1. Improve one-to-many management of client analytics accounts. Google AdWords (in which we do search engine marketing management) makes it easy to manage multiple client accounts. Google Analytics, less so. What would be ideal is one master client-management account for which all associated users could manage all child accounts. Additionally, cross-account reporting could be enabled at the client-management account level.
2. Facilitate easier sharing of custom reports and advanced segments with all users of a profile. Currently, the only way to share custom reports and advanced segments is by sending other profile users a link, which they must click to install a custom report or segment into their Google Analytics instance. This becomes quite cumbersome when you have even a few reports, segments and users. What would be ideal is the ability to share reports and segments with all profile users the way you can share goals, filters and other profile-level configurations.
3. Allow an unlimited number of custom reports to have the same name. Granted, this might cause some problems under the current sharing model, but I find it frustrating that you can’t create a report with the same name, but different features, in multiple profiles. I understand some of the thinking here. A report called, say, “Top Content by Location” might apply in every profile. But once you start configuring reports around, say, goals, all bets are off unless two profiles have the same goals. For example, if a report shows “Top Content by Whitepaper Download,” and the download refers specifically to a goal 1 configured in the profile, then the report is useless in other profiles unless they also have a whitepaper download configured for the same goal. However, they might have a whitepaper download configured for goal 2. Yet under the current model, it wouldn’t be possible to name another custom report “Top Content by Whitepaper Download.”

I fear that this has now become a rant, largely because a tiny percentage of Google Analytics users will even understand what I’m talking about, and I haven’t quite provided the description or graphics necessary to broaden accessibility.

But the bottom line is this: if Google is serious about creating an ecosystem of analytics consultants (and it appears to be quite interested), we need more features to facilitate the kind of work that entails. Beginning with some improved sharing features.

Unless I’m completely off the mark here. Anyone have suggestions for addressing these challenges (besides, of course, lobbying Google)?

But it’s really only a matter of time before marketers begin to figure out the social media conundrum and actually make it pay off. And we might have those first glimmerings in the “State of Inbound Marketing report” released this week by HubSpot and reported by eMarketer.com.

HubSpot’s study indicates that lead generation spending is 60% less among companies that dedicate at least one-half of their budget to inbound marketing tactics like search, blogs and social media.

Now, this doesn’t surprise us—at least, not the part about search. We’ve had a lot of success using cost-effective AdWords campaigns leading dedicated landing pages to generate leads for clients. Pay-per-click ads and SEO strategies fell below or near the average cost-per-lead 65% or 83% of the time, respectively.

But we were a little surprised to find that 63% of companies rated lead generation through social media as below average in cost-per-lead. And being skeptical journalist types, we wondered about the quality of the leads (leads mean nothing unless they turn into customers, after all)—until we looked at the chart that showed that, for business-to-consumer businesses, seven out of 10 companies had found customers through Facebook. (For business-to-business companies, LinkedIn was the most effective social media customer acquisition tool.)

So, apparently, there’s hope for social media as a marketing tool. But the lessons we’ve learned along the way—that campaigns that can’t be measured against concrete business objectives aren’t worth the investment—still hold true. If you aren’t realizing a positive ROI from your online marketing—or if you aren’t tracking your ROI in the first place—you’re wasting money, regardless of whether you’re investing in PPC ads or Facebook fan pages.

The projects have been—ahem—educational.

For one thing, we’ve all mastered a whole lot more French vocab than any of us learned in high school. “Accueil,” for example, means “Home” (in a website context, that is). And “homepage” is “page d’accueil.” Now we know.

We’ve also discovered that most school boards in Ontario—English and French, public and Catholic—have websites. But their ability to track visitor behavior and online marketing ROI varies wildly, from sophisticated analytics configurations to no apparent tracking ability at all.

But we’ve come to another, more far-reaching realization as well.

It isn’t only businesses that benefit from tracking website performance and keeping tabs on online marketing ROI. Public organizations—even ones, like school boards, that might not appear to emphasize marketing and sales—need accurate, customizable, comprehensive reporting tools.

And although this post has “school boards” in the title, the benefits of analytics tracking applies to any organization that wants to improve its marketing effectiveness and maximize its online ROI.

So, with that in mind, here are the top five ways school boards (read: any public organization) can benefit from Google Analytics.

1. Justify online marketing expenditure to trustees and other stakeholders

By capturing more robust return-on-investment data—which promotional campaigns are working to drive qualified traffic to the site, for example—trustees and other decision-makers can make informed decisions about prioritizing marketing budgets.

