Google Data » Google Conversions

Saying goodbye to the Conversion Room blog

Emily Wood — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:23:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who has been a loyal reader of this blog over the last few years. After some consideration, we recognize that we're just not generating enough content here to warrant your time, so we won't be posting here any longer. We encourage you to visit the Google Analytics blog or the Inside AdWords blog for ongoing news and best practices about measuring and improving your online efforts.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Making Mobile-Friendly Websites – Webinar Recording

Shane Cassells — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:55:00 +0000

In March I presented a webinar on building mobile-friendly websites with UK site examples. There was a large turnout of website owners but there have also been a lot of calls for copies of the recording so I’m including the link here for those of you who are interested.

So, if you like to get your updates aurally and visually rather than having to read it all yourself, check out the webinar.

Summary of Contents:

The mobile momentum
Why mobile sites matter
10 mobile site best practices
Best practices in action
Build a mobile website

If you have feedback or questions, please leave a comment.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Google Analytics has learned 9 new languages

Shane Cassells — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:06:00 +0000

Recently we introduced new and improved Google Analytics, so that you can quickly find even more powerful and useful data to improve your internet marketing efforts.

Now, we are proud to say Google Analytics is available in 9 new languages. This makes Google Analytics quite a Polyglot, and it is in total available in 40 languages now. Newly introduced languages are:

- Arabic
- Croatian
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Latvian
- Romanian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Ukrainian

To change the language of your Analytics account to any of these new languages, you have to activate the new interface, if you haven’t already, by clicking on the “new version” button at the top of the account. Then, navigate to the settings page where you can select the new language.

You can also now enjoy reading the newly revamped Analytics help center in any of the 9 new languages.

We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts.

Happy data mining!

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 3: Implementing Your Conversion Rate Optimization Process

Shane Cassells — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:22:00 +0000

This is the third part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

Previously in this series, we discovered how your conversion rate optimization process can be improved by adding some critical planning and research. In this article we will see how Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend taking those learnings and applying them. Take a look at part 1 and part 2 to see the previous steps.

Step 7: Design your experimental web pages (your "challengers")

This is the point at which you’ll create the content that you’ll be testing. Create wireframes of the new pages (or page elements).

Create your wireframe first

Pay particular attention to critical copy elements such as the headline, introductory paragraphs and calls to action. Carry out several usability tests on the wireframe and discuss them with anyone who has an empathic understanding of your customers.

Step 8: Carry out experiments on your website

For each split test, follow a procedure that ensures that all team members understand what the test is, why you’re running it, how it fits into the site, how it aligns with the business goals, and how you’ll measure success. These experiment plans create a valuable archive of your business’s evolution. Once a test is started, the software takes over. All split-testing software automatically calculates when one version of the page has generated statistically significantly more conversions than the others, at which point you can end the test and promote the winning version to be your new “control”. If you are new to split-testing tools, check out this quick start guide to Google Website Optimizer and conversion rate optimization.

Step 9: Transfer your winning campaigns into other media

Diversifying your customer acquisition channels gives your business more stability. Your increased conversion rate will mean you can profitably invest more in advertising channels such as SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing and offline media. Also, explore how the insights from your winning experiments can be implemented in other parts of your marketing funnel.

A winning appeal in a landing page test can provide a winning headline for your AdWords campaigns (or vice versa)
A winning landing page can be adapted for space advertising in offline media
If a particular offer performs well in your own marketing materials, your affiliates may benefit from using it too

Insights from winning experiments can be implemented in other media such as print advertising.

Summary

As you can see, while a lot of work, your results will reflect the effort that you put in. Keep in mind that the process is not a one-off event, rather it is an iterative methodology. Subsequent experimental plans will be based on the outcome of the previous experiments and each improvement builds upon the success of the previous ones.

With iterative testing your profits can only go up—because you only keep the winners.

Each time your conversion rate is increased, it becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to compete. Also, as your conversion rate grows, more opportunities present themselves. Hopefully this series will give you some ideas that you can take and implement into your own Conversion Rate Optimization processes. If you want to see the whole process in more detail, check out the full Conversion Rate Experts Process.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 2: Critical Research that Can Boost Your Conversion Rate Optimization Results

Shane Cassells — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:28:00 +0000

This is the second part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

-------------------------------------------

In the first part of this three part series, we looked at how many marketers rush into setting up their conversion rate optimization process but Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants) recommend instead applying a little bit more strategic planning, and how this can get you a much better outcome and avoid you overlooking some fundamental factors. Now we need to drill further into this approach so that you have can be armed with all the research that you need and make an informed decision going into your actual experimentation. Make sure you check out part 1 to see the previous three steps.

Step 4: Research the market

No business exists in a vacuum. You need to understand the ecosystem that you are working in. Study your marketplace by researching

Your competitors

Expert commentators

Social media

Review sites

Anywhere your target market gathers.

Explore possibilities for improving your positioning against that competitive environment by building upon your company’s core strengths.

Step 5: Reveal the hidden wealth in your business

You will likely have elements within your business that would be highly persuasive to your prospects, if only your prospects could get exposed to them. The key is to identify all of these persuasion assets, then present them to the prospect at the right time in the buying process. In effect your website should be a "proof magnet", incorporating all the necessary support material, persuasive content and evidence necessary to move your prospect forward with confidence.

Your website should be a “proof magnet”.

It can also be useful to identify assets that would be compelling to your prospects —

Invest time in gathering your company's existing material and sort through your collection to find under-used persuasive assets.
Create missing assets that would be persuasive to your target market, if only you had them.
Compile a wish-list of persuasive content and material that your company needs to acquire from outside sources, such as paying for material to be created or interviewing clients for case studies and results.

Step 6: Create your experimental strategy

Extraordinary improvements come from extraordinary ideas. Take all of the ideas you’ve generated from the research, and prioritize those big, bold, targeted ones that will grow your business in the shortest time. After collating all the ideas, prioritize them based on three simple metrics:

How likely is it to double your conversion rate?
How easy it is to implement the test?
Has this idea worked before?

Summary of Part 2

Rather than starting with the first optimization experiments that come to you, it will pay big dividends if you take a short step back and really research and prioritize what you should be working on. As you have seen, there might be gold hiding in terms of your positioning in the marketplace and in your previously under-used proof elements. You can see how Conversion Rate Experts used this exact process to quadruple Voices.com's conversion rate from under 5% to 22% here in this case study. In the next and final part of this series, we will put all of this research and planning to good use.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 1: Improving Your Conversion Rate Optimization Process

Shane Cassells — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:33:00 +0000

This is the first part of a three part guest post by one of our GACP partners, Conversion Rate Experts.

--------------------------------------------------

Many marketers start their Conversion Rate Optimization process by going straight into creating a list of things to test. Conversion Rate Experts (one of our Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants), however, advise you to resist the urge at this stage. Here are two good reasons why:

You don’t know why people aren’t converting yet.

You need to experience your business as a customer rather than a marketer.

Conversion Rate Optimization isn’t about tweaking a particular type of page element or simply setting up new tests. Instead it’s a well-defined, systematic process — a list of things you need to do. In this article series we will take you through the Conversion Rate Experts methodology so that you will have a full process to follow.

CRE Methodology Mind Map

First, in this article, we will cover some preparation steps:

Step 1: Define your strategy, long-term goals, and how you’ll measure success

First decide the strategy and vision for your business. You need to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will ensure you meet your goals. Next, it is important to have customer empathy and to understand the thought processes your visitors are going through, so become a customer of your own site. Discover what the actual visitor experience is really like. The insights gleaned from these activities will give you a better guide for what you need to work on.

Step 2: Understand (and tune) your traffic sources

It’s impossible to critique a website without knowing where its visitors are coming from, which landing pages they arrive on, and how they navigate around the site.

Seek to understand your entire conversion funnel

Aim to work on the areas of your business that will have the biggest impact on your goals.

Also prioritize your efforts on parts of your business that are easiest to make changes to.

Discover blockages and missing pieces in your funnel with web analytics tools.

Search for any aspects that are under-performing and any required parts of your conversion funnel that have not yet been created. For example:

Turning a one-step sale into a multi-step sale

Adding a well-placed refer-a-friend program

Adding an effective email autoresponder sequence

Adding a series of post-sale offers

Growing a customer community

Rolling out successes into other media

Step 3: Understand your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones)

Your key question to answer at this stage is, “Why is the visitor not converting?”. The answer typically comes from research in these core areas:

Understanding different visitor types and intentions

Identifying user experience problems.

Gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.

There is a list of 15 tools here that will help you with your visitor research.

Summary for Part 1

By the end of this part of the process you should have a great idea of the priority areas that you need to work on, both from a funnel and an end-user experience point of view. In the next article we will look at further refining your strategy so that you get the best possible outcome from your efforts. If you would like to see more about how to implement the CRE Methodology we have been outlining here, check out this case study which describes how sunshine.co.uk used the process to almost double their revenue.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Introducing Flow Visualisation: visualising visitor flow

Shane Cassells — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:54:00 +0000

Many of you have shared with us difficulties you’ve experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don’t sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You’re looking for better ways to visualise and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.

The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualising visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

So we are releasing “Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyse site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualisers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualiser on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.

Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

You’ll also notice that we made the visualisation highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.

This type of visualisation allows you to answer important questions, such as “How successful is my new promo page?” In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the “specials” or promo page come from Google search.

To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by “exploring the traffic” through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.

We realise that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we’re providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualiser to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.

Goal Flow

Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.

You can find the Goal Flow visualiser in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.” Goal Flow helps you understand:

The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)
The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways
Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined
How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualiser. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize “backward”. Such “reverse paths” could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, “forward” paths from a page (or pages) can be visualised to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.

Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common “visitor” flows, and we’re building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.

If you don’t have goals or goal funnels already set up, don’t worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.

These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualisation for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualisation truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.

- Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Google Analytics User Conference, Madrid.

Shane Cassells — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:17:00 +0000

There will be a Google Analytics User Conference on in Spain later this month. Organised by our Google Analytics Certified Partners and sponsored by Google, please see the site below if you'd like to attend.

Madrid, Spain - October 27th 2011
Partners: metriplica, Watt, webanalytics.es

Event Site: http://googleanalyticsconference.es

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Google Analytics Premium – a new option for our largest customers

Shane Cassells — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:30:00 +0000

We built Google Analytics on the principle of democratising data -- giving all website owners, big and small, the ability to learn from their visitors. Many websites use Google Analytics, ranging from personal blogs to large enterprises whose products and services we use daily. We learned from some of our largest customers that they have some specific needs that the current version of Google Analytics can't meet in their entirety. Today we're addressing these needs by announcing a new option built for our largest customers: Google Analytics Premium.

We developed Google Analytics Premium around these pillars: more data, advanced tools, dedicated support and guarantees. Here’s a summary of what that covers:

Extra processing power - increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
Advanced analysis - attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
Service and support - experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call - all backed by 24/7 support
Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Google Analytics Premium was developed in close coordination with some of our largest clients. During our pilot phase, we’ve been working with Gucci, Travelocity, TransUnion , eHarmony and others, to make sure Google Analytics Premium meets their needs. We’re very happy with what we’ve built and we’re now ready to make it available to all interested clients.

Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual fee in the United States, Canada, and the UK. You can get it directly from Google or through Google Analytics Premium Authorised Resellers. To learn more about Premium, you can contact the Google team or our authorised resellers.

We're more committed than ever to providing our customers, large and small, with options to measure and improve their marketing efforts. Google Analytics will continue to offer a powerful, free product as it always has and you’ll see plenty of new features and enhancements in the future. We’re pleased to help all of our customers to work more effectively with Google Analytics. Happy analysing!

Enrique Muñoz Torres, Senior Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium

Part 4 – Mobile Website Optimisation: 10 Tips to Make Mobile Conversions Easier

Shane Cassells — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:09:00 +0000

This is the fourth post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. The previous three posts covered Content Prioritisation, White Space and Big Buttons

In Summary: Making it easy to convert on a mobile device is key to maximising conversion rate. Mobile conversions must play to the strengths of mobile devices and simply replicating the desktop experience is often not enough.

As in previous posts in this series, I invite readers to think about the way the mobile user experience is different from desktop. On desktop, many conversion funnels require visitors to jump through a series of hoops (often forms) before the visitor can become a customer. While this is often an unsatisfactory experience for a person with a mouse and a keyboard, mobile visitors are even less likely to put up with this in order to convert.

Mobile devices are increasingly touchscreen and the majority of smartphones have only a virtual keyboard. Mobile users also don’t have the speed of multi-finger typing and many will enter data solely with relatively large unwieldy thumbs. While there are vehicles for data-entry specific to mobile which can really help, like voice entry and text completion, these methods are rarely useful when a visitor is using uncommon language such as when they are entering a postal address or email address.

So, how do we help mobile users complete a conversion or even partially complete? By partially completing a conversion I mean allowing them to perform an action that they can complete conveniently through another medium. Here are some ways that can help make mobile conversions easier:

Have a Single Customer Experience Across all Platforms
The means by which visitors can interact with your site are varied. Mobile users will be using small screens and their thumbs; tablet users will be using medium size screens and their fingers; and desktop users will be using medium to large screens and a mouse and keyboard. However, it should be possible for a visitor to begin the conversion process on one platform and complete it on any of the others. This is what we mean by a single customer experience. For example, with amazon.co.uk a visitor can login to their account on a desktop and start adding things to their shopping cart. If they need to leave their desktop, they can simply login to their account on their mobile device and complete the transactions while they’re on the move. And this functionality is not limited to ecommerce websites. On autotrader.co.uk a visitor can add a car they are interest in to their garage on their desktop and then open their garage on mobile or tablet and find the same car there as they travel to see it.

On Amazon.co.uk, it is possible to begin a conversion on one device and complete it on another

Allow Visitors to Save Searches
The ability to save searches can be particularly useful for travel or local website owners but really it is suited to any website where a user is likely to search for the same things repeatedly. In the case of travel, it is not unusual for visitors to have favourite destinations or even for them to re-visit a site multiple times before completing a purchase. Or a take-away restaurant is likely visited time and again by users who have a favourite meal. Allowing visitors to save their searches makes the journey to their regular purchases that little bit easier. If the visitor doesn’t have an account, make it easy for them to save searches by just adding an email address or use cookies to remember the last search they completed.

