Last month we ran a series of GoMeasure with Google Analytics events across Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. In those four events, Googlers and Google Analytics Certified Partners shared insights into how to get the most value out of Google Analytics’ new features as well as sharing site optimisation and conversion tips.

Today we’re releasing the videos of the presentations from the Singapore and Kuala Lumpur events. The videos are of easy-to-digest bite-sized lengths. So you should be easily able to watch them in between meetings or while taking a break. You can also download the slides if you would like to view them on a bigger screen.



Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

Many of you have shared with us difficulties you’ve experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don’t sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You’re looking for better ways to visualize and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.

The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual “path analysis,” which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualizing visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.

This morning at Web 2.0 Summit, Susan Wojcicki & I unveiled the release of “Flow Visualization” in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, “Visitors Flow” and “Goal Flow” will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualizers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here’s what you can expect from this initial release.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualizer on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.



Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

You’ll also notice that we made the visualization highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your “specials” set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.



This type of visualization allows you to answer important questions, such as “How successful is my new promo page?” In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the “specials” or promo page come from Google search.

To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by “exploring the traffic” through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.



We realize that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we’re providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualizer to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.


Goal Flow

Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we’re supporting only URL goals, but we’ll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.



You can find the Goal Flow visualizer in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.” Goal Flow helps you understand:

• The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)
• The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways
• Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined
• How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualizer. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize “backward”. Such “reverse paths” could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, “forward” paths from a page (or pages) can be visualized to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.




Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common “visitor” flows, and we’re building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.

If you don’t have goals or goal funnels already set up, don’t worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.

These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualization for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We’re excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!

As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualization truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

Multi-Channel Funnels are a new set of reports that show which marketing channels your customers visited your site from during the 30 days prior to a conversion or purchase. In this series of three posts, Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations of Shoes of Prey, shares how he uses these new reports to improve sales for the business. - Ed.

What are Multi-Channel Funnels reports?
We were excited to be one of the earliest testers of Google Analytics’ new Multi-Channel Funnels reports. Multi-Channel Funnels are a new set of reports that show how customers arrived at our site (i.e. which channels they interacted with) during the 30 days prior to a conversion (e.g. newsletter sign-up) or purchase. We get a better understanding of what role website referrals, searches and ads play towards influencing a purchase; and how much time passed between the visitor’s first visit and their purchase. What this means is that we no longer have to base our decisions based on the source of the last click. Using these reports, we can now look at all the channels that visitors may have used prior to converting. This gives us much more powerful insight into which channels are working for us.

I would like to walk you through how Shoes of Prey gained useful insights that helped our business through these sets of reports. Today, in the first of our three articles, I’ll focus on the Top Conversion Path report.



Top Conversion Paths report
We use the Top Conversions Paths report to understand the sequence of channel interactions that led to conversions. For example, if we study this conversion path (the number of times a customer visited our website, and from where) below, we can see that two conversions happened due to a series of interactions where the visitors:

1. First visited us three times via a direct visit (i.e. using a bookmark or typing our URL directly into their browser)
2. Then visited us by clicking on a paid ad
3. They returned twice more to our site, but this time from clicking on organic search results
4. Then they visited us again directly three more times
5. Finally they came to us through organic searches. They ended up purchasing a pair of shoes on the very last search.

We could then further break out these results to see more details, for example, which particular keywords attracted the visitors when they came to our site via Paid Advertising and Organic Search.



Insights: Is there confusion among some of our customers?
When analysing recent top conversion paths, we realised that a significant number of sales occur due to a series of direct visits from people who had typed in the URL or came from a bookmark. Some visitors were making up to 30 direct visits before purchasing a pair of shoes!

It was heartening to see a lot of all-direct visits, as it signified that these visitors had made up their mind to purchase their shoes from us. We realised, however, that we need to take efforts to help our customers design and purchase their shoes in a fewer number of visits. We understand that our offerings could be overwhelming for some customers when they could choose from over four trillion shoe combinations!





Actions: Reducing the number of visits to purchase
We took steps to drive more of our potential customers to our leather videos. We wanted them to learn more about the products in a shorter period of time and encourage them to design their shoes sooner.

We also implemented a website chat solution that allows customers to ask us questions while browsing the site. We can answer their questions in real-time and hopefully help them arrive at a decision sooner.

We have also been continually testing changes to our user interface that would help customers reach a decision on which pair of shoes to purchase. These include testing different forms of wizards and guides, and even highlighting how to get started.

Results: Shortening the purchase cycle
Taking these steps have helped our customers make a purchase decision sooner. In the last three months we’ve seen a 40% increase in our conversion rate and a shortening of all-direct paths before a sale. We’ve seen same-day purchases increase by 20% and 12+ day purchases fall by 8%.




