At Microconf 2014, Annie Cushing, VP Marketing at YourTango and Founder of Annielytics, shared insights about how Analytics should be optimally used.
You can view the video here
Transcript
Annie: So today, I’m going to talk about 10 Questions entrepreneurs need to ask their Analytics. Little bit about me. If you’ve ever seen my blog, my blog at Annielytics.com, because my name is Annie and I do Analytics, it was kismet. Actually started as a joke on Twitter and became a brand, so all things are possible. So if anyone has been to my blog, I have a compulsion to create especially Google Docs, any kind of resources that will help, especially marketers, but I also have quite a bit for developers. The one that has probably been populated the most is my hundreds of tools for marketers stop. It literally contains hundreds of tools and it takes the approach, a lot of tools list, just list the tools. I started with, “What is it that you will actually need to get done, you know, and what’s the task that are broken up into different spreadsheets by the categories and then that you know if it is free or paid or paid with an upgrade option?” and I don’t classify something as “paid with an upgrade option” unless you get quite a bit free!.
And then I also have an audit checklist that is again massive, and if you want to do a DIY audit, you can use these. One thing I’ll mention, I do have all of the Bitly links in the presentation don’t actually use all caps. That’s just a style thing. You actually want to use lower case, but when I say compulsion, it is the compulsion and it’s like my [catcher] in the…I think the government implanted into me or Google or someone, but throughout my site, you’ll see all kinds of Google Docs, but it’s kind of my being at this conference, like I had never heard of MicroConf. until Rob graciously invited me to speak and I’ve been so engaged the entire time, listening to you guys talk. I am like, “I don’t even know why I was invited to speak here,” because it was like, I don’t monetize anything. I mean, it’s something like my training and consulting…I’m like the Polyanna of Marketing. I’m like, “Here you go. Here’s the form here.: Just anything to help people, you know, kind of learn what they feel like they need to learn, so don’t take any kind of like business advice from me; just Analytics! [Laughter]
So talking about Analytics, things can get really technical, really fast and I am going to avoid that in this talk and really strictly focus on the business. So all of these questions are going to be questions that, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, you should be asking your Analytics and a lot of times, people just don’t know that they could ask their Analytics these questions. So I am going to jump right in. They are not in any particular order, with the exception of the first one. This first one, if you want to check email, just wait until we get Task No.1, then you could go back to checking email, Twitter, Facebook, but this, I would say is by far the most important one, which is, “Which marketing channels are your [unsung] heroes?” and there are quite a few! But first, I have to kind of back up. I do have to get a little bit geeky, but I’ll keep it to a minimum. So first, I need to explain ‘last click attribution’, that’s just geek speak and here’s a simple explanation.
So let’s say someone comes to your site via your social media channel; may be your Twitter, you share a link or Facebook and then let’s say within an 80-day period, they come back via organic, so they are searching for something, they find your site, they click-through. A couple of weeks later, let’s say they signed up for your email, they come back to your site from a link in your email and if you…how many people here do email marketing? Okay, I have a resource that I am going to get to you in a minute, that you will absolutely have to check out! But then, let’s say they come back and on the last visit, they buy something for a $100 and this is a result of clicking on your ad. What last click attribution does is, it says, “Okay, all the credit goes to CPC.” So it doesn’t matter that your social media channel is your brand evangelist, that you rocked it on organic, or that your email is effective – all the credit goes to CPC! No one should be using last click attribution in 2014! 2008 – fine; it’s all we had. Not 2014!
So now let’s talk about multi-channel funnels, very helpful to click attribution. So Google last year came out with these multi-channel funnels, got over some issues – I will touch on this, but basically what it does is it says, “Okay, if that conversion was worth a $100, it gives each one of those channels that assisted within that, with the [inaudible 0:05:14] look back window, equal amounts of credit.” So social gets $25, organic, email, CPC – this is a great way to see which of your channels are actually performing, that you don’t know they are performing?
