Disclosure: This is a simple but extensive guide. After have read this post you’ll be able to set up and manage your website more efficiently. Reserve yourself around 30 minutes to read and apply what I’m about to teach you here. Also make sure you have access to your website background (FTP/Cpanel, etc), or if you have no idea what it means, go ahead, read the post and if you still have doubts drop a comment.

Some of you know Jeff Richardson and I are running the Internet Marketing Academy’ seminars for some time now.

You can read all about it here www.internetmarketingacademy.com.au.

We cover website design (under business perspective) and optimisation, social media (twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, etc), online advertising (like Google AdWords), and other online strategies like email marketing and online PR.

One of the big discussions we’ve got around the sessions is about ROI and Measure tools. One is scared of using the various tools available online that allow you to track more than visitors on your website.

Let’s talk about Goals

Goals (with a capital G) are a way to measure business objectives for your website in Google Analytics.

Goals must correspond to a measurable action performed by your website’s visitors, for example, a visit to a “contact us” page.

This combination of a business objective and a measurable action make up a Goal. Here are some common examples.

To use a real world example, the Internet Marketing Academy objective is to get attendees, and the measurable action is a complete registration.

Keeping this goal in mind helps us focus on the objective and not worry about things that may don’t matter — like the number of visits and how many citations on Twitter (just example-in some cases this might be important). Goals serve this same purpose in Google Analytics.

Understanding the Goal Funnel

Usually the visitor action that’s associated with a goal involves multiple steps.

Together these steps make up the Goal Funnel, or the sequence of steps that lead up to the successful completion of a Goal.

Like the Goal itself, each of these steps must correspond to a measurable action, such as a pageview of a specific page.

Here’s a real world example.

Let’s assume we, from Internet Marketing Academy want to generate more registrations using a specific action.

The path for that play is as follows:

User comes to the home page, clicks on agenda page, after reading the agenda, the user decides to check on Price/Location and then convinced is a good deal, clicks on registration and complete the transaction.

In this example, the Goal is to complete a registration and the Goal Funnel is:

Home > Agenda> Price/Location>Thank You page.

The user moves from one page to another until either registration (Goal completed) or bounce out (Goal abandoned).

How to set up a Goal and Funnel:

Step 1) Define your Goal Funnel

Navigate to your website, and move through the steps required to complete your Goal.

As you navigate, note down the URLs for each page in the sequence. You will need it the url

If the sequence includes only one step (the Goal) than you don’t need to define a funnel at all. If the sequence includes events other than pageviews (such as clicks), you will need to use virtual pageviews or another method beyond the scope of this tutorial.

On our example:

1. http://internetmarketingacademy.com.au/ (home page – step 1)
2. http://internetmarketingacademy.com.au/internet-marketing-classes-agenda/ (agenda – step2)
3. http://internetmarketingacademy.com.au/price-locations/  (price/location – step3)
4. http://ima-melbourne-cbd1.eventbrite.com/ (registration – step4)
5. http://ima-melbourne-cbd1.eventbrite.com/thank_you.html (thank you/completed – step 5)

Step 2) Configure Goal Settings for Each Profile

Log in to your Google Analytics account and then click “Edit” beside your profile.

You will need to configure goals for each profile you want them to show up in.

Go to Conversion Goals and Funnel and click “Edit”

Set “Active Goal” to “On”

Set “Match Type” to to either “Exact Match,” “Head Match,” or “Regular Expression Match.”

In our example, we chose “Exact Match,” because there is only one exact URL for our Goal page “thank_you.html.”

If you have multiple Goal pages, or multiple pages for one of the steps leading up to the goal, you might need to use a different match type.

If your Goal has a specific $$ value, be sure to enter it under “Goal Value”.

You may need to look at your financial data to determine how much a Goal completion is worth to you.

Step 3) Define Your Goal Funnel

Enter the URL and a meaningful name for each step in your funnel.

In our example the Goal URL is “/thank_you.html” and the name we gave it is “Conversion.”

If you only have one step (the Goal) than you don’t need to complete this section.

Step 4) Wait a Few Days and Analyze your Goal Performance

Your Goals will not work backwards, so you will need to wait for Goal data to appear in your reports.

Once you have data to analyze, navigate to the Goals section and open the Funnel Visualization Report.

Now we can analyze the entire goal funnel or just an individual page.

The report will show things like:

• Visits entering the funnel (at home page)
• Visits in which the person moved from one page to the next step in the funnel .
• Visits that completed the entire funnel and reached the Goal

Summary

So there you have it.

Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics let you see how well your website is living up to your business objectives.

They also help you identify specific areas of your website to improve on. Overall, they’re a crucial element in a successful web strategy.

• Before implementing Google Analytics Goals, identify what your business objectives are for your website, and what visitor actions they correspond to.
• Identify the steps visitors must go through to complete the desired action, and note down the specific pages that make up those steps.
• Use this information to configure Goals and Funnels.
• Take action on the data. Make simple design changes or try using Website Optimizer to make improvements.
• Work on your landing pages

Post inspired by Google

Best Regards

Lucio Ribeiro

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Google is cool.