Have Clear Calls To Action
This one stands to reason everywhere but it is still a barrier to conversion on many sites. Often the website owner has provided too many conversion options or not clearly enough labeled to the visitor where they are expected to go next. Avoid using multiple conversion options and use button colour and size to clearly indicate to a visitor what you want them to do next.

On Mothercare.com, the call-to-action is clear and easy to find

Allow Visitors to Save Baskets
For website owners with a basket for their visitors to fill prior to checking-out, it is a good idea if those visitors can save their baskets for their return or even for them to access the basket again from another platform. This will also encourage cross-platform purchases. Easy account login is imperative for this to work. Have an account login button on every page and keep login simple. If a visitor doesn’t have an account and is not making an immediate purchase, entering their name and email address should be sufficient for them to save their basket and access it again elsewehere.

Keep Forms Short
The best way to ensure that conversions are easy is to make sure that all forms are only as long as absolutely necessary. Get your conversions in before asking irrelevant marketing or cross-sales questions. By keeping forms short you can make conversion on a mobile device much easier indeed.

Use Top-Aligned Labels
When a mobile phone user taps on a form field, very often the browser zooms in to that field. Mobile devices are also long but narrow when vertically orientated. Thus, having form field labels to the left as is common on desktop is less feasible. By implementing field descriptions above the field it is easier for a visitor to see where they are and it allows more space for form fields.

Booking.com uses top-aligned labels in their checkout

Use HTML5 for Form Fields
By using HTML5 in form fields, it is possible to help users to complete those fields more efficiently. For example, a field for telephone number will be filled using the number keypad. Find a simple introduction to HTML5 in plain English here.

Use Check Boxes, Lists & Scroll Menus
Data entry needs to be kept to a minimum when a user has only their finger or thumb and a virtual keyboard to help them. By using check boxes, lists and scroll menus to make data entry easier, you will be helping the visitor to proceed through the conversion process. However, it is important not to give a visitor too many options in these lists or they may be less decisive.

Implement Click-to-Call
Mobile users are much more likely to make a phone call than a desktop user. If your business converts over a telephone line, make sure that all references to phone numbers on your website are tagged for click-to-call and where possible make those links into buttons.

RAC.co.uk have implemented click-to-call buttons for their breakdown service

Use Geo-Technology for Offline Conversions
A key difference between mobile and desktop users is that mobile users are using a device with location based technology. Where a conversion can take place offline, it is advisable to use this technology to help a visitor find their way to your store. In such cases it can be useful for there to be a stock checking functionality on the page and a button which will link to directions, preferably with a map, to the nearest store with the product(s) in stock. If you wish to track purchases which began on a phone, consider allowing visitors to reserve products in advance and attributing a unique tracking code to each reservation. Or to encourage quick offline sales, you might also consider having a discount code for mobile shoppers who come to the shop and convert quickly.

So, in summary, 10 ways to make conversion completions easy from a mobile device include:

Have a Single Customer Experience across Channels
Allow Saved Searches
Have Clear Calls to Action
Allow Saved Baskets
Keep Forms Short
Use Top Aligned Labels
Use HTML5 in Form Fields
Use Check Boxes, Lists & Scroll Menus
Implement Click-To-Call
Use Geo-Technology for Offline Conversions

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, test it on different devices to make sure it looks well on different sized screens. Check out this tool to replicate phones from different operating systems on your desktop.

In my next post, I will be looking at best practices for Search & Refinement on mobile websites. If you have a comment, please post it.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 3: Mobile Website Optimisation – 7 Considerations When Designing Buttons on Mobile Websites

Shane Cassells — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:07:00 +0000

This is the third post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. The previous two posts covered Content Prioritisation and White Space.

In Summary: Buttons rule on mobile devices. The rule of thumb means that big, well spaced buttons with clear calls to action will likely result in more conversions.

Before looking at how buttons can make the mobile user experience better we must first understand the way mobile users navigate. Think about the way you hold your phone. More often than not it’s in just one hand and because your fingers are gripping the phone from behind, you are left only with your thumb for navigation of the screen. The thumb is far less precise than a mouse pointer.

As you can see from this image, fingers are behind the phone leaving the thumb to do all the work.

The Mobile Rule of Thumb: If it cannot be done with the thumb, it cannot be done.

The hyperlink is a poor user experience on a touchscreen mobile device because it is very hard to use with an imprecise instrument like the human thumb. If that’s not all, mobile devices are often used by people on the move, so hitting a small point on the screen is just getting harder and harder. The best way to alleviate these issues is to build your links into big buttons which allow for greater levels of inaccuracy.

Here are are a few things to consider when building button links:

Buttons Should be Big
In a recent study of iPad users, Jakob Nielsen, the father of human computer interaction studies, recommends that buttons be at least 1cm x 1cm in diameter. That’s 28px assuming the standard web resolution of 72dpi. There’s a lot of debate around this area.

Apple is recommending 44x44 at a minimum for buttons in apps.

A very interesting introduction to designing for different screen sizes on Android can be found here.

This is something you really need to test when building your site. Without a mouse or even a stylus, buttons need to be big. Put simply, you should build buttons for thumbs. And err towards large thumbs. There is also the issue of light. Many mobile screens perform poorly in daylight or bright light environments – big buttons make it easier to perform tasks while visibility is low.

Buttons Should be Isolated
How many times have you tried to click a button on a mobile device only to find that you have inadvertently clicked something else? It can be a really painful experience and is also a sure-fire way of making a user give up in frustration and go somewhere else. One way to avoid accidental clicks is to ensure that buttons have a little space between them. Call-to-action buttons especially should be isolated. Where possible, leave a little white space around buttons.

Buttons Should be Reachable
The placement of your buttons is also important. Just as we need to consider big thumbs for button size, we need to think about what is comfortable for thumbs when placing buttons. The standard navigation button is across the whole page on mobile sites so it isn’t really an issue but many mobile sites have call-to-action buttons which are shorter and sit on one side of the screen or the other. If possible, these buttons should be made longer and centred more. Not only does that make them larger but it’s easier for both left and right handed people to reach the buttons with their thumb. If you must choose a side of the screen, contrary to the right side placement often found on desktop, it is actually more comfortable for a right-handed thumb (the majority of users) to click a button on the left side of the screen.

Kiddicare.com found button placement on the left side of the screen was easier for users than the right

Smaller Buttons Should be Padded
Padding refers to making clickable an area larger than the button itself. This can be especially useful for check boxes or buttons that need to be smaller so as not to draw attention away from the main call-to action. The trick is to make the area immediately around the button clickable as well. In the case of check boxes, it is important to leave sufficient space between boxes and then to make the text next to the box clickable too.

Buttons Should Look Like Buttons
This might seem like common sense but it is not unusual to find links on mobile sites which behave like buttons but do not look like them. Whether it is a link that looks the same as the text around it or a button that looks like a heading, the user needs some form of visual cue to help them understand where to click. Make buttons look three dimensional and they are more likely to invite clicks. It is also important that your site clearly indicates to a user which button they have clicked. Some sites do this really well, but others are a little patchy. Touching any part of a button should result in a visual signal for the user.

In the example above, the Filter link behaves like a button but looks like the rest of the text, so some users will miss that.

Buttons Should be Prioritised
In much the same way as we do with desktop sites, buttons on mobile devices need to be prioritised. Visual cues like size and colour will help users to identify where they need to click. If we are making all buttons big to allow for thumbs, then colour becomes even more important. Try to have a different coloured button for the main call to action. Other important links should still be buttons - just not as obvious.

Buttons Should Use Descriptive Text
This is not just a convention of mobile but it is still very important. The text we use on buttons will set the expectations of the users clicking on them. It is important that the text be clear and that it conforms to an action the user is taking. Button text should complete the statement “I would like to...” and begin with a verb. It should also consider the point the user is at in their journey through the site. ‘Buy Now’ buttons on the homepage are generally inappropriate. “Shop Now” is often a better call to action so early in the visit. There is never a time when ‘Click Here’ or other such terms are ideal because they set no expectations for the user.

Why use buttons? Imagine the difficulty of picking the right link in the example above.

So does this mean we can never use hyperlinks? Of course you can. But you should use them minimally and don’t put lots of them into the same space. As a rule, try to have no more than one link per band of text. For example, In the point above about making buttons big enough, I have spread the points with links across multiple lines to make it easier for touchscreen users to tap them on the mobile version of this blog.

Of course when it comes to a mobile site which is trying to convert visitors into customers, try not to have much text.

In summary, buttons on mobile sites should be:

Big
Isolated
Reachable
Padded
Obvious
Prioritised
Descriptive

Buttons that have been well thought out and follow the guidelines above should help increase conversions on your mobile website.

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, physically test it while you are in motion to best replicate the real-world user experience.

The next post will be looking at how to make conversions easier to complete on a mobile website. If you have feedback, please leave a comment.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

New Google Analytics: Improvements in Map Overlay reports

Shane Cassells — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:16:00 +0000

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, a few engineers from our team are sharing improvements they’ve made to Map Overlay reports.

In GA, we're always looking for ways to improve existing reports. For example, we noticed that you can only see state (i.e. province/region) breakdowns if you're looking at the United States. Surely, this information ought to be available for other parts of the world?!

It seemed like something that could be done in a short amount of time and yield a big win for our users. So, we're glad to announce that as of this week's release, you can now see region level maps of over 170 countries!

To try it out, simply go to the Location report (under Visitors > Demographics) and click a country. We'll try France.

Voila! We can see at a glance that Ile-de-France sends the most visits to our site. To see cities, just click "City" in the "Viewing:" list immediately below the map. Once you're on the cities view, you can try out another feature we rolled out recently -- a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together.

Enjoy the new features in your maps. We hope they speed you on your way to gaining actionable insights and metrics. Happy analysing!

P.S. Did you know you get map overlay in more places than just the Visitors > Demographics > Location report? Take a look at the tab on the Visitors > Technology > Mobile report

Posted by Eyal, Jerry, Yinnon, and Brian, Google Analytics Frontend Team

Custom Variables: Fairmont and Swissotel use-cases

Shane Cassells — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:08:00 +0000

The introduction of custom variables to Google Analytics opened up many possibilities in measurement for site owners. It allows you to extend the dimensions tracked by Google Analytics to include facets that are meaningful to your business. For example, wouldn’t you like to know how your logged in members behaved differently to your casual visitors? Or which categories of content your visitors are consuming?

Barbara Pezzi, Director of Analytics and Search Optimisation, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, has been kind enough to share her use-cases for the different types of custom variables. Head on over to the APAC Conversion Room blog to find out more about:

Visitor-level custom variables: Swissotel were able to segment their visitors based on membership levels, understand their preferences, and then target their marketing efforts accordingly.
Session-level custom variables: Fairmont measured which booking method (i.e. single vs multiple) was more popular on their booking engine; and were able to understand which method appealed to which types of customers.
Page-level custom variables: Swissotel used page-level custom variables to group pages according to the language of the content. With these groupings they were able to conveniently analyse the behaviour patterns and preferences of visitors according to the language of content consumed.

We would also love to hear how you use custom variables. If you have any tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments of Barbara’s articles.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Google Conversion Team

The Making of Google Analytics v5

Shane Cassells — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:04:00 +0000

What’s new about Analytics Intelligence?

Shane Cassells — Thu, 26 May 2011 10:28:00 +0000

With this flexible table overview, users can perform full-text search, event sort, as well as drilling into details of each event. For example, clicking on the “Details” for row 2 above,

In this detail view, users can explore the event further, add an annotation, or drill in by clicking on Go to Report, which allows users to jump to a full report related to the dimension of interest.

Additional improvements include the ability to create and edit custom alerts without leaving the Intelligence reports:

We’ve also made significant improvements to the quality of automatic alerts by filtering similar alerts and more comprehensive measurements of importance.

As we continue to improve the Intelligence reports, we hope to surface more actionable insights to you. If you have suggestions for our effort here, we greatly appreciate your comments.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

New Google Analytics – Overview Reports Overview

Shane Cassells — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:43:00 +0000

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

This week we’re going a bit meta with an overview of the new Overview reports in the new Google Analytics. Overview reports were part of the old version of Analytics, of course, but we’ve made some changes to help your analysis.

Anatomy of the Overview Report
Each overview report consists of three sections. There's a timeline graph, some aggregate metrics, and a set of reports.

What’s inside of each of these sections depends on which report you’re looking at. For example, the Visitor Overview shows a graph of visits and metrics like New vs. Returning visitors, while Content Overview shows metrics like pageviews and average time on page.
The Graph
We’ve made a few changes to the graphs in the new Google Analytics, and we’ll share them here. You can now make adjustments to the graphs you see in Google Analytics from the buttons on the top right of the graph:
Switch a graph between Line Chart and Motion Chart
Graph different metrics: Select from the dropdown or the scorecard

Compare two metrics: Graph an additional metric for comparison

Graph By: Change graph from between Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and even Hourly for some reports

Reports
The bottom section of an overview report lets you look through a subset of the reports available in that section. You can flip through these reports to see where you want to start your analysis. In the Traffic Sources Overview, we can start by looking at a report of Keywords.

From here we can go view the full report or look at another report, like Referral Sources:

Intelligence Overview
Google Analytics Intelligence automatically searches your website traffic to look for anomalies. When it finds something that's out of the ordinary it surfaces this as an alert. You can also setup your own alerts by defining custom alerts.
Now you can feel like the president of the principality of Analytica with your very own Intelligence Overview report.

The Intelligence Overview report shows you all of your automatic alerts (daily, weekly, and monthly) sorted by importance at a glance. From the Intelligence Overview, you can click on Details to see a graph of the alert and go directly into the GA report. You can also add or review an annotation right from the pop-up graph.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of Overview Reports. Please continue to send us feedback on the new Google Analytics. Stay tuned for next week’s installment in New Google Analytics series.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics User Conferences this week

Shane Cassells — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:39:00 +0000

There will be Google Analytics User Conferences on in Sweden, Denmark & the Netherlands over the coming days. Organised by our Google Analytics Certified Partners and sponsored by Google, please see the sites below if you'd like to attend.

Sweden, Stockholm - May 17th 2011
Partners: inuse | insights, Klikki, Guava
Event Site: http://analyticsconference.se

Denmark, Copenhagen - May 18th 2011
Partners: Guava, IIH Nordic, Valtech DK
Event Site: www.gabc.dk

Netherlands, Amsterdam - May 19th 2011
Partners: clickvalue, Netprofiler, Netsociety, OrangeValley, Traffic4U, Traffic Builders, Checkit, Tribal, Maxlead, bSeen
Event Site: http://www.gauc.nl

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report

Shane Cassells — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:41:00 +0000

Content: Which landing pages are slowest?
Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies?
Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

One effective use of the Site Speed report is to measure speed for your most critical pages. For example, you might learn that the target audience of your site is located in a geographic region that experiences slower page speed. Or, you might learn that certain pages on your site run slower in some browsers. In addition to the Site Speed report, we’ve created a custom report that you can use to help answer these questions: view the Site Speed custom report.