So I recently was talking to someone about Twitter and I was trying to explain just the travesty of last click attribution and why we shouldn’t be relying on it as much as we do and I think, you know, we kind of like, if you owned football team and you said like, “Okay guys, here’s your deal. Whoever scores a touchdown, you guys get paid. Everyone else, sucks to suck!” I mean, that’s really what last click attribution does. And well, multi-channel funnels kind of takes more of the team approach. Everyone who helps get the ball down field and that’s about as much as I know about football, and I like the egos and I like green, but anyway, so multi-channel funnels kind of gives the credit to everyone who assists.
So if you think of the audit, like, “Life just doesn’t blend itself to last click attribution in any sense.” So let’s take the example of the [Dugger] family. I love to pick on these guys! They are just so cute. But let’s say that Jim Bob decides after baby number 19, “That’s it. I quit. I am going to get the operation. I’m going to be shooting blanks.” I mean, would it be fair to put the blame on that, on cute little…do you think the name is Josie? But no! I mean, in reality, all 19 of them contirbuted to that final decision, right? “I’ve done enough damage to society,” you know? So anyway, so that’s just kind of life…leave Josie alone! So when you think about it, like “nothing operates.” Well, you shouldn’t say nothing! I really try to avoid…but nothing really, you know, like it just doesn’t make sense.
So here’s where you can actually find it, is the assisted conversions report. If you go down to…I can’t see here, I think it says…they just changed all of the names, but conversions and then assisted conversions, multi-channel funnels, assisted conversions, that’s where you’re going to find these and one other little caveat, this is so weird, it took me the longest time to figure out what the hell they were talking about, but see here, where it says, “Last click or direct conversion value, ” and I was like, “What is that?” “It’s just the last click.” The reason they said, they put it that way is I think they were thinking, “Well, typically, if it’s direct, someone is not actually clicking on something, so we are going to get like super-pedantic and include both.”
But just think of it as, “Here’s your revenue from last click; here’s your revenue from the assisted conversions and if we look at this…,” well, actually, before we get into that, there are a couple of things that I recommend changing or adjusting. The first is, in the upper left hand corner, how many people here have revenue tracking or eCommerce tracking set up on your site? Yeah, okay. So if you have eCommerce tracking, I recommend making this change and deselecting goals because if you’ve goal values assigned, I just don’t like to muddy the water with, I guess it will by default include both and I really just like to focus on ecommerce. If you are tracking goals, the only way you can use multi-channel funnels is you have to have some kind of revenue. So you need to assign values to your goals.
The other thing here is this is, it’s called a “Look back window” and it’s in the upper right hand corner. By default, Google sets it to 30 days. It’s because they don’t want you to use up all their resources. I recommend that you click that slider and push it all the way to 90, because then it’s going to look at the last 90-days, to see, you know, which channels have been driving traffic to your site,instead of the last 30? How many people here use the Google Analytics API? Oh, okay, awesome!
Unfortunately, the API doesn’t have this slider incorporated. Actually we are pretty closely with the Google Analytics team and I asked them about it and they were like, “Oh, we’re looking into that,” which, off the record, don’t tweat this, but it really means “Shit! We forgot to include that.” So if you’re using the API, you are limited to 30-days and that’s important because your numbers won’t match up, if you are using, if you’re going back and forth between the interface and the API. So it’s worth to utlise on that one.
But if we just look at one of the line items here, it’s picked a random client and if you look at the last click revenue, it’s $14000. If you look at the assisted revenue, somewhere $82000. That’s a 577% uptake in revenue, that most marketers and site owners aren’t even taking into consideration and so I just randomly picked a client, looked at the last month and targeted that, and you can see organic isn’t even the most…I don’t know, whatever…like you have social networks appear with a 2300% uptake and that’s pretty much the norm. Social revenue is almost always going to under-import with last click.