2. Determine whether the website is communicating effectively with parents, students and staff

Analytics data can tell you whether you’re effectively communicating key messages. For example, checking pageviews and bounce rates for a page about school closures will help determine whether the page is being used to its maximum effectiveness, and provide some context for improvement.

3. Gain understanding of qualified traffic sources

One school board discovered that, although government sites weren’t sending large amounts of traffic, they were referring highly qualified visitors, indicating that further partnerships with government sites would be in the board’s best interests. Analytics information helps you avoid unfruitful partnerships and see exactly where your ROI is coming from.

4. Tracking key activities that have direct impact on ROI (like downloading registration forms)

By tracking registration form downloads (something that hadn’t been previously done), one school board was able to gather data that will ultimately inform navigation, design and site architecture optimization to encourage more conversions. Websites are living entities—by keeping tabs on how your visitors use your site, you can encourage them to take significant actions.

5. Determining areas for potential expansion

Using Analytics’ map overlay tool allowed one school board to determine that they had a small contingent of foreign visitors to the site—providing key information for promoting the board’s offering to a small but significant secondary market. You may have interested prospects in places you never would have predicted—and analytics data can help you pinpoint where they are.

What’s your experience using Google Analytics for public organizations or non-profits? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

• Delivery method—pacing your ads throughout the day or burning through your daily budget as quickly as possible
• Keyword bidding—the amount you’re willing to pay for ad placement per keyword
• Ad scheduling—determining when during the day or week you want your ads to show
• Position preference—designating a position range for each of your keywords
• Ad serving—deciding whether you want your ads to rotate evenly or be automatically optimized
• Networks—showing ads on Google’s search pages, partner pages or content network
• Locations—choosing geographic targets ranging from countries and territories down to precise coordinates

Now if all that complexity doesn’t scare you off, you may notice that none of it is necessary. In its infinite wisdom, Google offers an autopilot mode that lets you skip the customizable factors mentioned above. But while you may be tempted to stick with AdWords’ default settings, assuming Google knows more than you about how your ads could best be delivered, you’d be passing up some serious opportunities to continuously maximize your long-term return on investment.

So to avoid autopilot stagnation and give your search marketing wiggle room for improvement, follow these tips when setting up your AdWords campaigns.

Deliver your ads according to your reach

If you’re targeting or selling to a global market, you’ll want to make sure your ad appearances aren’t limited by time zones. So “standard” delivery, which spaces your ads evenly over the course of each day, is your best bet.

But if you’re staying local, you’ll want to round up conversions at whatever time your target market is most click happy, meaning “accelerated” delivery is the way to go. Keep in mind, however, that once your daily budget has been eaten up, your ads won’t show.

That said, once you’ve developed a funnel that guarantees returns on every click (i.e., the average value of your conversions outweighs their average cost), there’s no sense in limiting your daily budget. After all, why turn down guaranteed profits?

Avoid automatically optimizing your ad rotation

This one’s simple: by choosing “Optimize” in the Ad Serving section, you give Google the authority to give preference to the ads that it designates as your top performers. It seems like a solid plan, until you realize that a few initial fluke successes can snowball into a suboptimal ad ruling the heap without ever having been put to the test.

Instead, make sure your ad placement is set to “Rotate” so that all of your ads appear in equal measure. Only then will you gather sufficient data to determine the real winners.

Use bidding, not position preference, to choose ad positions

Everyone wants their ads to show in the top spot. Depending on your category, that might not be an option, but Google lets you enable position preferences that guarantee your ad will be shown only if it fits within your preferred range. Your quality score, as well as your keyword bids, will determine when and whether this happens.

But because AdWords is essentially a game of money in vs. money out (making sure your investments are always exceeded by the value of your conversions), it’s best to monitor and designate ad positions according to customized bidding instead of setting parameters from a placement frame of mind. Both options offer the same control, but in the interest of minimizing complexity, it’s best to focus on the money you’re spending and what you’re getting in return.

Create a separate campaign for each network

Google offers three distinct locations for ad placement: its search result pages, partner pages and content network. Your campaign’s default setting will encourage you to take advantage of all three at once, but you’ll find that your prospects respond differently to ads that show in different places. And even worse, ads that appear on different networks may require different bid prices, preventing you from truly targeting your bids according to keyword performance.

To skip this mess, assign one campaign exclusively to each network when setting them up, and keep them separate. The quality of the data you collect, along with the added intricacy of optimization, will be worth the effort.

Target locations according to your business

Don’t make the rookie mistake of running ads worldwide if you’re business is location-specific or requires foot traffic as its economic driver. If you’re a ski resort in Whistler, displaying ads in Singapore won’t do much good unless you expect enough oversees tourism from that region to justify the expense.