Setting up the Site Speed Report
By default, page speed measurement is turned off, so you’ll only see 0’s in the Site Speed report until you’ve enabled it. To start measuring site speed, you need to make a small change to your Analytics tracking code. We have detailed instructions in the Site Speed article in the Analytics Help Center. Once you’ve updated your tracking code, a small sample of pageviews will be used to calculate the page load time.

We’re excited to bring this important metric into Google Analytics as part of the new Google Analytics platform. Please continue to send us feedback on Site Speed and the rest of the new Google Analytics.

- Zhiheng Wang, Phil Mui
on behalf of the Google Analytics team and the Make the Web Faster team.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Part 2: Mobile Website Optimisation – How Effective Use of White Space Can Improve the Mobile Website Experience

Shane Cassells — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:03:00 +0000

This is the second post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions.

In Summary: Uncluttered mobile sites with minimal but meaningful information which is visible to users on the go is key to maximising conversions on mobile devices.

Mobile devices have small screens. The larger ones have about 640x960 pixel resolution (or 4in/10cm diameter). When you compare that with a desktop computer screen it’s not very big. So how do you ensure that a user on a small screen gets to see all of the things they would see on a desktop version of your site? You don’t. In this post we will be focusing on using white space as a means to making mobile websites feel intuitive and uncluttered.

Do Not Overcrowd the Screen: As covered in the last post on content prioritisation, a big part of mobile site building involves stripping out as much detail as possible. Mobile users are task oriented so they only need the details necessary to complete a task quickly. Speed is important and the way you present the information on your site will impact heavily on the speed with which a user can digest it. It might seem counter-intuitive when the screen is so small and you have so much to say but pushing lots of information and too many options at your users will push them away from a conversion. Prioritised content combined with effective use of white space leads to a better mobile experience.

Banners, Pictures & Videos: Desktop sites are generally overburdened with banners, pictures & videos but it’s easier to get away with that when you have a big screen and a fast broadband connection. Real estate is precious on a mobile device so only use small pictures - but pictures are still recommended. You can make it possible for a user to click on pictures to increase the size but it should be a user choice. Banners should be kept to an absolute minimum or even removed altogether. If you are using a banner it should only be a conversion reinforcement banner such as highlighting a delivery or returns policy. You can also use banner advertisements if that is the way you monetise your site. Videos can contribute effectively to a conversion, particularly a brand oriented one. However, where a video is not necessary and is even distracting, it should not be included. If you’re unsure, test it with a tool like Google Website Optimiser to see what impact video has for your mobile site.

Bullet Points: Desktop users generally will not read lots of text. Mobile users are even less likely to. All paragraphs of text should be removed and replaced with clear concise bullet points. Mobile user’s often read at arms length so the text should also be large enough and clear enough to facilitate this. A great way of doing so is to ensure that there’s not a lot to read. Where bands of text are unavoidable, it should be possible for users to hide or expand the text or to get more information on tabs. Use headlines that summarise the text that follows so a user can still convert without reading everything.

The m.wikipedia.org. site allows users to choose what text they want to see

White Space is Light Space: Dark backgrounds are a bad experience even on a desktop but on a mobile site they can be devastating to conversions. Mobile users are on the go and when they are outside in daylight situations background colour is very important. Try using a projector in a bright room with the curtains drawn and the light splashing onto the screen. If your slides have a dark background you won’t see them. If they have a white background with black text, it won’t be a problem. That is the same experience on a macro level as a user trying to use a website with a dark background on a mobile device outside. It might look cool when you’re building it in a lab, but it’s not a great experience. Users can increase the brightness of their display but that will place greater strain on the battery.

White space (also called negative space) doesn’t have to be white but it should be pale so that high contrast text and images placed against it are visible even in poor light. Using a picture as a background is also not recommended. Again, remember that users are often on the go and reading at a distance.

White space also helps when building sites to fit multiple devices of varying resolutions. The more white space, the less likely your site will look cramped or stretched on different devices. Of course, it’s also a good idea to design your site with multiple resolutions in mind.

This site uses a light background and uncluttered space to great effect.

To summarise, 4 points to keep in mind when creating a layout for your mobile site:

Mobile sites should not be cluttered
Remove unnecessary elements which take up space and data
Use bullet points instead of paragraphs for text
Have a light background to your site

Mobile Website Testing Tip: When you are building your mobile site, test it in different light levels to best replicate the user experience.

The next post will be looking at how big buttons can make mobile website conversion a whole lot easier. If you have feedback, please leave a comment.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Custom Reports in the new Google Analytics

Shane Cassells — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:35:00 +0000

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. We’ll be discussing how to use updated custom reports.

Every website is different, yet we focus much of our time on the standard reports in our web analytics tools. Custom reports have been an integral part of Google Analytics since 2008. With the new platform, we took a close look at how we could improve the custom reports to make them more usable and powerful.

The Custom Reports tab
For starters, custom reports now live under their own tab, which you can find next to My Site in the main menu bar.

The overview shows a list of all the custom reports available for your profile. You can also view, edit, or share a custom report, and, of course, you can also build a new custom report.

Building a custom report
As with the previous version of Google Analytics, you build a custom report by picking the metrics and dimensions you want. For the new platform, we’ve made some enhancements. Let’s walk through the creation of a custom report for measuring the effectiveness of content on this blog (borrowing from one of Avinash’s awesome custom reports).

Getting the right data
We saw that custom reports were most useful when focused on subset of data. For my blog report, I've decided that I want to only focus on referral traffic. In the old version, I’d have to combine an advanced segment with my custom report to do this analysis. With the new platform, we’ve made it possible to make the filter part of your custom report.

You can add multiple filters to the same report, and filter on dimensions other than those you’ve chosen to use in the report. Best of all, these filters are saved as part of your custom report. As soon as you (or your boss) opens the report, you’re looking at the data you need.

Organising your report
Like the current version, you can build multiple report tabs into your custom report. This is helpful to organise your report, or build different views for people across your organisation. In the new Google Analytics, you’re no longer restricted to using the same dimensions for each report tab, which allows you to truly get all of the data you care about in one custom report. There are two types of report tabs available: Flat Table and Explorer tabs.

Explorer report tabs are similar to the report view that is used across Analytics. They allow you to drill down into data, as well as add a secondary dimension. When creating an Explorer tab, you can also create Metric Groups, which help further organise your report for easier analysis. For our example, I've built out an Explorer tab focused on content quality metrics with a drill down into where the traffic came from.

Flat Table report tabs allow you to look at two dimensions side by side, meaning you don’t have to click to drill down into your data. We’ve created this report view to make it easier to export the information you care about, email it to a colleague, or simply print it out. For the example report, I have a Flat Table tab focused on where the traffic came from and the quality of that traffic.

And here's the finished report:

Sharing your custom reports
Once you've finished creating your report, you might want to share it with your team. One of the most widely used features of Custom Reports has been sharing, which allows you to share a link to your custom report configuration with others.

Like the current version, sharing a custom report in the new Google Analytics only shares the structure of the report, not the data from your account. There is one difference to keep in mind, when you share a custom report in the new version, the link will always reflect the state of the report when you first created the link. So, if you create a report, share it with your colleagues, and then make further changes, the link you shared will still point to the first version of the report. You can share your reports from the Custom Reports overview. Just click the share link:

And here’s a link to the custom report example we’ve referenced throughout this post:http://goo.gl/McSBl.

Finding a home for your old custom reports
Did you spend a lot of time creating the perfect custom report in the old version? Not to fear: we’ve created a migration tool to help you migrate your reports from the old version to the new Google Analytics. From the Custom Reports Overview, you’ll see a section called Migrate Custom Reports. It will let you know if you have reports to be migrated. Keep in mind that migration only works one way. Once you move your reports over to the new version, you won’t be able to use them in the old version.

Using standard reports to analyse your website can only take you so far, which is why we’ve put so much effort in making custom reports more powerful and easier for Google Analytics v5. Please continue to give us your feedback on the new Google Analytics. Happy analysing!

Posted by Kate Cushing, Google Analytics team

New Analytics Help Center

Shane Cassells — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:34:00 +0000

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to even more users soon. Sign up for early access. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

We recently announced the new version of Google Analytics. If you’re one of the early users, you may have noticed that there is also a new help center dedicated to this latest version. You can get to the new help center via the Help links that appear throughout the user interface. But, regardless of whether you’re already using the new version, you’ll find the new help center at http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/.

In addition to addressing features for the new version (see “What’s New”), we’ve redesigned the Help Center completely. For this launch, we have:

organized the help center into five topics, each addressing a key usage need,
improved the organization of all topics, and
reduced content duplication.

You can compare our new Help Center to the older version at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. Please post a comment to let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Also, look for a survey in a few weeks. We’ll be actively gathering your input on this Help Center in preparation for the next round of improvements.

Patricia Boswell, on behalf of the Analytics Education Team.

The New Google Analytics: Events Goals

Shane Cassells — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:59:00 +0000

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to even more users soon. Sign up for early access. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

Real Analytics ninjas use goals. Google Analytics has always had URL Goals (when a visitor reaches a specific page). In 2009, we added Engagement Goals to track success metrics around visit depth and time on site. With the new version of Google Analytics, we’ve added one more: Event Goals. This was one of our most requested features, and it gives you even more reason to use event tracking.

A brief intro to Event Tracking
You can use Event Tracking in Google Analytics to track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews. It's a great fit for tracking things like:

Downloads of a PDF or other file
Interaction with dynamic or AJAX sites
Interaction with Adobe Flash objects, embedded videos, and other media
Number of errors users get when attempting to checkout
How long a video was watched on your site

Events are defined using a set of Categories, Actions, Labels, and Values. Here’s how you might set up event tracking for tracking downloads of whitepapers and presentations.

These interactions all have potential business impact, but until now you couldn’t track them as goals in Google Analytics. Let’s look at three ways you might use Event Goals on your site.

Tracking Downloads
Suppose you run a business to business (B2B) website and offer whitepapers (as a PDF download) in order to attract leads. You drive traffic to this page through advertising. You can track the number of downloads using event tracking. For example, we can use the category to designate the click was of type “download”. We can use the action to designate the download was a “whitepaper” and we can use the label to identify the actual whitepaper that was downloaded.

With the new Google Analytics, configuring this as a goal is easy. We simply match any event with the category of “download” and the action of “whitepaper”. Finally we set the goal value as 20.

Tracking Time Spent
Event tracking is powerful because you can track values, along with the category, action, and label. Going back to our B2B website, suppose you have a embedded product demo video on your page. With a little JavaScript, you can track the time a user spends watching the video and send that number back to Google Analytics as an event value.

With Event Goals, you can now set up a goal based on this value. In this example, we’ve configured a goal when a user spends over 180 seconds watching the product demo.

Using The Event Value As The Conversion Value
Traditionally, the only way to set goal values was when creating the goal in Google Analytics, or from the tracking code using ecommerce tracking. With Event Goals, you have another option: using the event value as the goal value.

Again putting yourself in the shoes of a B2B website owner, you realize not all your whitepapers bring in the same quality of lead. The lead value associated with downloading a certain whitepaper is $20, but the lead value from a different whitepaper is $35. Rather than creating a separate goal for each, you can pass the values 20 and 35 as the Event Value, and then set up the goal to use the actual Event Value:

Now when a goal is matched, the value passed in the event will be used as the goal value.

These are just a few examples of how you can take advantage of Event Goals in the new Google Analytics. You can read more on how to implement Event Tracking on Google Code, and how to set up goals in the new Analytics. We’re constantly giving more of you access to the new version. If you don’t have the new version yet, you can sign up for earlier access.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics team

The New Google Analytics: Quick insights with Plot Rows

Shane Cassells — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:49:00 +0000

This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a small number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to more users soon. Sign up for early access.

The graph on top of most Google Analytics reports is designed to give you a quick overview of your site’s performance over time. From the graph it’s easy to spot trends and understand how your traffic has changed over time. One request we heard was the ability to quickly focus the graph on a particular row of data. While you could do this with a drill-down report or using an advanced segment, we saw this as an opportunity to provide an easy way to do quick comparisons in the new Google Analytics.

Say for example you’re examining your site’s traffic by traffic source. You can see there are peaks and valleys in the traffic, but if you want a sense of the major contributors, you need to dig into the table.

With Plot Rows, you can graph any two rows alongside the overview. You can then easily determine how much a row contributes to the whole. Or you can compare two lines against each other to look for comparison trends.

To use Plot Rows, just tick any one or two checkboxes next to the rows you want to plot, then at the bottom of the table, hits the Plot Rows button.

Remember, that some reports like New vs. Returning default to a Pie Chart view. This doesn’t mean you can’t use Plot Rows, just switch the view to Data, and you’re good to go.

Here’s a quick video showing this in action:

Usage Tips
When looking at continuous metrics, like Visits, Plot Rows is most revealing when exploring the rows of similar scale, for example to see how they contribute to the whole and change over time. When looking at rows at different scales the graph will be more informative when using percentage metrics like Bounce Rate.

In this example, we’re looking at organic search traffic driven to the Google Store from Google and Bing. One would not expect that Bing users are actively looking to buy Google merchandise (like this awesome t-shirt), so the number of visits is understandably low. Since the traffic from Bing is relatively low, the graph doesn’t share much we didn’t already know from the table.

In new version of Analytics you can quickly graph any of the metrics in the scorecard (the bar on top of the graph) by clicking on the metric in the scorecard. Looking at Bounce Rate, we can see that over time the Bounce Rate from Google search (orange) has dropped, which has reduced the overall Bounce Rate of the site (blue), while the Bounce Rate from Bing (green) has more or less stayed constant.

You can use Plot Rows in just about any report when viewed from the Table View. Let us know if you find a place you want this functionality that doesn’t already have it. Also, we’re planning to give a bunch more of you access to the new version this week. Be on the look out!

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Using information architecture techniques to improve long term conversion rates

Shane Cassells — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:22:00 +0000

Information architecture on the web involves organising and presenting information in a way that is easy for the visitor navigate, find and understand. Information architecture is to your website what blueprints are for a building. It forms the basis onto which everything else can be built.

