This is right out of the “why didn’t they think about this earlier” file, but makes perfect sense on the heels of Google integrating Google Analytics goals into the Google AdWords interface.  Google did right by me this time, recognizing another customer pain point: marketers and agencies not having the full suite of data available in Google Analytics reporting that is readily available in the Google AdWords interface.

The Good:

• Trended metrics straight out of Google AdWords, and not just one or two, but a whole heap of great metrics to trend.  My favorite right now is CTR versus Bounce Rate (below).

• Day-parting reports: True, this report could be generated the hard way by using Google Analytics Custom Reporting, but getting it for free is always nice.

• Destination URLs: All my landing pages in one report?  That’s super handy.  All the normal metrics available in Google Analytics for only those landing pages I’m using in AdWords.  Again, a brilliant one-click reporting destination for a standard report marketers should have created using “Custom Reporting”.

The Bad:

• Ugh, TV reports?  Jeez… talk about soft-sell marketing.
• Placement reports: Would love to be able to have a pop-out link to visit content network placement domains/URLs from within the interface.

The Ugly:

• Not sure why, but not all metrics seem to be up to date or accurate.  Realizing this is still “in beta,” core metrics such as spend should be relatively accurate.

An unfortunate recent statistic unearthed from the Factual Blog has shown that less than 30% of businesses worldwide are using Google Analytics on their websites out of a 4 million site sample set (via Manoj Jasra at Web Analytics World Blog).  Unfortunate only because there seems to be a booming interest in search engine marketing, namely search engine optimization.  By no means does one need Google Analytics to measure indicators of success in SEO, but it sure helps.  Any web analytics tool should top your list of priorities when embarking in online marketing, but there are lots of other resources freely available to webmasters.

Web Analytics: Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics

As mentioned already, the focus should be to start collecting web analytics from day one in order to benchmark any optimization effort.  In fact, collecting historical data a few weeks or a few months prior to optimization efforts can highlight key seasonality trends that you may mistake for successes or failures in website changes.  For example, did changes to your site enable it to start ranking for a keyword, or is it because you always ranked for the keyword?  You may not necessarily know for sure without historical data, but this shouldn’t be a stalling point.  A good guy (Avinash Kaushik) wrote a great article on search analytics, which is a super resource to answer common questions about measuring SEO efforts, I recommend giving it a read as well.

Metrics to watch:

• Visits, time spent on page, and bounce rate by top entry page, segmented by Natural/Organic Search)
• Reverse goal funnel, segmented by Natural/Organic Search
• And to find a hint at visitor intent, top internal search queries segmented by Natural/Organic search
• Visits by non-paid keywords, but filtered for branding, trademarked, or copyrighted terms.  It’s relatively easy to rank for keywords in your company’s name, domain name, or product names, but it’s often those long-tail generic terms you are optimizing.  Remove anything else that will contribute to noise.
• Google Analytics “Intelligence” is a new report that does significance testing for you.  Use it to quickly identify and build segments related to significant changes in visitor behavior.

Google Webmaster Tools

Let’s face the facts, according to recent studies from various sources, the majority of search traffic still originates from Google, on the order of 60-70%.  Google Webmaster Tools gives a ton of insight into which keywords your website ranks in results for, as well as which keywords are clicked on.  Keep in mind, Google tests rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) and weighs long-term ranking through several factors, one of which being click-through rate and bounce rate.  So by keeping an eye on the keywords your website is ranking for, but not generating click-throughs for, might let you shift optimization efforts accordingly.  Again, Google Webmaster Tools is totally free to use, and easy to setup.

Metrics to watch:

• Number of keywords triggering results for your site
• Position of your site in the search results for specific keywords
• Number of clicks to your site from keywords
• Position of your site in the search results for specific keywords clicked
• Diagnostic crawl stats can also provide insight into increasing, decreasing, or unchanged crawler activity to your site, which should be taken with a grain of salt

Competitive Intelligence

There are a multitude of competitive intelligence tools, free and paid, available online.  Due to sample collection and sample size, each tool has it’s pros and cons in terms of accuracy and precision, but they’re helpful nonetheless.  Free competitive intelligence tools include Alexa, Compete.com (free reports), and Google Trends. Paid tools include Compete.com, Hitwise, ComScore, Nielsen, and a host of other premium services.

Metrics to watch:

• When comparing two sites side-by-side in Google Trends, for example, it’s important to avoid getting wrapped up in the actual values attributed to metrics, but focus on the trending of page views, unique visitors, etc.
• Compare visitors referred from external sites to two or more competitors, but filter out large referrers such as search engines (premium tools such as Hitwise and Compete.com offer this functionality) to increase the resolution of those niche sites your links aren’t reaching.

Link Intelligence

Aside from competitive intelligence, which provides insight into which sites are sending traffic to you and competitors, consider link intelligence as well.  Search engines still value links on other websites as a ranking factor in their algorithm, so even if a link does not provide any traffic, it may still provide a boost in page rank (or SEO juice if you subscribe to “page rank” being dead).  Obviously there is no shortage of sites that track links between sites, however one great resource that is currently high on my list is Majestic SEO.