Over time, careful analytics monitoring will tell you which regions will be your most successful targets (again, depending on the nature of your business), but if you’re just getting started with search marketing, you’ll need to make some cost-saving assumptions about how far people will come or what regions are worth your while.

These simple tips might mean more complexity, more monitoring and, ultimately, more work. But by exploring these options from the start, you’ll find it far easier to optimize your campaigns and increase your returns according to the data you’ll gather over the coming months.

How do I know? A fascinating report on new radio ratings systems shows that when people self-report their classical music listening habits, they inflate their estimate by that margin—probably to give the impression that they’re smarter.

The discrepancy revealed itself when radio surveys were switched from paper-based diaries to more accurate pager-like “people meters.”

Classical music listening went down. Soft-rock listening by men went up—by 16%.

The takeaway? Don’t trust what people say. Trust what they do.

Objective data shows that interest in analytics is gaining on interest in surveys

This is particularly important with web marketing. With the ceaseless launch of new websites and technologies, it’s easy to get caught up in hype. And people don’t want to seem like they’re getting left behind.

Online video and social media marketing are some recent examples. People love to say they’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks, and using them extensively. But often they want to appear savvier than they are.

There’s a similar bias with market research and advertising focus groups. Often, ads that work well in the field perform poorly in testing—a phenomenon discovered in the early days of direct marketing. Why? Because people don’t want to admit how they would really respond to more direct pleas rather than those that are more artful.

So beware self-reported survey data. At the very least, temper them with objective analytics.

Focus on bounces for actionable insights

In the pecking order of analytics metrics, bounce rates place pretty close to the top. They’re tough to misinterpret, and they tend to be standardized across all analytics tools. More importantly, they immediately tell you what’s wrong with any of your site’s landing pages, meaning bounce rates are a highly actionable metric. No matter what tool you use, your bounce rate report will tell you the number of people who called up your site, did absolutely nothing, and left. In other words, it measures people who quickly realized your site wasn’t for them, and who clicked the “back” button just as abruptly as they arrived.

While the bounce rate for your entire site is an important barometer of its relative suckiness in the minds of your visitors, you should be especially concerned with the bounce rate for each of your top landing pages. Whether intended or not (remember that, thanks to search engines, people don’t always land on the pages you expect), these are the first pages that most of your visitors see, so a high bounce rate for any of them tells you whether your inbound links, keywords or pay-per-click ads are sending the wrong type of visitor to the wrong page. Fixing these leaks could be as simple as providing some introductory copy or a call to action on pages you didn’t think anyone landed on.

To make this report even more actionable, check the bounce rate of each of your top referrers. It’ll let you know, at a glance, who’s really driving qualified visits and who’s not pulling their weight as a referral partner. Next, check your bounce rate for each of your top keywords—both paid and organic. A high bounce rate for an organic keyword will tell you if you’ve optimized your site for a useless term, while high bounce rates for paid keywords will let you know if you’re wasting money driving untargeted visits.

Don’t be distracted by exits

Bounces are exciting, informative and immediately actionable. Exits, on the other hand, are sorely overrated. Your exit rate tells you exactly how many people left your site, regardless of what they did before they left. But while some people think this bigger picture of site “leakage” should be even more useful than immediate bounces, it’s not actionable in the least. Why? Because everyone who visits your site has to leave at some point. Even if they spend 20 minutes in spellbound appreciation of your content and they perform every desired action and goal completion your analytics tool lets you track, they’re still going to leave. And the vagueness of this metric means you can’t distinguish people who leave your site happy from those who leave frustrated, angry and determined never to return.

The exit rate exception

There’s one exception to the “ignore exit rates” rule: If you’ve cleverly planned your online conversion funnel in hopes that your prospects will follow a structured path from your intended landing page to a specific product page and all the way to a conversion page (and hopefully a “thank you” page), an exit from any of the pages before the conversion takes place—now called an “abandonment rate”—is definitely worth looking into and is definitely actionable. While bounce rates might help you assess the worth of an intended landing page for your funnel, they’re powerless when it comes to measuring the success of any of the equally important intermediary pages.

The distinction should now be clear: Bounces, which refer to people arriving and immediately wishing they hadn’t, are one of the quickest, easiest and most actionable glimpses into your site’s overall performance. And exits, which tally a notch every time someone leaves—whether for the right or wrong reasons—are essentially useless outside of your sales funnel. Plan your measurement accordingly, and you’ll gain quicker access to actionable information without wasting time on pointless metrics.

