Google Analytics

The Google Analytics system is a web analytics system provided by Google Inc.

Anyone can register to use Google Analytics, and it's free of charge up to a certain number of impressions per month, but always free to users with an active Adwords account.

In its most basic form the Google Analytics package is very easy to configure, requiring a small piece of javascript code to be inserted above the closing </body> tag in each HTML page on your web site. For larger sites the tag can be written at template level, or a custom code can be genrated to populate every page published with the tag.

For more complex integration you can add ecommerce tags, and you can use the URL builder tool to track traffic coming into your web site from external sources such as email marketing campaigns and external paid search campaigns with Yahoo or Microsoft.

STAR Digital - We recommend Google Analytics

At STAR Digital we actively recommend the use of Google Analytics to measure you web traffic as it gives you the following advantages;

- It's free as long as you have reasonable traffic levels, which means no monthly charges

- It's very easy to understand the reports generated, and the out of the box functionality is comprehensive

Google Analytics Lets You Understand What Your Web Traffic IS DOing And Where It Is Coming From

- It integrates fully with Google Adwords so you can see which campaigns are performing well

Google Analytics Provides Reports on Your Adwords Results

- The eCommerce tracking feature gives you a snapshot of how your business is performing across paid search, organic and direct traffic. This is a slightly more complex and time consuming feature, but any eCommerce business should have this integration as a number one priority

Tracking your eCommerce sales and sources lets you understand how well your online business is performing

Google Analytics Case Study Snapshots

Fellows & Sons Auctioneers

When we moved Fellows & Sons web site onto the Activedition Content Management Platform we created custom code tags to render the Google Analytics Javascript code onto every page of their web site. This was not a minor task as on any average day the site contains tens of thousands of pages illustrating upcoming lots in their numerous fine jewellery and silver auctions.

Until Google Analytics had been implemented, the management team at Fellows & Sons didn't know what people were looking at, where they had come from, and what their repeat vistor rates were like. Their email marketing campaigns were not tracked into their web site either, so it was difficult to measure the effect of their auction alert system.

The main metrics that were reported on initially were as follows;

New vs Repeat Vistors
Number of Pages per Visit
Length of Time per Visit
Key Lots Viewed per Auction Catalogue
Keyphrases Used to Find WebSite
Bounce Rates at different points within the web site

From this it was derived that whilst SEO key terms were optimised for first page ranking on Google it would make sense to introduce a paid search campaign for each major sale. Conversion tracking code was added to the registration page to measure the number of conversions per search term and the following metrics were observed

Number of organic visits vs cost per click (CPC) visits leading into an auction catalogue
Conversion rate of CPC visitors and cost per acquisition (CPA) of a Registered Bidder
Number of Pages per visit CPC vs Organic
CPC Keyphrases with highest Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Number of Pages per visit per Keyword
Top landing pages for organic and CPC traffic

This level of understanding within the business allowed Fellows & Sons to fully optimise their web content to suit their audience. The results were first page SEO ranking on the majority of their key search phrases, and higly optimised CPC campaigns leading into each new sale.

In addition to this they wanted to understand how well the email alerts worked to generate traffic to the web site, and to see how it then interacted with the sale. Through the use of appended URLs that Google Analytics can understand they are now able to track each email campaign and see the following

Name and date of the email campaign
Average Number of Pages per email visitor
Most Popular Lots Per Auction from Email Traffic

Overall, traffic levels at Fellows & Sons have increased substantially, and they now know which segment the traffic belongs to, direct, organic, CPC, referral or email marketing.

STAR Digital have acted as search marketing and web analytics consultants to Fellows & Sons for over 12 months, and the company has seen an unexpected rise in web site traffic and online bidding for a reasonable financial outlay.

To find out more about how we helped Fellows & Sons, and a number of other Auction Houses develop and improve their web site performance give us a call on 0845 123 3982.

SilverTrophy.com

SilverTrophy.com Ltd had a common problem. As an eCommerce provider of Silver Trophies and Gifts they had been trading successfully using the Google Adwords programme since late 1999.

However, in 2006 they started to see an influx of competition and they didn't have any meaningful analytics to help them make informed decisions about their web site strategy.

STAR Digital were called in to see what could be done, and we quickly advised them to install Google Analytics to see where the majority of their traffic was coming from.

Once the Analytics results started to come in we quickly discovered that their SEO was woeful and a staggering 99.9% of their traffic came from Google Adwords. Retention was virtually non-existent and the CPC rate for most key search terms was over £1.00 just to stay in the top 5 sponsored results.

We added their Adwords account to our client centre and linked it to Google Analytics to see which keywords were driving quality traffic. However, we didn't want to take a guess at which keyphrases were converting to sales so we organised the configuration of eCommerce tracking within Google Analytics to give us accurate information. eCommerce tracking tells us which percentage of keywords or key phrases convert to a sale, and the value of those sales. But most importantly it tells us whether those sales are direct, organic or CPC by origin.

In the case of SilverTrophy.com a month of analysis allowed us to switch off 40% of their broad keywords, saving a staggering £2000 per month whilst increasing their sales volumes, not to mention their bottom line.

Since embarking on their project we've also made recommendations for SEO, and organic search terms now account for 28% of overall traffic and 7% of all sales and is growing all the time.

Without an intelligent web analytics suite and best practice eCommerce consultancy, SilverTrophy.com would still be spending huge amounts of money on paid search every month, not knowing how well it was performing.

To find out more about how we helped SilverTrophy.com and how we could help your eCommerce business give us a call
on 0845 123 3982

STAR Digital Marketing services Ltd , UK Internet Marketing Company , services include Website Development,
Email Marketing Services, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services

Our Email marketing systems are fully integrated with Google Analytics