Google Analytics gives WordPress users an excellent way to monitor the performance of their blogs online. However, not many WordPress users, both business and bloggers are using Google Analytics. If you aren’t using Google Analytics then there are benefits that your website or blog could be missing.
Filed under: Tips & Tricks
Tags: analytics, benefits, Google Analytics, wordpress, wordpress benefits
After you have created your campaign, the next step is naming your ad group and creating your first ad for the group. Here is an example of ad we created for booking Las Vegas hotels.
After you have created your campaign, the next step is naming your ad group and creating your first ad for the group. Here is an example of ad we created for booking Las Vegas hotels.
1. Insert your display URL. The display URL is what users will see in green font. It’s not where your ad will send them too when it’s clicked. Ideally you should display the domain name with the keyword in it:http://lvhotels.com/Las-Vegas-Hotels and make sure it redirects to the landing page you want. You can also just leave your domain there: http://lvhotels.com for branding purposes.
2. The destination URL is where you will place the landing page URL. The landing page should have a call-to-action like subscribing for a service, subscribing to a newsletter, signing up for an account, etc.
Next is to add keywords to your ad. Google will recommend you a list of keywords for your ad but you should avoid using them since they are not the best keywords to go for. Some of the keywords that were suggested by Google may be overpaid keywords. It is important to do your own keyword research to find the best keywords for your ad.
Some examples of keywords we would use for our Las Vegas Hotels ad would be: book las vegas hotel rooms, las vegas 5 star hotels, las vegas hotels, las vegas hotel rooms, book hotel rooms in las vegas. When adding your keywords you can wrap the keyword with brackets if you want exact match or quotes for phrase match. E.g [las vegas 5 star hotels] or “las vegas 5 star hotels”.
Another way of adding keywords for a business like this would be to set the geo location to Las Vegas and adding keywords like 5 star hotels, hotel rooms, book hotel rooms, etc. so that you only target people in Las Vegas who probably want to book a hotel immediately. This is one way to improve your conversions and also see a higher volume of ad impressions.
You can add additional ad groups to your campaign by going to your campaign and clicking the “+ Ad Group” button. You can also duplicate your ad group, keywords, etc. by copy and paste. This is useful feature for when you want to substitute a keyword like “hotel” with “casino” in another ad group. To duplicate an ad group, go to the ads tab and check mark the ad. Then click on the “Edit” drop down menu and select Copy then select Paste. You can also use Ctrl+c and Ctrl+V.
Filed under: Documentation→Search Engine Marketing
Tags: ad group, ad groups, Google Analytics, search engine marketing
You should always link your Google Analytics with Adwords to track where your visitors are clicking, how much time they are on your site, how many conversions you get, which page makes your users leave your website the most, etc. There is an option to do that in Adwords, so don’t forget about linking your Adwords to your Analytics. It is very important to analyze how well your campaigns are working so you can make adjustments to it. You’ll have to use auto-tagging which allows you to import Adwords data into Analytics automatically. You can also manually tag but we recommend auto-tagging for additional details you wouldn’t get from manually tagging. Auto-tagging will allow you to see what happens after a user has clicked your ads. When you enable auto-tagging, a parameter called gclid will be added to your landing page URL like this: www.domain.com/?gclid=548abc.
To enable auto-tagging in Adwords, go to the gears icon and select Account settings. In the preferences tab, you’ll find a Tracking section. Click Edit and checkmark Destination URL Auto-tagging and Save changes.
Auto-tagging will provide you with these detailed reporting in Google Analytics:
• Campaign
• Source
• Medium
• Content (creative)
• Keyword
• Query Match Type
• Ad Group
• Destination URL
• Ad Format
• Ad Distribution Network
• Placement Domain
• AdWords Customer ID (in case you have multiple accounts for your company)
• Hour of Day
• Placements
• Keyword Positions
If you don’t link your Analytics with Adwords and don’t use auto-tagging, you’ll get (not set) as the # of visitors that came from your campaigns. This does not help you because you’re getting clicks but you don’t know what happens after the click. This makes it impossible to measure your goals.
Filed under: Documentation→Search Engine Marketing
Tags: adwords, google adwords, Google Analytics, search engine marketing, tracking
One of the standard tools webmasters use to track website/mobile data is Google Analytics. Properties are where you place the tracking code such as a website or mobile app. To set up your first property, you can do so when you open your GA account or if you’d like to add another property go to your Google Analytics account and click on “Admin”. Click on “Create new property” from the property dropdown.
On the next page, select whether you want to track a website or a mobile app. Give your website a name and input the website’s URL and click “Get tracking code”.
The next page will have the tracking code where you will copy and paste on every page you want to track data from. It is good to place it in your header so that Google Analytics can track a hit even when the user decides to leave the site before it finishes loading. Once you have placed the tracking code on your pages, it should start tracking your data instantly.