Well, here’s a secret. When we provide web analytics services, we know that one of the biggest wins is simply configuring goals and goal funnels. By doing this, you can evaluate metrics according to objectives, giving you insight rather than just information, such as which traffic sources and content are most valuable for your business. In fact, by assigning actual values to goals, you can even sort content according to its revenue value—guiding you to add, optimize and delete content according to its measurable worth (not just how “cool” that guy in the cubicle next door thinks it is). Something like this:

Setting goals in Google Analytics adds functionality such as dollar-index value that adds insight into your return on investment

Setting goals is fairly straightforward (and obvious) for people like us who spend more time with web analytics tools than with family members. But if your life’s more balanced, and you haven’t set them up, here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

1. Define the business objectives for your website. Sounds like a no-brainer. But you would be surprised how many people haven’t clarified the why for their website. Is your site supposed to generate leads? Reinforce existing relationships? Start with the end in mind.
2. Map a sales funnel to your objectives. What happens on the web at each step towards your objective? For example, if your objective is to get people to visit your contact page, how do you get them to your website? And how do you get them from their to your contact form?
3. Establish a conversion page or action. How do you know if someone completes your desired objective? For example, if you want to track contact form submissions through your website, you’ll want to set up a conversion page (or, if you want to get nifty, trigger virtual page views through JavaScript as on our contact form). With new features from Google Analytics, you can now also configure non-page conversions such as time on site.
4. Determine the value of your conversion. How much is your desired action worth? For example, if 10% of people who submit a request through your contact form become a customer, and the average sale is $500, each contact form submission is worth $50.
5. Input your sales funnel, conversion action and conversion value into your analytics tool. If you’re using Google Analytics, here’s help setting up your goals and funnels.

It sounds complicated, but often the hardest part is simply clarifying your objectives. Far too many people, when you ask, often respond with means rather than ends, such as “get more traffic.” Once you know your objectives, the rest is just following instructions. And if you’re really struggling, or have complicated goals and funnels, feel free to contact us for web analytics service. We’ll happily track that conversion and help you out.

Well, yes—although we don’t bill ourselves as an SEO shop.

And when we ask clients about their objectives for their website, their answer is usually “Lots of traffic.”

Sure. We help with that, too.

The problem is that most people stop right there. They figure with enough keyword-loaded meta tags and thousands of visitors, success will inevitably follow.

Sorry—it just isn’t that simple. (And, by the way, loading your meta tags with keywords is pretty ineffective and, well, just old-fashioned.)

SEO’s not a silver bullet

There is no silver bullet in internet marketing. Traffic’s only the first step down a much longer road to sales.

SEO is one small part of search engine marketing (SEM), which in turn is only one component of your overall online marketing strategy.

Think of it this way: your prospects go through stages as they decide whether or not to engage with your products or services. Generally, those stages are:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Consideration

• Acquisition

• Retention

• Advocacy

Now, look at those stages, and think about what SEO is designed to do. Sure, high search rankings will definitely increase awareness, and compelling meta descriptions might spark interest in your site. And prospects who see your ranking may click through and consider what you’re offering.

But if all you’re doing is SEO, how are you going to move your prospects through the next three steps of the funnel?

Once they get to your site, how are you going to keep them there? And how are you going to convince them to engage any further beyond a click and a bounce?

SEO just isn’t enough.

SEM isn’t magic, either

Search engine marketing—that is, pay-per-click ads, link-building initiatives and similar strategies—will help take your prospects a little farther along the funnel. If you’re running a lead generating campaign, for example, you’ll be acquiring leads, some of which will lead to sales.

And because SEM campaigns offer infinite opportunities for optimizing your messaging, you’ll increase interest and consideration as well, simply by saying things that people want to hear.

But even SEM, on its own or combined with SEO, isn’t enough.

That’s because too many people put SEO and SEM campaigns into place, then forget about them—thinking, wrongly, that they’ll continue to generate traffic, leads and revenue with no further work.

Nope. That may work for a while, but search engine algorithms change and messages become less compelling over time. Your system just can’t continue to work without constant tinkering.

Strategy (and constant optimization) is key

For your sales funnel to be truly leak-proof, you need a comprehensive strategy in place to attract prospects, turn them into customers, then hold them close, keep them happy and get them talking.

And for that, you need to go beyond SEO or SEM. You need an an overall, continuously optimized online marketing plan that aligns with your business’s objectives—one that grows and changes with the demands of your market.

Yes, it should include SEO and SEM.

But it also has to include things like:

• Clear, concise copy that’s been optimized for the way people read on the web

• Regular content updates

• Community-building initiatives like a blog or discussion group.

And it must include a way to track your online performance—so you can tell where your funnel may be leaking, and improve accordingly. (And, just in case you couldn’t tell from all our previous posts, we like Google Analytics.)

