By Julie Woodside
The Newport Interactive Marketers went to class at Christie’s on June 23 as Jay Murphy, Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Artsinstructor and managing director at Trionia, taught attendees how to use Google Analytics to get the best results from their online efforts.
Did you skip this free course? Here are some of the lessons from Jay Murphy’s presentation.
Google Analytics capabilities
- Shows
- Where visitors are coming from
- How many come back to your site
- How often people go to your site
- Exit points
- Traffic trends
- How deep into your website do visitors go
- Time of day people are looking at your site
- Allows you to compare data with other similar sites (if you share your data as well)
- Powerful heat maps are currently in Google Analytics Beta
- Can link AdWords to Analytics
3 Big analytic tools
Free analytic sites
- Google Analytics
- Website optimizer
- AWstats
- Example at Ribc.org/webstats
- But you need a Perl environment to run in
- Webalizer
Who measures with Google Analytics?
- Business owners
- Bloggers
- Online/offline ad agencies
- Site developers
- Online marketing specialists
Easy installation
- Input name and time zone
- Embed a bit of code
- Check to make sure analytics is on
Set goals on Google Analytics
- Time visitors are spending on your site
- Pages visited
- URL destination
- E-mail signup
- Then measure against goals
Bounce rate
- When someone comes to the page and then leaves
- Bounce is not necessarily bad
- Need experience to interpret
- Varies by industry and trade
- Bloggers who post regularly will have higher bounce rates
Google URL builder
- Google URL builder is an important tool for tracking ads/media/creative/content
- Use to measure partner campaigns or 2 versions of a campaign to see results
- Can use for email campaigns
Visitor reports
- See even which town people are in when they visit your site
- How many pages they visited
- Are they new to the site or returning
- What type of browser and connection speed they have
- In-site analytics will overlay percentages of click on each page, allowing you to see each click
Advanced Segments
- Will sort out different interests and match behavior
- Example: Will sort out shoe shoppers vs restaurant goers (mall used as an example)
Optimize your site
- Yellow buttons are better than red
- Too much text is bad
- Changing fonts is distracting
- An “ugly” submit button works better than a fancy looking one
- When looking for mobile users, look at the operating system being used instead of the browser
Lessons from another analytics guru
Don’t be intimated by Google Analytics, it’s here to help your webpage. Use Google Analytics to understand and better engage your audience, and to set and excel your webpage goals! A great presentation, & another great Newport Interactive Marketers event.
A special thanks to @carloverkat, @franciscosamuel, @SJohnKreese, @NoirBlancDesign, @seangw for tweeting their insights during this event.