I often wonder how the life of an SEO consultant would have been if there was no Google Analytics. I mean, sure in that case a lot of paid tools like Omniture, Webtrends etc. would have dominated the analytics segment of the online world, but then, that would also mean that business owners around the world would have had to pump in those extra bucks into their online marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics has become such an integral part of our data analysis and still quite often we land up criticizing it for some of its smallest flaws. But in all of this love and hate game, we always forget the most important feature of this wonderful tool i.e. its absolutely FREE and there are a lot of features that a lot of other paid tools do not offer.
On a personal note, I have always believed that Custom Reports, Custom Variables and User Defined Variables are some of the most underrated features of Google Analytics and many internet marketing firms do not use these amazing features to their fullest potential. In fact, if used intelligently, Google Analytics more than often can help you come out of tricky situations, especially when you are dealing with high end and high profile, demanding clients.
Imagine a client whose SEO, PPC and Social media campaigns are doing really well and yet he comes to you and states that he wants his website to generate more revenue. Keeping this situation in mind, I decided to analyze one of my client's website from usability point of view and as usual I turned to Google Analytics for some help.
Now before the word "usability" misleads you I would like to clarify that by usability I meant understanding and analyzing the performance of my website across different browsers in terms of the metrics provided by Google Analytics. I created a simple custom report with "Browser" as my key dimension. The whole idea was to find loopholes in the website from a browser point of view using some of the key user metrics like bounce rate and %exit. Once I have the data for the under-performing pages the next step would have been to identify any browser compatibility issues like page not loading properly or improper screen resolution etc.
Before we discuss the findings of the report let's just have a look at how to go about making this report.
We are generating a simple custom report with some of the key basic metrics like Revenue, Bounce Rate, %Exit, and Unique Purchases. And the dimensions selected are Browser, Page and Keyword. Now that we are done with the report let’s start with some analysis. For your information, only a few combination of metrics and dimensions are allowed. You can check the complete list here.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole idea was to generate a report that would help me in understanding the performance of the website in terms of its usability. But on creation of the report what I found was pretty startling.
For any internet marketer it's a dreaded sight to see large number of visits in conjunction with negligible revenue and I was well aware of the fact that it's only a matter of time before my client found out about it. It is clearly visible that Opera and Opera Mini browsers are driving almost same number of visits to our website but the difference in revenue is pretty huge. Obviously, this called for an investigation. The question hounded me for 10 whole minutes ( I mean sure 10 minutes sounds very less but trust me for those 10 minutes I was going crazy).
Anyway, while I was scratching my head over it, something else caught my attention.
I found that I was getting almost 5200% more (yeah you are seeing the right numbers!) revenue from Android browsers when compared against same number of visits from Opera Mini. I was nervous and happy at the same time and I knew that I had to get to the bottom of this. I immediately opened my website on Opera mini, Opera and Android browsers to understand what was stopping Opera Mini users from buying products from my site.
Well simply put, Opera and Opera Mini users were taken to the desktop version of the website. As you must be aware, Opera Mini is a mobile browser and as any SEO consultant would know, the obvious recommendation here would be to take the user to the mobile version of the website. But how do we convince the client?? The answer lies in the report itself.
That's when I showed the android numbers to the client. Turns out that Android users were taken to the mobile version of the website. (That's when we hit our Eureka moment 
). This is nothing but hardcore evidence that shows that by simply taking the mobile users to the mobile version of the website the revenue will definitely improve. The above data when presented resulted into our recommendations getting implemented without any doubts or concerns at the client's end.
Once again Google Analytics made me a hero. I would be sharing more such reports with all you amazing SEOs and would love to hear back from you.
Google Analytics for me or for any SEO is a must use tool although there are few good paid tool already available in the market but FREE grabs the attention of clients as well as webmasters especially when it can almost provide you everything that a paid analytics software will provide (sure you need to be a bit more creative while using GA)
Honestly, I have been playing around with Google analytics for quite a long but never considered browser metrics as a winning shot…but this forced me to think again.
thanks for sharing!
Like you, I have never considered this part. Sajeet made me to think on it. Just now I used this idea for one of my e-commerce clients after reading this. I found the differences. It may help me and make me a hero like Sujeet :)
Thanks Sajeet.
Great post Sajeet. It's really nice to be able to push all this data into one report. I agree that sometimes these issues aren't clear until really looking at all the data laid out in a report like this.