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: digital analytics, Google Analytics, property, web analytics
A view is the level in Google Analytics where you can access reports and analysis tools. When you add a property, Google Analytics will automatically create one unfiltered view. It is important to never make y changes to your unfiltered view because if you do add filters to your unfiltered view and remove them later on, the data that has been filtered out will never come back. Instead, you can customize multiple views with different settings like one view for internal traffic or one view to track activity coming to a certain page on your website. To create a new view, go to “Admin” and in the property column select the website you want to create a view for in the property dropdown. To the right, you’ll see the view column. Click on the dropdown and click “Create new view”.
On the next page, give your view a name and click “Create View”. After creating your view, you can select it from the dropdown and give it filters, goals and more. For example, you can create a view called “Sign ups” and add a filter that will only track visitors when they land on the Registration complete page.
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: digital analytics, Google Analytics, view, web analytics
In “Admin” page, select the view you want to add a filter to and click “Filter”. On the add filter page, you will see something like this:
Give your filter a name such as “Sign ups” and select the filter type. For beginners, you should use predefined filters. When you learn more about regular expressions (ReGex), you can use custom filters which allows you to create more powerful implementations. To learn more about regular expressions you can go to: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034324?hl=en
Moving on to our “Sign ups” example, we can select “Include Only” for the first box. For the second box, we can choose “traffic to the subdirectories”. For the third box, we can choose “that are equal to”. If our website sends the user to domain.com/registration-complete/ after signing up, we can put “/registration-complete/” in the subdirectory field. You can choose whether it’s case sensitive or not and click “Save”.
Now your view “Sign ups” should track visitors who have signed up to your website only. You can experiment with other filters but make sure you do not add any filters to your “All Web Site Data” view as data that has been processed through these filters cannot be changed.
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: digital analytics, filter, Google Analytics, web analytics
Users are the visitors who visit your website or mobile app. Sessions are the time they spend on your website or mobile app. Interactions are what the users do while they are on your website or mobile app. For example, think of your website as a restaurant. You’ll have customers (users) who come in once and never come back. You might also have a returning customer (users) who comes to your restaurant multiple times (sessions). For each session, the user will do something like look at the menu, order food, eat their food or pay the bill (interactions). Individual interactions are also called hits. Some users may look at the menu and leave right away because it’s too expensive. Others might spend more time and have more interactions with your website (multiple hits).
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: digital analytics, Google Analytics, interactions, sessions, users, web analytics
The first time a visitor comes to your website or mobile app, Google Analytics creates a random unique id that is associated with the user’s device. Each unique id is considered a unique visitor. In each hit, this unique id is sent to Google Analytics. If a new id is detected, this means there is a new user. If Google Analytics sees that the id is an existing id in a hit, it will count the hit as a returning user. These ids can be reset or erased if the user clears the cache from their browser or uninstalls/re-installs the mobile app.
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: digital analytics, Google Analytics, returning visitors, web analytics
A user can have multiple sessions. Sessions can occur on the same day or over several days, weeks or months. When a session ends, there is an opportunity to start another session. By default, Google Analytics ends a session when there hasn’t been any activity from the user in the past 30 minutes. This is based on the session timeout settings. The next time Google Analytics detects a hit from the user, a new session is created. For example, a user lands on a page and idles for 2 hours. After 30 minutes, the session will end. When the user comes back to their computer and interacts with the page again, a new session will be created. Two sessions were counted by Google Analytics. You can change the session timeout based on your business needs from 1 minute to 4 hours.
To change your session timeout, go to Admin and browse to the property you want to change the session timeout for. Click on Tracking Info and click on Session Settings. Here you’ll be able to change the session timeout and campaign timeout.
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: campaign timeout, digital analytics, Google Analytics, session timeout, sessions, web analytics
You can use account linking or data import to import data from other sources into Google Analytics without using the tracking code. The data you import from these two options will be processed along with all the hits you collect from the tracking code.
Starting with account linking, you can link Google Products such as Google Adwords, Google Adsense and Google Webmaster Tools with Google Analytics. When you link a Google Product, the data from the product will flow to your Google Analytics account. For example, if you link your Adwords account to your Analytics account, you’ll be able to see your Adwords clicks, impressions and cost data in your Analytics reports.
Additionally, you can import data into your Google Analytics account. To import data into your Google Analytics, a key must exist in both your imported data and Google analytics. The key is the common element that connects the two sets of data.
There are two ways to import data:
1. Dimension Widening
2. Cost Data Import
With dimension widening, you can import almost any data into your Google Analytics. For example, let’s say that you own a library and have a database full of authors and topics. You can import this data into Analytics so that you can segment your data by Author and Topic as long as there is a key for each one. A key that may work for this would be page URLs or some other data that you can find on Google Analytics that you can apply to the imported data. To import this data, you can import a file such as an excel spreadsheet.
With cost data import, you can use this to calculate costs from your non Google advertising campaigns such as Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Yahoo ads and more. You’ll need to have campaign source (Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter) and campaign medium (ppc, display, etc). Data import can be time consuming if it is frequently updated so it’s also recommended to develop a program that uploads the data automatically to Google Analytics using API.
For more information on the reporting APIs, go to: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/
Filed under: Digital Analytics→Documentation
Tags: digital analytics, Google Analytics, import data, web analytics