How to Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is, in my opinion, the most valuable application that Google has created so far. Sure, Gmail has significantly changed how we communicate, but if I was really in a bind, I could still get an email message to someone without using it. However, we have become so dependent upon Google Analytics that without it, all of our marketing efforts would be much less effective and perhaps even fail.

A year and a half ago, Eric wrote a newsletter article titled What in the World is Your Website Doing? Not only was it our first video newsletter, but it also served as a training resource for our clients in interpreting their Urchin website traffic reports and introduced Google Analytics for the first time. Since then, we've officially stopped using Urchin in preference for enabling Google Analytics on all of our projects.

I've included a SlideShare presentation I created in order to take you on a detailed tour of our own Google Analytics account, which covers basic stats interpretation, goal setup, custom reports and advanced segmentation. You can view the presentation by clicking below:

This month, I'd like to review the basics of how to use Google Analytics and then focus in on your content, bounce rate, and goals.

Read on to learn about how Google Analytics works...

Google Analytics is enabled by including a tracking code in the template of your website. This way, Google's indexing bots can see every page of your site and tell you all kinds of information about the traffic you're receiving on those pages.

This is fundamentally different from how Urchin works: Urchin is installed on the same server as your website's database, so it looks at your website from the "inside" and tracks traffic in terms of hits to the database. Since a hit is registered every time a file is requested from the database- every word, image, CSS or javascript file- consider just how many hits might be logged just from loading our homepage! Also, Urchin lumps in database files along with your pages in its reports, so don't be surprised if "robots.txt" is the most popular file on your site. What Google understands is that you are interested in how people use your website, so they've built their analytics tool around that principle.

Humans, Not Bots

Google Analytics looks at your website from the "outside" and attempts to closely approximate the experience of a human user. Consequently, many people notice that their numbers tend to decrease when transitioning from using Urchin to Google Analytics. This is not a bad thing; it's much more realistic. Remember, though the numbers may be lower, they're just numbers. What's more important than big numbers is accurate data.

By the way, Google allows you to add IP addresses to a filter in your analytics account so that your numbers are not skewed by your own traffic on the website. If you haven't set this up, you should (see Slide 6 in the SlideShare presentation I included for more on this). It would be a real bummer to go on thinking your website is crazy popular because you spend hours clicking through it every day.

The Long Tail of Content

The image below shows our Top Content report in Google Analytics. This is one of the most important reports, as it helps us to understand which pages are performing best on our website. You can see that in the last month, users viewed 1,738 different pages on our website, contributing 31,285 unique pageviews total. That's a lot! But also notice that within the top ten pages, we have a range of 3,032 pageviews (for our homepage) to 514 pageviews (for the page about our employees). Even within the top ten, we're starting to see what will be a very long tail of content, where the majority of the 1,738 pages viewed are contributing small numbers of pageviews. By the time we reach the 352nd most popular page, it and the rest leading up to 1,738 are all contributing only 20 pageviews or less each (click here to see the full top 100). This is why active content creation is the most effective means of generating and maintaining website traffic.

If I look more closely at an individual page, I can get a better sense of how it is performing. I've chosen to look at the page titled "Web Development Prototyping Process." As Eric has written, prototyping is really at the heart of how Newfangled works, so this page is really important to how we convey our message to potential partners and clients on the website. From the screenshot below, you can see that this page got 428 unique views last month with the average user spending almost 3 minutes on the page. That's not bad; people are reading this page. The bounce rate (don't worry, more on this later) is about 67%, which is definitely on the higher side, but I'm actually not too worried about this. Because we're describing a prototyping process for web development projects, many of this page's viewers are likely developers themselves, so once they've read about our approach, they're probably going to hit the road and get back to their own work. No big deal.

Where Do They Go Next?

The next step that I normally take is to look at the Entrance Paths report (see screenshot below), which you can get to by clicking the second link underneath Navigation Analysis on the Content Detail view. This report shows me the top 10 pages that users clicked to after reading the Prototyping Process page. What interests me here is that the second most commonly clicked-to page after the prototyping page is our Pricing page. This potentially tells me two things: 1) After reading about our process, viewers become a bit more interested in working with us and then want to know how much we cost and 2) We've done well by placing a sidebar widget about our pricing (with a link to the pricing page) on this page.

Remember, the marketing value of your website is completely dependent upon how people interact with your content. By using these content reports in Google Analytics, you'll be able to better evaluate which pages of your site are the most important and then where to place important calls to action.

It's All About Bounce Rate... or is It?

Understanding bounce rate is an important aspect of analyzing your overall statistics, especially when it comes to determining the effectiveness of an individual page. The bounce rate measures the number of visitors to a website that leave before a specified amount of time has elapsed (this time period varies among analytics tools, but is typically 30 minutes). This means that if a user accesses your site and leaves it within 30 minutes or leaves their browser idle for that time, they will be registered as a bounce. The bounce rate for an individual page of a website is determined by the number of users that access a page and leave the site without clicking to another page within the specified time period.

So how high is too high? Avinash Kaushik, one of Google's analytics experts, has blogged about measuring the effectiveness of your web pages and writes:

"My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis based on my experience, but hopefully it gives you a feel for what you are shooting for."