It would be great to see your conversion rate in there though, looking at revenue versus visits maybe a useful metric, but I think it's important to see if your conversion rate from browser to browser stays relatively the same. That and looking at the bounce rate are easy ways of quickly singling out the poor performing mediums and determining where there are issues with usability. For example, it looks like you have a 5% conversion rate(even though its unique purchases) for IE while Firefox is about 3%. Then looking at the 33% difference in bounce rate between the two browsers, I would think there might be an issue there and possibly some lost revenue there. This can be a little tricky to add in there though, as you would have to setup a sale as a specific goal, once that's done you should be able to drop the conversion rate into the report. Otherwise exporting the report and manually calculating it works too =).
Great post... Built the report before I finished reading, thank you so much...
Thanks Sajeet, it's great to see real world examples like this.
I'm looking forward to more :)
Ummm, "Houston... we have a problem."
The post is very valuable. As a non-tech guy, it's precisley the sort of thing I need to learn and know.
That said, I cannot reconcile the title...
...to the effect that this clever tech diagnosis and fix helped the client save money....
...to the author's admission in comments that the client has yet to implement the fix.
Huh? Or to put it less politley, "WTF@##$%^&!!!"
Not to be unkind, but the there is a giant elephant on the room here: Unimplemented great ideas are useless.
Too often, we congratulate ourselves on our geeky expertise. But to what end? Earning brownie points from our online buddies?
We need to get our clients to follow up. Otherwise, we are being self-indulgent and unprofessional.
Provocatively Yours,
-Daniel
Your Online Buddy
Daniel,
Appreciate the honest reply here, i agree that we need to follow up with the client to get things done but then again as part of client handling it’s important that i do not go overboard. It is imperative that we as Internet Marketing consultants put ourselves in the client's shoes and understand that certain web initiatives take precedence over others. The important thing is to get a nod from the client to get the changes implemented and if there is a delay just send a gentle reminder.
About the confusion regarding implementation, my bad here as i should have been more clear. What i meant was that the changes have been implemented but have not been pushed live as it is still being tested. About the Title - I guess being a little optimistic, confident and futuristic is not a Sin right?? Well that’s why the Title Hope my answer provides Houston a sigh of relief and yeah it doesn’t matter how Giant the Elephant is what matters is the Size of the Room. There is nothing wrong in congratulating ourselves on any expertise (geeky or superficial doesn’t really matter) or being self-indulgent but yes one should never be unprofessional
Lastly you say Brownie Points?? You have to be the biggest liar in the world if you say that you don’t love it.
NON - PROVOCATIVELY Yours,
- Sajeet
Your Online Buddy
Thanks for the good-humoured reply. Much appreciated.
Sajeet, great investigative work. I would love to see the sales numbers once the results have posted.
Why?
We saw the problem, we saw the diagnostic, and the offered solution. I am curious to see the results.
Fair enough Eryck.
I second Eryck. Great post. Would love to see the results if you'd like to share :)
Excellent, so do you have the results of this change? It's still an educated guess until you get hard data.
- Jon
Still waiting for the client to implement the changes and once complete would love to share the results with you guys.
Straight after reading the postg I jumped on my clients Analytics and bingo, Mobile really is driving a lot of traffic towards us.
Thanks for posting, very helpful
Very interesting post... Thanks for sharing your insight... It is very informative...
Just another reason why analytics rock. There is always more to lean if you know how to look for it, i'm going to check my own mobile stats right now. thanks for the post.
Nice post! Glad to see that GA helped get you some positive results!
Just took a look at my own traffic and played around with custom reports. I was surprised to see safari visitors having much higher bounce rates than the other 3 major browsers. I dug deeper and couldn't find any logical reason for this. I'd expect safari visits that came through mobile devices to have higher bounce rates (we haven't invested in a mobile verison yet) but safari visits through mac and windows were also extremely high. I searched around and many are saying that Safari's "top sites" feature is responsible for these inflated stats. Anyone experience substantially higher bounce rates in safari? Any insight into this?
Great post Sajeet.
Thanks Arjun,
Appreciate it.
- Sajeet
Good post Sajeet. Well done mate.
Submit as many atom and rss feeds to webmaster tools/sitemaps as you can, including feeds of user blogs, discussions etc, and regularly resubmit.
[link removed]
This is great! Google Analytics is a underutilized tool for many website owners. There is a ton of information there that can help improve business. Good job helping your client figure this out!
Great read Sajeet,
GA is vital part in SEO and you prove it. It simply awesome to see live example which you have presented here. There are many useful things are avalible in GA but we don't identified how to use in a proper way.
Likewise the custom reports as you said it is really great feature to measure your website. We definaetly get the good results if we use in a best way. I love to use GA and really useful article for me.
Thank you Sajeet for sharing this wonderful article with us.
Your Fan
-Hiren
Thanks Hiren,
Really Appreciate the support here.
