One way to make web analytics actionable is to break the site into different sections (such as home pages, category pages, etc.) and generate reports specific to those pages/sections. In this post, we’re going to identify some of the most common reports for analyzing home pages.

First, lets start by defining home pages and their goals. The home page is typically the main gateway page for your site. It’s the first impression that your visitors will have of your site. Its role is to showcase your offerings, your value proposition and provide quick access to the most popular or important sections of your site. For this reason, web analytics should help you answer some of the following questions:

• How effective is the home page at directing visitors to product pages?
• Which part of the home page is the most effective?
• Is the home page effective at enticing visitors to learn more?

Based on these, below are some popular web analytics reports for home page analysis along with the explanation:

• Bounce Rate
• Micro Step Conversion Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Acquisition Sources
• Home Page Real Estate

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is defined as the number of bounces (single page visits) divided by entries. It shows you what percentage of the traffic landing on the page bounces and does not view any other page on the site. It is a reflection of the home page’s ability to retain visitors. Clearly the goal is to make changes to the home page and lower the bounce rate. It’s probably one of the best reports to look for when analyzing home pages. This report is widely available in most web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics and Unica NetInsight.

Micro Step Conversion Rate

Although the ultimate goal of your site is to drive conversions, we recommend micro step conversions as a better way to assess home pages. The goal of your home page is to drive people to your product description pages. It’s at that level that you do the selling. For this reason, when assessing the success of your home page, it should be around its ability to get visitors to those ensuing pages. You can get this in a number of way. Inside tools such as Yahoo! Web Analytics and SiteCatalyst, you can tag your product description pages as events and look at the success of your home page around this event. In Google Analytics, you can create a goal for your product pages, as long as the pages have a consistent nomenclature. If not, you can create an advanced segment for your product pages and look at the home page traffic for the segment. Such metrics can pretty easily be created inside Unica NetInsight and Webtrends.

Conversion Rate

Yes, this should not be your primary report for home page analysis, but you can still use this report as a tie-breaker. For example, if two versions of home have similar bounce and micro step conversion rates, then you can use the overall conversion rate to see if one version does in fact do a better job. Unfortunately, we often see that many people use conversion rate as the primary report for assessing home page effectiveness.

Acquisition Sources

Want to lower your bounce rate? One place to start is by looking at the acquisition sources. You can start with the sources of traffic to your home page and look at their respective bounce rates. Start with referring sources with high bounce rates. Often, you’ll find a messaging gap between the referring sites and your home page. The referring site may be saying something while your home page could be promoting something else. While you cannot optimize your home page for all referring sites, you can start with those with high traffic and high bounce rates and provide messaging on your home page that helps retain this incoming traffic. You’ll typically find that a handful of sites may account for a high percentage of your bouncing traffic.

Home Page Real Estate

To understand the real estate effectiveness, you’ll have to look at the click activity on the page. Rather than looking at all page links, we recommend classifying the link into sections or categories (such as as header, footer, navigation, left box, right box, etc.), and analyzing the activity by such sections. This is different than the default site overlay that you typically get from web analytics tools and requires some additional configuration to get proper reporting. For example, if you’re using Google Analytics we recommend using Event Tracking to track the activity on various sections and links within sections. You can then see how effectively each section and each link gets visitors to product pages and to final conversion.

You can also investigate some of the in-page analytics tools such as CrazyEgg and ClickTale, which do a more thorough job of providing such reports than web analytics tools.

Of course, depending on your business, your reporting needs may vary, but we believe this list should provide a good starting page for optimizing one of your most important pages.

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As more large enterprises are adopting Google Analytics, there’s a growing demand for enterprise-level features from the solution. Google has made some tremendous progress over the last year by introducing some advanced functionalities such as Advanced Segments, Custom Reports and API access, which has created an impressive ecosystem of add-on tools. There are still, however, some functionalities that are highly desired by the more advanced user base. One such functionality is reporting on product conversion or abandonment.

The Ecommerce functionality inside Google Analytics already provides a great deal of insight, including transactions and identifying your top revenue sources such as keywords, campaigns and affiliates. However, for those companies interested in optimizing their site merchandizing, a useful report is that of product conversion or abandonment. In other words, companies would like to understand the effectiveness of individual products at generating a view, a cart-add, checkout progress and finally a purchase.