So I’m just going to mention this in passing. There are some changes that you kind of have to make to clean things up. If you were using campaign tags, it is a prime importance that you set it up correctly because the way that you tag, especially social, the most important thing I’ll tell you is you’ve to set UTM_Medium to social. Do not set Medium to Twitter or Facebook; you will under-report everything, not just in your multi-channel funnels, but there is another channel to report.
And that’s all covered in the link here, the GA Campaign Tagging Guide – this is an absolutely enormous guide that covers all things campaign tagging. I even included a video and my training style is basically take you by the hand, like, “oh, it’s only scary the first time,” and I explain everything and of course I have a Google Doc where, if you just put in your campaign parameters, it uses a formula to automatically generate the urls and I even include like an example campaign with different mediums and stuff, so feel free to check that out. But there is one section, fixing your default channel grouping section and that’s where you learn more about how you can fix your channel groupings, if those are messed up.
Now another thing that’s really important to understand is that multi-channel funnels are not the same thing as the standard funnels. And so you can see the standard funnels appear under acquisition, multi-channel funnels are down in conversions and there is absolutely, I really take umbrage at the fact that they put multi-channel funnels inside of conversions because from an information architecture standpoint, it looks like it’s kind of a sub-set of conversions, but it’s not! Multi-channel funnels uses a completely different API and logic, so what happened was in their early days and this probably dates back to [inaudible 0:13:23], this probably isn’t Google’s fault, but Google is good for it, you know, whatever – the big boys! But when they set up the attribution system, they kind of set up this good old boy system where they said, “You know what? Here’s the deal. If direct is the last, let’s say channel or a lack of channel, that if someone visits your site with and converts, whatever channel they came to your site, the [four] direct, inherits the credit.”
So if they came to your site via let’s say organic, and then they came back via direct, in all of the last click attribution reports, which is everything except that tiny old section of multi-channel funnels, direct doesn’t get credit; the other channel does. And Google had no idea or urging; they had no idea that this would end up leaving them in the butt, in a major way, because what was happening was direct was like, “Okay, fine.” It was like the red-headed …you know, it was like being pushed up against the locker, so “Here you go; use your credit,” you know, but now, with the multi-channel funnels, direct get credit, if they are the last, if someone comes to your site within that 90-day look back window via direct and convert, direct actually gets the credit.
So if you compare the data in your multi-channel funnels report with your other reports, they are not going to match up. Then in the multi-channel funnels, direct is typically going to get credit for a lot more of revenue and this is really unfortunate and it’s the main reason that they can’t incorporate multi-channel funnels throughout all of Google Analytics. It’s just like it’s own little ecosystem, but in my opinion, it shouldn’t be nestled in the eCommerce reports because it is it’s own ecosystem and I think that there is a general assumption that this is just part of the eCommerce stuff, but it’s not! So that’s all I would say about that.
Moving on, where do your best links come from? So link building is pretty important in SEO and it’s important to know where your best links are coming from and every time I check mine, I’m really surprised, like there are times, and I even track like social mentions and stuff and I still find links in this report, that I had no idea about. Now the one caveat is, there is no standard report for this, so we are going to have to use a custom report. I do use quite a few custom reports. Any custom report I do, I will share with you here, so I’ll provide the urls; at the very end, I’ll give you the Bitly link for the slideshare, so you don’t feel like you have to seriously take down all these urls. But so, here’s where you find the standard reports.
Everything in that left side bar, but one caution with that is most people think that’s Google Analytics, like all of those reports…and when I was new to Google Analytics, sometimes I would want to research something and I would go into a report and I click on something, I drill down, I’ll be like 500 landing pages with this. “You have drilled down from Medium” and I get source and you just kind of kick the dirt and move on. They will start to think of the standard reports is basically just like templates, but you should really be relying much more on custom reports. So we are going to need to use the custom report for this and I am using a dimension called the “Full Referrer” – this is kind of a newer dimension. As far as I know Google Analytics never announced it; else I didn’t get a notification before an announcement. That’s really awesome before I just happened to stumble across this, to get the full url, I would have to [inaudible 0:17:11] source plus referral path and any time you see path in Analytics, you just geek speak for the URI – just the part of the url after the domain.
