What you can find out from Google Analytics?

For most of the people it will be just rows of numbers and graphs, but for some it might be key information which allow to track trends in group of people visiting your website or blog. If it’s not for some of you, it should be important part of your Online PR, or Online Reputation or Presence building process. This is actual report which will give you hint where which areas you should improve.

From wide range of stats offered by Google Analytics I would like to highlight only one of them which is reflecting behavior of your site visitors. It is something what  Google named appropriately Visitor Loyalty.

Well as you might guess both are related to same subject of encouraging online customer engagement or rather related subject of measuring its KPI.

Just to add (apology for copy/paste job here) what is whole online customer engagement (CE). Online customer engagement refers to:

1. A social phenomenon enabled by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and taking off with the technical developments in connection speed (broadband) in the decade that followed. Online CE is qualitatively different from the engagement of consumers offline.

2. The behaviour of customers that engage in online communities revolving, directly or indirectly, around product categories (cycling, sailing) and other consumption topics. It details the process that leads to a customer’s positive engagement with the company or offering, as well as the behaviours associated with different degrees of customer engagement.

3. Marketing practices that aim to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour. Although CE-marketing efforts must be consistent both online and offline, the internet is the basis of CE-marketing.(Eisenberg & Eisenberg 2006:72,81)

4. Metrics that measure the effectiveness of the marketing practices which seek to create, stimulate or influence CE behaviour.

The CE metric is useful for:
a) Planning
b) Measuring Effectiveness
Just to name few of components of a CE-metrics:
* Duration of visit
* Frequency of visit
* % repeat visits
* Recency of visit
* Depth of visit (% of site visited)
* Click-through rate
* RSS feed subscriptions
* Inquiries
* Customer reviews

As I was presenting in one of my previews publications, building online presence it’s not only build website and put it in search engines. In that publication I was trying to motivate or encourage if you would like even small and medium businesses to develop maybe not even process but habit to check those few simple but crucial points. I have proposed simple diagram (presented below) just to keep track of what you doing.

Each point of this diagram is of course separate subject which we could talk hours.  But lets just focus on point 7, as that is where Google Analytics is coming with help.

What is Google Analytics ?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.

Click on the image to view full panel breakdown.

If you refer to CE metric mentioned above and options available on Google Analytics Panel you will be able to see where and for whom this is the tool most spot-on (aka accurate).

Now when we know where this numbers are relevant in development process and what is the tool you could use to measure it, we can talk examples.

I don’t want to copy and paste another samples here so I am going to support this article by stats from my own blog (this one you are reading right now, or rather very briefly according to  my numbers from G-Analytics ).

Now going into the details we can find out that our average visitor is:

from US or ireland, using most likely broadband connection with Firefox or IE browser which found my blog on images.google page and spend about 1 min reading my blog.

What is more interesting you can see actually people reading blog are from direct traffic (they typed www.gargasz.info in the address bar in their browser) with 19% of returning visitors where average each of them is spending about 7 min reading the blog. But only 11% have viewed more then 2 pages on my blog.

So you are looking on two results here, how search engine is bringing traffic to your website, and percentage of people being actually interested in your website. So two crucial points here, to get people interested in less then30 seconds of page view, easy to memorize domain name (I have parked/pointed several easy to memorize domain names to this blog)  so they can easily come back and then actual content to keep people interested.

But it would be mistake to ignore any of those numbers, of course those 11% are your fans, but don’t forget long-term off-line efects of your website or rather online presence.  Even if visitor didn’t spend much time on your site, doesn’t mean he will not come back, or talk about it maybe with his/her friends. That is why online presence is rather long-term process opposite for direct sales marketing processes. I would bravely compare it to social media, where most likely is not being used to generate direct sales, but to build brand image and product awareness. And that is why measurement of those online marketing techniques is so argumentative and so many publications can be found in this subject. Of course you can see current trends, try to predict the future based on historic data, but on the end its always experience and knowledge of human behavior which wins the gold.

Well you can always use controversy to burst some traffic right? Like the latest campaign of crisp brand in Ireland…it depends of the product image you want to create, wouldn’t be just ‘cheap’ to do such ad for high range product? I am not saying it can’t be done, of course it can, but with lets say more delicate and subliminal way without controversy targeting areas which I was talking about in Controversy and sex in advertising post.

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cestece

Thanks for taking the time to share your view with us.

14 March 11 at 22:25

tions

Very Interesting Blog! Thank You For Thi Blog!