On the whole, I agree with Kaushik. After all, he knows much, much more about web analytics than I ever will. But I would add one consideration: Your evaluation of your bounce rate should take into account your specific goals for your website, as well as the overall number of pages that make up your site. Our site makes a good example of this idea. Because we write so many newsletter articles and blog posts, we get lots of organic search traffic, much of which does not turn in to actual leads for us. This is because our site is very information-rich and covers topics that are sometimes only loosely related to what we actually do, which benefits many more people than are interested in working with us. Consequently, these visitors will read one of our articles, get the information they were looking for, and then leave. It's not the same kind of bounce as a user that leaves immediately because they didn't find what they were looking for, but it's a bounce just the same.

Stay on Point

At the beginning of January, the overall bounce rate for our site was around 72%, very high by anyone's standards. Of course, we had 1,738 pages viewed on our site last month alone, many of which were topical articles that likely had fairly high bounce rates individually. Again, this is because our organic search traffic is very strong, which brings all kinds of viewers to our site, the minority of which fit our positioning. However, I wasn't convinced that our bounce rate couldn't be reduced. In reviewing our top content, I noticed two particular blog posts that were registering extremely high bounce rates, even over 95%. One was a review I wrote comparing Picasa to Flickr way back in 2006. The other was a blog post written by Bettina Johnson, our Resourcer, who compared WALL-E to Apple computers. Both posts were receiving tons of organic search traffic, but because neither had anything to do with our company's core discipline, web development, those viewers who read the articles were not sticking around. In other words, these posts were unnecessarily skewing our numbers. Though I'm pretty comfortable with having a higher (by Kaushik's standards) bounce rate, I decided to remove these pages from our site to see if our bounce rate would begin to drop. Less than two weeks later, our bounce rate has dropped to 69%. I'm betting that we can get down to 50% by making more minor tweaks like this. Even though we create a lot of content that is peripheral to our core discipline, instances like this show that it pays to stay on point most of the time.

So far, I've been talking about bounce rate in the context of your entire site, which is ultimately just an average of all the individual bounce rates of all your individual pages. If you are paying attention to your Top Content reports and identifying which pages are most important on your site, it is their individual bounce rate that matters more than your overall site bounce rate. From that perspective, I would certainly be looking for rates under 40%.

You've Got to Have Goals

One of the simplest ways that you can get even more helpful information from your analytics is to create goals. If you have any contact forms on your website, then you have a potential goal to set up in Google Analytics (you can create up to four). The way a goal works is that you provide Google Analytics with the URL for the "Thank You" page a user would be directed to after filling out a contact form. By submitting this URL to Google, it will be able to track the number of users that complete forms in your analytics reports. Remember, because a human user actually has to complete a contact form, Google has no other way of knowing how many times a user gets to the "Thank You" page unless you provide the URL directly.

Most of the forms we build for our clients will already have two means of tracking their completion: The primary means is usually to store the completed form data in the database, and have it be viewable and retrievable using the CMS. The second way is to have an email alert be sent out to the webmaster every time a form is filled out. These are very helpful for keeping track of these contacts and following up with them, but adding the Google Analytics goal will provide even more value long term. For example, say you wanted to build a custom report in Google Analytics that showed you only visitors that came in from Google organic search results in the month of January that ended up filling out a contact form on your site. Without setting up the goal, your analytics report will be missing that last metric.

To set up a goal, log in to your analytics account and click 'edit' to the right of your website listing (see below):

Once you are in your profile view, you'll see the box titled "Conversion Goals and Funnel." You can add up to four goals (G1-G4). To add one, click edit to the right of any available goal slot (see below):

For a basic contact form goal, use the next screen (see below) to enter the URL for the "Thank You" page in the "Goal URL" field, create a name, and then submit. Google Analytics also allows you to specify a sequence of URLs if you want to divide your goal among steps in a transaction process.

I hope that seeing our Google Analytics account in action was helpful to you. I really encourage you to set up a Google Analytics account and to make it a part of your daily routine to evaluate your website's traffic. Between this newsletter, our previous one on analytics, our blog posts tagged "analytics" and the resources below, I think you'll have more than enough information to get you started.

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Analytics Reading

Below is a list of books, blogs and other links that should be helpful to you in your analytics education:

Web Analytics 2.0 : The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik

Purchase it (the proceeds from the affiliate link go to charity)

"...It is not a technical book, though it will make you technically dangerous. It is not just a business book, though every dna strand in this book is more about online marketing than online analytics. It is not a hard book to read, though it is brain food...." (from the Occam's Razor blog)

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik

"...Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik ... debunks leading myths and leads you on a path to gaining actionable insights from your analytics efforts. Discover ... why qualitative data should be your focus, and more insights and techniques that will help you..." (from Amazon's description)

Occam's Razor, an analytics blog by Avinash Kaushik

Official Google Analytics Blog

ROI Revolution, an unofficial Google Analytics blog

Be sure to also check out my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged "analytics." I've loaded them in to the sidebar on the right side of this page. There are over 50 different analytics-related articles, tutorials, videos and other resources listed there already.

Below is a "curated" tutorial, comprised of analytics videos I thought would be helpful (you can also view a more comprehensive list at Google's Conversion University playlist):

Update (02/16/2009): FutureNow has put together a long list of Google Analytics resources, organized by categories (i.e. initial setup, configuration, goal evaluation, ecommerce tracking, etc.).

Below is a SlideShare presentation I created in order to take you on a detailed tour of our own Google Analytics account, which covers basic stats interpretation, goal setup, custom reports and advanced segmentation. Note: To enlarge and view the presentation full-screen, click the projector icon () in the bottom right corner of the SlideShare player.