I should be eternally castigated to the fiery furnace for spoofing a Devo tune, but hopefully redemption can come in the form of this post's value. We've been spending some time in analytics programs lately, both for our own in-house projects and for some clients. In every instance, the addition of action tracking makes a huge difference to how well we can optimize and make changes to internal pages and external marketing.
Action tracking is one step deeper than basics analytics - rather than simply observing what pages are visited and how many unique sessions are logged, action tracking allows you to narrow down groups of visitors by the actions they take on your site. In most instances, it requires setting up a code in your analytics program and attaching that code to a button, page load, image rollover, or other javascript-trackable task (a click or hover). Once you've plugged it into your analytics and the website, the action can be used to refine data you're already collecting. I've created a quick example below:
You can see from the above that:
- Avatar's Loan Form has action tracking applied to it
- Based on the people who submit loan inquiries, we can predict which search terms will be better at converting visitors into applicants
- The "revenue" column is empty, but if we were tracking e-commerce buyers, we could put their totals into those columns and track high-volume buyers
- Expanding on this idea, you could also track users by time of day, the search engine they used, their geographic location, etc.
What I've done in this post is to list out all of the actions that you should be tracking depending on the type of site you run. Many sites will fit into multiple criteria:
E-Commerce Site
- Add to Cart Button - studies have shown us that users who "add to cart," even if they don't complete checkout, are more likely to return to make a purchase. This is also a good way to calculate shopping cart abandonment and make changes to refine + improve.
- Complete Checkout - an obvious one; this action will show you what percentage of each user group is converting into sales.
- Save in Wishlist - e-commerce sites offering wish lists are still in the minority, but it's a great way to track interest that "isn't quite a purchase."
- Send this to a Friend - many sites offer the "share this page" function, and it's a great action to be aware of. If folks are sending out your link, you know you've got a hit.
B2B Site
- Subscribe to Newsletter - A subscription is a tacit endorsement of your brand and a desire to stay in contact. It may not be a conversion, but for B2B, it may well be the next best thing.
- Contact Form Submission - A runner-up with subscribing to a newsletter is filling out the contact form. Though some of these will be support issues, many may be questions about your products/services and will indicate a desire to open a sales conversation.
- Email Link - As with contact forms, direct email links have the possibility to be a sales contact. The best thing you can do is to clearly label sales emails and track them separately from support or business issues.
Blog
- Subscribe to RSS Feed - An RSS feed subscriber is the blog's equivalent of a conversion; tracking these is imperative.
- Add Comment - Anyone who's contributing content to the blog or participating should be paid attention to (as should those channels that send you participatory people)
- Social Bookmark / Share - all those folks who are submitting your content to Digg & Reddit deserve to be recognized (and sought after).
Forum or other UGC-Based Site
- Sign up for an Account - These users are active contributers; you need to know where they come from.
- Contribute Content - When a user publishes, discovering their path is important (especially if it's not from a bookmark/type-in)
- Add Comment - As above, comments are a great predictor of engagement.
- Vote/Rate - Even low levels of participation like a rating or vote is worth tracking when every piece of participation counts.
You can get very creative with many of these and track all sorts of actions. If you offer a tool or calculator, track usage. If you want to follow who clicks a particular link (rather than just a page), add an action to it. You can even see which users hovers on an image.
For many marketers, action tracking is the secret sauce. Once you install and activate this data, even an inexperienced manager can easily make changes to an AdWords campaign or focus marketing efforts on particular terms, phrases or pages that will make a huge difference to the campaign's efficacy. For professionals, it's a "can't-live-without-it" tool. The recommendations made based on this kind of track is backed up by real data. In my experience, there hasn't been a time when a high-volume action tracking study hasn't made a huge impact on a site's bottom line.
I know that the following analytics services offer action tracking, though to what extent for each, I'm not certain:
- Indextools - obviously, it's our favorite, both for its ease of use and shockingly low price. It does have some limitations, though, and isn't quite as robust as Omniture or WebSideStory.
- WebsideStory - Along with the Omniture, it's tops for offering the most complete package.
- Omniture - as above
- ClickTracks - a little less in-depth, but a great interface and a very usable product.
I believe there are others (though Google & Urchin are notably absent). If you've got suggestions for other programs that run action tracking or on how to use it, we'd love your feedback.
p.s. Come on track it. Track it good.
What really frustrates me about the big tracker programs is that they usually use remotely hosted Javascript or log analysis to provide data, and usually on a per-domain licencing fee as well.
What I more ideally need is something than runs in PHP and can send data to central database on my own server, where I can track not simply by site but also by channel.
The concern about JS tracking is that it isn't tracking surfers without it enabled - if we bandy the common web stat of 10% of surfers not enabled, then this represents a very significant user group.
Additionally, JS tracking isn't going to track spider behaviour, which I figure is a key analytic.
Hosting the data remotely on a vendor's site also raises eyebrows - often you can't white label this for clients without paying some pretty ridiculous licencing fees - which can be especially restrictive if you simply want to track the behaviour of non-monetised sites to get an idea of monetisation potential through user behaviour.
Even worse, some trackers charge per pageview, which makes them fundamentally unsound for tracking site with forums, where generating hundreds of thousands or even a few million pageviews per month isn't unusual.
If anyone has any suggestions of PHP/MySQL driven analytics you can white label and run on your own servers, then I'm all ears.
I see these stats in my raw log analyzers but I do not believe 10% of people surf with javascript off. Maybe 1% at most. The web is almost unusable these days without it on. Most of those visits are from some sort of bot, not actual people.
