Visits, Google Analytics adds and averages the total "revenue" from your conversions. This revenue might be from e-commerce sales or from static values that you assign to non-ecommerce goals. Thus, as with any endeavor, goals and goal values are necessary. You'll need to set them up in order to see metrics such as $/Visits as well as ROI and RPC (Revenue per Click), which you'll find indispensable for optimizing your keyword buys.

To learn how to set up goals, take a look at the Help Center article "How do I set up goals?"


Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team Permalink  |  Links to this post

Catching up

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

You may have noticed that we make changes to Google Analytics from time to time. (We call them improvements and we hope you agree.) Since we've just started posting to this blog, we'd like to catch you up on a few of the improvements we've made recently. By the way, you can also learn about new features and other changes through a link at the bottom right of your account's Analytics Settings page when you log into Google Analytics. The link is called What's new with Google Analytics. It's a brief and frequently updated Help Center page listing recent changes.

So what's new? We've added support for Safari browsers. We've re-enabled the Site Overlay report to work more reliably on sites with dynamic content. And to make it easier for you to see data about your dynamic pages, we've replaced the Page Query Terms report with the new Dynamic Content report, and added query terms to the Top Content report. We've made it possible to assign the order in which filters should be applied (via the Assign Filter Order link on your Profile Settings page). And you can now edit your time zone and rename your accounts.

Last but definitely not least, we're sending out more invitations all the time. We won't stop until every advertiser, publisher, and website owner on the planet has access to sophisticated, actionable, and free web analytics.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team Permalink  |  Links to this post

Welcome to the official Google Analytics Blog!

Thursday, June 15, 2006

We are pleased to welcome you to the official Google Analytics blog. Now you can stay up to date on the latest info posted by the Google Analytics team. You'll learn about product changes as we make them, whether it's a new feature you’ve asked for, or a fix for something that needed fixing. We’ll let you know when we add new reports (see below) and will ask for your feedback too. And we’ll frequently post tips and best practices, as well as spotlight helpful resources such as Conversion University and the Google Analytics Help Center.

Expect to see posts from a variety of people on our team. Sometimes they'll be informal and brief; others will be more structured. We hope you'll find all of them useful.

And now for our first product update (which you may have already noticed): there is a new report in Google Analytics called AdWords Analysis.

You can see it within your Analytics reports now (located in Marketing Optimization-->Search Engine Marketing).

The AdWords Analysis report was released two weeks ago and shows you the ROI for every Campaign, Ad Group, and keyword in your AdWords account. You may find it useful as you monitor and optimize your Ad Groups and keywords. In order to get the full benefit of this report, you’ll need to link your AdWords account with your Analytics account and have auto-tagging turned on.

Enjoy, and subscribe to the feed, or visit often to learn about updates like this within hours of their creation.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team Permalink  |  Links to this post