Google Analytics is a valuable tool that can help you increase the Return on Investment (ROI) of your Website. Data in the Google Analytics reports show where conversions are coming from, how much revenue these conversions are generating (if you have Ecommerce set up) and how much they cost (if you have AdWords installed). With this information you can weed out efforts that are not profitable. Below are six areas you can use Google Analytics to increase your ROI.

Email and Advertising Campaigns - Use Google Analytics to compare your advertising campaigns. Which ones are bringing you the most cost-effective conversions? Are you capitalizing on those campaigns? Test different versions of email campaigns and banner advertisements to see which ones perform the best.

In addition to online advertising, use Google Analytics to compare offline advertising effectiveness when that advertising drives visitors to your site. Use vanity or promotional URLs in your ads so you can see which ads are the most effective. Of course you need to take into consideration the cost of your offline advertisements as Google Analytics does not know that information.

PPC/CPC Campaigns - Improve your PPC with Google Analytics integration. Google Analytics can show you how many conversions you are getting from your Pay Per Click or Cost Per Click programs. It can pull in cost data so you see how much you spent compared with how much you earned. You can identify additional keywords to target by seeing which keywords are working for you, while eliminating those that are not.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Are your SEO efforts effective? Analytics will show whether your efforts are paying off. Expect organic traffic to increase conversion rates as your program moves forward. If your conversion rates are not increasing, you may need to adjust your SEO efforts.

Keywords - Are you targeting keywords that bring buyers to your site, or are these keywords bringing traffic that doesn't convert? Google Analytics will identify which keywords are working to attract quality traffic that converts. These are the keywords you should be focusing on to continue increasing ROI.

Goal / Sales Funnels - Do you have a bottleneck in your online goal/sales funnel that is preventing visitors from converting? Perhaps you have a form step that isn't working properly, or that discourages visitors from continuing on. Google Analytics can show you these problem pages through funnel visualization. See which steps may be causing your problems and investigate why these steps are causing problems. Then fix them.

Page Performance - Some of your pages may be the golden ticket to getting visitors to convert, while other pages may be causing visitors to leave the site. Using the content report, you can see which pages are leading to conversions and which ones have high exit rates. Some pages by default will have high exit rates depending on the nature of the page, but in general, having a high exit rate is not favorable. You will want to analyze why these pages are not doing well, and take the steps to improve them.

Each of these areas is a great place to start increasing the ROI of your online marketing efforts. Monitoring over time will tell you how well your efforts are working or when you need to tweak them for improvement. Remember to look at your data overall and not just individual points, which can be misleading. Don't forget that there are often outside costs associated with your online marketing program that Google Analytics cannot see, and these need to be taken into consideration. Using the data gained from Google Analytics, make changes to improve your program so you can become more effective and efficient.

Labels: Google Analytics

In the simplest of terms, XML Sitemaps are lists of the pages / files on your Website. They allow you to send Google a direct list of all the pages / files on your Website, including those pages that may not normally be found via Google's search crawlers. Keep in mind that just because you have all your Website's URLs listed in the XML Sitemap doesn't mean Google WILL crawl or index all of them.

In addition to your typical XML Sitemap, Google also supports the following specialized XML Sitemaps: mobile, video, images, code search, geo and news. Until recently, Webmasters had to create separate XML Sitemaps for each of the specialized formats. Now, you can combine all of your specialized XML Sitemaps into your main XML Sitemap; combine multiple XML Sitemaps down to one. Yeah! Well maybe?

For some webmasters this may be a huge plus, however there are advantages to keeping your XML Sitemaps separated:

Metrics: By submitting individual XML Sitemaps for various media types as well as your most important content you can measure indexing, links, etc on a more direct level. For example, when you submit an XML Sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can see the # of URLs submitted as well as the # of URLs indexed. By having a separate images XML Sitemap you can narrow that count down further to knowing how many of your Images Google is indexing versus them being lumped in with Web pages.

Size Limitations: With the new change, Google has NOT increased the current limits on the number of URLS and size that can be included (50,000 URLs and 10MB), so if you are a large Website with many media files, you will still need to use multiple XML Sitemaps.

Alliance: How does this change affect the Sitemaps.org Alliance (2006) between Google, Yahoo and Bing? The Alliance created a uniform support for the Web page XML Sitemap format; however Google launched specialized XML Sitemaps on their own. Yahoo and Bing do not appear to support the specialized XML formats. The question is then raised that isn't Google working against the Alliance by combining the specialized XML formats into one XML Sitemap without the input of Yahoo and Bing on the matter? If you create one main XML Sitemap with all the specialized attributes included, will Bing and Yahoo be able to understand it? That's the big question now isn’t it? Maybe it is not a big deal, but wasn't the purpose of the Alliance to make things easier for the Web site owners? Seems to me Google may have done the opposite.

Labels: Organic SEO

A great way to get your Google Analytics data is to have the reports emailed to you. An even better way to stay up-to-date with your data is to have your reports scheduled to be emailed to you. This allows you to get all of the information you need without going to the Google Analytics site and logging in. Though this is a seemingly basic feature, it seems as though a lot of users are not aware of it or don't know how to set it up. Google Analytics even allows you to have these reports emailed to others, so your whole office can stay up to date on your progress, as well as any clients or decision makers that want to stay informed.

To email reports or set up scheduled report emails, you first need to go to the Google Analytics Website and login.

Once you are logged in, you will want to select "view report" next to the profile you would like to see reports for.


Once you are in your reports section you can click on any of the reports you would like emailed to you. For example, perhaps you want your traffic report emailed to you. Click on "Traffic Sources" in your left navigation and at the top of the page you will see a button that says "Email". Click this button.


You will then be taken to a screen where you can fill in the details of who you want your report sent to, the subject, a description of the report, and what format to send it in. You have the option to send your report in PDF, XML, CSV for Excel, CSV, or TSV format. There is also a check box that is selected by default to have the report emailed to the email address of the Google Analytics Account. On the right side of the screen you will see a small preview of what the email will look like before you send it.


At the top of the screen you have the option to schedule the emailing of reports. You can schedule reports to be sent quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily. When scheduling the reports to be emailed, you also fill in the email addresses of the recipients, a subject, description, and the format of the report.


Once the information is complete, click "Schedule" and you are finished! Your report will now be emailed based on the information you input.
If later on you decide you want to change the frequency of your reports, who they get sent to, or stop them completely, you can do this by going to the "email" option under "My Customizations" in the left navigation of the page.


You will then be taken to a "Manage Scheduled Emails" screen. Here you can edit the scheduled emails by clicking on the subject title, or you can delete the scheduled emails by clicking on the trash can off to the right of "Manage Scheduled Emails" screen.


The ability to email reports and schedule them is a great time saver and a great way to keep stakeholders and decision makers informed. This is just another great feature offered by Google Analytics that often gets overlooked. Google Analytics makes this easy so anyone can use it. Try it out, you can always change it later!

Labels: Google Analytics