That being said, I run both Google Analytics and NetTracker log analyzer. There are certain things logs can show you that GA can't.
I used Indextools in the past and I agree with you guys. It's one heck of an analytics tool. Highly advanced features. And what's most important, they offer real time stats, not 2 days delayed stats like G Analytics or other services.
Rand, I think you should reconsider the list of items you suggested for onclick events. For example, most of your suggested ecommerce events don't need onclick coding because the page will change after the person clicks on the shopping cart button, and the page change is enough of an event for the analytics to pick up the click. "Subscribe to a newsletter" and "contact form submission" should all have success pages ("Thank you very much for your question, our CEO will be contacting you in the next hour,") and that is an easier and more customer-friendly way to track.
Having said that, there are plenty of great reasons to track onclick events. I strongly recommend that GA using readers check out the poorly-written but comprehensive Help section from Google regarding onclick events for Javascript,.pdf, Flash, AJAX aas well as off page events (like RSS subscription if that takes someone to the FeedBurner page - a good example, thank you.)
And thank you for mentioning the importance of analytics!
Obviously, the method in which you apply the action doesn't matter as much as tracking it (and segregating visitor groups by that data), but yes - thanks for pointing out that there are other ways to apply the tracking code besides just the onclick.
So very true and actually practical posts. I was long looking for the tracking tools and i feel it is really a nice compact points :)
Thanks for sharing it
Regards
Suhasini via
https://www.imediadisha.com
There is one type of conversion you are missing which is critical for all sites. It could actually be the most important metric directly related to your SE rankings going forward. That is the # of page views per visit.
With the big G moving towards implementing user behavior into their algo, what a user does when they visit your site coming from a SERP will soon start affecting that actual SERP if it doesn't already.
With the millions of toolbars already installed and GA running on so many sites, Google can determine the quality of your site without even knowing what's on the page or who is linking to it. By using their sample group (toolbar users) they know if 90% of the people who find you using their search engine view only the one page. If so, that is a sign of a low quality site that doesn't actually offer what the user was searching for.
Now determining how many page views would constitute a conversion or what dollar value to place on such a conversion is a tricky subject.
Jeremy - I agree that's a very important metric, but almost every stat program can do it; you don't need separate action tracking. :)
Your correct, you don't need to do anything special to track PPV. But most people do not take the time to properly segment these stats and most programs do not consider it a conversion or assign it a value which should be done. Even if it's just $0.01 per visitor that visits more than one page. Since it's not being considered a conversion metric by most, many SEOs are not adjusting page content based on these numbers.
I think this is especially the case when working for clients. PPV isn't going to mean a thing to them until you assign it a dollar figure.
You guys really did a great job on the Avatar site from all angles. /tip hat
On the example shown - there appears to be no javascript tracker in the submit button
The indextools javacript appears as a tracking script at the bottom of the webpage - and is called once the page has loadedinput type="submit" value="Submit Loan Application" class="button" script language="javascript1.1" type="text/javascript" src="/indextools_ssl.js
If you'd automate this process, you could take this data, determine conversion percentages on keywords / phrases, and automatically increase your cpc biddings on phrases converting well, as well as automatically ranking the site in question for that phrase, and sending you an email if it's not ranking well enough... So much cool stuff to be done :)
Why isn't Google Analytics on the list?
I use this to track everything on some major ecommerce sites. It can track link/button clicks using onclick and also track everything about transactions from the value to the city and zip code of the buyer.
My mistake - I had thought for some reason that GG didn't have action tracking and forced you to use their Adwords tracking interface. Thanks for the heads up. I need to go back into the program and dig around a bit.
I've just started using GA recently. I can track most of my incoming link sources, but I can't find any instructions on howt o track a button action. How do you do that?
I posted about this over at DP.
Rand, there are details here about ecommerce tracking.
Ok the whole read was worth the last line. Nice work.
You're absolutely right about making sure that all of the various conversion points are examined and optimized for. I appreciated the mention of times of day especially.
There are a few analytical methods I've been using for a client whose business runs almost completely on phone calls. In the beginning, analytics were terrible since these phone calls could really only be tracked by time. But today is a new day.
There is one particular method for tracking calls to the keyphrase that have been invaluable. If combined to the additional conversion points that you've outlined above, the info is absolutely golden.
-Javascript code along with some tags on the PPC URLs can be used to display different phone numbers for the visitors depending on which keyphrases on which they clicked. (sorry, I can't end a sentence with a preposition--it's my previously secret fatal flaw).
The result is that we know to a large degree which keyphrases convert to calls, which times those callers are online, and bundle that info with the rest of our data to run some killer marketing efforts.
I think when juggling all of these conversion points though, the real key is to have that analytics system that makes it easy to define them and then track them easily. Rand, of the ones you listed above, have you used them all? Was Indextools super easy for you to manipulate & track multiple conversion points?
Stick up Analytic! (sorry, tried but couldn't resist).
Abhilash - yeah, I've used them all over the years, though I haven't seen the latest versions of Clicktracks. Indextools, from my perspective, is very easy to use and very fast (which is something I can't always say for the others).
However, it doesn't offer the types of day-parting and segmentation that Omniture and WebSideStory can offer.
Who's Calling looks interesting; I'll have to check them out. Thanks for the link!
Based on your description abhilash310 it seems that you are talking about some type of multi-channel marketing (PDF).
Seems that it can be a lot to win for some by having a multi-channel strategy.
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