I have to take a moment and give a shout out to a top-notch Google Employee that I have worked with for the past almost two years. Kevin, you’ve been a most excellent ‘Relationship Manager’ as I suppose your official title was. Thank you so much for your many hours on the phone with me as we worked on the account together. I wish you the best of luck in you future roles at Google.
I recently started working on PPC and Analytics for a new launched website. In this case, it is an Optometrist in Lincoln, NE. I’m particularly interested in knowing if anyone has any bounce rate benchmark information for medical practice sites. Please comment below if yes. It seems to me that many private practices could greatly benefit from a knowledge Analytics expert. I’ll keep everyone in the loop as to how this newly launched site is panning out. I’ll even probably share some groovy charts.
One report that I find extremely useful in the Goals Section is the Conversion Rate Report. In a moment, I’ll explain how a quick export of data from the Conversion Rate Report can provide valuable insight into one’s abandonment rate. But first, a quick intro into conversion rates, abandonment rates, and conversion funnels. In general, I assume that my readership is relatively erudite in Google Analytics. So if this next paragraph is below your level of expertise, feel free to skip ahead. That said, I believe it is worthwhile for all us out there who are trying to be successful on the Internet to get back to the basics and remember the fundamentals.
Fundamental #1 –> It’s all about conversions.
Really. It is. Especially when it comes to e-commerce. There are soooo many people about there who are still interested in how many people come to their site. But if they aren’t taking the desired action(s) that you would want them to, then most likely you’re wasting time and money.
Take a step back. Take a deep breath. And say to yourself, “what do I want people to do when they come to my website.” The answer(s) should be easy. Lead generation? (Filling out a form). Signing up for an email list? Online purchase?
Once you define your goal and properly configure it in the settings section, you’re ready for the next step.
But before we get there….
Fundamental #2 –> Lowering Abandonment Rate is the best way to increase conversions.
For most of the online conversions we can think of, there is usually a multistage process that the user needs to go through in order to complete the conversion. This is called the conversion funnel. Whether it is filling out a form, or completing an online purchase, if the user is on one page and then needs to make a click on a button to submit or proceed, they are in the funnel. If a user is in the funnel, but they don’t make it to the end of the process, then they are ‘abandoned’ the funnel. In many cases, a potential customer will put an item in their shopping cart but won’t check out. This is called shopping cart abandonment. This is also called leaving money on the table; or imagine yourself at the grocery store with a whole cart of food and the you just leave the cart in the middle of aisle 6 and walk out of the store without buying anything. Since you don’t want people to walk out of your store, one of the best things to do is to get less people to leave when they have good in your cart.
This article is not about ways to lower cart abandonment. There are a lot of good tools out there (read: Google Website Optimizer) that can help with testing different cart scenarios and designs.
The main tip that I’m presenting here is a unique way to look at abandonment rate. By noticing trends in abandonment rate you will likely find a way to leverage this information to make some decisions that will pay off (like adjusting your PPC bids).
Ok… enough chatter. Here’s the tip:
As I mentioned in a previous post, it is very worthwhile to set up goals for different stages of your funnel. This may require setting up an additional profile to do just this, but trust me, it’s worth it.
In this example, we’re going to look at those people who put something in their cart and those who complete their purchase.
Simple math –> divide the number of people who complete their purchase with the number of people who put something in their cart, subtract from 1, and you have your abandoment rate, represented as a percentage.
Abandonment Rate = 1 – (purchase/cart).
In the conversion rate report under the goals section a really nice feature is the ability to look at conversion rates at different times of the day.
Conversion Rate by Time of Day
Remember that simple math from above? So just export your two reports with conversion rate for time of day at the shopping cart and completed purchase levels of your funnel and you can calculate your abandonment rate by time of day using a spreadsheet.
Abandonment Rate by Time of Day
An action item for this client would be to lower PPC bids during off hours and boost them during midday hours.
Questions and Comments are welcome.
Proper configuration of Goals in Google Analytics is a critical to the ability to make good business decisions. Especially for those of you out there spending money on PPC, in order to make the best return on investment possible (and stop wasting your money), properly set up goals are a must.
In my humble opinion, Conversion Rate and Bounce Rate are two of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs). As you can see below, when I configured Goal Conversions for a client, I was able to make the types of decisions necessary in their PPC account to drive conversions up and bounce rate down.
BEFORE –> 50.19% Bounce Rate | No Conversion Tracking.
Bounce Rate Before
AFTER –>38.73% Bounce Rate | 2.28% Conversion Rate
Bounce Rate After
As you can see, I was able to take the bounce rate down almost 12 percentage points. This is significantly lower than the benchmark for sites of similar size. Check out the stats for last week’s traffic.
Bounce Rate Benchmark
The major improvements in online performance were mostly do to looking at which campaigns were working and which weren’t. While bounce rate is a very important metric, I would not have felt comfortable making such bold changes to the PPC spend without knowing the conversion rate.
Comparing Campaigns | Conversion Rate
Where would you want to put your money?
Another extremely useful place to look at in Google Analytics is the Map Overlay. The Map Overlay allows you to look at Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate by location (of course, in addition to other valuable metrics).
This particular client was spending close to 25% of their PPC budget for ads in the UK.
Conversion Rate by Country
Yuch! But before I decided to pause the ads in England, I applied an Advanced Segment that allows me to see the performance of all visitors who didn’t bounce. Just wanted to make sure that I knew about the behavior of the Brits who did stay on the site.
Conversion Rate by Country | No Bounce
Also pretty bad… Guess who isn’t advertising in England anymore?
Thankfully, looking at these metrics smartly has allowed this client to save significant money and improve their ROI.
In any case, I found the relationship between conversion rate and bounce rate to be interesting. I hope you did too.
