Analytics is one of the most important things about running a website, whether you use PPC or not. But especially if you are running PPC campaigns. Are you underestimating the power of analytics information?

The first thing you need to know about analytics is to get some. Whether you pay for an analytics package or use a free one such as Google Analytics, it’s something you can’t do without. Through analytics you can track your visitors, see where they go, what they do on your site, when they leave, etc. It’s the most valuable tool for any website.

Be sure to include the analytics code on every page of your website, not just one or two. You won’t be tracking anything if you don’t have the code on the page.

Take a close look at your bounce rate. It says a lot. The bounce rate is the number of visitors who exit your site in under a minute, or sometimes (depending on your analytics package) after just viewing one page. If you have a high bounce rate then you need to figure out ways to keep your visitors longer.

Also pay attention to page views and visitor loyalty stats. How many unique visitors do you get each month? Each day? Knowing who returns and who doesn’t could be a very valuable piece of information for you.

Keep in mind that no analytics package is 100% accurate. Don’t look at hard numbers. Look at trends. Do you have a peak season? It’s nice to know when that is. How about your demographics. Do you cater to college students? High school students? Older people? Male or female? If you can gather that information then it says a lot about who your target customer is.

If you don’t have an analytics package installed on your website then now is the time to do. Do it before you start running PPC ads, not after.

If you have nothing to do June 17-20 and you live near Burlington, Vermont, or have $2,200 + expenses to spend, then you might be interested in the Online Marketing Boot Camp. I get no commission from this if you sign up, but it looks like it could be a good training session.

Since the event is sponsored by Google the bulk of the training will center around Google Analytics and Google AdWords. That’s good because there is a lot to learn with just those two tools. But there will also be some workouts on Website Optimizer and social media marketing. I believe you can never know too much about these topics.

What I like about this boot camp, which I got from the website, is that it looks like it will actually cover some meat and potatoes. The organizers are offering customized learning for beginners and advanced users. Not bad. And they say there will be no vendors or selling, which is great because if you’ve been to very many of these types of seminars a good 50%-75% of the time can be eaten up trying to sell you stuff.

Here’s a look at the Online Marketing Boot Camp schedule. If it looks like something you could spend your time on then I’d encourage you to sign up. There are only 70 seats available.

Google Analytics is now offering training videos on its blog. Here’s a video tutorial on the basics of using Google Analytics, good for beginners:

On the same page with this video is another video tutorial on how to use the Google Analytics interface. Both videos are good tutorials for beginners or users of Google Analytics who aren’t quite sure how to make the most of the tools. I encourage you to watch both videos and be prepared for more great videos from Google Analytics as they will be producing more in the future.

The MSN adCenter blog had a good post recently on the importance of analytics. I couldn’t agree with the post more.

Here are three snippets:

Myth 1: Over a third (34%) of respondents think it would take a day or more to set up a campaign. In reality, the time taken from opening an account to it going live can take as little as 15 minutes.

Wow! I’m befuddled by this one. It really just takes a few minutes to set up an account at any of the pay per click companies. 15 minutes is the longest it should take. In some cases, it only takes 5 or 10. I’d recommend starting at Google AdWords then moving on to Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter.

Myth 2: Some 56% cite cost as a top reason why SMBs will not invest, with a quarter of all SMBs thinking the best keywords are already taken. Actually, SMBs can invest as little as 10-20 pence per click or a monthly budget of around £5.

Hint: All the best keywords are not taken. The beautiful thing about pay per click advertising is you can still bid on keywords that are taken. Unlike organic search results, you don’t have to claw your way to the top. Sure, you might have to pay a little bit more for a top position than the next guy, but if you can get the return on investment to justify the cost then what does it matter?

You don’t have to be afraid of losing the farm. You can set a monthly and daily budget. Once you reach your budget then your ads will automatically stop running. And many of your best keywords might actually be very affordable.

Myth 3: Many are put off by the idea that it sounds too complicated – with the overwhelming majority (89%) thinking it was more difficult than online banking. However, SMBs can easily manage accounts from their desk and are likely to see immediate results from just a few simple keywords.