Google serves as a handy searchable archive for back issues of online publications.

Internet is moving quick. However one thing is still moving slower – Internet search, keep reading….

Not all sites have their own search engines technology, and even the ones that do are sometimes difficult to use, usually they are powered by Search Engines tech.

Complicated or incomplete search engines are more pain than gain when attempting to search through archives of published articles.

If you follow a couple of rules, Google is handy for finding back issues of published resources.

The trick is to use a common phrase to find the information you’re looking for. Let’s use the New York Times as an example.

• Articles from the NYT

Your first intuition when searching for previously published articles from NYTimes.com might be to simply use site:nytimes.com in your Google query.

For example, if I wanted to find articles on George Bush, why not use:

“george bush” site:nytimes.com

This will indeed find you all articles mentioning George Bush published on NYTimes.com.

What it won’t find is all the articles produced by the New York Times but republished elsewhere.

While doing research, keep credibility firmly in mind. If you’re doing casual research, maybe you don’t need to double-check a story to make sure it actually comes from the New York Times, but if you’re researching a term paper, double-check the veracity of every article you find that isn’t actually on the New York Times site.

What you actually want is a clear identifier, no matter the site of origin, that an article comes from the New York Times. Copyright disclaimers are perfect for the job. A New York Times copyright notice typically reads:

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Of course, this would only find articles from 2001.

A simple workaround is to replace the year with a Google full-word wildcard :

Copyright * The New York Times Company

Let’s try that George Bush search again, this time using the snippet of copyright disclaimer instead of the site: restriction:

“Copyright * The New York Times Company” “George Bush”

At this writing, you get over three times as many results for this search as for the earlier attempt.

• Magazine Articles

Copyright disclaimers are also useful for finding magazine articles.

For example, Scientific American’s typical copyright disclaimer looks like this:

Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
(The date appears before the disclaimer, so I just dropped it to avoid having to bother with wildcards.)

Using that disclaimer as a quote-delimited phrase along with a search word—hologram, for example—yields the Google query:

hologram “Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.”
At this writing, you’ll get one result, which seems like a small number for a general query like hologram.

When you get fewer results than you’d expect, fall back on using the site: syntax to go back to the originating site itself.

hologram site:sciam.com

In this example, you’ll find several results that you can grab from Google’s cache but are no longer available on the Scientific American site.

Most publications that I’ve come across have some kind of common text string that you can use when searching Google for its archives.

Usually it’s a copyright disclaimer and most often it’s at the bottom of a page.

Use Google to search for that string and whatever query words you’re interested in, and if that doesn’t work, fall back on searching for the query string and domain name.

I personally have a string reason to use this google hack. Do you see value for you?

Let me know

Lucio Ribeiro

marketingeasy.net

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One of the greatest features of Digital Marketing is real time data analysis and modeling.

Using one of the numerous available software’s, Marketing professionals can/should develop customer profiles, determine customer desires and behaviours and merchandise price profitability, identify and build segmented database and conduct other in-depth analyzes.

Tracking and monitoring web site traffic using website analytics is essential for online strategies.

Internet Marketing its not just about reacting but acting with users or customers who come to your web site; understanding who they are, where they are coming from, and what interaction they had. Analytics can compile this information into comprehensive web statistics

Everything seems great unless online marketing professionals start using it!

Stan Rapp used to say that a good product is that easily available when customers don’t even know they need it. The secret is understanding.

It’s alarming that about 82% of the online advertisers DON’T measure online actions in any way!

Worse,

75% of those who use web analytics are failing to adopt a coherent strategy that ties in web analytics data with business objectives according to the Online Measurement and Strategy Report from E-consultancy and Lynchpin. Full report here.

Spend millions of dollars of your budget and not having a clue of what is happening?

Web Analytics data its proven useful for driving decision-making, but still isn’t being used properly, around 60% of web analytics users say that they use around 30% of total potential of data.

Why?

I’d risk to say that it’s not been sold properly internally.

It lacks real understanding of how to sell within a company.

If you are an Internet professional trying to implement online strategies based on behaviour and understanding of your subscribers/clients you need to first learn how to sell it internally.

Let’s define some points first:

1) WHY do you need to sell internally?

2) WHO do you need to sell to?

3) WHAT you’ll be up against?

4) DO you have different arguments for different departments?

Understanding your internal clients and different arguments with them is crucial.

Don’t’ talk to the Decision Maker the same way you talk/explain to the End Users

When you’re selling to Peers you need:

- Build interest and consensus within your organization

- Sell to the end users

- Focus on features, usability, rewards, etc

When you’re selling to the decision-makers

- Write a killer and short business case

- Keep your focus on ROI, costs and benefits in short and long run.

Thinking about the bottom up and top down approach will help you to manage and to implement your web analytics strategy successfully.

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

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