SEO is a start to your online marketing—but it certainly isn’t the end.

In Web Analytics 2.0 (required reading for anyone who cares about doing well on the web) analytics guru Avinash Kaushik discusses the difficulty of separating the people (visitors) from the events (visits) with some tools, and a brief summary is in order.

Visits are typically simple to gauge. Most tools refer to them as such, or they call them “sessions,” which is still descriptive enough to get the job done. Some tools, however, confusingly refer to visits as “visitors,” making it difficult to distinguish between these basic metrics.

But things get a little more shaky when it comes to measuring unique visitors. While telling visits apart is easy, tools like Google Analytics have to distinguish between the people who visit a site by setting a unique cookie on each person’s browser. So if they visit again, the tool, which will now recognize them, will tally a new visit but not a new unique visitor.

Why some tools inflate visitor counts

Because some browsers don’t accept cookies or reject third-party cookies (an unavoidable fact that web analysts simply have to deal with), developing an accurate picture of your unique visitors is fraught from the start. And some tools further complicate this inaccuracy by breaking up the metric into “daily unique visitors,” “weekly unique visitors” and “monthly unique visitors.”

If you’re shopping around for an analytics tool or you’re using one that offers these additional metrics, you should probably understand just how useless these metrics are. Why? Because daily unique visitors will register as unique for every consecutive day they visit. The same goes for weeks, so if you’re analyzing your site’s performance over the course of a month (which you likely do unless your site is massive), your unique daily visitors and unique weekly visitors metrics will throw numbers at you that are completely out of proportion. In many cases you could easily end up with more visitors than visits.

The only visitor metric that matters

The answer to this visitor inflation is, of course, the “Absolute Unique Visitors” metric. If you’re used to using sophisticated, user-friendly tools like Google Analytics, XiTi or Nedstat, you might take this metric for granted. (You might even mistake it for jargon.) But know this: Not all tools are equal, and not every tool offers this complicated and (mostly) accurate metric. Your “Absolute Unique Visitors” report is the result of extremely complex and time-consuming calculation. It’s an extra mile that lazier tools with their “additional” metrics have simply avoided—much to the user’s detriment.

The lesson here? First, you should always question the importance of a particular measurement. Differentiating between daily, weekly and monthly visitors might seem like due diligence, but it’s really just laziness that can easily skew your data if you aren’t careful.

And when choosing an analytics tool, you should always place an emphasis on user-friendly naming conventions. Ask your vendor what they call a visit. If they say “visitor,” you might want to keep looking.

Most importantly, make sure you pick a tool that measures absolute unique visitors. Measuring unique visitors will never be a completely accurate process, but monitoring your absolute unique visitors is the closest you’ll come to correctly tracking this important metric.

1. Apps: Anyone with an iPhone already knows it. But the appification of Facebook, Salesforce, Google and other web titans suggests there’s more to apps than handheld video games. In fact, Pincus believes (and he seems to have a knack for this web stuff) that the traditional web battlefields are wide open. Even search, he proposes, has no clear leader in the app space. So just because your business dominates the web doesn’t mean it will dominate web-connected apps.
2. Measurement: As a company focused on analytics and measurable results, we’re happy to hear about this—and we’ve noticed. As people increasingly turn to the web and apps for things they previously got elsewhere (like books and newspapers), the ability to measure their activity has become both more important and more possible. That’s why so many web analysts and marketers were excited by Google’s recent announcement of new mobile- and app-tracking features in Google Analytics. Such measurement enables rapid testing and optimization. And if your company’s not doing it, you will almost certainly get left behind by more savvy competitors.
3. Paid content: Could it really be? Are people finally willing to pay for web content? Well, yes and no. With over one billion downloads, the Apple app store reportedly makes $1 million a day in application sales. Traditional websites, however, still tend to fail at pay-wall experiments. So it appears that just because something uses data from the web doesn’t mean people treat it like a website. That’s of important note for your business, as it’s possible you can develop an app that people will actually pay for (like Kraft did). Why? I think there are a few reasons. First, people treat the web like public space, but treat their mobile devices like private space. They expect public space to be free but understand private space takes investment (they’ll buy patio furniture for their yard but not for their nearest park). Second, as internet access costs drop to nothing—and they will, facilitated by Google’s better-than-free operating system plans that will encourage companies to give away mobile devices and data access—people have more money to spend on digital content. There are many other factors, of course, but the bottom line is that consumers appear ready to pay for some digitally distributed content and web-enabled applications.

Call it what you will, but it’s clear these trends will impact your business.

And you should probably act now, because you can bet web 4.0 is on its way.