It really isn’t hard, but there are some things that you have to look out for. For instance, with Google AdWords, if you do not check off that you DO NOT want to participate in the content network then you may find yourself, like some advertisers, spending too much money on clicks that don’t convert. That’s an inherent danger that you want to avoid.

If you really want to make the most of pay per click advertising, you should start with a guide. A manager can help you avoid the pitfalls and advise you on the best way to proceed for your given circumstances. You’ll pay just a little bit more for the management of your advertising, but again, if you see the ROI from your efforts then it’s worth the cost. It’s not how much spend; it’s how much you make in return.

I’d have thought Google would have been the first to do it. But just when you least expect it, Yahoo! pulls a rabbit out of the hat and introduces a click filter report.

While the report doesn’t promise or aspire to solve or diminish click fraud, it does allow advertisers the opportunity to see how many of their clicks are being tossed out and which they won’t have to pay for. From the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog:

Our Click Protection System works around the clock to identify clicks we believe you shouldn’t have to pay for—but until now, you had to take our word for it. Now you can use our new Click Filter Report to find out how many clicks we’re throwing out.

I say kudos to Yahoo! for this. Advertisers have been on all the search engines and pay per click providers for years now about click fraud. Finally, it looks as if one of the search engines is taking it seriously. I’d be curious to know if this new development increases Yahoo!s PPC business. My bet is, it won’t.

The reason you won’t say Google advertisers move over to Yahoo! for this report is because Google actually does a better job of providing advertisers with tools to make their ads more successful. They’ve figured out the pay per click game. And that’s why it’s surprising that they weren’t the first to come up with this report. I’m putting my money on Google introducing a similar service for Google AdWords some time in the near future. They’ll still be the market leader.

When you establish your pay per click campaign, do you define your goals and measure them according to metrics that are useful? I ask the question because most advertisers don’t. The bottom line is ROI and to measure ROI successfully you have to have pre-defined criteria beyond merely calculable numbers. In fact, you can’t get too specific with the numbers because they aren’t always accurate. It is better to judge ROI according to trends.

For instance, narrowing down the number of clicks to a specific number is not really helpful as any given analytics tool will not be 100% accurate on any given day. Instead, you should look at ups and downs by percentage over a period of time. Did your clicks increase while your conversions decreased from one month to the next? By what percentages did those increases and decreases occur? By focusing on the long-term trends, you can get a better picture of how your pay per click campaigns are going than you’ll ever get by looking at one day’s performance and the total number of conversions last month. The reason is because a number is just a number. Outside of the context of a given trend it doesn’t really mean anything.

To analyze advertising campaigns more successfully, you should study the trends over a period of weeks and months for your click-throughs, conversions, effective CPM, and total ROI. It is only by graphic the trends that you can make reasonable decisions about the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Google Analytics has had its benchmarking service in beta for about a month now. It could prove to be your most important tool.

Benchmarking is really checking your site against your competition. This is important because you are comparing important metrics like traffic, page views, average time spent on site, and bounce rate. Knowing where you stand against your competition on these important metrics questions can help you better optimize and improve your website.

For instance, if you know that you average 10,000 visitors per month on your website but other sites of similar size and the same target market attract 15,000 visitors per month then you can know that you are behind the competition. But keep in mind that these numbers represent only the number of websites that are using the benchmarking service. So if it’s just you and one other competitor then the information may not be the best information you can get. But where else can you go to get a complete overview of your industry? There really is nowhere else.

Chances are, if your competition is using Google AdWords then they will benefit from benchmarking as much as you are. So if you know that your most important competitors are using Google AdWords and running Pay Per Click campaigns then it would behoove you to join the benchmarking service because they most likely are using it. The service doesn’t give you any details on your competitors, nor does it give competitors your information, but it does compare your site to the general trending of all of your competitors and your site combined. That’s pretty useful information and I highly recommend the benchmarking tool.

Andy Beal announced on Marketing Pilgrim today that there is a new analytics tool entering the market that will make Google Analytics seem like an elementary student. The tool, called Woopra, offers live tracking - that is, you can see who is on your website right now - as a prominent feature. The obvious question is, How will this help me improve my marketing?