So they created this new dimension called the “Full Referrer” and you can apply that. Here are a few networks sites that don’t include the full url. I think one of the most unfortunate ones is YouTube. All the referrals from YouTube just show up as [inaudible 0:17:40] to watch, so you can’t see your specific YouTube videos. If you want to know your specific YouTube videos, I recommend tagging those links and putting it in the description. But here’s the [underbelly] of the report; this is how you pull together a custom report of share, of video that I did, that explains how to use custom reports. These are all of your metrics. Metrics are basically anything that can be measured with a number. This is the dimension, “Full Referrer” and I applied the referral, a filter that just says the medium has to [eco-over] from. Pretty simple.
Now if you are new to Google Analytics, it can be pretty difficult to keep track of like all the different, like dimensions and metrics and stuff, so Google provided this resource that is absolutely phenomenal, especially if you click web where…yeah, over here, web, so even if you’re learning how to use the API, I highly recommend clicking web because what it does is it tells you the web view name and the API name because a lot of times they are very very different. But that’s a great great resource. Just to find out like what kinds of dimensions in metrics are there to choose from? And here’s where you can find the video that I did. It is one of my earlier videos, so…you have to start somewhere! There’s nothing I can do about my 12-year old voice in these videos.
Okay, so the third one is what do visitors search for, when they come to your site? So basically, this is just your site search. You should always have site search. Well, not always, but just about, and this is basically like your visitors wish list. So when I worked in-house for a publishing company, one time I was just going through their site search report, and I saw that like all of these visitors wanting to know more about HTR photography, but they taught like really high-brow digital photography and stuff, so they weren’t keen at all on providing training for HTR. But then when I showed them how many people were searching the site, and then saying, “Well, yes, you know, offer it,” and moving on, and then I showed them the keyword research to show how many people were searching via Google and then within 6 weeks, they had a Program that today did like online training and stuff and within a 6 months, that one particular course had made them more than $60000. So there is gold in these hills. And just so you know, the studies have shown that more sophisticated visitors tend to use site search; less sophisticated visitors tend to browse, as a general rule.
So here’s what the site search terms report look like. Here’s where the navigator that I want…I want to duplicate this and then you can check out all this, but here’s where you can see the terms that people are searching when they come to your site. And I’ll just show you one example of a bunch of people who are searching for hundreds of tools because of that tool stock and you can see here that the time spent, after search, is just under 13 minutes and the pages [inaudible 0:21:08] is 4 pages, so I can look at that and see, you know, like people really hang around after searching for hundreds of tools because they are like click…”Is this even for real?”
But anyway, so it’s a great great report to use. If you want to know how to set it up, just simply do search on your site. You can’t use an [Eject] search; like your search actually has to return a url and you’ll see my site, when I search for a test, the query parameter up in the url is ‘s’; sometimes it’s ‘search’; sometimes it’s ‘keyword’. Look for that query parameter and then go to Admin. view, which used to be profile; whatever reason, they changed profile’s view and then view settings and scroll down to ‘site search settings’ and just drop that query parameter. I also recommend stripping the query parameters out o the urls. If you don’t, you are going to get…it’s just going to create a bunch of noise and duplication in your content reports.
Alright, next question: How many pages does it take to convert? So in Google Analytics, you can pretty easily find out how many days it takes someone to convert and how many visits it takes someone to convert and that’s all under ‘Conversions ‘ “Days to purchase,” or “Time to purchase.” But there is not a standard way to find out how many pages..”Does someone have to, you know, drill through my site, to ultimately convert?” and I use this to basically, this is my assessment of how if you combine it with a low conversion rate, it will let me know, “Okay, this is an organic traffic issue. This is, you are getting full traffic to your site. You just can’t convert them, so you suck at [CRO].”