Well constructed, easy-to-use websites lead to greater visitor satisfaction, meaning better conversion rates and more returning customers.

In this first post of the series on information architecture I wanted to take a quick look at some techniques you can use to improve the way your content is categorised, labelled and organised.

Visitors on your site use a variety of navigation aids to find content on your site and we’ll discuss some of these in later articles. For now though lets assume we have a typical hierarchy structure on our website.

Categories and labelling

So how many categories does your website have? Or perhaps a better question: is your categorisation easy to understand or what visitors expect?

Cognitive load theory suggests that people may have difficulty storing more than “7 information chunks” in their working memory at any given time. There have been many research papers written on the topic, but the key take away is that you should gradually introduce your users to new information and not overwhelm them with too much choice especially in the beginning.

This particular cycling website has over 2000 categories listed down the left hand navigation pane (indicated by the red arrow). This makes finding products on their website extremely difficult because it’s extremely hard to recall this many items in your working memory.

What about the three click rule? The three click rule suggests that visitors should be able to find what they want in 3 clicks of the landing page, but the number is not what’s important. What is more important is that each click brings the visitor closer to their goal.

Various studies including this one conducted by Ed Chi at Xerox PARC show that visitors on a website navigate via an information scent. Much like animals stalk their prey based on scent, websites with strong information scents are good at guiding visitors to content. This is because visitors hunt for information based on clues. Once the information scent is lost, visitors will often use the browser back button to return to a page where the information scent is strong again.

The caveat is that if visitors have to repeat this process often, the information scent dries up causing visitors to leave your website altogether. Think of this as your “give up rate” metric.

Often the best clue a visitor has moving through your website in terms of information scent is navigation headings (breadcrumbs), along with the primary and secondary navigation. Which are often based on your underlying category structure.

Take the following category structure of a website. What happens if I’m looking for an MP3 player for my car? Do I look under Car Audio or MP3’s? Or what if I need new brakes for my car, do I look under Brakes or Discs? And clothing for a 2 year old child? Do I look under Children or Baby?

Too many specific categories can be confusing. Especially on smaller sites with less content. They can often lead to the information scent going cold causing the visitor to back pedal through the site and sometimes “give up”.

Guessing that there is a problem, we might decide to simplify our sites navigation and make our categories more broad like so:

On a large website however with over 100,000 products for sale this might not be enough categories and trying to cram too much content or products into a particular category could end up confusing visitors.

So how do I know if my site is difficult to navigate for visitors?

Google Analytics

You can view your content reports to get an idea of what areas of your site may not be meeting visitor expectations. Starting simple you can look at bounce rate, exit rate and top exit pages.

Top exit pages report may show you where the information scent went bad for visitors to your site. Whilst bounce rate may show that visitors arriving at a specific page had certain expectations that the site didn’t meet.

The Content Drilldown report will show you what sections (depending on your URL structure) of your site are performing like and you may find specific categories on your site are doing worse than others.

If you suspect certain pages are not meeting visitor expectations or visitors are not finding the pages you expect them to you may want to take a closer look at the navigation summary report.

This will show you what pages the visitor was previously on and what pages they most frequently view afterwards. Does this match what you would expect?

In Page Analytics reports can give you a visual view of which links or sections get the most clicks from a particular page.

Site Search reports can show you terms with a high % Search Exit rate and % Search Refinement rates. These can be useful for getting an insight into the visitors mind in terms of their vocabulary and intent. In particular take note of terms that produce 0 useful results.

Usability Studies

You may find that Google Analytics can show you what happened, but perhaps not why it happened. To learn more about your visitors sometimes you have to observe them. The best way is user testing and it’s easier than you think, you can start with just 3 or 4 participants.

Just ask Steve Krug: author of Don’t Make Me Think who has provided the User Testing chapters in PDF format on his website for you.

A simple task for your users may be to find a particular product or page on your website without using site search or external search tools like Google. Instead ask them to navigate through your site, take note of the categories they look in and perhaps the number of times they have to backtrack (i.e use the back button) before finding the content or product.

You can conduct this same test before and after your category structure improvements to see if the success rate has improved.

Surveys

Another way of soliciting feedback is via surveys. This is a good opportunity to seek advice on the organisation of your website. Even frequent users of your site may expect to find content in certain sections of your site or spend several minutes finding content they know exists but can’t recall what it’s categorised under.

Not sure what to ask your visitors? How about The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever?

There are loads of Free Survey Tools you can use to gather feedback.

How can I better categorise my content and find these potential problems?

Card sorting is 1 such technique, the idea is relatively simple, create cards that represent the content of your website then ask a group of participants to arrange that content into the most logical groupings.

Use the findings and analysis to determine the best structure for your website and its content. An interesting finding may be that a particular piece of content belongs in more than 1 category.

When it comes to card sorting you have 2 options:

Open card sort: This is where you do not define the category names, instead you present a group of cards (these cards represent your content) and you ask participants to group them using their own choice of category names.

An open card sort can be useful if you have never done a card sort before because you may find the way visitors on your site categorise content and the vocabulary they use is completely different to your existing websites category structure.

Closed card sort: This is where you have your top level categories already defined and ask your participants to place the content into the categories that they feel is best suited.

This is useful when you are adding more information to your site and have already established a category structure that works well for your audience.

How a card sort looks using a paper based approach. You will want to collect the results and enter them into a spreadsheet at some stage. So you may wish to use a program to help automate this for you.

Xsort is a free card sorting utility for Mac OSX. This view shows a completed card sort where the user has created the category boxes (in blue) and placed the cards (off-white-colour) into categories. Using a PC based program saves you having to collect the results manually. You can also export results to your favorite spreadsheet program for further analysis.

When conducting your card sort exercise take note of the following:

How did the majority of people group the content?
Did people create similar categories or groups of content?
Did people agree / disagree with suggested categories (in a closed card sort)?
Was there anything that people couldn’t categorise properly?
Did participants feel that content belonged in more than 1 category?

Analysing the results

This was an open card sort. So the dendogram (image above) shows the most common groupings.

We can see that certain movies above have been grouped together and from here we may decide that a logical way to group these items is by genre such as Sci Fi, Drama, Action, Nostalgic, Thriller.

Summary:

If you think that card sorting is part science, part art and a bit of reading between the lines, you would be right. There is no absolute 1 way approach. The best results are obtained by doing research. Speaking with a variety of different stake holders such as customers, sales people and support teams and asking the right questions. You also may have to conduct more than 1 card sort refining it as you go to get your final category structure.

No structure will be perfect, your overall aim however is to improve your findability rate so that the majority of visitors to your site can find what they are looking for without too much grief.

So after reading this article hopefully you will:

Understand the importance of a category structure that is easy to navigate
Know how to use Web Analytics to help identify potential problems
Be introduced to the concepts of user testing and user surveys - because web analytics can’t tell you everything.
Understand the benefits of card sorting when creating a traditional hierarchy structure
Be more confident should you wish to employ outside help from usability experts

In this article we have assumed that information is categorised using a traditional hierarchy approach. However on the web we have far more flexibility in the way we can organise information (tagging, related items, facets) than in the real world (think of a library or video store).

We’ll explore these different ideas and concepts in the next parts of this series along with other usability aids to help make your website more user friendly, allowing you to convert more visitors into customers.

Posted By Gavin Doolan, Google Analytics Team

The New Google Analytics: Dashboards

Shane Cassells — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:47:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a small number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to more users soon. Sign up for early access.

Today, we would like to introduce you to the new dashboards that is available in the new version of Google Analytics announced last week.

Custom Dashboards
For most Google Analytics users, the dashboard is the first thing you see when viewing your reports. Dashboards in the new version of Google Analytics have been redesigned to be completely widget-based and highly customisable. There are four types of widgets: Metric, Pie Chart, Timeline, and Table. This gives you the ability to choose the visualisation that best suits the data you want in your dashboard. The Dashboard uses a three-column layout, and you can customise the layout by dragging and dropping the widgets as you’d like.

Metric: Shows the value of a metric and a sparkline of that metric over the selected time period
Pie Chart: Best suited for displaying breakdowns of a metric by a certain dimension. E.g., Visits by Browser Type.
Timeline: A graph of any metric over time. You can also compare two metrics in the same graph.
Table: Think of this as a mini-custom report. You can show one dimension with two metrics and up to 10 rows of data in a table.

Multiple Dashboards
A common request we heard from you all is that one dashboard isn’t enough. You told us that wanted the ability to customise multiple dashboards for different analyses. Thanks to the new Google Analytics platform, we’re happy to give you the power to create multiple custom dashboards, up to 20 per profile. You might start with an overall “Company KPIs” Dashboard that includes the most important performance indicators for your company, then create an “SEO” Dashboard for your search engine optimisation efforts, and a “Content” Dashboard that centers around the content of your website. We’d love to hear what you do with the other 17 slots.

Going Forward
The core functionality for the new dashboards is ready for you to use, but this isn’t everything we’ve planned for dashboards in the new version. Because we are so excited about the new Dashboard, we decided to make its core features available to you first. For starters, we still need to bring some of the features from the current dashboard over, such as the ability to share, email, and export a Dashboard. We are actively working on them (along with many other improvements), so please stay tuned.

We hope you will find the Dashboards in the new Analytics easy and fun to use. Happy Dashboarding!

Posted by Yi Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics team

Part 1: Mobile Website Optimisation – 5 Considerations when Prioritising Content

Shane Cassells — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:13:00 +0000

According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), the Western European mobile phone market grew 7.5% year on year to 50.7 million units in 3Q10. Shipments of smartphones increased to 19 million units, 109% higher than the previous year's third quarter, to represent 37% of total shipments. More and more users are moving to mobile devices capable of a full internet experience and so it is growing even more important than ever that mobile optimised websites be built to capture this growing market of users.

This is the first post in a series on optimising mobile websites for conversions. This post focuses on content prioritisation as a means to making mobile websites quick and easy to use.

In Summary: Mobile website content needs to be prioritised for multi-tasking users on the move. Everything that helps a user to convert quickly and easily should be included. Everything else is surplus to requirements.

To understand how we should think about the content to be placed on mobile handheld devices we must first think about how these devices are used. A key to this is in the very description we use - mobile. Mobile device users are on the move. They are usually in a hurry and are accessing the net at times which are convenient to them and often for short periods only.

Desktop websites need to be optimised for small screen hand-held devices

Mobile users are task oriented. Mobile is about fast access to information and services – whatever tasks can be completed by your service quickly and on the go will be the target features for mobile users. When choosing mobile website content, focus on features which are local, mobile and easy to complete. Take a look at your website analytics and use an advanced segment for mobile users to see how they have been using the desktop features on your site. This will give you an insight into the kinds of services mobile users will want to access most on your mobile site.

Mobile users seek speedy answers. Quick convenient conversions are important to mobile users and latency is not tolerated. If a site is taking a while to load, attention may quickly move to something else. Mobile optimised sites are stripped of extraneous content as well as most advertising, videos, pictures and banners - unless they are necessary for a conversion. Flash should be avoided. Data download and streaming speeds are much slower than most home/office broadband connections. By prioritising content and building for smaller screens, it is possible to make your website accessible to users quickly.

Mobile users are likely to search. With mobile devices there is little room for navigation bars and drop down menus. Mobile users are in a hurry so they will often search rather than navigate. The search box should be big and obvious, near the top of the page. Make the search box large enough that a user can easily tap it using their thumb. Results should be easily filtered.

Mobile users scroll through content. Users will still scan but they will do so from top to bottom, scrolling with their thumb to access more information. This is becoming a convention of mobile. If your site layout obviously follows this convention, users will not think twice about scrolling. As with a desktop site, prioritise your content so that the most important features are seen first. It is also a good idea to put important information or buttons at the bottom of a page, particularly when the page is very long. Many mobile users will scroll really quickly to the bottom of a page if they don’t find what they need at the top.

Mobile users are online and offline. If you have a bricks and mortar store, mobile users may access their handsets to improve their offline experience. Store location, directions, product availability, product reservation and creating shopping lists are all things that the mobile user will need to be able to access easily on your site.

Source: eMarketer.com

To summarise, 5 points to keep in mind when prioritising content for mobile:

Build for task oriented users
Make site navigation fast
Have a visible search box
Layout content for scrolling
Build for online/offline experience

The next post will be looking at how to use white space to improve the experience for users of a mobile website. If you have feedback, please leave a comment.

Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

Looking towards the future of Google Analytics

Shane Cassells — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:35:00 +0000

Today at the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco, we shared a look at a new version of Google Analytics. We’ve also reached out to a small group of Analytics users to participate in the testing. If you’re part of this group you’ll see a link to the new version in your Analytics account. We’re starting small, and we’ll gradually roll the new version out to everyone.

Our goals for the new version are to make it easier and faster to get to the data you want and to
enhance the Google Analytics platform to bring you major new functionality. Many of the changes in the new version are the result of your feedback. For example, you can now view multiple advanced segments without needing to also use All Visits. You’ll find some of the other most requested features like multiple dashboards in the new version as well.

We’ll be sharing many more details about what’s new along the way with a new series on the blog focused exclusively on the new Analytics. In the meantime, if you want to be considered for the test, visit the beta sign-up page. Using the new version won’t change how Google Analytics reports your website traffic, and you can continue to use the current version while testing the new Analytics.

As you start using the new Google Analytics, you should also check out the updated Google Analytics Help Center. We’ve also set up a new category in the Help Forum where you can ask questions and discuss the new version.

This release wouldn’t have been possible without your feedback. Please continue to send us your feedback as you start using the new interface.

Happy analysing!

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

How Conversion Rate Experts helped Sunshine.co.uk double their revenue

Shane Cassells — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:10:00 +0000

Sometimes really simple things can have a big impact on conversion rates. Conversion Rate Experts, one of our Website Optimiser Certified Partners, told us how they recently almost doubled sunshine.co.uk’s revenue, an increase of £14 million year-on-year, through website optimisation. You can read all about how they did it on their website. Regardless of which industry you work in, you can learn a lot from following their process.

Knowing What To Test
What I particularly like about this case study is that it focuses on the importance of getting all the right data together before you start testing. Conversion rate optimisation is about more than testing – it is really important that we are testing the right things. Conversion Rate Experts identified what to test by surveying website visitors, usability testing and using Google Analytics.