Metrics to watch:

• Back-link discovery trending graphs can provide insight into how your link-building efforts are assisting page rank.
• External backlinks and referring domains are also useful, but if links to a website are on each and every page in an external site’s template, trending these numbers could be meaningless.  Instead, consider focusing on external back-links PER referring domain.  The goal here is to ensure the ratio doesn’t become inflated with links to your homepage, but links embedded in actual content that’s relevant to deep pages on your site.

We truly live in an age of data overload. By no means is the above list exhaustive, as these tools and services are only a minuscule subset of resources available to marketers and web analysts.  Feel free to share your favorites below!

Regardless of the tool you use today to measure your website traffic, even if it’s an antiquated server log parser (boy I’m dating myself here), you can be proud that the information you’re collecting is by far the cleanest statistical data on the planet (booyah!).  Many will argue that there are still a ton of flaws associated with web analytics data, but truth be told, information available to a web analyst today is far more trustworthy than the majority of audience measurement options out there.

This post will probably be WA 101 for some of my readers, but with a new blog I have to cover the basics early.

Opt-in versus Opt-out

Data collection is often a question of fishing for people to participate in a study.  After all, what’s better than observing behavior first-hand from willing participants? Well, a lot as it turns out.  It can be pretty darn tough to phrase the perfect survey, conduct polls, and formulate focus groups.  All three of those can also be super expensive.  In the online world, the equivalent of a focus group is an opt-in panel, such as employed (sometimes literally) by research giants like comScore, Neilsen, and Alexa to name a few. A few obvious problems with any panel-based data is non-representative sampling and bias.

Web analytics is different.

Most users don’t even know information is collected on websites.  Oh sure, upon asking them simple questions they think Facebook is evil because of all the privacy concerns the media has got a hold of, but otherwise the majority of internet users are oblivious. As visitors become more familiar and comfortable with e-commerce, they soon realize that their information is tracked because leaders like Amazon will start recognizing them when they visit, or recommending products other people liked.

To the average person, web analytics is an opt-out service that is beyond their comprehension to disable.  Or the convenience of cookies and other beneficial features that go along with website tracking outweigh the perceived risk.  By default, web analysts have a huge sampling of highly representative (albeit not 100% exact) behavior that is highly unbiased.

Usually highly precise

Precision can be thought of as a measurement’s reproducibility.  Can you get close to the same number again and again, regardless of what tool you use?  If you cannot, does the data at least trend similarly?  Peaks and valleys in the same places over time?  If so, you’re already winning over more traditional measurement of media.  That’s not to say we don’t care about accuracy, but it’s becoming less important.

Accuracy is the ability to find the real-deal number.  Many have said that web analytics isn’t accurate because of this or that…

Wha-chu-talkin-bout Willis?

Last I checked, the accuracy of web analytics data is never used to settle legal matters, meet financial disclosure, etc.  Sure, we can use analytics to give us a ballpark number of orders on an e-commerce site, but your analytics will never account for all activity in a business.

That’s an important hard fact to realize.  You don’t have to sweat it if Google Analytics tells you one thing, and Omniture or Webtrends tells you another.  It’s okay to be different.  Let’s all sing kumbaya.

Correlate shoe size to video views

Heck, why not?  There are so many different ways you can measure an audience, you’re going to want to use web analytics for everything.  Based on subtle signals visitors use to help themselves, we can better understand and apply mechanisms to capture that information and feed it back into creating better user experience.

If you really wanted to, you could capture shoe size on an e-commerce store and keep that information handy for that same visitor over the lifetime of their tracking cookie.  And cookies can stick around for a long damn time.  One of the oldest cookies I’ve tracked was more than 3 years old, and the lifetime value information attributed to that visitor was amazing to behold.

But let’s not limit ourselves to the realm of websites, because today we can correlate and apply measurement of offline (or nonline) response as well.  Coupon codes for in-store offers, inbound call tracking, and even our cell phones themselves, all give analysts a wealth of information.

Aside: it’s no coincidence that Google is entering the mobile phone business.  Food for thought.  Information is power, and they’re quickly becoming Skynet.  Fashion the aluminum foil head wear!  (joking, of course, Google, I love you guys/gals)

Everyone else is doing it, and so should you

I think the stat that is currently floating around on Twitter is that 28% of websites worldwide are using Google Analytics.  Let’s toss another 10% on there for paid analytics tools such as Omniture, Webtrends, HBX is still kicking long after death, Citi, Neilsen, etc.  The majority of webmasters don’t know that the information they possess goes well beyond a comprehension of popularity in a vacuum, or my favorite, “hit counting”.

And that is what we’ll talk about in coming posts, turning a bunch of “prudy numbers” and “purdy graphs” into cash.  Cash cash cash.