Goals, Funnels and Filters: Interpreting Key Measurement Tools

As digital marketers, one of our pain-staking jobs is to report, measure, analyze and provide insight on the successes of websites. And one of our biggest tools of the trade, Google Analytics (GA), provides the various components to measuring that success.

This week, I explored the various ways of segmenting traffic and how their behavior is affected by the various tactics being implemented. Some key tools are Goals, Funnels and Filters.

In case you didn’t know, here are brief descriptions of the various components of GA I will be discussing:

• Goals: Web site page that helps generate conversions for your site (a ‘thank you page’, purchase confirmation page, an ‘about us’ page, etc.) (Wells, 2012)
• Funnel: This represents the path you expect visitors to take on their way to converting to the goal (Wells, 2012).
• Filters: These are applied to the information coming into your GA platform. This allows users to manipulate data so you can breakdown and segment your audience based on a variety of parameters (traffic from domains; traffic from IP addresses; etc.).

Now that we’ve discussed the components, let’s get down to business. Since the blog is meant to function as a channel to disseminate content, goals were developed to account for traffic visiting any blog post for a given timeframe. As you can see from the screenshot below, the blog has had 76 pageviews with visitors spending well over four minutes during each visit, leading to a zero percent bounce rate. This, of course, is due to the small number of visitors the page has reached (17 visits).

For the blog, the following goals were set:

• Visit Duration: two goals were set measuring time on site – one minute and three minutes
• Pages/Visit: a goal was set to measure a goal met when a visit accounts for viewing more than 2 pages

Since the blog’s purpose is not to generate sales (eCommerce), a value was not given to these goals. This doesn’t mean that a blog has to sell products/services to have a value. 

Measuring ROI can benefit some bloggers greatly in how they sell their blog to media, PR professionals, etc. Case in point, a popular blogger wants to sell content space on his blog and must show that there is value in his content, which generates traffic, to get advertisers to buy media space.

Evaluating Goal Conversions

Based on the data accounting for the last 30 days, the blog only converted two goals a total of four times. This largely correlates to the goal’s standards being set too high for a blog with little traffic and fewer than 10 blog posts. It is unlikely for the average consumer of digital media to spend more than three minutes on a site, given the average length of the blog posts. Further, since the blog has fewer than 10 blog posts, it is unlikely for the average visitor to view more than two pages. 

As you can see from the Goal Flow, visits came to the blog and of the total visits, only 5 managed to stay on the blog for longer than three minutes (both returning and unique visitors). Of this 5, they managed to view two pages: the index page (homepage of the blog) and a blog post about referral sources.

The benefit of measuring goals is to set actions you want people to take and identify areas of improvement. “Every time your user takes one of these actions, it’s a conversion. A visitor becomes a subscriber, a subscriber becomes a customer (sometimes, a visitor becomes a customer), and so on ("Tracking your blog," 2012). And various goals can be created, from newsletter sign-ups and downloads, to blog comments or RSS Feed followers. 

With that said, I added another goal to track completions after one minute. This should increase the quantity of goals being converted without giving up quality. This will also give me a better picture of how people are interacting with the blog, and if traffic is coming from other sources where I share my content on (i.e., social media sites).

Tracking Conversions through the Funnel

That’s right; there is a funnel in GA. As mentioned earlier, the funnel breaks down the path visitors took to convert a goal. Since the goals were set rather high, the funnel has little depth. Less than 12 percent of visits converted goals. With the creation of the new goal mentioned above, an improvement in goals will likely occur.

Another key takeaway of goals is to track events occurring on a site. Events represent important actions on a website – in this case, my blog. Events are directly tied to elements on the blog and not reaching a certain page. So on my blog, I would be tracking sign-ups to RSS Feeds and/or downloads of any documents posted on the blog. 

To date, my priority has only been to track various pages being viewed and from where those interactions are coming from. As traffic and overall audience size grows, I will add specific events to track key interactions that will further align my efforts.

References:

Tracking your blog goals with google analytics. (2012). Retrieved from http://unstuckdigital.com/tracking-goals-with-google-analytics/ 

Wells, M. (2012, May 21). Lesson 6: Successful approaches in google analytics . Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116001/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct

Web Metrics: It’s How We Measure and Learn

One of the most important tools to any marketer is knowledge. The more we know, the better our ideas will be and the greater success we will have. So it’s no surprise that with web metrics, the more we know the better our chances will be in improving our efforts across the digital landscape. The primary goal of web analytics is to “analyze and statistically process user and customer behavior."

Defining Web Analytics

Techtarget.com utilizes the widely accepted definition of web metrics:

Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a Web site. The use of Web analytics is said to enable a business to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for goods or services, or to increase the dollar volume each customer spends. This analysis can also include determining the likelihood that a given customer will repurchase a product after having purchased it in the past, personalizing the site to customers who visit it repeatedly, monitoring the dollar volume of purchases made by individual customers or by specific groups of customers, observing the geographic regions from which the most and the least customers visit the site and purchase specific products, and predicting which products customers are most and least likely to buy in the future. 

Avanish Kaushi said it best in his book, Web Analytics 2.0,  …”to change how the world makes decisions when it comes to online.”

Google was quick to create the right platform where someone with basic knowledge of websites can simply apply one line of javascript code and within minutes, have access to a plethora of data we use to define everything we need to know about how their website is performing.

A key learning from anyone looking to dive into Web Metrics is to have a deep understanding of the fundamental metrics. These foundational metrics are the building blocks to understanding how a website is performing, which can then be used to improve on the results of these metrics. 

Identifying Foundational Metrics

In my research, various users list different “foundational” metrics. Matthew Wells, of Web Metrics and SEO at West Virginia University, mentions five metrics: Page; Page view; Visits (sessions); Unique Visitors; and Event. 

My Internet Marketing Partner, mentions eight that include some of the aforementioned:

• Visitors / Visits: It may help if you think of visitors as being a count of people and visits as being a count of the number of times those people visited your website. 
• Time on Page / Time on Site: Time on page is simply the average amount of time that people visiting your site spent on your page. 
• Bounce Rate: The bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of people who came and landed on a page of your website and then turned around and left immediately without visiting any other pages on your website. 
• Conversion Rate: Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of people who come to your website and then go on to make a purchase, fill out a form, or whatever the desired action is for your website. 
• Exit Rate: The exit rate is a page level statistic that shows you the percentage of people who leave your website from any given page outside of the bounce rate.
• Engagement: Website engagement is a way of seeing how well your website is engaging and interacting with your audience. 

With these foundational metrics in mind, goal can be set to measure the successes and failures of a website. The results help in determining what the areas of improvement for continued success are.