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By Kurt Krejny, Fathom Online Marketing's Director of SEM Best Practices
At Fathom Online Marketing, we are very fond of using Google Analytics to help track the success of our clients' online marketing campaigns. Google Analytics is a very robust and flexible analytics tool that simply helps us do our job better. We have worked with a number of different analytics packages over the years, but Google's tool continues to support and enhance the tracking capabilities for our clients' websites.
If a client starts a program without Google Analytics, we immediately look to set up an account. For each client we strive to properly track a measurable return on advertising (ROA) for all of our online marketing efforts, whether they are organic, paid, email, video, or display ads. We want to prove the traffic we are getting to the site is converting into new business.
Before we before begin accurate tracking, there are a few measures we need to put in place. I won't go into fine detail, but there are items in the Google Analytics set up process that can't be ignored.
1)
Place Google Analytics tracking code on all pages
a.
Apply cost data to link to an existing Adwords account
b.
Enable e-commerce tracking if you are an e-commerce site (this requires custom analytics code that matches your shopping cart checkout variables)
c.
Enable Site Search if you are have a search function on your site
d.
Track file views and events (PDFs Downloads, Word Docs, Flash Video plays)
2)
Set up filters (here are a few to start with)
a.
Exclude client traffic (you don't want internal employees skewing the data)
b.
Exclude Fathom Online Marketing traffic (we don't want Fathom's traffic in the data)
c.
Consider creating additional filters to segment traffic for a blog, social media referrals, user logins, etc.
3)
Set up goals
a.
Create an inventory of all online forms
b.
Make sure each form has a unique confirmation URL upon completion (this is needed to track completions in Google Analytics)
c.
Establish a lead value (How much is each online form completion worth to you?)
4)
Properly track all incoming traffic sources
a.
Separate paid from organic search by tagging your paid search destination URLs (Google's URL Builder can get you started - http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578)
b.
Tag email marketing and display ad campaign links
Once we have the above measures in place, we can accurately track the website traffic, and use analytics data to help us determine which sources and/or keywords are converting. Knowing which sources and keywords that convert is powerful information that allows us to provide strategic recommendations to further improve the visitor quality and increase conversions.
Find out which sources and/or keywords are converting on your website by setting up a simple Custom Report in Google Analytics.
How Fathom Online Marketing Uses Custom Reporting
1)
Click on "Custom Reporting" and then click on "Manage Custom Reports"
2)
Click on "Create new custom report" at top right of page
3)
Set up and Save your Custom Report
1)
Enter a name for your report - a proper name for this report is "Source/Keyword Conversions"
2)
Under the "Metrics" box, expand "Goals" and drag and drop "Total Goal Completions" onto the "metric" field. (You also have the options to add and name new tabs, and add additional metric fields)
3)
Under the "Dimensions" box, expand "Traffic Sources" and drag and drop "Source/Medium" onto the "Dimension:" field
4)
Under the "Dimensions" box, expand "Traffic Sources" and drag and drop "Keyword" onto the "Dimension:" field
5)
Click on "Save Report"
4)
View Your Report
1)
Click on "Custom Reporting" and click on the custom report you just created
2)
Click on the Source/Medium to view the keywords that converted. This will only work for Organic and Paid mediums.
Keyword rankings and traffic are only one part of the equation of growing your business online. We need to make sure the keywords we are optimizing for are converting. Whether through lead generation or ecommerce sales, we continually look at reports like these to make sure quality visitors are getting to a website and taking action.
Learn more about Fathom Online Marketing's process for "GET, CONVERT and MEASURE". Schedule an SEO product demo with one of our business consultants to see how we can help improve your online visibility and grow business.