Surveying your clients or visitors and doing usability testing regularly gives you an idea about what they want. Remember that to get the most out of Google Analytics you need to know what you want.

Of course, no analytics package will be of use to you unless you have first identified what you want your site to do and decided on key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure how successful you have been. For a more detailed explanation of what you should be thinking about, see this blog post from our analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.

Always Be Testing
Recognising the importance of split-testing regularly when working on a website is key to the success of any conversion rate optimisation. It’s not easy to double the conversion rate of a site, particularly in the case of sunshine.co.uk, when conversions throughout the entire market are down. They did very well to have a 60% success rate from their A/B testing. Not all of your tests will lead to site improvements but don’t stop testing if you aren’t seeing immediate returns. Reassess what your hypotheses are - and if you need help, reach out to a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

Key Take-Aways
Here are some of the things we took from this case study:

Addressing User Concerns
Regular readers of the Conversion Room Blog will have seen a post I published back in October about the importance of speaking to the sales teams/users, finding out what the most frequently asked questions are and then answering them immediately to avoid confusion and loss of conversions. Just clarifying what made up the price details on the sunshine.co.uk site resulted in a 19% increase in conversions.

Finding the Positives
Even when you have a roadblock for your customers that you don’t have the means to change, you can still change their perception of it. For example, you may have a business that doesn’t take credit cards because the additional cost makes your prices uncompetitive. Letting your visitors know why you don’t take credit cards may help retain visitors who might have left without knowing that.

Growing Your Business
With the increase in revenue that conversion rate optimization brings for your site, don’t sit back. Continue to test improvements to your site and also reinvest the improved ROI in growing your user base. As a result of the lower cost per acquisition that comes with conversion rate improvements, you will be able to afford a greater investment in PPC advertising and affiliate programs, bringing more visitors to turn into customers.

Please do read the whole case study on the Conversion Rate Experts site as well as a Q&A they did with the team at sunshine.co.uk. Hopefully you’ll learn something that you can use to improve your own business. As sunshine.co.uk have learned, it’s well worth it.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team

How Conversion Rate Experts helped Sunshine.co.uk double their revenue

Shane Cassells — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:10:00 +0000

Consumers prefer to provide personal details at the end of the booking process on TUIfly.com

Alan Wrafter — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:00:00 +0000

This post was first published in German on the the German Conversionroom blog

The air travel portal TUIfly.com is part of TUI, the world's largest tourism group. On TUIfly.com travellers can book flights to around 170 destinations in 42 countries. These include popular holiday destinations around the Mediterranean sea as well as city destinations. TUIfly.com offers flights from more than 10 airlines, including their own fleet. Conceptually and technically the TUIfly.com website is being taken care of by GCP SinnerSchrader.

In the beginning of 2009, a newly designed site was launched which is now continuously being optimized based on the wishes and behavior of visitors. The basis for this optimization is Web Analytics data and extensive A / B and multivariate testing on the site. The Web Analytics Team of SinnerSchrader leads this process of continuous improvement.

Requiring Personal details at the beginning of a booking process leads to higher exit rates
In the flight booking process, TUIfly.com offers the consumer the option to reserve seats and book extras such a specific menu or additional luggage. The selection of seats and extras and assigning these to the person(s) traveling should be as easy as possible, so the names of the passengers are required at the beginning of the booking. The visitor can then assign the seats and extras to each passenger.

An analysis of the booking process based on Web Analytics data showed that a considerable percentage of consumers abandoned the booking process early in the process when they were asked to provide passenger details. Based on this data driven insight, an A/B test was designed to reduce the percentage of consumers abandoning the checkout at this point and increase the conversion rate of TUIfly.com

A / B test
To find a better way of combining the entry of personal details with the selection of seats and booking extras the following A/B test was set up:

In variation A (the original) the names of passengers were required before selecting seats and booking extras
In variation B, representative names (first passenger, second passenger, ...) were used - personal details including the names of the persons traveling were not required until the end of the booking process.

During a four week testing period, visitors to the site saw one or other of these variations when going into the booking process.

Variation A

Variation B

Variation B reduces the exit rate by 25%
After four weeks, the test had delivered a conclusive result: Variation B showed a 25% lower exit rate than variation A (the original). The conversion rate (the percentage of consumers booking a flight) increased by a factor 1.01 (i.e 1%) Based on these results, variation B was implemented and is now live on TUIfly.com. Although variation A, where seats and extras are assigned to named travelers, seems to make more sense from a usability perspective the test result shows that consumers are more likely to complete a booking when personal details are not required until the end of the booking process.

What should you do next?
Important in optimizing a website (in addition to qualitative usability improvements) is carrying out a quantitative test. By simply making changes based on usability considerations, you might overlook implications that your changes have for other parts of your website as well as for the main goal(s) of your site. Run A/B or Multivariate tests with a tool like Google Website Optimizer to verify that your site improvement hypotheses really work.

SinnerSchrader is part of the Google Conversion Professional (GCP) network in Germany. If you are based in Germany, you can learn more about this program and find an expert that can help your online presence to maximize profitability. If you are based outside of Germany, there is a network of Google Analytics Certified Partners and Website Optimizer Certified Partners that can support your efforts to maximise the ROI of your website

Posted by Jos Meijerhof, Google Conversion Team and Alexander Czernay, Head of Web Analytics at SinnerSchrader

Consumers prefer to provide personal details at the end of the booking process on TUIfly.com

Alan Wrafter — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:00:00 +0000

In variation A (the original) the names of passengers were required before selecting seats and booking extras
In variation B, representative names (first passenger, second passenger, ...) were used - personal details including the names of the persons traveling were not required until the end of the booking process.

Shoes of Prey – Using Custom Reports to identify influential pages

Alan Wrafter — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:48:00 +0000

This post was first published on the Asia-Pacific Conversionroom blog

Michael Fox is a co-founder of Shoes of Prey, an online retail store that allows you to design women's shoes online, which are then handmade and shipped to you. Michael blogs about running Shoes of Prey at the business blog www.22michaels.com. - Ed.

Like most online retailers, we’re always looking for ways to turn our website visitors into customers. We use Google Analytics to monitor the performance of our website and our online marketing and to understand how to make our website even more appealing to potential customers.

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our website, we recently asked ourselves: which pages on our site are most influential to our customers’ purchase decisions? For example, if someone visits our testimonials page, does that make them more likely to make a purchase? How about watching the videos on our leather page, visiting our gallery, or arriving on our small shoes or wedding shoes landing pages? We knew the answers to these questions would help us maximise the number of purchases from our website.

Custom reports
To start answering these questions, we created a Custom Report in Google Analytics to review the “Highest Converting Pages” on our website. You can make a copy of our custom report setup here and use it with your own site data.

This report shows us three key data points:

Pages that people visited (Page column)
The number of views each page received (Pageviews column)
How many sales (ie goal completions) were generated in that same visit session after visiting one or more of those pages (Total Goal Completions column)

Analysing the data
We then divided Total Goal Completions by Pageviews (on a separate spreadsheet) to discover what percentage of people who visit a particular page end up making a purchase. We assumed that the higher the percentage, the more valuable that page for turning visitors into customers. We could then promote the content on those pages more across our website.

We kept in mind a few circumstances that could impact this data. For example, people visiting our shopping cart or logging into our members area will have a high conversion rate, so we filter those pages out. Customers looking to purchase may be more likely to visit our page about our returns policy. We also kept in mind that we were looking at the same visit session only. Often, customers make multiple research visits before they finally make a purchase. Therefore, we were conscious that there may be other pages that motivate purchases, but are not reflected in our custom report because they were viewed in another session.

After reviewing the data, we determined that our most influential pages were:

1. Leathers page

2. Returns policy page

3. Tab2 - the delivery tab on our product page

4. Customer testimonials page

Taking action from our insights
Knowing our most influential pages has helped us maximise the number of purchases we generate through our website. Once we reviewed the data, we took the following next steps:

We’re in the process of redesigning our shopping cart, and we’ll look at ways to incorporate this information within each step to reduce drop off and increase conversion rates. For example, we’ll provide information about our returns policy and deliveries within the shopping cart pages itself. This will reduce the need to click away to our FAQ page.
We’ll also consider making some of this information, especially our customer testimonials, more readily accessible on our home page and custom shoe designer.
We’ll include some of this information on key search engine marketing landing pages such as our gift certificate page. For example, we’ll incorporate customer testimonials in order to assure those purchasing our gift certificates that they are providing a gift that will be appreciated.
This will be good information to incorporate into discussions on our Facebook fan page and in videos on our YouTube channel.

We’re excited by the range of insights that Custom Reports provides us. It allows us to slice and dice our data within a single report rather than having to combine separate reports within a desktop spreadsheet. We would love to hear about the custom reports that you find useful for your online business.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

Shoes of Prey – Using Custom Reports to identify influential pages

Alan Wrafter — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:48:00 +0000

Pages that people visited (Page column)
The number of views each page received (Pageviews column)
How many sales (ie goal completions) were generated in that same visit session after visiting one or more of those pages (Total Goal Completions column)

1. Leathers page

2. Returns policy page

3. Tab2 - the delivery tab on our product page

4. Customer testimonials page

We’re in the process of redesigning our shopping cart, and we’ll look at ways to incorporate this information within each step to reduce drop off and increase conversion rates. For example, we’ll provide information about our returns policy and deliveries within the shopping cart pages itself. This will reduce the need to click away to our FAQ page.
We’ll also consider making some of this information, especially our customer testimonials, more readily accessible on our home page and custom shoe designer.
We’ll include some of this information on key search engine marketing landing pages such as our gift certificate page. For example, we’ll incorporate customer testimonials in order to assure those purchasing our gift certificates that they are providing a gift that will be appreciated.
This will be good information to incorporate into discussions on our Facebook fan page and in videos on our YouTube channel.

Learn how to set up Ecommerce reporting in Analytics at a live, online course

Alan Wrafter — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:32:00 +0000

This Wednesday, January 26th, we’ll be hosting a live, online course about Ecommerce in Google Analytics as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK).

During the course we’ll discuss how to set up Ecommerce tracking in your Analytics account and enable Ecommerce for your reports. We’ll also discuss implementation techniques such as tracking 3rd-party shopping carts and detail the best reports to use for in-depth analysis of your AdWords activity. This should help you assess your AdWords return on investment and give you more insight into how your advertising is performing in relation to online transactions and revenue generated on your site.

The course will be presented by Analytics specialists and is most suited to advertisers with websites which include the functionality to purchase goods or services. It will take place on Wednesday 26th January from 3pm - 4pm
GMT (7-8 am PST) and will include time for Q&A.

If you're interested, be sure to sign up now!

Posted By Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

Using Google Analytics and AdSense: Monetise your top exit pages

Alan Wrafter — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:22:00 +0000

Google Analytics does a great job of allowing you to analyse your web traffic through a very important metric: top exit pages. This metric, along with bounce rate and time on site, is valuable as it allows you to measure the impact of changes to your webpages. Did exit rate go up or down? You can choose to optimise pages with high exit rates to try to keep your visitors longer or help them convert, or -- if the page is a logical exit point, you can monetise outgoing traffic on high exit pages by using Google AdSense. (As you may know, Google Analytics and AdSense are integrated, similarly to Analytics and AdWords, so you can optimise your AdSense campaigns using data in Google Analytics.)

If you choose to monetise an exit page, take a look at this short real-world example.

SavetzPublishing.com, on its FreePrintable.net site, provide documents and templates for individuals and businesses, ranging from business forms and certificates, to bookmarks and almost any other document someone would want to print. With sixty-six sites focusing on different niches in printing, Savetz Publishing was looking for a way to optimize their ad placement without having a negative impact on their core users. As a solution, they decided to “find the pages with the highest exit rates and put AdSense on them," according to Kevin Savetz, the owner of Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable.

Kevin has been an Analytics user for as long as he can remember and he had an idea of where the bounce and exit rates would be highest. Kevin used Google Analytics to confirm his theory and placed AdSense ads on some of these pages. He quickly realised that this advertising did not have a significant negative impact on his site’s core users and on conversions. Instead, as he describes, these ads provide “a means of monetising traffic that would already be leaving. My users are still happy and getting relevant content.”

Savetz Publishing’s strategy highlights how sites can use AdSense to monetise traffic that is already exiting the site. AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Kevin put it, AdSense allowed him to “see a huge jump in revenue after targeting exit pages.”

And taking it one step further...As a Google Analytics user, you understand how visitors interact with your website. With this knowledge and the controls in AdSense, you can even structure your AdSense ads to appeal to advertisers who want to display their ads on your site. In turn, you will earn revenue by displaying more relevant and high quality ads.

Here are a couple suggestions to get started with AdSense on your site.

Try testing AdSense first on your top exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your relevant traffic, by referring to your top exit pages report.
If, like Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not turn your relevant traffic away, increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. You can use the additional revenue you earn from AdSense to help you generate more qualified traffic.

Learn more about AdSense and start by testing on your exit pages.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Nathan Deoms, Google AdSense Team

New Video: Use Google Analytics to track AdWords return on investment and optimise ads.

Alan Wrafter — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:43:00 +0000

Check out this short video to learn the importance of monitoring your AdWords return on investment by tracking sales/leads with Google Analytics. When you link AdWords and Analytics you’ll gain deeper insights that will allow you to optimise your ads and keywords and improve your return on investment.

This is the final video in the optimisation made easy video series. If you’d like to see additional tutorials to help you improve your AdWords account performance check out the AdWords Online Classroom. And for in depth videos on how to use Google Analytics check out the Google Analytics YouTube channel.

Posted By Sara Bonfioli, Google Analytics team

Successful Collaboration: Thomas Cook and TravelTainment increase conversion rate by 33% using A/B testing

Sara — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:52:00 +0000

Thomas Cook AG offers everything from holiday packages, last minute holidays and city trips to car rental and cruises via their website thomascook.de. The last minute and holiday package parts of the site are powered by the Internet Booking Engine of TravelTainment GmbH, which is part of the Amadeus Leisure Group.

Booking made easy: improving the last step in the booking process
Looking at the conversion funnel in their web analytics reports, Thomas Cook identified that a relatively large percentage of their visitors were reaching their booking page but were not completing a booking. They understood that improving this last step in the conversion process could dramatically increase their conversion rate and approached their partner TravelTainment to work together on optimizing this page. Their hypothesis was that a shorter and (visually) less complex booking page would lead to a higher percentage of visitors completing a booking.