Although this is not a standard report in Google Analytics, you can use the new Event Tracking feature in Google Analytics in order to generate this insight. This post outlines the instructions for those that want to generate such reporting inside Google Analytics.

The Event Tracking feature was originally designed by Google to help track visitor interactions within the web site. Examples include link clicks, downloads or interactions within a video or a Flash application. A typical syntax for sending an event to Google Analytics is the following:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value);

Where category is the name you supply to the elements you want to track, action is the name of the user action, label is the name or label associate with the event and an optional value, such as an amount associated with the event.

For this solution, we’re going to use the following syntax:

• Category: the value passed into Category will be “product”. This lets us differentiate between other events if this feature is also used for other purposes.
• Action: the values passed into this variables will be “view”, “cart”, “checkout” and “order”, depending on the stage at which the visitor is.
• Label: this variable will be used to capture the name of the product.
• Value: not needed in this case.

The next step is to code your ecommerce pages accordingly in order to pass the product name and the event into Google Analytics. Below are some instructions.

For the product pages, the following line should be added to the Google Analytics page code. The PRODUCT_NAME should be inserted dynamically from your content management solution.

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “view”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “cart”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “checkout”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

pageTracker._trackEvent(“product”, “order”, “PRODUCT_NAME”);

Viewing Reports

The reports will be available within the Event Tracking section inside Google Analytics. If you want to see the overall progress at different stages, you can start with the “Categories” report and from there, click the “product” category. An example of the resulting view is shown below.

However, this merely gives you the progress at different stages without visibility into specific products. In order to see the progress within a specific product, you can go to the “Labels” report as shown below, which provides a list of individual products and select a specific item. The ensuing screen is also shown below and provides a view of the progress at each stage for the specific item selected. Here, you’ll be able to see how many times an individual item was viewed, added to cart, checked out and purchased.

Obviously, Event Tracking was not originally built for tracking product conversions, so it’s important to note the implications of such methodology. One of the main items to consider is that Event Tracking generates extra views in your account. As a result this methodology will have an impact on your overall account pageviews, pages per visit and bounce rates. For example, if a visitor hits a product page and bounces, because you’re using Event Tracking to track the page view event, you won’t be able to see the bounce event take place. However, for those who absolutely need to track product conversion/abandonment, this provides a reasonable solution.

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Hi everyone, this is Olivier. I wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that I’m running for the Web Analytics Association Board of Directors.

For those who read this blog, I would like to explain briefly the reasons behind my nomination and why I’m asking you to vote for me (weird feeling now… requesting your vote! I feel like I’m entering into politics).

Anyway, I have presented my candidacy because I feel that our industry needs as much help and support as we can provide. And having been in the Web Analytics and Online Optimization space for more than 10 years now, I felt it was time for me to give back to this industry that has given me so much. My objective with the WAA if I have the chance to be elected is to put much effort in helping web analytics and online marketers solve the challenges of spending more time on what matters. For the past 10 years, and everywhere I go, it’s the same challenge.

What matters is the analysis, the interpretation, and more importantly the actions/recommendations/changes we can make base on the data that has been collected. Testing new marketing or web design ideas, improving the user experience, watching the online conversion rates increase, that’s what is fun and rewarding.

But unfortunately, most people are bugged down with data accuracy, implementation challenges, best practice measurements, etc. Too many individuals are spending their time trying to reconcile numbers, understanding and explaining why A and B don’t match as they should, figuring out the best way to measure specific web content (i.e.. flash, video, Social Media, mobile, offline data, etc.), and finally coordinating efforts with IT to implement (or re-implement) their web analytics tags for the 10th times to capture all this. There’s got to be a better way. And that’s the challenge I would like to tackle with all the players in this industry if I’m elected.

I really think that the WAA could be more proactive as an organization. Look at the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and how they create web standards ahead of time for everyone, especially for technology vendors to follow. As a WAA director, I would love to list all the key challenges expressed by the WAA members (some of them listed above) and figure out proactive standards and best practices for measurement and implementation with all the key players in this industry so that WE (all of us) get to spend more time on what matters.