Here’s the answer: It can help you improve your customer service. If you can see who is on your site right now and know that your website visitors are having a problem with a certain area of your website, you can pop up a chat box and start chatting with that customer before they give up and leave your site. Yep. Woopra offers the live chat feature as well.

You can see a screen shote of Woopra interface at Marketing Pilgrim as well, and I’ve got to say it does look cool. But be careful. I think there is potential for abuse with this. If you are too aggressive with the live tracking and live chat features then you could scare off your customers. There is still a big privacy concern with online consumers and popping up a box to ask them “May I help you?” just could be the motivation they’ll need to leave your site and never come back. But I can see some cases where it might come in handy.

For instance, if your website is an online retail store and you are looking for a particular item but can’t find it. If you’ve been searching for a couple of minutes and can’t find what you need then you might get frustrated. If you were shopping off line you’d have a customer service representative in the store who could help you. Online, there is none. Until now. With Woopra, you can tell if your customer is having problems finding what they want. That’s when it might be helpful just to jump up and say, “Can I help you find something?” If the answer is no, back off. But if the answer is anything else, you have an open door. Woopra looks like it could be a real boon to online retailers.

Google Analytics now has its new benchmarking feature live. You have to opt in to use the feature and I highly recommend it. This is one feature you don’t want to miss out on.

The usefulness is that you get to see where you stand against other sites within your niche for your important tracking metrics. The benchmarking feature is only as reliable as the number of sites within your niche that participate in the benchmarking, and since it’s anonymous reporting you don’t know who they are, but you can tell somewhat where you stand. Here’s why it is important:

The websites within your niche most likely to use benchmarking are also using Google AdWords. Since you have to have an AdWords account in order to open a Google Analytics account, you know that everyone tied in to the benchmarking feature at least has a Google AdWords account. Whether they use it or not is another story. But users of Google AdWords have an incentive for using benchmarking while those not using the service don’t have as much at stake. That makes it more likely that Google AdWords advertisers are using benchmarking. They’d want to know what their competitors are doing and how they stack up against them. You should too.

If you have a Google AdWords campaign then you should be tracking your conversions and website user statistics with Google Analytics. The free metrics package is fully compatible with Google Adwords and is a real necessity if you are advertising through Google’s PPC network.

Not only can you track sales conversions with Google Analytics, but you can also get valuable information about user activity on your website. You can see whether you get more traffic from organic search or PPC advertising. You can tell which PPC ads are drawing you the most traffic and which keywords people use to find your website most often. All of that is very valuable information for a website owner. Google Analytics can even help you optimize your website better for search and for PPC traffic.

Well, if you live in San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, or Raleigh, North Carolina, you can attend a training seminar for Google Analytics that will teach you how to make the most use out of this absolutely necessary free technology. If you sign up 7 days before the seminar in each city then you can get $50 free advertising through AdWords thrown in. You have nine days before the first seminar in San Francisco.

If you’re new to Google Analytics and Google AdWords then I highly recommend this seminar. For more information, head over to the Google Analytics Blog.

Now that Google has completed its acquisition of DoubleClick, they’re ready to start helping advertisers advertise and publishers publish. No sooner was the ink dry on the deal than Google announced its new Ad Manager.

Right now it’s in beta and participation is by invitation only, but I don’t think that will last long. Probably six months at most. Google will probably start taking open applications as soon as they feel comfortable that the bugs have been worked out and that could be as early as three months. Even now, they’ll take requests for participation from webmasters just dying to get in on the ground floor.

I see Ad Manager and a Google-owned DoubleClick catching on pretty fast. Google has already taken a lead in contextual advertising, pay-per-video, audio advertising, and now has gotten into print advertising. The way Google does things, it is inconceivable that it won’t sink a lot of resources into the lucrative display advertising field. Just take a look at the features Ad Manager offers and tell me you don’t think this will be a hot product:

# Inventory management
# Yield optimization
# Ad targeting
# Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
# Creatives and rich media management
# Reporting
# User interface
# Administration

I’m really looking forward to this one. Savvy webmasters will learn quickly how to make it pay.

The Google Analytics Blog had a great blog post about how necessary it is to plan your tracking and metrics rather than just winging it.