The decision was made to run an A/B test in which the original page (A) was tested against an alternative (B). In the design of the alternative page Thomas Cook and TravelTainment focused on reducing the length of the page:

The layout of the booking form was improved

Before

After

The option to enter a voucher code was made expandable

Before

After

The (optional) car rental section was redesigned with less detail

Before

After

Payment option details were hidden and are only expanded when a payment option is selected

Before

After

The size of the call-to-action button at the bottom of the page was increased

Before

After

Improved booking page improves Conversion Rate by 33%
The changes listed above resulted in an alternative page that was around 40% shorter than the original. Over a period of almost 3 weeks half of the visitors to the booking page saw the original page (A), the other half saw the newly created alternative page (B). The alternative page had a 33% higher conversion rate than the original

What can you do?

Optimise your booking / checkout process to increase your conversion rate
To convert more visitors into buyers, regularly check your Web Analytics data to find out where a large percentage of visitors are leaving the conversion funnel of your website. Diagnose what the issues with the pages you have identified are, and start creating and testing possible alternatives. As a general guideline, try to keep an eye on the following when thinking about optimizing you booking / checkout pages:

Try to keep your booking or checkout process as easy as possible to complete
Offer your visitors the option to order as a guest without creating an account
Avoid visual distractions
Show the steps in the process
Show payment options early on in the process
Reduce the number of form fields (preferably, only include required fields)
Show examples when needed (for instance: date of birth (23.08.1976))
Clearly highlight errors when visitors forget to fill in a form field or use a wrong format
Offer assistance (show a phone number so visitors can contact you with questions)
Show visitors that their data will be secure
Try to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter after they completed the purchase / booking

As Thomas Cook and TravelTainment have shown in this case study, a simple A/B test with a tool like Google Website Optimiser can have a huge effect on your conversion rate!

(This case study was previously posted on the German Conversion Room blog)

Posted by Jos Meijerhof, Google Conversion Team

Free online course on how to define and analyse goals in Google Analytics

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:07:00 +0000

This Wednesday, November 24th, we’ll be hosting a free, live, online course all about using goals in Google Analytics. Goals are a way to measure conversions or successful actions on your website. This action could be a view of a specific page such as a 'thank you' page after a visitor has completed a form or made a purchase on your site.

In this live course you’ll learn how to set up goals and how they can be of benefit for you. We'll also clarify the difference between AdWords conversions and Google Analytics goal conversions. Finally, we'll discuss what reports the goals section offers and how these reports can help you make informed business decisions, particularly in relation to monitoring the performance of your AdWords ads.

This interactive course will be delivered by two members of the Google Analytics team and will take approximately 1 hour including time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday 24th November from 3pm - 4pm GMT and is suitable for anyone who’d like to learn more about goals in Google Analytics.

If you're interested make sure to sign up now!

Posted by Sara Fogarty, Google Analytics team.

New resource launch – Agency Help Center

Sara — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:27:00 +0000

For Conversion Blog readers who manage Analytics and AdWords on behalf of their clients, there is a new and interesting resource available, starting today; this resource, the AdWords Agency Help Center, is specifically designed to help agencies master the suite of Google media solutions and account management tasks across many accounts.

The Agency Help Center is currently available for the US and UK. Over the course of Q4 2010, we'll be localizing this resource across multiple languages, as well as continuing to incorporate new agency-centric resources into the site.

Posted by: Sara Bonfioli, Google Analytics Team

System Update: 2 November

Sara — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:29:00 +0000

On 2 November, Google Analytics experienced technical difficulties which lasted for a few hours. Users saw lower visits than expected during this time.

We deployed a fix as as soon as we were alerted and Analytics is now back to normal and data has been restored.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics team

Introducing Web Analytics TV

Sara — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:32:00 +0000

We’re excited to introduce a new series of YouTube videos we're calling "Web Analytics TV" starring Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski from the Google Analytics team. These videos are a fun and interactive source of information around anything Analytics related.You can ask questions, and vote for your favourite questions from other viewers, via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and then have our experts answer them in the next installment.

Check out the latest episode below, and visit the Google Analytics YouTube Channel to see all previous episodes.

In this episode we introduce our new ninja award program (and ninja chop to go with it). Going forward, we will pick our favourite question and award the person the Analysis Ninja of the Episode award! They will get an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Our first winner is Sushant from New York for his excellent question on tabbed browsing and it’s impact on session level data. Congrats and please keep the great questions coming (and win!).

Here is the list of last weeks questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:
(2:35) Combining (A AND B) OR (C AND D) in advanced segments
(4:03) Is there a way to tell how many people have opted out of being tracked by GA
(6:18) How does tracking Google Analytics and Urchin work together
(7:53) How is tabbed browsing tracked in Google Analytics?
(10:30) Do Website Optimizer A/B tests only track direct traffic?
(11:27) Are there any survey/voice of customer tools that integrate with GA?
(12:47) Does the async code execute faster than the traditional snippet?
(14:40) You can’t track users who have opted out of GA
(15:13) Why table report filters get removed when you navigate away from a page
(16:30) Why are there differences between Unique visitor reports? Which to use.
(18:00) Can Google Analytics track live chat forms?

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:
How you can automate requesting multiple advanced segments with the API to get AND precedence with Advanced Segments.
Kampyle - Google Analytics, Voice of Customer Integration
Live Person - Google Analytics, Integration

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, share your comments below. And, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Test Your Christmas Offers Early In The Season For Maximum ROI

Sara — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:39:00 +0000

Summary: Test early in November & use the increasing traffic to help you get through tests quickly, giving you insights that could help increase conversions throughout the busy Christmas period.

Conversion specialists understandably focus a lot of their attention on making it easier for visitors to use websites so that they can become customers. That should be a long term focus for all website owners. However, there are also short term, quick advantages to website testing. A tool like Google Website Optimiser can be used to test offers against one another and how those offers impact on conversions.

In the run up to Christmas, many retailers will be thinking about how they can get visitors to buy from their websites. One way of doing this is by introducing special offers to encourage visitors that they are in the best place to buy what they are looking for. But how do we know which offers are going to generate the best returns? We test them of course!

In 2009, Blume2000.de - a popular German florist - tested two offers in the early part of the Christmas season. It was a simple A/B test of two different Christmas offers. They tested whether people would prefer combining flowers with a CD of Christmas music (Version A) or a slightly more expensive offer of flowers with a box of chocolates (Version B) .

Despite being more expensive, their early testing showed that people were more interested in the chocolates combination (Version B). They saw a 6% rise in their conversions as a result of this simple test. You can see the case study (in German) here.

Start Testing Now

As you can see from the Insights for Search graph below, shoppers in the UK steadily grow their interest in Christmas Gifts from early October and by November a website owner will likely be seeing enough of an increase in traffic that they can make some quick tests and get conclusive feedback more quickly. This means your testing is finished before the really busy season starts.

So, what now? Prepare to test your Christmas offers while traffic is heating up but before the really busy season starts so you can make the most of the results!

You can learn how to run an A/B test using Google Website Optimiser here.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Analytics team

Using FAQs To Boost Conversions

Brian O' Sullivan — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:14:00 +0000

IN SUMMARY: It’s not what you say but how you say it. Answering simple questions can reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions. Test putting bullet point answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) on relevant pages of your website.

Let’s see how we can make our landing pages more relevant, reduce our bounce rate and increase conversions with just a couple of minutes work.

It is very common for us to visit websites which have paragraphs of text which rarely answer our most basic questions. Those questions are often answered on separate FAQ pages despite representing what a website owner is most frequently asked or expects to be asked by a prospective client.

So, why hide the answers?

Let’s look at an example:
Imagine I bake cakes for all occasions and I sell them online. Here is an example of my homepage with an introduction to who we are:

“We in the Cassells Family have been baking cakes for more than 25 years & at this stage we’ve gotten pretty good at it. Frederick Cassells started his first bakery in Bath back in 1985 and we haven’t looked back since.

Today we bake cakes for every and all occasions including Birthdays, Weddings, Christmas & many Corporate Events. In 2006, we moved our business online so that we could bring our delicious cakes to people throughout the UK. We have sold more than 1,000 cakes since then & our bakers have been doing all they can to meet your demands and your desires.

We hope that you enjoy our site and that we can be of service to you whatever your occasion. We offer a Freshness Guarantee on all of our cakes!”

The above is a pretty typical example of what we can expect to find upon landing on many websites. Lots of text but little substance. A user who has questions is unlikely to find the answers on that landing page. It’s reasonable to assume that many users are in a hurry to order a cake at the last minute and if they don’t find the answers to their questions quickly they probably won’t stick around.

Quick bullet point answers to FAQs on all relevant pages can help to reduce bounce rates and encourage visitors to become customers. It also helps to keep users in the conversion funnel instead of diverting them to pages from which they may just leave the site – like a separate FAQ page.

Let’s look at some of the typical FAQs I could expect as an online cake shop:

What occasions do you have cakes for?
Will my cakes still be fresh on delivery?
Do you deliver next day?
Do you do custom messages on cakes?
What are your shipping options?
Are your prices competitive?

These are just some of the more obvious questions that we could be answering. Now let us test a change to our homepage so that we address some of these issues:

What have I done?

While I still have an introduction, it’s much shorter and no less informative but it focuses my users on what I want them to do - how to order a cake.
By using big bullet points to summarise the answers to the most common questions, I have made my landing page about the user and why they should buy their cakes here.
I have made it easier for users to see why they should stay on my site and how to continue to the next step of my conversion funnel. And they can easily read it in 8 seconds or less.

So, what now?

Look through your site and see where you have too much text that your users probably won’t read. Test summarising the main points into concise bullet points.

Remind people of the answers to their most frequently asked questions the whole way through the conversion process.

Posted by Shane Cassells, Google Analytics team

New features available in AdWords Search Funnels reports

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:47:00 +0000

We’ve received very positive feedback from advertisers using Search Funnels - the new set of reports launched in Conversions. Advertisers are beginning to understand the path to conversion beyond just the last click and are now able to give credit to assisting keywords and ads that customers saw and/or clicked before converting. Each buying cycle is different and Search Funnels is eliminating the guesswork over the roles your keywords are playing in the path to conversion.

And here’s the first round of improvements, as requested by you.

Longer, customisable Conversion History Windows
A buyer may take longer to research and buy a vacation package rather than purchase movie tickets, for example. The funnel for various conversion types can differ greatly in regards to time to purchase and number of clicks to purchase. Now, you can adjust the time span, or Conversion History Window, to 30 days (default), 60 days or 90 days prior to a conversion to see the Search Funnel data leading to that conversion. With this feature, you can look further back into the history of your conversion paths.

Only show complete conversion paths
A percentage of surfers clear cookies from time to time, which can influence search funnels data by causing conversion paths to appear shorter by eliminating some upper funnel assists - impressions or clicks on your keywords - that may have occurred prior to cookie deletion. For instance, if a buyer clicks on one of your ads, then clears cookies, then goes on to click another one or your ads before making a purchase, the click prior to cookie deletion will not show up in your Search Funnels reports.

Now, you can sanitize the search funnel data you’re looking at by checking a box in your reports called “Only show complete conversion paths.” This optionwill filter out conversions that are from paths that are potentially biased by cookie deletion. As such, while you will end up analysing fewer conversions overall, you will be seeing truer, more complete conversion paths. Use this option to strengthen your overall funnel analysis and understand how buyers are finding your products.

These new features were created based on feedback we received from Search Funnels users and we hope you find them useful as you experiment with, analyse, and optimise your portfolio of keywords.

Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics team

Transform your AdWords account and win cool prizes – sign up by October 3rd

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:45:00 +0000

There’s still time to sign up for the the AdWords Train & Gain challenge which kicks off October 4th.

Once signed up, you’ll receive four weeks of free advice for improving your AdWords account. At the end of the four weeks, you’ll have learned lots of different ways to improve your account performance. If you complete all the steps and answer a short questionnaire to let us know what you learned, you could win an Android Phone. Or even a free consultation with an AdWords expert — in Sydney, Australia.

Check out the Train & Gain site for more details about the challenge, who’s eligible to compete and how we’re selecting winners. Full terms and conditions can be found here.

Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team

Get more from AdWords, win cool prizes

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 08:54:00 +0000

We’re so excited to announce the first AdWords Train & Gain challenge.

You’ve asked us for recommendations of things you should be doing with your AdWords account, so we’ve put together a series of simple steps to help you become more successful with your online advertising.

The AdWords Train & Gain challenge starts October 4th. You’re invited to participate. Simply sign up, and you’ll receive a weekly list of simple steps for improving your AdWords account. Then, sign in to your account twice a week, and take the suggested actions on how to better manage your account. At the end of four weeks, you’ll have learned a lot of different ways that you could improve your AdWords account. And if you completed all the steps and answered a short questionnaire to let us know what you learned, you could win an Android Phone. Or even a free consultation with an AdWords expert—in Sydney, Australia for you and a colleague.

Here’s a sneak peek of the fast and easy tips you’ll get:

Improve ad text: Stand out from your competition by writing ads that highlight your most competitive features: Low price, special services, free delivery, etc.
Use negative keywords: Specify which search terms you don’t want your ad to appear on. This will help you keep costs down because it prevents clicks from people looking for things you don’t offer.
Track sales and leads: See where your ad spend is working best and focus your money on the efforts that are generating business.

We hope you’ll sign up for AdWords Train & Gain, so you can see for yourself: it really doesn’t take a lot of time to make a big difference for your business. Learn more or see official rules for more details about the challenge, who’s eligible to compete and how we’re selecting winners. Terms and conditions can be found here.

Also, if you’re ever looking to learn more about your AdWords account, you’ll also want to check out our brand new AdWords Small Business Centre, which we announced last week. The site is a central AdWords learning hub for small and medium businesses. It allows visitors to explore beginner, intermediate or advanced AdWords topics and connects you to the latest AdWords news and best practices. All easy-to-find in one place.

Posted by Jo Hainsworth, Google AdWords team.

Spotlight on AdWords Search Funnels – Part 2

Brian O' Sullivan — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:21:00 +0000

Evelyn recently provided an introduction to the AdWords Search Funnels reports and I would like to expand on her post by looking at these new reports in more depth. I want to provide some insight into how the Search Funnels reports can help you to re-evaluate your keywords

What can I learn about my advertising from the Search Funnels reports?
A lot :) There’s a lot of information in the reports and you might wonder where to start. You can see information as diverse as how long it took from users first seeing an ad to converting to which keywords had the best ratio of providing assists to last click conversions. There’s a lot of insights to be gleaned. In this post I’ll focus on re-thinking how you attribute credit to your campaigns, ads and keywords.