26 October 11 at 14:43

Online reputation

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weigh

trying to follow you on twitter but cant find your name

14 September 10 at 04:41

Zbigniew Gargasz

It is: http://twitter.com/_dublin

4 October 10 at 13:39

Internet Marketing Bible – 4V

This is the model that we will accept as relevant in Internet Marketing. It is combined and adapted knowledge of 4P and 4C. If we will bring to attention facts like many industries and companies operating now didn’t exist before Internet it is obvious this adaptation is necessary. For example web developers, hosting providers, ISP’s which is currently 50% of IT sector. This is number, which cannot be ignored. In this reality 4P/4C model can be described as:

Product – Internet connection or hosting, website design

Pricing – resourced by competitors and price of Internet connection and server

Placement (or distribution) – Internet channels

Promotion – user engagement, SEO, banners, linking, social media

Looks similar as previous 4P model just with added Internet wording on the end. In ‘old market’ reality you were the manufacturer of Coca-Cola. You have built your ads, put it on TV, pay for shops, display cabinets etc. You have spent millions only on distribution and packaging. Now you are ISP company reselling hosting. Product is purely virtual and exists only in Internet, whole company and everything around it is only in Internet. It is not only communication media, it is brand new market, brand new consumers, needs, and environment. Market, which is rapidly growing and changing. Some might say, that is not the first time when new market, or new opportunities came to attention of businesses. So why is it so crucial? Let’s come back to coca-cola, well you cannot consume it via Internet, so why they need Internet campaign? To provide information, product awareness, empowering the brand, reputation, to display ads and entertain people with games and funny advertisements not available legally on TV, and implementing/programming product consciousness. All the promotion, information and distribution can be done on Internet. Additionally it provide opportunity to build something called user/consumer engagement. Internet is not only place or distribution channel, or a product itself (it is for ISP’s or for example eBay sellers). Currently it is one of the most powerful promotional tools, opening new doors to Marketing. As marketing research shows ‘word from friend’ is the best way to advertise (see below Advertising tactics graph). Attempts to do so where already taken by TV shows, like sitcoms, big brother etc where people where shown with every day product with the label of it. You might miss that fact, but it is getting into you in strange way that the product shown there is so right even for you, and it will be so obvious so you will not even wonder to choose this brand over other. Dream of any producer, marketer.

But this is what Internet marketing together with social media attempt and seems like where successful to do.
On the end fact how well the different tool performs depends not always of the tool by itself but the person who uses it. So whichever tool you choose, you should learn it thoroughly and apply it wisely

To make people to talk about product. When people decide to buy something, what they do? Research. How? Fastest and cheapest way – Internet and Google.
So how to adjust or redefine old good 4P to changing Internet reality?  Writer and editor Lers Thisayakorn took this challenge and proposed evaluated 4P/4C, the new 4V: validity, value, venue and vogue.

Validity – Product, Consumer

The old Product approach is to develop and produce a product as good as possible to market and make sales. The Consumer approach is to study consumer wants and needs, and to manufacture products in response to those needs.
Validity discover that product with great consumer needs may not be valid and need to be addressed. We have recently cases of product with great consumer demand such as toys and foods from China that needed to be moved out from the shelves due to high-risk nature of the products.
Marketing should not only consider the wants and needs of the consumers, but also other product factors of safety, environment, and social issues – Validity. Many Internet products may be of great demand to consumers but should not be marketed due to age inappropriateness.

Value – Price, Cost

Price charged to consumer is no longer a sufficient marketing parameter for it is only one part of consumer cost. If we sell product on e-bay, for example, we have to consider the cost of currency exchange lost and exchange risk to the client. Hence, a co-net work of PayPal was created to lower consumer buying cost.
Value marketing go one step further to advocate that lowest price and considerate cost are not sufficient in today’s marketing solution. As more people are getting higher up in their standard of living, people are more value conscience of what they eat, what they wear, what they drive, etc. Also, as population age distribution is shifting from the young to the old where product value is emphasised, marketing should look more to value than just the price and cost.

Venue – Place, Convenience

The whole Thai centuries old retail market is almost totally wiped out in a short time span of 3-4 years because of the shift of marketing from Place to Convenience. A distribution channel of providing just a place to buy is no longer competitive. The convenience stores such as the ubiquitous 7-Eleven or giant super stores like Tesco have seized the retails sale by providing conveniences of all kind to customers.
Convenience needs to take one step higher up to the Venue level. Venue is not only providing place for clients to come, it is sales to your home. May be we should provide our customers with a buying venue of electronic gadget of some kind instead of a place with conveniences?

Vogue – Promotion, Communication

Promotion is one way street advertisement in telling what you think is best in the promoting product. Communication, however, applies two ways traffics between the buyer and seller to advertisement. It is an “interactive” program using phone, web site, etc. to get response from advertisement.
Vogue requires more than just getting a message across and 2 ways communications. It is saying that to make an advertisement successful, it must have vogue or in trend. It must be popular, acceptable, and has great public favour. ‘

This is model that in my opinion is closest to Internet market specification. This is the more academic point of view, how it’s finding it’s reflection in reality and does it require future adjustments? Probably it does, but we need facts.  Especially if you will think of Internet as big gossip village where people are more consciousness and intelligent buyers (or they would like to think so) and where potential consumers are finding information about your company and your product. For instance if more people posting articles that they were disappointed with your product, this will build negative product image and might drastically affect sale. How to avoid it? How to build so called Online Reputation and manage complex Internet campaign?

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Raymond

Top-notch article it is without doubt. My teacher has been seeking for this content.

9 January 11 at 03:11

Pinkston

While we are taking on the topic of Internet Marketing Bible 4V | Internet exploration |, The ability of ...

25 January 11 at 15:44