But for this report, we have to get a little fancy, so again, you can reference the sites, but we are going to need to use an advanced segment. In almost all of the reports in Google Analytics, whether it’s a custom report or a standard report, you will see this all down-facing arrow. You just click on that and then I would choose ‘Built-in Appear’ and then ‘Visits with Transactions’ and I specifically want to target which visits actually included transactions. And then what I do is I close all visits, so I am just looking at…I just want to see the traffic from people who came to my site and actually ended up converting. It’s very insightful. so here was one client. You could see that for that particular month, there were low over 7000 page views, and no more than 1000 visits, so that’s about seven and a half pages [inaudible 0:24:14] to convert. So I will give that a thumbs-up! Seven and a half pages that includes like getting through your sales funnel, that’s pretty good.
Another client, well, it’s a former client, but I still have access to their Analytics because people forget to turn that off. Sorry. But they had a question about why they weren’t converting better, so I used this. In fact, it was this client, this is where I came up with this idea of looking for pages to convert. You look here and you see when 21000 page views and out of 595 visits, that’s average of 37 freaking pages to convert. When I bought this to them, I was like, “Guys! Picture a gauntlet! That is what your visitors have to endure to get to a conversion” and you know, it’s really…I wasn’t actually click…I was like, “This is really bad.” And they were like, “No, we think that people are just really engaged in our site,” and I said, “Well, you know what?
If you had like a two and a half percent conversion rate even, I would say may be you have the 0.02 conversion rate,” which suggests this isn’t just like when they sell like designer handbags. This isn’t just a bunch of chicks looking at a bunch of bags. This is people who are going, “I have no idea how to get through the site.” If you’ve been to Waras, Mexico, that’s why I told them…I was like, you walk through the streets of Waras; you have people like screaming at you to buy their wares and stuff and that’s what their conversions, was like.. and the funny thing is I told them that last year, “This was the last month’s data,” so clearly they didn’t take that to heart, so….
Okay, another question: Should you consider going responsive? So responsive is all the rage. It’s where, you know, you just have one page; you serve up the same page for different devices. It’s a very legitimate question. Here’s an example of how you can use your Analytics to help you make that decision. We’re going to use again a custom report and I wanted to mention is we are going to use, is one of my favorite dimensions – Google Analytics really…I don’t think they even announced this and I think the dimension is awesome! It’s called ‘The Device Category Dimension’ and before Device Category, they just had a [Bullion Dimension] – is mobile.
So they just said, “Either the visitor was on a mobile device or they were on desktop.” That was it. But studies have shown that visitors on mobile devices behave very differently from visitors on tablets, so then they came up with this “Device Category Dimension” which breaks it down into mobile devices, tablets and desktop, which is sublime and then what I did was I wanted to be able to click on, let’s say mobile, and look at their specific landing pages. That’s obviously the page that someone lands on and you can see here that for this particular client, when you look at mobile, their bounce rate is quite a bit higher than the others, so their end, not much revenue coming from mobile. Now there are other factors to consider, but you know, this is a good starting place.
Now if we drill it down, I didn’t want to show my client’s landing pages, so I decided to use my own, and this is really really bad. So I picked two of my more popular pages and then I also decided to throw in average page [inaudible 0:28:08] all the time, that’s a really good metric to look at and you can see here, the bounce rates are pretty high. Now bounce rates for a blog are kind of not a very accurate measure because someone could spend 20 minutes on your page. If they don’t click through to another page, then it’s going to register as a bounce, but you can add like an event, either a time-triggered event or a scroll event that will make bounce rate infinitely more accurate.
But average page [inaudible 0:28:39] of time, yeah, that’s on me and I suck! But anyway, you can use that report to kind of get a sense for if you should consider going responsive. Next one, are you taggimg all of your emails, so I will ask the client this, you know, “Are you tagging all your emails?’ They will typically say, “Yes, yes, we are..”, but again, this requires little bit of background and there are three reasons you absolutely have to tag the links that point back to your site, not links that point back to other people’s sites. It’s like painting your neighbor’s house! Just links that point back to your site; it’s absolutely critical.