Some thoughts on attribution
One of the great things about online advertising is it’s accountability. Using tools like Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics we can track whether visitors to our site go on to convert after clicking one of our ads. Traditionally if someone clicked our ad and then converted we recorded a conversion against that ad, ignoring any interaction that user had with our site or ads previously. This has been the de-facto way to evaluate our online advertising performance for quite a while now, but this sort of measurement doesn’t always tell the full story. If I was to buy a new DSLR camera for example I would be unlikely to do one search and buy immediately. The same is true for most of our purchases online and offline, typically there will be a decision process that will involve some research. I might start out searching on general reviews for DSLRs, then reviews for specific models and finally move on to searches for one specific model that I have decided to buy (I’m almost at this stage ;) ).

Studies have shown that users do anything between 5 to 6 searches and 9 to 12 site visits prior to converting for products like mobile phones, computers and clothing.*

The truth is, looking solely at conversion rates based on last click can lead to some flawed decision making. I previously wrote a post where I recommended looking at additional metrics like bounce rate in Google Analytics when evaluating keywords. A smart reader commented that showing assists for keywords further back in the purchase cycle and granting them a share of revenue would be the ideal way to deal with this scenario.

The obvious question then is; how much value or share of revenue do we attribute to our assisting keywords? There are different approaches you could take to answer this question. You might just decide to divide the credit equally between all keywords clicked on prior to conversion, you might value clicks that happened closer to conversion higher reasoning that there’s a ‘time-decay’ effect, you might give special credit to the first ‘introducer’ keyword and last ‘closer’ keyword or you may use some other model of your own making. I think it’s fair to say that it’s difficult to single out a clear one size fits all model. Also a ‘complete’ attribution solution would ideally focus on a variety of mediums/channels including offline so as I said I don’t think that perfect solution exists yet. However attempting to do multi-touch attribution is a vast improvement on evaluating keywords solely on how they perform in terms of last click.

The value of Search Funnels

The data that Search Funnels provides enables us to do multi-click attribution for our AdWords campaigns. It shows us which keywords were viewed and clicked on on Google search domains prior to conversion. It can also show us the sequence of those impressions/clicks.

One metric I really like in the search funnel reports is the ratio of assist clicks to last clicks as found in the ‘Assist Clicks & Impressions’ report. The reason I like this metric is because it removes the bias of volumes. If you have a thousand keywords and you only look at the first 10 rows in your report you sometimes forget about the other 990. In the remaining 990 lie keywords that you might have de-prioritised because of their low count of last click conversions but they might be creating awareness and help in setting up that final sale. The assist/last ratio highlights these keywords.

An Example: Twiddy.com

Let’s take a look at an example.

Twiddy.com rents holiday homes on the east coast of the US. If you take a look at the site I think you’ll agree that the places they rent out are quite nice! They’re generally big and lavish and not likely to be the sort of place you’ll rent without some consideration.

Diving in to their Search Funnel reports we order the Assist Clicks & Impressions report by the assist/last ratio. Here is the list of keywords we get:

The first few keywords on the list are very low volume but row 4 grabs our attention. It is outperforming the average ratio by quite a bit, 1.25 vs .84, and has enough volume to warrant a bit more exploration.

We now check out the Top Paths report:

We see the [outer banks vacation rentals] keyword appear in quite a lot of paths. The conversion rate had never looked particularly good for this keyword so we didn’t invest too heavily in it. But this keyword seems to be a lot more important than what we thought when we looked at last click. Its real value seems to be as a keyword that drives initial awareness of the site.

If we don’t have much time we could try and get this keyword more traffic by upping our bid. We could check in in a week or so to see the impact on the paths above. If it continues to provide the same level of assists and last clicks relative to ad clicks then we could consider retaining the increased bid.

If have some more time we should consider trying to do some more precise attribution. We could combine Search Funnels data with AdWords cost data to achieve this. Our goal here will be to redistribute conversion credit amongst our keyword portfolio to account for the benefits of assists. We will see keywords that are better at last click conversions get less credit and hence higher CPAs (cost per acquisition) and keywords that contribute more in terms of assists get more credit and lower CPAs. In the above example it’s likely we would end up with a lower CPA for [outer banks vacation rentals] at the expense of a higher CPA for the Twiddy brand keywords.

If we decided that distributing credit equally was the form of attribution that made most sense for our company we could simply divide the credit from conversions for paths in rows 3 & 4 in the top paths screenshot by two (as there are two keywords in these paths). To do this in bulk it will be easier to export all the data to a spreadsheet and apply some logic there to calculate the number of keywords in the path, divide the conversion value by that figure and then credit the keywords. We could use the same method for the other models I mentioned earlier, building in weights (percentage increase or decrease) if we deem some positions in the path to be of higher or lower value.

Nothing to tell and the value of testing

I talked about the bias of volumes earlier in the post. Lower volume, high value keywords can be discovered using the ratio of assists to last but this pre-supposes that we are bidding on keywords nearer the start of the buying cycle in the first place. If we have taken our last click obsession to the extreme we may have stopped bidding on more generic terms altogether.

When this happens Search Funnels can’t really tell us much and you should consider experimenting with some more general keywords. If adding generic keywords in to your account I would recommend doing so on a test basis. See this post for ideas on expanding your keyword list. Once they have enough volume (at least well into the double figures, ideally into treble) you can evaluate the number of last clicks, assists and where in the conversion path they fit. If you then find they provide real value, you can decide to retain these keywords.

Posted by Brian O’ Sullivan, Google Analytics Team.

*Source: comScore custom analysis- UK Population, 15+

Free live course about using Google Analytics goals – sign up today!

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:29:00 +0000

We'd like to invite you to a free live course about using goals in Google Analytics which is taking place on September 15th, 2010 at 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1, 7am PST, 10am EST.

Goals are a way to measure conversions or successful actions on your website. This goal could be a view of a specific page on your site such as the 'thank you' page after a user has submitted information through a form or made a purchase on your site.

In this course, you will learn how to set up goals in Google Analytics and how they can help you track your return on investment. We will also clarify the difference between AdWords conversions and Analytics goal conversions and discuss how to analyse the goals report section of Google Analytics so that you can make informed business decisions.

Posted by Zarina Khaliq, Google AdWords team

The AdWords Small Business Centre: the key tips, tutorials, and updates you need for a successful AdWords account

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:22:00 +0000

Last Friday we launched a new website - the AdWords Small Business Centre. Many of you asked for an AdWords resource focused on learning and top tips for small and medium businesses, and we listened. This new central learning hub allows you to share AdWords best practices and provides the key information you need to know to run a successful AdWords account.

Learn the essentials

Whether you're new to AdWords or not, the AdWords Small Business Centre allows you to explore insightful topics as a beginner, intermediate, or advanced user. It covers everything from strategies for writing great ads to ways to improve your website, all in an easy-to-navigate format.

Explore new possibilities

Want to discuss one of tips on the site with another small business owner? Visit our recently launched AdWords Small Business Corner, a discussion forum in which other small and medium business owners who use AdWords exchange advice on the strategies that have helped them grow their businesses. Use it to share your AdWords experience or simply learn from others.

We hope you find the AdWords Small Business Centre useful. Check it out today!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Google AdWords team.

Introducing ‘Improving Online Conversions for Dummies’!

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:44:00 +0000

Are you eager to optimise your Conversion Rate, but feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of the tools available to help you? Today we're delighted to introduce ‘Improving Online Conversions for Dummies’!

We have just released a simple, easy to follow mini book, in conjunction with John Wiley Publications, to help you get a better grasp of the conversion improvement tools offered by Google. Improving Online Conversions for Dummies explains how you can make sure your ads show on searches that are most likely to convert into sales. Understand which ad clicks and impressions lead to conversions, better apportion your marketing spend and even develop your own conversion attribution model. Discover the secrets to getting more bang for your buck with this ebook!

For more information, visit www.google.com/conversion/fordummies

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics team

Introducing the Japan & Asia-Pacific Conversion Room Blog

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:09:00 +0000

Today we'd like to introduce the Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) Conversion Room Blog. Over the last two years we have seen a tremendous uptake of Google’s conversion products in this region, celebrated many success stories with users, and witnessed the development of local expertise. The JAPAC Conversion Room aims to inspire JAPAC (and global) online marketers towards maximising conversions through sharing success stories and expert tips from this region.

If you are drawn to digital marketing, optimising for conversions, and have an interest in the Japan and Asia-Pacific region, then head on over to the site now and subscribe to all the latest articles.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar and James Toepfer, Google Analytics team.

Upcoming Free Webinar: Increase ROI with Enhanced CPC

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:28:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the launch of Enhanced CPC, a new automatic bidding feature designed to increase your conversions and ROI in your Max CPC AdWords campaigns.

We’d like to invite you to a free webinar hosted by members of the product development team to learn more about Enhanced CPC. Specifically, we’ll discuss:

How Enhanced CPC works and benefits your campaign performance
How Enhanced CPC complements your current bidding strategy, including 3rd party bid management solutions
Key differences between Enhanced CPC and Conversion Optimiser & how to select the best bidding option for your campaign

Register here for the webinar to be held on September 8th at 9:30am PST / 5.30pm GMT.

Posted by Lisa Coffey, Google AdWords Team.

Announcing the Conversion Champion!

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:47:00 +0000

Back in June, we announced the Conversion Champion Challenge to help motivate you get your conversion rates in shape for summer. Many of you embraced the challenge - with stronger ROI to show for it! However, one advertiser stood out among the rest as the true Conversion Champion.

We are delighted to invite our Champion, Hüseyin Tanrıöven from the Wall Street Institute in Turkey, to our super cool offices in Zurich, Switzerland to meet our Conversion Specialist team for a full usability assessment of their website with recommendations to further improve their conversion rate.

Wall Street Institute (WSI) is the world’s largest English language school with 430 centres in 29 countries. The Wall Street Institute opened operations in Turkey in 2001 with 11 learning centres in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmit, Eskisehir, Bursa and Izmir. The Turkish WSI website was launched to provide potential students with course information and contact details to sign up to a learning centre. The WSI have always been keen to understand how their marketing efforts were contributing to conversions, given that conversions in AdWords are currently attributed to the last ad clicked before the conversion happened.

Hüseyin told us a bit about his journey to the finish line:

“WSI analyzed the search funnel reports for campaigns over a 73 day period. We derived insightful data about path lengths and how campaigns assisted each other in terms of conversions.

We conducted a deep-dive analysis to come up with a weighted attribution model so we could determine the real value of assist keywords, ad groups and campaigns by going deeper into the conversion path, instead of just focusing on last click conversion data.

We compiled a list of keywords where we could change bids to increase the average position and conversion numbers while still remaining within our CPA limit and even further decrease that value. We then went on to delete some negative keywords, which we had added to the account months ago having deemed them to be valueless by just looking at last click conversion data.

Search funnel analysis was very valuable for us to understand that these keywords could actually be assisting a lot of valuable conversions, so we were then able to make informed decisions about keyword performance and remove them as negative keywords.

We regrouped keywords into more appropriate ad groups and added some new ad text in order to increase the CTR and attract additional conversions by improving our account structure.

In the 28 day period since our account overhaul with Search Funnels, we have seen conversion rates increase by 54.5% and CTRs improve by 10.5%. Furthermore, the cost per conversion has decreased by 28.1%.”

Stay tuned for the full case study. Well done Wall Street Institute in Turkey! See you in Zurich!

Learn more about AdWords Search Funnels and Conversion Optimiser.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics team

Increase your conversions… Improve your ROI… Say hello to Enhanced CPC

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:31:00 +0000

We're excited to announce the launch of Enhanced CPC, a new automated bidding feature to help you improve your ROI on your Max CPC campaigns. Each time that your ad is eligible to appear, Enhanced CPC will automatically adjust your Max CPC bid based on the likelihood that your ad will convert. It does so by using your campaign's historical conversion tracking data. As a result, you should receive more conversions while maintaining or reducing your overall CPA and hopefully spend less time managing your Max CPC bids.

How does it work?
Let's walk through an example. Jeff sells model airplane kits and has enabled Enhanced CPC for a campaign that contains the following keywords, each with a Max CPC bid set to £0.30: model airplane, model airplane kits and build model airplanes. When a user searches for 'model airplane kits,' the AdWords system recognises that this term has converted well for Jeff in the past and therefore increases the Max CPC bid to £0.32 for this specific auction. If the likelihood of a conversion is very high, Enhanced CPC can bid up to 30% above the Max CPC. This means that the most that Jeff will be charged for a click is £0.39.

On the other hand, when a user searches on the more general term 'model airplane,' the AdWords system recognizes that this term has not converted well for Jeff in the past and lowers Max CPC bid for this specific auction to £0.20. By adjusting bids based on Jeff's conversion data, the AdWords system ultimately helps him increase sales while maintaining or decreasing his average cost per conversion.

Enhanced CPC has the unique ability to consider a number of factors when predicting the likelihood of a conversion. A few examples of what Enhanced CPC is able to do include the following:

Adjust your bid depending on how well a particular search or content partner site in the Google network has converted for you in the past
Recognise when specific words within a keyword (e.g. 'kits') convert well and adjust your bid when users search on variations of these terms (ie 'model airplane kits for children')
Detect attributes such as the user's location, language settings, browser and operating system and analyse how these attributes may impact the likelihood of your ad converting

How to get started

To use Enhanced CPC, you'll need to first enable Conversion Tracking for your campaigns. Conversion Tracking not only allows you to take advantage of ROI-boosting features like Enhanced CPC but also provides you with valuable insight into how frequently your ads convert into sales and how much you're paying for these conversions.

If you're already using Conversion Tracking, getting started is easy. Simply navigate to the 'Bidding and Budgeting' section of the settings tab for your campaign, and select the checkbox under 'Enhanced CPC'.

If you're choosing between Enhanced CPC and Conversion Optimiser as your method for boosting ROI, please read this FAQ for more information on how these tools differ. You can also visit our Help Centre to learn more about Enhanced CPC and view instructions for enabling Conversion Tracking.

Posted by Lisa Coffey, Google AdWords team.

Spotlight on AdWords Search Funnels – Part 1

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:35:00 +0000

We recently announced a brand new section to AdWords reporting called AdWords Search Funnels and today we’d like to give you more in depth info about these very useful reports.

What are AdWords Search Funnels reports?

