This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to a number of Analytics users. We’ll be giving access to even more users soon. Sign up for early access. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

Real Analytics ninjas use goals. Google Analytics has always had URL Goals (when a visitor reaches a specific page). In 2009, we added Engagement Goals to track success metrics around visit depth and time on site. With the new version of Google Analytics, we’ve added one more: Event Goals. This was one of our most requested features, and it gives you even more reason to use event tracking.

A brief intro to Event Tracking
You can use Event Tracking in Google Analytics to track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews. It's a great fit for tracking things like:

• Downloads of a PDF or other file
• Interaction with dynamic or AJAX sites
• Interaction with Adobe Flash objects, embedded videos, and other media
• Number of errors users get when attempting to checkout
• How long a video was watched on your site

Events are defined using a set of Categories, Actions, Labels, and Values. Here’s how you might set up event tracking for tracking downloads of whitepapers and presentations.

These interactions all have potential business impact, but until now you couldn’t track them as goals in Google Analytics. Let’s look at three ways you might use Event Goals on your site.

Tracking Downloads
Suppose you run a business to business (B2B) website and offer whitepapers (as a PDF download) in order to attract leads. You drive traffic to this page through advertising. You can track the number of downloads using event tracking. For example, we can use the category to designate the click was of type “download”. We can use the action to designate the download was a “whitepaper” and we can use the label to identify the actual whitepaper that was downloaded.

With the new Google Analytics, configuring this as a goal is easy. We simply match any event with the category of “download” and the action of “whitepaper”. Finally we set the goal value as 20.

Tracking Time Spent
Event tracking is powerful because you can track values, along with the category, action, and label. Going back to our B2B website, suppose you have a embedded product demo video on your page. With a little JavaScript, you can track the time a user spends watching the video and send that number back to Google Analytics as an event value.

With Event Goals, you can now set up a goal based on this value. In this example, we’ve configured a goal when a user spends over 180 seconds watching the product demo.

Using The Event Value As The Conversion Value
Traditionally, the only way to set goal values was when creating the goal in Google Analytics, or from the tracking code using ecommerce tracking. With Event Goals, you have another option: using the event value as the goal value.

Again putting yourself in the shoes of a B2B website owner, you realize not all your whitepapers bring in the same quality of lead. The lead value associated with downloading a certain whitepaper is $20, but the lead value from a different whitepaper is $35. Rather than creating a separate goal for each, you can pass the values 20 and 35 as the Event Value, and then set up the goal to use the actual Event Value:

Now when a goal is matched, the value passed in the event will be used as the goal value.

These are just a few examples of how you can take advantage of Event Goals in the new Google Analytics. You can read more on how to implement Event Tracking on Google Code and how to set up goals in the new Analytics. We’re constantly giving more of you access to the new version. If you don’t have the new version yet, you can sign up for earlier access.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics Certified Partners play an important role in Asia Pacific’s web analytics ecosystem. They are the Google Analytics implementation and reporting experts, and they partner closely with businesses of all sizes to help them improve and grow their online presence. This is one in a series of articles from Google Analytics Certified Partners across the region.

Anantya is the Executive Director of Think.Web, the first Google Analytics Certified Partner in Indonesia. - Ed.

Rapper, radio broadcaster, host, TV personality and writer: these are the many faces of popular Indonesian independent artist Pandji. As an independent artist, Pandji has to be smart about his Web presence and his budget and he needs an efficient and cost-effective way to get the word out about his work.

That’s where Google Analytics, and the Think.Web consulting team, come into play. In this post, we’ll walk you through how we used Google Analytics to answer two key questions about Pandji’s online presence - “Why do Pandji’s fans visit his website?” and “How do we reach Pandji’s fans?” - and then how we applied those insights successfully to promote a new album.


Why do Pandji’s fans visit his website?
To understand what fans like on Pandji’s website, we decided to analyse three months worth of data from two reports:

1. Top Content report: which tells us which pages (and which music and writings) people like the most
2. Internal Site Search report: which tells us what people are searching for once they reach the site

These reports revealed that Pandji’s fans visit his website to find out more about his latest releases. The Top Content report showed that the “For You” page, where Pandji showcases his latest books, songs, and radio recordings, was the most-visited page on the site after the home page. To confirm this finding, we looked at popular keywords typed into the internal site search. Here too, fans wanted information about recent works, whether it’s a new book, radio recording, or single. These insights motivated Pandji to release his next album 100 percent online, where fans were already turning to find his latest releases.

Note: nasional.is.me is Pandji’s e-book, hardrock is the radio station that airs his show, and “mulanya biasa saja” is the title of one of his songs.


How do we reach Pandji’s fans?
Pandji uses Facebook and Twitter to interact with his fans. To identify which of these mediums provide the best reach and traffic, we used campaign tracking parameters to monitor the performance of Pandji’s social media campaigns. We wanted to pinpoint which medium we should use to promote Pandji’s next album.

Before the actual album release, we posted several times on Twitter and Facebook and used campaign tracking parameters to understand which posts were most effective at driving visitors to Pandji’s website. We learned that almost 11 percent of overall traffic came from promotional messages placed on Twitter and Facebook. We also learned that promotions on Twitter (twitter/promoSMM) performed better than both organic referrals from Twitter and promotions on Facebook (facebook/promo SMM). With this information, we decided to use Twitter as the main vehicle to promote Pandji’s new album, Merdesa.

Putting it all together: Distributing Merdesa online and measuring performance
Pandji released Merdesa on his website as a free download and promoted the release on Twitter. We then partnered with Pandji’s marketing team to monitor Merdesa’s popularity and gain learnings for his next album release. As you can see, we’re big believers in continuous improvement!

To understand performance, we looked at:

• The number of page views of content related to Merdesa
• The number of clicks on the album’s download link

Analysing the results
The Merdesa page was the most-visited page in November 2010 and contributed 24.65% of all pageviews on the site for a total of 8,383 unique pageviews. We then used event tracking to measure clicks on the download links. For each click, we also tracked the title of the song downloaded. We identified 13,399 downloads as of the end of November 2010.

The event tracking reports could also show us which songs were most popular among visitors. With this list, we were able to rank each single on the Merdesa album by popularity. This insight helps Pandji understand what his fans want to hear.

Measure, analyse, recommend, measure again
Through the insights provided by Google Analytics, we were able to identify the key channels through which Pandji influences his fans and what they were most interested in. With these insights in hand, Pandji’s marketing team were able to come up with an effective digital marketing strategy for Merdesa.

We strongly believe in our Measure-Analyse-Recommend-Measure strategy for improving success rates for the marketers we consult with. I hope this inspires web analytics practitioners in Indonesia and globally to adopt a similar strategy!

Posted by Anantya, Executive Director, Think.Web