We found the Top Conversion Paths report to be an eye-opener. It clearly demonstrated to us how our potential customers were interacting with our site prior to making a purchase. I encourage you to start looking at your Top Conversion Paths report now - I guarantee that you will find at least one conversion path worth exploring that you had never considered before!

Posted by Michael Fox, co-Founder and Director of Operations, Shoes of Prey

What a crazy two weeks it has been! GoMeasure with Google Analytics did a whirlwind tour through Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. In those four events, Googlers and Google Analytics Certified Partners shared insights into how to get the most value out of Google Analytics’ new features as well as sharing site optimisation and conversion tips.

You can view the presentations from the four events via the below links. We’ll also be providing the videos of the talks from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur next week. Stay tuned!

• Southeast Asia Leg: Kuala Lumpur (Sep 8 2011)
• Southeast Asia Leg: Singapore (Sep 6 2011) 
• Australia Leg: Melbourne (Sep 1 2011) 
• Australia Leg: Sydney (Aug 30 2011)

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

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 all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

Over the last few months we have been showcasing what’s new in the latest version of Google Analytics. The Google Analytics Product and Engineering team have been contributing a series of posts on the latest round of improvements. Head over to the Google Analytics blog to find out more:

Improvements in mobile reporting. Internet traffic from mobile devices is growing rapidly with smartphones and tablets expected to outsell computers this year. Now you’ll see a new Mobile section in Visitors reporting. Inside this section you will see two new reports: a Mobile Overview report, and a Devices report. Find out more in the full article.




Improvements in Map Overlay Reports. The Location report is widely used for discovering which parts of the world your visitors are coming from. For some countries you were able to drill down to a regional (e.g. province or state) level. Now region level maps are available for over 170 countries! That’s not all. The team have also introduced a magnifying glass feature that allows you to easily view information when there are tightly clustered dots on the map. Find out more in the full post.




Pilot the Webmaster Tools integration. On this blog we often focus on how Google Analytics can benefit marketers. But webmasters can also get a lot out of Google Analytics. One of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal is Google Webmaster Tools; and now it is being integrated into Google Analytics. Read the full article to find out more and to sign up for the pilot.




What’s new about Analytics Intelligence? Intelligence reports are a quick and convenient way of understanding what has significantly changed within your traffic in recent times. These reports have been greatly improved upon in the new Google Analytics. Read the full article to learn more about the new overview report, full-text searches, event sorting, and usability improvements.




The Making of Google Analytics v5. What did it take to redesign and deploy Google Analytics from the ground up? Watch these videos of members of the team discussing what went on behind the scenes.




Make time to explore the new Google Analytics. There have been many enhancements to make this an easy-to-use yet powerful tool to glean insights from and take action. Subscribe to this blog to stay up-to-date on the latest on Google Analytics.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Senior Conversion Specialist, Google Southeast Asia

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.

Adrian Tan is one of the founders of clickTRUE Pte Ltd, Southeast Asia’s first Google Analytics Certified Partner. - Ed.


I would like to share an example with you on how our team at clickTRUE use insights from Google Analytics to benefit our clients’ online marketing effectiveness. Recently, a world leading electronic security and alarm monitoring service provider approached us to optimise their reporting and analysis framework. We helped them adopt Google Analytics as a way of measuring the number of leads generated by their website. With Google Analytics we were able to react to changing conditions within days rather than months.


Problem: Non real-time analysis
The client ran several Google AdWords campaigns to drive sign-ups via their enquiry forms. These sign-ups represented the number of leads for their business and provided a forecast of their revenue for the months ahead. The client was used to consolidating the enquiry form sign-ups from their website on a monthly basis and sending it to us for analysis.

We would analyse the numbers and determine how many conversions (i.e. enquiry form sign-ups) were attributed to their AdWords campaigns. We would then suggest and implement changes for their following month’s AdWords campaign so that they could generate a higher volume of sign-ups at a lower cost. Waiting for monthly reports was less than ideal. Since we deal with the Internet, we wanted to measure the performance of our enhancements in real-time! We wanted to cut down this lag to make more timely changes and more quickly achieve the client’s target number of leads per month.


Solution: Integrating Google AdWords and Google Analytics
Being a Google Analytics Certified Partner, we knew that one of the best ways to get near real-time insights about the performance of a website is to use Google Analytics. We worked with the client to implement Google Analytics on their website, and then integrate their AdWords account, so that we could attribute conversions to AdWords clicks.

Here is how we approached the creation of the reporting and analysis framework for the client:

Step 1: Link the Google AdWords account to the Google Analytics account
We first linked the client’s Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts.

Step 2: Define goals within Google Analytics
We defined a goal in their Google Analytics account as visitors who arrived at a “Thank You” page after submitting their contact details.

Setting up the goal was easy: we took the URL for the “Thank You” page as the goal URL.