Until next time….
Ninjafully yours,
A.N.
Understanding your conversion funnel is one of the keys to finding the best ways to improve your conversion rate. The first thing to do is to identify which part of your funnel needs fixing. For example, are people abandoning in the shopping cart? Somewhere else in the checkout process?
conversion funnel
The challenge that I’ve come across is answering questions like, “Who is abandoning my cart? Which keywords are they searching on? Which traffic source are they from?” and on and on…
The Supreme Ninja already told us that by using Advanced Segmentation we can all be Analysis Ninjas. Well, here is my tip for super-charging your conversion funnel analysis.
Really, it’s quite simple. Just create an Advanced Segment for each page in your goal funnel. (Dimension > Content > Page = Step in Funnel). In the example above, the cart and form pages of the online purchase funnel are the two areas where lots of people are dropping out.
Here’s an example of creating a segment for all visitors who visited the cart page:
advanced segment of shopping cart visitors
The results are quite powerful. Let’s take a look at All Traffic Sources. We can now export this data and calculate the abandonment rates for each of our traffic sources.
advanced segments of conversion funnel
This can now be applied to the Map Overlay (which locations have higher or lower abandonment rates), the Content Section (which pages have higher or lower abandonment rates), Keywords, Campaigns… use your imagination.
Let me know what you think!
Best wishes,
Your friendly neighborhood analytics ninja
This Google Analytics Ninja seems to have saved the day and spotted a problem with code implementation for a friend’s WordPress blog. (Well, a friend of a friend, but I guess it is about the same thing).
On July 20th, I was approached with the all too common, “I believe that I”ve configured Google Analytics properly, but it isn’t working!” problem.
I took a look at their source code, and I spotted an extra space.
Google Analytics Isn't Tracking - problem
I thought to myself, “hmm… how did that space get there?” In the WordPress backend, I confirmed that indeed a space was the culprit.
Google Analytics Isn't Tracking - Culprit
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would have caught that problem just by looking at the Analytics for WordPress plugin configuration page.
Shortly thereafter, we were able to see GA tracking properly.
Proof of Success
Action Item: Check your source code for any unwanted spaces.
Extra note: this can be the culprit for e-commerce tracking issues as well.
There are a lot of things that bother me about Yahoo Search Marketing. A LOT. If anyone from Yahoo out there reads this blog, please pass on this piece of advice to your supervisors –> copy Google. DO WHAT THEY DO.
*Sigh* I’ll vent more frustration about Yahoo later. There does happen to be, however, one or two areas that Yahoo is superior to Adwords, imvho. Today’s post is about one of them: Tagging.
For the purposes of this post, I assume that everyone reading this blog knows how to tag their links. If not, please read up here. And use the URL builder.
Here is the tag that I put on all of my Yahoo PPC destination URLs.
?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PUT-THE-CAMPAIGN-NAME-HERE%20{YSMMTC}&utm_term={YSMKEY}&utm_content={YSMRAW}
Another option is to leave the match type off of the name of your campaign. I have found it helpful to leave it in, like the first example.
?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PUT-THE-CAMPAIGN-NAME-HERE&utm_term={YSMKEY}&utm_content={YSMRAW}
The utm_term={YSMKEY} tag populates the Keyword dimension with the keyword that you are bidding on, and the utm_content={YSMRAW} populates the Ad Content dimension with the raw query.
Make sure that you have tracking urls turned on in the Yahoo backend.
The result in Google Analytics is the ability to drill down on a keyword in Yahoo and see all of the raw queries which triggered the keyword. In other words, a search query report (which, not surprisingly Yahoo doesn’t even offer in their UI, you have to request it from the support team. argh! )
Yahoo Search Query Report
IMPORTANT: Make sure to exclude the URL parameters from your Analytics reports. Otherwise it messes up your Content Report, landing page analytics, etc.
exclude URL parameters
This is one of my favorite advanced segmentations. I often times find myself frustrated by the fact that keyword match types are all mashed together and reported as one keyword. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, they are three different keywords. For example, in Adwords
[podiums]
“podiums”
podiums
will have different CPCs, different average positions, different conversion rates, but in Google Analytics I only see
podiums
With one bounce rate, one conversion rate, one average pages per visit, etc.
Since I’m bidding and paying different amounts for different match types, I treat [podiums] differently than “podiums”. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could natively segment this in Analytics?
Well… unfortunately you can’t.
Keyword Positions
But here is my method to do exactly that.
Step One: Embedded Match
Separate all of your keywords by match type into unique adgroups. Then use embedded match to guarantee that each search query triggers the right keyword match type. Using embedded match isn’t fully necessary here, but it is a good idea anyway.
What is necessary is that the adgroups are clearly named so that they can be segmented later.
Embedded Match Adgroup Names
Step Two: Create Advanced Segments
Segment by Match Type
Choose Adgroup as your Dimension. Choose contains and then the naming convention of your adgroup. In the example above, I have named all adgroups that contain phrase match keywords with the word “phrase” as a part of the adgroup name.
Now, when I look at any of my keyword level reporting in Analytics, I can see how different keyword perform by match type.
What it looks like when you segment by match type
Questions and Comments are welcome.
Enjoy,
Analytics Ninja
Welcome to my Analytics Ninja Blog:
Analytics Ninja
Yes… Yes… I know that there are plenty of other Web Analytics Ninjas out there. I have a lot of respect for many of my colleagues who are continually rocking the field of Web Analytics with their Analytics Awesomeness. That said, with a great sense of humility I do feel entitled to share the designation of Analytics Ninja with my fellow ninjas who are out there.
I hope that any readers of this blog will find the musings of this ninja to be informative, worthwhile, and enjoyable.