The main points of the Analytics blog post are, when planning your approach to tracking data on your website, you should:

1. Determine what data you actually need
2. Find out if the data is available by default
3. Decide where you are going

I agree that it is important to know where you want to end up before you begin. Know the finish before you start, in other words. That said, these points are critical for making key decisions on collecting and analyzing data.

Be careful though that you don’t just start tracking data that you don’t need. Beginning webmasters like to ask for everything imaginable, but they may not really need all the information they are asking for. Be sure you ask for only what you need.

Most analytics packages offer a set of default tracking metrics. Those are default because it is assumed that most webmasters will be interested in that information. But some webmasters may want a little more detailed information. If that is the case then you’ll want to set up custom tracking for those particular metrics that you have an interest in.

Finally, by knowing the end before you begin, you can keep an honest and accurate record and historical information for that data that you are interested in.

Thanks for the Google Analytics Blog for an insightful post. Now happy tracking!

Google Analytics just got better, or did it?

Overall, I think the industry benchmarking statistics is a good idea. I welcome them. But there is something that eats at me about it and, no, it isn’t the privacy issue.

It is Google’s assertion that they won’t use your data unless you opt in. Well, that bothers me because it really isn’t industry statistics if it doesn’t include the entire industry. It is more like Alexa where the only people who are measured are users. That discounts the value of the information somewhat.

Let’s say that out of 100 Google AdWords customers within your industry only 20 of them opt in to the Google Analytics industry benchmarking. You’re one of them. Great! Now you get to see how you compare to 19 of your competitors. But you don’t know which 19. What if those 19 competitors are all below you in terms of market share? How would you know? There’d be no way to know, would there? And not only that, are you going to know that you are being compared to only 19 out of 99 competitors? Likely not.

That’s what bothers me.

Of course, I like the idea that competitors aren’t going to be able to see your personal business statistics. That’s the way it should be. But I do think that all users within your industry should be rolled into the statistics. Otherwise, the information is only half-good.

Google Analytics will help you with more accurate reporting. To get a more accurate account of your page views, click throughs, and conversion percentages you need to exclude your own IP address from the counts. When you visit your own website you will be logged as a visitor just like everyone else unless you filter your IP address from the equation. Not filtering your IP address will lead to watered down results.

For example, if you have 100 pay per click visits to your website and 20 of those result in sales conversions you will have a conversion rate of 20%. But if you visited your website 20 of those times then your conversion rate should in reality be 80/20, not 100/20, which is a 25% conversion rate. That’s why it is important to use the Google Analytics filter.

Log into your Google Analytics account. Below your website profiles you’ll see three links:

• Add Website Profile (on the left)
• Asset Manager (in the middle)
• Filter Manager (on the right)

Click on Filter Manager. Now click on “Add Filter” in the top right corner of the gray bar. Put a name in the Filter Name box then click on the drop down box below that field and select Exclude All Traffic From An IP Address. In the IP Address field you’ll see a sample IP address. That is a fictional sample, not a real address. You’ll have to replace the numbers will the numbers of your own IP address, but be careful not to edit out the back slashes or the dots. Next, select the websites that your filter will apply to. You can filter a range of IP addresses by including the range in the form of ([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$ where your last set of numbers in the IP address appears. Here’s an example:

Just before Christmas, Microsoft adCenter Blog announced the introduction of its new Microsoft Web Analytics tool. It was just a beta release, but it looks like a great tool. In fact, I’d say it’s an essential tool if you use adCenter for your pay per click campaigns. You can hardly run a pay per click campaign without some form of analytics and while Google Analytics is great for Google AdWords, you really need to use an analytics tool that is designed specifically for the pay per click campaign that you are running. That’s why I recommend a Gatineau account for Microsoft adCenter users.

Initially, Microsoft had a $5 account sign up fee for new users. The plan was to dispense with that fee after the beginning of the new year. I haven’t seen anything that has changed that or that has said the fee is no longer required. Keep checking this blog for more updates and feel free to subscribe to the Microsoft acCenter Blog as well. If anything change or new developments occur regarding Microsoft acCenter or its Gatineau account then we’ll let you know.