- Sajeet
You are most welcome Sajeet. You know i spent almost 9 to 10 hours on GA and currently i am concentrating on funnel optimization. I think it is nice feature to use.
Thanks for your reply and i have just sent you a twitter request.
Your Fan
-Hiren
Very informative and useful post Sajeet.
Hi Sanjeet,
Thanks for sharing this information. after your post I can add my new experience in google analytics, Thank you very much...:)
Analytics is an AWESOME tool! I've recently been playing with the custom reporting option and find it incredible. We are able to define the metrics on the report that i'm concerned with. My clients enjoy them because it by-passes the fluff and gets to the issues they are concerned with all in 1 report!
+1 for your Excellent Article!
Thumbs up for a great post.
Thanks a lot Craig, really appreciate it!!!!
Nice post. I have to say that there are a lot of great free analytics tools out there, and were many years before Google Analytics. GA actually has a lot of things missing that I'd really like to see, and some pretty basic things missing too. It has provided inspiration for things like Piwik and OWA though, so it's swings and roundabouts I suppose.
This really exemplifies how Google Analytics can really allow you to break every stat down (as long as you know what you are doing) and get meaningful insight from it. Its no wonder tools like Google Analytics has changed the Marketing game!
Great post, Sajeet.
Hi,
Handy post some ok tips for people who are new to Analytics.
But in regards to the comments about Omniture, I think it is hard for people to comment on Omniture if you are not actually an active user of the product, I use Omniture on several clients and it is quite handy.
I think the thing is with larger clients in the Finance and Insurance niches they are worried about their data hence they go with Omniture for more security.
but that been said Google Analytics has come ahead in leaps and bounds in recent times and it really a great solution for all business levels.
Regards
Google Analytics has surely come a long way and there is always room for improvement. Having said that i also believe that omniture is an Analytics Tool that is highly unexplored, in fact very few people actually use it to a great extent. Since you mentioned that you use it for several clients it would be great if you could share with us some links to starter guide/basics of Omniture which people can refer to.
- Sajeet
There isn't the same level of tutorial with Omniture. If there is then they keep it hidden. When you first want to learn GA you can go to Conversion University, but I fail to find that for Omniture.
Although, their support has always been helpful when I have to work on the behalf of a client.
Nice observation about the users using Opera and Opera Mini. Great post.
Nice, focused bit of writing here on the types of trends you can look out for when you're reviewing an Analytics account.
This is just a great reminder as well to pay attention to where your traffic is coming from, no matter your assumptions. I do SEO work for a software company, but none of our offerings are for Mac or mobile users. However, a recent look at our own Analytics data showed that we're still getting significant traffic from users on iPads, iPhones, etc- and now we're making some layout adjustments to accomodate those readers.
Good stuff..Thanks
Thanks a lot
I'll be honest, I've never really paid much attention to my client's browser differences. This is incentive for me to take a look, even though I don't have any clients right now with mobile sites. Nicely illustrated points :)
The first thing I tell a new client if they don't have Google Analytics is to sign up immediately! You shouldn't go making changes to yout site before you know what is and isn't working. For instance, if you don't know which keywords drive most of your traffic, how will you know which keywords need to be replaced and when?
Excellent article, Sajeet. It's surprising to see such a staggering difference in usage based on browser experience. It'll be a good metric for us to start testing to determine which browsers need to be re-evaluated as "working".
I'm a big fan of Google Analytics. It helps me to understand the traffic my sites are receiving and how I should handle changes to the websites.
In all fairness Sajeet, I would of thought that you would of identified and corrected such a simple error much earlier as well.
I couldn’t agree less but you know what they say, it’s never too late as long as you know that you are doing the right thing :)
Yeah Sajeet, I'll give you that one :-)
Sajeet very beautiful discovery. I am totally agree with the point you said many of us forget that Google analytics is free tool, that why it seems like much peoples are not taking it that seriously as they do with chargeable tools. I just want to say that the best practice for effective SEO is just how innovatively we observe search engine results and tools result for better outcome. It's same like utilising a single object for multiple purpose.
Webmasters really need to consider getting their site optimized for Mobile because the big boom is starting... Thanks for the great insight.
Furthermore if you're not actively monitoring your mobile traffic your missing out! It's important to use the mobile Google Analytics segment and if you have the availability for custom development I would also recommend modifying the trackPageview call to include a mobile variable that can be excluded for main profiles but included in a secondary profile for mobile only.GA is endless. Don't waste money with Omniture.Hire a developer who can harness the power of GA as opposed to your developer who just scanned the documentation. ;)
I totally agree - thanks.
Google Analytics always helpful to track your site in a right way.You can easily understand what factor is affecting more to your site and which is not affecting.