Visitor Insights

Tealium is proud to have accomplished the Google Analytics accreditation process to become a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC). This is in addition to our recent accreditation as a Google AdWords Consultant.

The combined certifications allow us to extend our web analytics and online marketing expertise to clients of Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

You can find out more information about our Google Analytics services via this link.

A while back we published a post on using Google to predict elections. A similar post has recently been submitted by Jeremiah Owyang on the use of social networking stats for similar analysis. Obviously, in both cases, one cannot heavily rely on these numbers to predict elections, as they’re a reflection of interest and one cannot guarantee that interest turns into votes. But in both cases, there’s a great deal of entertainment value associated with the data.

However, a recent article in New York Times reveals a much more powerful side of Google Trends. In this case, Google is using its search data ot track the spread of flu within the United States. More specifically, deta from last year revealed that Google saw a spike in number of searches for terms such as “flu symptoms” about two weeks before the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) reported regional outbreaks. The graph below shows the comparison between the two data sources.

I must admit this is one of the most clever uses of Google Trends as it captures real data in a manner that can be used to actually predict trends. Congratulations to the folks at Google.

Google recently announced a major upgrade to Google Analytics. The new version now includes features and functionalities once available to high-end solutions. Among these new features is the Advanced Segments functionality which lets users create complex segments using a drag-and-drop interface. In order to help users get started, Google has already included a number of pre-defined segments such as “New Visitors”, “Returning Visitors”, “Search Traffic”, “Direct Traffic”, etc.

The pre-defined segments should greatly increase user adoption of this functionality. At the same time, users will be able to further extend the value they get from the tool. We’re going to outline some additional segments that can further add value. For this post, we’re going to concentrate on lead generation site types, whose goal is to generate leads for the sales team that are eventually closed off-line.

Note: These segments are also applicable in other web analytics solutions, even though the examples are provided for Google Analytics.

Some quick win segments that you can get started with are:

1. Form Page Visits
2. Form Abandonment Visits
3. Engaged Visits
4. Highest Value Conversions

Form Page Visits: One of the pre-defined segments in Google Analytics is “Visits with Conversion”. As long as you’ve defined your site goals in Google Analytics, this segment will filter out visits where a goal event has occurred. The segment will let you identify your most effective acquisition sources for example. However, you can take Google Analytics to the next level and define a segment based on visits where your site visitors hit the form pages (just before the conversion). Why? People who make it to the form pages are also considered as qualified visitors, even though they don’t fill out the forms. This segment will also let you identify your best acquisition sources, whether a conversion occurs or not. This segment can be created by selecting the dimension “Page” from the “Content” list and typing in the name of your form pages. If you have multiple form pages, you can add them by adding an “or” statement.

Form Abandonment Visits: This segment will filter out visitors that make it to the form pages but do not complete the process. This segment is valuable because it lets you identify where you’re leaving money on the table. This segment will consist of two filters. The first one is similar to that used for the “Form Page Visits” segment. The second filter is using the metric “Total Goal Completions” and setting the value to equal zero. The relationship between the two filters should be an “and” statement.

Engaged Visits: Regardless of whether your visitors convert or hit the form pages or not, you’re still interested in how they consume your content. The “Engaged Visits” segment lets you filter out the site visitor that are engaged in your content. An easy way to do this is to start by your average number of pages views per visit and time on site. You can then build a segment with two filters. The first filter is by selecting the “Pageviews” metric and making sure that it is set to a value greater than your average. The second filter (“and” statement) uses the “Time on Site” metric, as shown in the figure below. You can take also this segment to the next level by adding recency into the equation. Eric Peterson has recently posted about this very topic, and we recommend his approach for media sites. For lead generation sites a simplified engagement approach should suffice.

Highest Value Conversions: Not all web leads are created equal. For companies that offer only one product or service, this may not be an issue. But for many lead generation sites and companies that offer multiple products, this will be of importance. For example, you may have a free and a paid version of your product. In that case, you would be more interested in visits that result in a lead for your higher-end products.

In some cases, this may be an easy segment to build if your conversion pages for your various products are different. Often times, you’re using the same form page to capture leads for all your products. In such cases, we recommend that you allow visitors to choose which products they’re interested in form within the forms and capture the user selection in Google’s User Defined variable. By doing so, you can then build a segment based on the “User Defined Value” dimension under the “Visitors” group. The new segment will then allow you to determine where to target in order to capture leads for your highest value products.

We’re all looking forward to the eMetrics conference next week. This is the premier event for everything and anything web analytics and with all the changes happening in the industry, this event is a must.

We’re specifically interested in connecting with other industry experts and see how organizations are tackling their analytics challenges.

If you’re also attending the event, please drop us a note.

Ever come across reports that make you scratch your head and wonder “what can I possibly do with the data”?

Apparently, this is not just isolated to web analytics. An analysis of the VP debate by a language monitoring service shows that the phenomenon also applies to the world of politics. Here’s a link to the story.

Highlight KPIs from the VP debate:

Sentences per paragraph: 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.

Letters per word: tied at 4.4.

Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7 (with 100 being the easiest to read or hear), versus 62.4 for Palin.

Number of words spoken: 5,492 for Biden and5,235 for Palin.

There is definitely entertainment value in the data, but not much value beyond that.

Why do we bring this up? Because we’ve seen many web analytics practitioners fall into the same trap. Yes, you can measure just about everything online: detailed user interactions, mouse movements, etc. But just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should. Rather, you should always start with the question “what would I do with the data”.