Search Funnels show you the AdWords ad click and impression behaviour that leads to a conversion on your site. A conversion could be a completed sale, form submission, time spent on your site etc.. These conversions are based on the completed action(s) you have specified with AdWords Conversion Tracking or from goals imported into AdWords from your Google Analytics account.

Now you can uncover the value of all keywords, ads and campaigns in your AdWords account, not just those related to the last click before a sale/lead.

Why is Search Funnels data useful?

The standard approach to conversion reporting traditionally focused on a customer’s last click on your ad. Search Funnels fills in the gaps on what happened before this last click!

Before completing a sale/form on your website, your customers have likely searched multiple times on Google. This means they may have searched using many different keywords and clicked on more than one of the ads in your AdWords account before they completed your defined conversion/action.

Tip:

To get the most from AdWords Search Funnels reports it helps to have a good AdWords account structure. Check out this video for tips on improving your account layout.

In addition you should always look at an appropriate amount of data before making business decisions. For example, looking at one month’s worth of data instead of one day’s, should give you a better picture of what’s happening in your account.

Interpreting AdWords Search Funnels reports

To start with, let’s explain some of the new metrics available within these reports:

Assist clicks: Any click on your Google AdWords search ad that happened prior to the 'last click' before a conversion.
Assist impressions: Any impression on your search ad that was not clicked and happened prior to a conversion.
Path length (clicks): The total number of AdWords search ad clicks in your account (including the 'last click') that preceded a conversion.
Assisted conversions: The number of conversions that were assisted by a particular campaign, ad-group or keyword. Assisted conversions do not include last click conversions.
Last click conversions: The number of conversions that had a particular campaign, ad-group or keyword as the immediately preceding search ad click.

For a full glossary of all the new terms relating to Search Funnels check out this help centre article.

So let’s look at some of these new reports...

Below we’ve highlighted just two of the nine reports available in AdWords Search Funnels to give you an overview of the insights now available into your conversion path.

Assist clicks and impressions report

See how many assisting clicks and impressions there are for each keyword, ad group or campaign in your AdWords account
Identify which campaigns are contributing to conversions and adjust your bidding and budgets accordingly
Optimise your keyword lists to ensure you have keyword variations included for strong assisting keywords

Top Paths report

See the combination of keywords, ad groups and campaigns that were clicked on or seen before a conversion
Look at how brand term campaigns compare to more general term campaigns
If your brand terms and general terms are grouped together consider breaking out into different campaigns to gain further insights

What can you do next:

If you have already set up Conversion Tracking or imported your Google Analytics goals into AdWords, log into your Google AdWords account and visit the ‘Reporting’ tab and select ‘Conversions’. (Not tracking conversions yet? Learn how to set up AdWords Conversion Tracking or import goals into AdWords from Google Analytics
Select ‘Search Funnels’ from the left hand side of the next page
Navigate through the nine report types on the left hand side to learn more about the ads and keywords that contribute to sales/leads on your site
Re-evaluate keywords and ad text based on this data and adjust AdWords account settings or optimise ads and keywords accordingly

We hope you find these tips useful. If you’re already a Search Funnels user please share your experiences by leaving a comment below. And don’t forget to enter our Conversion Champion Challenge by July 31st and be in the running for a trip to Google Zurich, a website audit from a team of Google experts and $500 of free Google AdWords advertising!

In the new few weeks we’ll follow up with another deep-dive into using AdWords Search Funnels reports so check back soon.

Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics: campaign data issue being corrected

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:08:00 +0000

Late last week, we made a change that caused some visits and campaign data to be processed incorrectly. All data was properly collected, but your reports may currently be missing some visits and campaigns information for the dates June 24th through June 29th. We are reprocessing this data and expect to have all report data corrected by early in the week of July 12th.

The impact of the incorrect processing will vary by site. Sites that receive a large number of new visitors and new campaigns have been most affected. Again, we are reprocessing, and all reports will soon be corrected. We will update the blog once reprocessing has completed and data in all accounts is correct.

We sincerely apologise for this inconvenience and are taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Update: July 14, 2010 18:15 GMTReprocessing is now complete and all reports should now show correct data.

Get your ROI in shape for the summer with the Conversion Champion Challenge

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:15:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the Conversion Champion Challenge, a contest challenging you to get your ROI in shape for the summer by using free AdWords conversion products & submitting a mini case study about your experience. It’s not too late to enter and compete to win the grand prize – an AdWords voucher and a trip to Google!

Whether you’re just getting started or are actively working to get your conversion rate in shape, here are some best practices for getting the most out of two of the free AdWords tool in the Conversion Champion Challenge: Conversion Optimiser & Search Funnel reports.

Tips for using Conversion Optimiser

Save time by letting Conversion Optimiser manage your bids to reach your ROI goals (On average, campaigns that use Conversion Optimiser experience a 21% increase in conversions and a 14% decrease in cost-per-conversion ).*
Choose to bid using the metric that you’re most comfortable with: Target CPA or Max CPA
Set different CPA bids for each Ad Group if conversions in one are of more or less value to you than conversions in another.
Let Conversion Optimiser run for a couple weeks to give it a chance to acclimate to your campaign’s performance.
Test it on just one campaign if you’re not ready to make large scale changes to your account. If you ever choose to disable the product, you’ll be able to return to the Max CPC bids that you had previously set.
Learn more and check out these success stories from advertisers who have used Conversion Optimiser.

*This analysis compares the performance of Conversion Optimiser campaigns over the course of a year with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimiser. The actual impact will vary from campaign to campaign.

Tips for using Search Funnel Reports

Run Search Funnel Reports within your AdWords account to gain insight into which ads and keywords users clicked on leading up to a conversion.
Identify keywords that play a key role in the conversion process and ensure that you’re bidding competitively
Identify low value keywords, those that you're paying for but aren't leading to conversions, and decrease your bids accordingly.
Use the Time Lag and Path Length reports to understand how long (time and number of searches) it takes before conversions typically happen on your site. This can help you determine how long to run your campaigns.
Learn more about Search Funnels at this help centre article and also check out upcoming Conversion Room posts where we'll deep dive into how Search Funnels can help you gain further AdWords ROI insights

We can’t wait to hear about your experiences with these useful tools, so let us know how it goes by entering the Conversion Champion Challenge.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team.

Free webinar about AdWords Search Funnels & Conversion Optimiser, Thursday, June 10th

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:00:00 +0000

With the recent launch of Search Funnels, we wanted to host a webinar showing off these new reports and we also wanted to offer you a refresher on Conversion Optimiser. So this Thursday we'll give an overview of these features, showing how they work and how they can help you.

At the webinar, you’ll learn:

How tracking conversions can take you beyond clickthrough rate and help you focus your spend on the ads and keywords that drive sales and leads
How the data in Search Funnels can take you a step further and tell you which ads and keywords are assisting your conversions
How Conversion Optimiser can use your conversion tracking data and cost-per-acquisition goals to help you focus your spend on the clicks most likely to convert

The webinar takes place this Thursday, June 10th at 5pm GMT. Register here if you’d like to attend, and please submit or vote on questions related to Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimiser or Search Funnels that you'd like answered during the webinar by Wednesday, June 9.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Team.

7 ways to improve your call to action

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 18 May 2010 09:58:00 +0000

If you only had 5 seconds to sell your product, what would you do? Your landing pages have, on average, about 5 seconds before visitors decide to stay or bounce.

So how can you make sure your landing pages do their job and captivate your visitors? Antoine De Saint-Exupery once said:

"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."

The problem for landing pages is that often the opposite is true. In an attempt to satisfy the needs of every possible visitor, landing pages are often crammed full of text, graphics, special offers and sometimes even advertising banners. Your call to action is competing with all that noise. Visitors are often left confused and unsure what to do.

Below are some suggestions to improve your call to action. As with any new changes you make to your website, we strongly recommend using a testing tool such as Google Website Optimiser to confirm any changes you make have a positive impact.

1. Good ol’ large call to action buttons

Perhaps the most obvious and definitely an oldie but a goodie when it comes to landing page design. Big call to action buttons really do work, because they are just so blatantly obvious.

Tips for big glossy buttons

Place your call to action buttons above the fold
Size does matter. Make sure it’s the biggest, especially if you have multiple buttons on the page
Start your button’s call to action text with a verb such as Sign Up, Buy, Order, Learn, Donate, Discover
Use a contrasting colour to the rest of your design

By default HTML buttons are not very exciting and not very good at conveying the strong message you want to show your visitors. With a little bit of CSS, HTML and your favorite graphical editor you can create a great call to action button as this tutorial demonstrates.

2. Support your call to action

Use graphics that support (not compete) with your call to action
Use bullet points (around 8 max) to emphasise your offer and its best attributes
If applicable consider using genuine customer testimonials
Use plenty of white space in your design and make use of grids
Avoid placing lengthy paragraphs of text above the fold
Use a compelling heading

The 8 bullet points list the benefits of the product
The testimonial is supported by a photo of someone playing guitar
The graphic in the top left supports the core message - someone playing guitar
Good use of white space and grids
The main focus in this design is still on the call to action buttons
The call to action is placed above the fold

It also tells visitors...

3. What’s in it for me?

This is the question your visitors are asking themselves. To truly strengthen your call to action make sure you address this question in your landing page design. Here is how you can do it.

Spend less time talking about yourself and more time talking about how you can help your visitors
Use a 50 words or less introductory paragraph to describe what makes your product or service wonderful
Tell them why they should choose you over the competition (example: price comparison)
Use upbeat positive language
Be personable - speak on a person to person level
Address any possible concerns (example: No Spyware / Adware)

This website tells you exactly who the product is in the headline Email marketing software for designers and their clients. Then it tells you why you should use the product in the introductory paragraph. Earn a tidy profit by letting your clients send at prices you set.

4. Reduce the number of choices

When it comes to landing pages, offering more choice is not necessarily a good thing. Barry Schwartz talks about the Paradox of Choice (20 mins) which discusses how reducing choice can result in selling more.

Brandon O’Dell discusses how reducing menu items in a restaurant is a good thing. When Gordon Ramsay went to Paris to help a struggling vegetarian restaurant he only offered 1 item at lunch, soup. In fact Gordon uses the same kind of formula (step #5) often in his Kitchen Nightmares show.
Apply the same formula to your landing pages. Simplify what you are offering and remove any competing choices a visitor has to make.

When possible create unique landing pages for each product
Simplify your offer and focus on its core benefits
Experiment with creating category pages that show less items per page
Aim to have only 1 call to action on a given page
If you must have more than 1 offer on the same page, help customers decide by telling them what offer best suits them based on their experience, budget or other relevant attributes

5. Competing offers

Sometimes you can’t avoid having more than 1 offer on a page. Let’s take a look at 2 example pages where multiple offers are displayed to visitors.

Both pages have multiple plans on offer. However, in the second example we can see that visitors are given some guidance as to what plan they should choose. Use of graphical hierarchy and the wording most popular plan helps visitors decide. Also worth mentioning is that the free plan has been de-emphasised but is still available.

6. Repeat your call to action

If you need more than one page to convince your visitors to take action, feel free to repeat yourself. If you offer a product tour or use several pages to explain complex features and options, place your call to action in a consistent position. This way visitors will know where to go when they are ready to take action.

On both sites above, you can see the call to action buttons Sign up now and Sign Up For Free on the upper right hand corner of the screen. The left hand navigation pane allows visitors to navigate through various sections of their site. Each page has the call to action button in exactly the same position.

7. Category pages and a call to action

These pages are often overlooked when it comes to improving your call to action. However have you ever tested allowing people to directly add an item to their shopping cart from this page?

The price comparison showing the price £RRP and YOU SAVE £X.XX assists the primary call to action
The buy now button allows visitors to add the items directly to their cart

This category page allows visitors to select a number of items they want to add to their cart, saving them time and making their shopping experience better.

Case study analysis

Take this case study by Tim Ferriss for example. The original landing page was good, but over time the page has changed and evolved as a result of continued website testing:

Original page (before testing)

After several tests

Reduced choice (only 1 large glossy button)
Repeated call to action (in 5 other sections)
Headline changed from Workout and Food Tracking to Better Fitness Results in Less Time (what’s in it for me factor)
Plenty of white space and clarity in design
Latest blog posts were removed
Latest member list was removed
3 bullet points used to support the call to action
Media buzz (credibility badges) moved above the fold
Improved graphical elements (assist call to action)

apple represents healthy eating
dumbbell, water bottle, measuring tape represents workout/gym
program screenshot ties them all together

The overall message has been simplified and anything deemed as a distraction has been removed from the overall design. The call to action button Join for Free! literally screams for attention. For additional case studies check out the Expert Help tab above.

How to test for success

When testing your call to action it’s a good idea to test micro conversions. This helps reduce experiment duration because your test pages and goal pages (micro-conversion points) are closer together.

You are also likely to have many more micro conversions than macro conversions on your site. This gives Google Website Optimiser more data to work with in a shorter time period, quickly giving you the winning variation. Example: If you decided to test your category pages by adding a call to action, select your add to basket page as the goal page in Google Website Optimiser (not your final checkout page).

The aim of your Google Website Optimiser experiment should be to determine if you get more visitors adding an item to your shopping basket (micro conversion) as the diagram below indicates.

Visitor conversion path flow

Hopefully you now have some fresh ideas to improve your call to action. Have any tips of your own to share? Leave a comment and let us know.

Posted by Gavin Doolan, Google Analytics team

AdWords Search Funnels workshop coming to eMetrics London

Evelyn O'Keeffe — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:52:00 +0000

We recently announced the new AdWords Search Funnels reports and we’re delighted to let you know that these reports are now available to everyone who is tracking conversions with AdWords Conversion Tracking or importing goals or transactions into AdWords from Google Analytics.

If you'd like to learn more about this cool new feature you can register for our free Search Funnels workshop with Senior Product Manager, Sissie Hsiao at eMetrics London. Sissie will be running the workshop on Monday, 17th May and Tuesday, 18th May from 12:40-13:20.

After Sissie’s workshop, Clancy Childs, EMEA Lead Sales Engineer for Google Analytics, and I will be hosting the Web Analytics Wednesday (on Monday, 17th May...go figure!) at eMetrics. Not only can you join us for a pint, but we’ll be also be running a Google Analytics Quiz. Brush up on your Google Analytics IQ knowledge to be in with a chance to win some cool Google Analytics schwag!

Don't forget to register for these events soon as places are limited. We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics team.