Google continues to innovate around bringing power, flexibility, and accessibility to web analytics and web content testing. Join us for the latest news about Google's free web analytics and multivariate testing products: Google Analytics and Website Optimizer. Learn straightforward, data-driven techniques to enrich your website and increase your ROI. Come early to grab a seat. This is an event you won't want to miss!
Speakers:
Avinash Kaushik, Author, Analytics Evangelist, Google
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer
Avinash starts by telling us bounce rate is a good indication of how much you potentially suck. Use it as a first step to find out what you should be potentially fixing. Many of the measures in Google Analytics will let you see bounce rate. You can see which referral sources are sending you traffic that bounces, which landing pages bounce most, etc. If you don’t do anything else when you go home, look at your bounce rate. You don’t control your home page, the search engine does. If you have 10,000 pages on your site, you have 10,000 home pages.
Avinash goes over sources to traffic to his blog, how many keywords, etc. Most analytics today are data pukers. He shows a screen of very very very tiny type with the 9,500 keywords. It’s a data puke that tells you nothing.
If you don’t rank high for your brand time, it reflects your incompetence. The brand names are generally the head. The long tail is a lot more generic keywords, and “virgin” keywords. I’m just starting to look for something, you’re the first site I see, convince me how wonderful you are. Search term example of best car insurance California.
How do you get beyond data puking to actually get useful information?
Two problems, two solutions. Head and Long Tail are two different two different problems, and have two different solutions.
Head: Obsess efficiently. Keyword position report is good for this.
Stop looking at visits, look at goals and conversions.
There’s a button for who sent me unusual traffic. Keywords that have sent you 20% more and 20% less traffic over the last seven days are listed. You can look to see what the trends/changes are. These keywords won’t show up in top ten, but can still be helpful. This report can tell you things like what new keywords to bid on. These reports can show trends before you see them at the top of the results.
Most marketers make the mistake of thinking of version in very basic terms. Don’t just look at one goal, but your website is solving for many different reasons.
Even though Avinash doesn’t sell anything from his blog, he does have three goals for his blogs. He spent a lot of time thinking about these goals. The pages are All Posts, About, and Speaking Engagements. Quantify your goals. You need to take into account more than just the profit of a hard good, but there are other monetary benefits that you need to take into account, will help show the value that these goals bring.
Visitor Loyalty measures. Visitor recency, depth of visit, length of visit.
You need to define how you measure success. It’s not just page views, or just the money made solely from a sale.
There are many add-ons for Google analytics. Outside people write Greasemonkey scripts that do lots of fantastic things.
Google Docs data: http://bit.ly/gadocs
Show raw numbers instead of just percents for goals: http://bit.ly/gagoals
Open report in a new tab: http://bit.ly/gatabs
What has changed report (things that aren’t easy to generally find): http://bit.ly/gaiceberg.
What’s new with Google Website Optimizer
- Momentum
- Resources
- Partners
- Product Updates
- Case Studies
Why is testing becoming mainstream
- Advertisers are focused on ROI and CPA, especially with economic climate we are in.
- Leading agencies are offering landing page testing services
- ~10x the resources available vs. last year
It’s all about after the click. Nobody takes impressions to the bank.
- Visitors have lots of choices – their expectations are as high as ever.
- Best practice landing page designs are the minimum ante.
- In today’s economy, CPA and ROI are king. The CFO is just as interested in your effort as the CMO.
New Resources
- Google Trifecta Webinar
- Landing Page Optimization and Always Be Testing books have been published.
- Google Website Optimizer Blog
- Website Optimizer Support Plans
- Website Optimizer Tutorial Videos
Go to google.com/WebsiteOptimizer for lots of resources
Many more new industry partnerships.
For those who want the VIP Treatment
Authorized Consultants
- Outsource everything
- Help with tags and tech
- Help with design
- Analysis
Woops! Missed some stuff here about how organizations can quality to be an authorized consultant, and what benefits they receive from being an authorized consultant.
New Product Updates:
The most requested feature is pruning. You can stop sending traffic to unlikely winners.
Improved reports.
- Color coded confidence intervals
- Color coded conversion rates
- Winner’s box
- Offline Validation for A/B tests.
The New Bill of Rights
We have a right to:
- Convert as many of our visitors as possible
- Challenger the HiPPO’s with science highest paid person in org.
- Landing pages that don’t suck
- Grow sales without growing ad spend
- Free testing technology for all our traffic on all our web pages.
Designing your test
- Basic
- Does it look legit?
- Is it intelligible with partial attention?
- Is it simple to convert?
- Advanced
- Is it compelling?
- Does it handle top objections easily?
Three things to do this week
- Evaluate top PPC landing page
- Set up A/B test
- Make it fun (they have internal contests to see who can get the best results).
Live blogging provided by Keri.