Well, the first reason is desktop apps. do not pass referral data, like if people are using like Outlook or WebMail, no referral data gets passed and it’s because they are headlist files and you guys pretty know more about this than I do, but they will show up in your Analytics as direct. Another reason, secure webmail providers don’t pass referral data. So like if we look at Yahoo, you can see this isn’t a secure page. It’s an http, non-http; yes, you don’t see the little lock, so because of that, if you click on the link from a Yahoo email, then it’s going to pass referral data and that’s actually going to show up in your Analytics [inaudible 0:30:05.4] in your referral report. And you can confirm this with a bookmark. Well, I do provide a list of all the links in a Bitly Bundle too at the end of the presentation.
So here email is a different story. So email providers like Gmail and Hotmail, they switch to a secure server and so if you see the https or the little lock icon, that ‘s secure and no data passes, so when I use the bookmark, I like to see what the referral is, it just shows up as ‘blank’ and that’s where you can get the …if you want it. Third reason is if those aren’t complaint enough, mobile doesn’t pass very much and I would say most data, because most apps. aren’t passing any kind of referrral data. It’s usually only if they are like in safari or something like that and even that can be sketchy.
So those…in the end, what happens is most of your email traffic, if you’re not tagging, will show up as direct. So you are looking at email and you are like, “It’s not doing anything.” No, it’s just because you’re not tagging it, so email tagging is very very important and here’s a little test that I do. So I, you know, ask clients, “Are you tagging your emails?” They will say, “Oh, yeah.” I’ll go into all referrals report and then in them, little…here, I will just put ‘Mail’ and if a significant number of visits show up in that, then I go back and say, “No, you’re not tagging,” because if all of the links were tagged, then these wouldn’t show up in your referral report; they will show up in your campaigns report. And then they say, “Oh, you know, we hired someone” or “We fired that guy,” or you know, whatever.
So next one: what are your top performing product category? So typically when people use eCommerce reports, they focus on products, but there is another primary dimension called ‘product category’ that I really like to focus on because it kind of buckets your products and so you’ll see here, under primary dimension, when you click on this report, this product report is going to show up, but check out that product category report and you’ll see, with this client, their categories are set up [inaudible 0:32:23]. However, with another client, this is a furniture client, I did some onsite training for them, I am just going through their Analytics for teaching them, as on there, and I really like, “What were…? These aren’t product categories. These are stain colors.” They were so embarrassed because I’m just doing a live demo and I’m like, “Yeah, there is a problem here,” because you know, I mean, their product category should be like “Dining Room”, “Living Room”, “Bed Room” because they were selling furniture. Who the heck cares…”Oh, how is our…furniture performing?” So double-check these, make sure your ecommerce is set up properly.
And here’s another custom report because…I do. Alright, another question: Should your site go multi-lingual or multi-national? So I have a client. They do lots of conferences and I was like going through all my clients and former clients data to try to find someone who, you know, could possibly have other country show up and this particular client, who does conferences, they offer one in Israel and I was like, “Ah, found something!” So when I looked at their countries, Israel actually showed up above the United States, so that was actually pretty surprising.
I thought I was just going to have to, you know, focus on hypothetical…and then you can also look at browser languages and you see here, this is just capturing from the cookies, whatever [bits] that is their default language in the browser. You can see Hebrew; a lot of visitors are visiting, who speak Hebrew, so I would make a case to them, “You know, you may want to consider another version, offering another version of your site in Hebrew.” So that’s how you can make that determination. Look at your bounce rates scene or look at your conversions, that kind of stuff. Here’s a resource that lists the different language codes.
Alright, next: Which competitors are stalking you? This isn’t really that important, but it’s just kind of fun to look at. So in this one report, it’s called ‘Network…”, yeah, I think it’s like “Network…” I can’t really; there’s a glare. But most people don’t even know what this does and one thing you need to understand is that…oh, yes, “Network Doman’ and Network Domain is just the domain name or the registered service provider and most of them are going to be like big ISPs and stuff, and then the other one just has like the actual url. So you can use either one, and I just use the secondary dimension, to get those side-by-side, so I just included a little thing. Like that’s what I chose to get those side-by-side and you could see the specific Network Domain versus the referral and let’s just move ahead.