With Goals set, we were now able to more accurately assess how each keyword in the client’s AdWords campaign was converting visitors into sign-ups (leads). Better yet, we were able to assess these on a daily basis, and didn’t have to wait for the monthly reports.


Step 3: Setting up the reporting framework
We created a set of custom reports to to address the key performance indicators that were most relevant for the client. Below is one of our custom reports that lists keywords and the associated metrics for clicks, visits, cost-per-click, impressions, clickthrough rate, bounce rate, time on site, and goal conversion rate. If we were to rely on Google Analytics’ standard reports, we would need to combine three reports to get this information. You can get a copy of this custom report here.

Step 4: Taking action by optimising keywords
With the above in place, we are better able to drill down and do optimisation on the keywords instead of just depending on traditional statistics such as clicks, cost per click and clickthrough rates.

For example, when we first ran the campaign, the keyword “CCTV” generated the most number of clicks. We needed to find out if this keyword was effective in producing qualified leads.

On closer inspection, we saw that the keyword “CCTV” was performing poorly in terms of bounce rate and conversion rate.

The bounce rate for “CCTV” was 7.32% worse than the site average. Visitors coming from this keyword left the site without signing up or even visiting any other pages. It indicated a poor visit quality – visitors did not find the content on the landing page relevant.

To help optimise the performance of this keyword, we analysed the actual search query used by visitors that contributed to goal conversions. For example, visitors who searched for “CCTV Singapore” and clicked on the client’s ads were more likely to sign-up and convert.

Such search queries were immediately added as phrase match keywords in the client’s campaign and set with a higher bid to have their ads appear more frequently . This fine-tuning allowed us to only show the ads to an audience that is looking for security solutions rather than to non-relevant searches for “China Central Television” that was also know as CCTV. We also included such non-relevant searches as negative keywords to filter out irrelevant impressions and improve clickthrough and conversion rates.

Through the use of better defined keywords, such as with approproriate keyword matching for the “CCTV” root keyword, we obtained much better conversion rates – increasing the rates from 1.55% to a range of 1.96% to 25% and a corresponding increase in ROI of at least 66%.

Actionable insights on early data results in 114% lift
The time previously spent waiting for monthly reports was now put to good use optimising based on almost real-time data. The lift in leads demonstrates the benefits of this strategy – a 114% increase after the first three weeks of the campaign. The client is now ahead of schedule in achieving their target number of leads and meeting their revenue forecast.

We strive to replicate the above process in all our engagements:

• Setting goals allows us to measure site performance and understand whether we are being successful or where we need to improve.
• Linking AdWords and Google Analytics accounts allows us to assess paid traffic performance in terms of bounce rates and conversion rates.
• Last, but not least, we cannot emphasise enough how important it is to analyse your Google Analytics data on a regular basis and take immediate actions to experience real-time gains.

Posted by Adrian Tan, Co-Founder, clickTRUE Pte. Ltd.

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 all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates.

This week we’re going a bit meta with an overview of the new Overview reports in the new Google Analytics. Overview reports were part of the old version of Analytics, of course, but we’ve made some changes to help your analysis.

Anatomy of the Overview Report
Each overview report consists of three sections. There's a timeline graph, some aggregate metrics, and a set of reports.

Whats inside of each of these sections depends on which report you’re looking at. For example, the Visitor Overview shows a graph of visits and metrics like New vs. Returning visitors, while Content Overview shows metrics like pageviews and average time on page.

The Graph
We’ve made a few changes to the graphs in the new Google Analytics, and we'll share them here. You can now make adjustments to the graphs you see in Google Analytics from the buttons on the top right of the graph:

• Switch a graph between Line Chart and Motion Chart
• Graph different metrics: Select from the dropdown or the scorecard

Metrics dropdown

Metrics Scorecard

• Compare two metrics: Graph an additional metric for comparison

• Graph By: Change graph from between Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and even Hourly for some reports

Reports
The bottom section of an overview reports lets you look through a subset of the reports available in that section. You can flip through these reports to see where you want to start your analysis. In the Traffic Sources Overview, we can start by looking at a report of Keywords.

From here we can go view the full report or look at another report, like Referral Sources:

Intelligence Overview
Google Analytics Intelligence automatically searches your website traffic to look for anomalies. When it finds something that's out of the ordinary it surfaces this as an alert. You can also setup your own alerts by defining custom alerts.

Now you can feel like the president of the principality of Analytica with your very own Intelligence Overview report.

The Intelligence Overview report shows you all of your automatic alerts (daily, weekly, and monthly) at a glance. From the Intelligence Overview, you can click on Details to see a graph of the alert and go directly into the GA report. You can also add or review an annotation right from the pop-up graph.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of Overview Reports. Please continue to send us feedback on the new Google Analytics. Stay tuned for next week’s installment in New Google Analytics series.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team