For more information about my candidacy, you can visit the WAA site.

I appreciate everyone’s support, and I wish you all a successful 2009.

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Ever wonder how you can track the performance of your onsite campaigns and promotions with Google Analytics?

The first instinct is to use Google’s campaign functionality to track their effectiveness. The problem with the approach though is that you’ll be overriding your external campaigns. Consider this scenario: the visitor comes from an email campaign that’s being tracked through Google Analytics and once on site, he/she clicks on the internal campaign, overriding the email campaign. When the conversion occurs, the campaign that takes credit is the internal one, falsely leading you to think that your email campaign is not performing.

So what to do in this case? The solution is to use another Google Analytics feature for internal campaign tracking to make sure your internal campaigns do not override your acquisition programs. Additionally, consider the scenario where you may have several internal campaigns or promotions that are displayed on the page at random. For example, in one impression the visitor may get exposed to promotions A and B, and upon refreshing the page the same visitor may get exposed to promotions B and C. An example of this can be seen at the bottom of the Wells Fargo home page shown below (note: not a client). In this case, it’s not only critical to track the clicks, but also impressions because the combined data points will give you the campaign click-through rates.

In this solution, we’ve developed a script that lets you track the effectiveness of your internal campaigns using Google Analytics’ new Event Tracking feature. The reason we selected Event Tracking is because we wanted an easy way to track both impressions (for rotating banners and offers) and clicks.

So how does this work? First, download the toolkit, which consists of the script and the instructions. This solution will let you tag the links for which you want to track impressions and clicks with a query parameter. By adding the query parameter onto the destination URLs, the script will track both impressions and clicks automatically.

Here’s an example: consider you have a total of 5 promotions on your home page that rotate randomly (like the Wells Fargo home page). The destination URLs for these five promotions are:

http://www.site.com/promotion1.html

http://www.site.com/promotion2.html

http://www.site.com/promotion3.html

http://www.site.com/promotion4.html

http://www.site.com/promotion5.html

By adding the parameter “promo_id” to each one of these destination URLs, the script will automatically track impressions for each of the links and also the clicks on the click through event. The only thing that you’ll have to do is to add the provided script to the page and add user-friendly parameters to the destination URLs. The following is a sample of what the resulting destination URLs would look like:

http://www.site.com/promotion1.html?promo_id=promo1_home

http://www.site.com/promotion2.html?promo_id=promo2_home

http://www.site.com/promotion3.html?promo_id=promo3_home

http://www.site.com/promotion4.html?promo_id=promo4_home

http://www.site.com/promotion5.html?promo_id=promo5_home

Sounds simple enough? Well it is. Now on to the reports. Upon the page load, the links tagged with a “promo_id” parameter will send an event tracking request to Google Analytics with the category: “promotions”, action: “impressions”, and label being whatever you’ve entered in the “promo_id” parameter. On the click event, the script will send another Event Tracking request with the category: “promotions”, action: “clicks” and label being the value passed in the “promo_id” parameter. The result is that you get true link impression and click tracking inside Google Analytics. The reports can then be viewed in the Event Tracking section of the interface, with categories showing “promotions”, Actions reporting on the number of impressions and clicks and Labels showing you the actual links being tracked.

Of course this comes with its limitations. First, Event Tracking is still in beta and not everyone has access to this feature yet. Next, you do not want to get carried away and use this for every link on your site. Google Analytics limits you to 10 events per page and no more than 500 total events for the entire session. So we recommend that you only use this for a handful of critical onsite promotions, mainly rotating promotions. The default script has a limit of 5 links to be tracked per page, which can be configured. Finally, it is imprtant to note that if you use this on your landing pages, it will impact your bounce rates. The extra event created via the impression tracking will eliminate any potential for a bounce, reducing your bounce rate. There is a mechanism to delay the impression tracking that is detailed in the distribution. This will allow you to only track promotion impressions for users spending X number of seconds on the page in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the bounce rate metric.

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We’re all looking forward to the eMetrics conference next week. This is the premier event for everything and anything web analytics and with all the changes happening in the industry, this event is a must.

We’re specifically interested in connecting with other industry experts and see how organizations are tackling their analytics challenges.

If you’re also attending the event, please drop us a note.

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