So what you could do…well, another option is you can also look to see how many visits, how many visitors are coming from dot com sites or even dot edu sites. That’s interesting. Just by using these filters…and then you can, when you identify your competitors, so I had a chocolate client that was brutal. For three months I was, you know, reading about chocolate all the time and they did atleast send me a huge basket, but I found out like [inaudible 0:35:58], Hershey – you know, these big companies were stocking them left and right and so I created an advanced segment to identify their competitors. Then once you have that segment, you can close out of all visits and then stock your soccers. When I say, “Well, let’s see what landing pages they are looking at? What are they doing when they come to my site?’ It’s so sketchy and here are the steps they…on segment and then you just need to apply it to your network report or anything else. And this is what I say: You can even add in landing pages just to see where they are going, when they land.
Finally, look to see, “Are sites scraping your site?” So this is one thing I do when I do an Analytics audit and then if you do any kind of publishing, this is actually more common than you might think. The report for this is the hostname report. Here’s where to find it and I also use this secondarily to see if the client has sub-domains, but this will tell you all of the domains that have your Google Analytics tracking code. So if you have, someone’s scraping your site, like when I worked for the publishing company, I hocked over this and when I found someone, I would just shoot them off a seasoned assist, you know, with our legal, you know, templates and stuff and I mean, the lawyers weren’t even involved.
They weren’t planning on pursuing any of them, but it scared the crap out of people. And so they would move and the reason it shows up is scrapers aren’t really the sharpest knives in the draw, so when they scrape,they are not typically going to go through and remove the Google Analytics tracking code, so you can nab them. Alright, so if you want to learn more, I do have a Bitly Bundle and you can find that at Bitly MicroConf Bundle and that’s just a list of all the links that I include and here’s where you can find my slideshare Bitly GA questions. And thank you very much. [Applause]
Male Speaker: Hi, first of all, thanks for the talk; definitely helpful. I’m trying to grab my..all this stuff personally right now, so I am very…
Annie: I’m not responsible for damages!
Male Speaker: I’ll send you an invoice! [Laughter] The multi-click attribution – I had a question about the tendency of people who go and search for your brands because they don’t know that they can go directly to your url, so they go into Google and they search for your brand and then they click on it. Of course that registers as organic traffic, so like I guess, ways to try and differentiate, like it’s not really organic search, like it’s basically a direct, but they are just using Google for it.
Annie: Yeah, so back in the day, before “[Not Provided]”, has anyone heard of the whole Not Provided debacle? Yeah, so what happened was…this isn’t Google Analytics; this applies to all Analytics. Google used to pass all of the search terms that people search Google for and landed on your site. Then bit by bit they started taking this away. At first, they said, “Oh, well, if they’re logged into Google, then we’re not going to pass on their search terms,” and then eventually they said, “No, you just can’t many of them.”
So if you look at your organic search terms, you are going to see the lion’s share shows up as “Not Proivded” and so back in the day, before Not Provided, you could actually set up a rule that said, “If someone searches for like my domains” or someone’s searched for “Analytics.com,” I could say, “Don’t count that as organic; count that as direct,” but now it’s kind of moved because we don’t know…you know, like you get such a small percentage of actual search terms that you could still use that rule and I can send you a resource, if you want to use it, but it’s not going to give you the insight that you are hoping for, just because most of it is just being pocketed; it’s not provided. Thanks Obama.
Male Speaker: Yeah, so do you know how to get the original tweet from the [T.co] link, after, you know, 14 days or so?
Annie: Yeah, that’s a really good question because the [T.co] link, so up until a couple of years ago, you had to tag social links. You still should be tagging social links, I hae to say that, but the four…I think it was about two and a half years ago, Twitter set up this wrapper called [T.cl], so a lot of your visits from Twitter used to show up as direct because if people were using a desktop app like TweetDeck or Retweet, those were, you know, referral data was going past and they were showing up as direct and then Twitter said, “You know what? Let us just wrap all links more than 19 characters in this [T.Co] wrapper” and so now, the bulk of your Twitter traffic will show up as T.co., so I’m just saying that for the benefit of the audience, so we don’t lose anyone. And so when you look at that full referral report, that I shared the custom report,it actually has the exact T.co link, so if you just copy and paste that into a browser, it will take you to the resource. So like, my campaign dock kind of went wild when I published it a few weeks ago and I could track that T.co link back to the actual resource.
Female Speaker: I was checking out your website and I noticed that you are going to be offering online training courses. You are no longer taking clients and you are also doing seminars. Are you doing any in Northern california, in the Sacramento San Francisco area and when do you plan to launch your online courses?
Annie: Yeah, so that’s a good question. I have been testing these 3-day seminars and they’ve gone well, but they are very difficult to market because I am pulling people out of their jobs fo 3 days and so I think the one I have coming up in Orlando,in a couple of weeks, may possibly be my last one. So many people have asked me to bring it online, that I am considering doing that. And then I am going to distill it down to 1-day seminars of “Making Data Succeed”, like that’s my tagline. I make data succeed; I teach other people how to make their data succeed. I have tons of Excel Tutorials, Google Analytics Tutorials and I am in the middle of writing my first book, “Making Data Succeed”, so I’m just trying to get through the book publishing process alive and then I am going to launch the online videos.
Male Speaker: Hi, I’m [inaudible] You’ve concluded, like blown the way, I am going to like look at Analytics with the multi-conversion stuff. I mean, it really like…I am pretty much like obsessed with just looking at referrals and I’ve already seen like that we recently started using InfusionSoft and I started to see that it’s like four times more valuable than I thought it was and so that’s kind of insane to me, but I was just curious. I know a lot of people in this audience are doing more retargeting stuff and I was just curious if you had any advice around retargeting and tracking that stuff. I mean, I know you can use campagin urls and stuff like that. It seems like that stuff is not making …to buy Analytics. I don’t know if that’s a tool problem. They say it’s not, but I’m just curious.
Annie: So with your retargeting, are you using campaign tagging or that you think they are on tags?
Male Speaker: Absolutely! Yeah, I am using the UTM…
Annie: What are you tagging the medium as? Are you tagging as a ‘Display’ or…?
Male speaker: I am probably tagging it as ‘Facebook’ or ‘Web’ because I am doing Facebook and like…
Annie: Yeah, so we can talk more, but that’s not going to show up in the right book bucket; in either your multi-channel funnels report or your main channels report, because the medium has to be set to ‘Bigger Bucket.’ And I go into this a lot in my whole guide, like I literally draw buckets and you know, and I am like, you know, explaining…a bit…Of all the paramters, medium is the most critical to get right, so if that’s how you are tagging them, that definitely explains why you are under-reporitng and a really good practice to make is going to your multi-channel funnels report and everything that Google couldn’t figure out what it was, just get buckedted as ‘other’ – good click on ‘other’ and drill down and it will show you the sources and look to see “Are these actually ‘other’ or [inaudible 0:45:22] is tagging something?’
Also like, if you are doing social, clicking your referral drill down and locate the sources and see …wait a minute, “Am I seeing social sites becuase if so, then I need to be tagging those as social.” One other little note about that is, and this is, I don’t know how many people are doing Ad Sense, but if you have a Text Ads as oppposed to Banners, for whatever reason, Google is classifying them as ‘other’; not…they are stil in the CPC bucket, the paid bucket, but it doesn’t show up the way you might expect it. But anyway…so yeah, I would…and if you want, I can just like look at it and kind of, you know, click around.
Male Speaker: Thank you again Annie.
Annie: Thanks guys.
Applause]
