Learning about website analytics is just one part of what I’ve learned over the years. Another part was learning about the working world. This career corner post is all about how to advance your career.
Choose a job where you’re paid fairly, always learning, and appreciated for what you contribute. If you’re waffling between staying at a job or moving on to the next big thing, see if your current position fits the above criteria. If it doesn’t, feel good about your decision to move onwards and upwards.
Find a mentor. People like helping people, so don’t be shy when asking someone to be your mentor. Look for a person you respect and has a job that one day you would like to have. If you work in a highly male or female dominated field, remember that you may have to seek out a mentor of the opposite sex.
Network. Get involved in your professional community. Networking is a great way to meet a mentor, get advice about industry changes, and learn about potential job opportunities. Ingratiate yourself in networking groups by offering to volunteer, even with small tasks. Getting your foot in the door and establishing a reputation as a dependable person will help grow your career.
Keep track of your accomplishments. You probably don’t remember what you ate for dinner last week, so the chance that you’ll remember all the accomplishments you’ve had over the past couple of years is pretty slim too. Keep a list somewhere or standardize naming conventions when you’re sending out emails or calendar invites about process improvements. Standardizing your naming conventions means you can easily pull up the many reasons why you deserve a promotion.
When asking for a raise, talk about what you’ve done in the past, what you will continue to do and what you will do in the future. Also, make sure to do your research on websites like Glassdoor and salary.com to know what the average salary for your position is. While you’re at it, make sure that your title matches up with your responsibilities at work. If you’re taking on more responsibilities than your current role requires, it might be time for a title change as well.
When setting up event tracking, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what you’re tracking on your website. You may be compelled to track every button click on your website, however, as I’ve discussed previously, collecting data for data’s sake is a bad move. In this two-part blog, I’m going to write about some key events to track that help move your business goals forward, such as CTAs and ways people are contacting you.
Tracking Specific CTAs on Your Website
While Google Analytics will tell you how a user moves between pages on your website, it is unable to distinguish which button a user clicked to get to the next page. That is, you won’t be able to get this information from Google Analytics without event tracking. That means if you ever want to be able to determine the most effective CTA on any given page, it’s best to add event tracking to the clicks on these buttons.
Tracking Carousel Advances on Your Website
Despite the hundreds of studies saying no one looks at the second slide on the carousel on your website, people still love carousels. As Google makes page speed a more important factor, tracking the clicks carousel CTAs is going to be an important tool in your arsenal. Only then will you have the data to show whether or not people are advancing through your carousel.
Tracking Buttons You Want to A/B Test
If you’re using Google Optimize to A/B test CTAs on your website, by definition the success or failure of your test would be whether or not someone clicks on the CTA. Google understands this and makes this kind of A/B testing possible through event tracking. By adding event tracking to the button click of that CTA, you can then tell Google “Hey, this button has been clicked!” Google will in return tell you which variation of the button received more clicks (was more successful).
Tracking External Links on Your Website
Tracking external links on your website is something I highly recommend, especially if an external link click on is the desired action on a page. For example, a desired action for a bank might be using a login button that goes to a third-party website. Another example is a music artist who might want you to click on a “Get Tickets” link.
Without implementing external link event tracking, you won’t be able to tie your specific online marketing activities, such as social posting, SEO, or digital ads, to ticket-buying intentions and logins.
Other external links that would be useful to track are:
Clicks off to any third-party careers page
Links to your social pages
Any resources you mention in your blogs
Social sharing buttons
Tracking PDF Downloads on Your Website
PDFs are not considered external links because when you click on a PDF the domain name almost always stays the same. However, since PDFs are not rendered as a web page, you cannot add Google Analytics tracking to PDFs. As a result, I recommend event tracking any clicks to a link ending in .pdf to give you a better idea of who is looking at PDFs from your website.
Summary
Deciding what to track on your website can be an overwhelming task. Staying focused on business goals and understanding how people are using your website can lead you in the right direction. Missed the first part of this blog? Check out What Should I Track In Google Analytics Event Tracking Part 1.
When setting up event tracking, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what you’re tracking on your website. You may be compelled to track every button click on your website, however as I’ve discussed previously, collecting data for data’s sake is a bad move. In this two-part blog, I’m going to write about some key events to track that help move your business goals forward, such as CTA (call to action) clicks and form submissions.
Tracking Form Submissions on Your Website
There are a couple of different ways to track form submissions on your website. The most popular way to track these submissions is by having the form submission result in a thank you page. Sometimes, however, a thank you page can be visited without a user ever submitting his or her information. As a result, you may want to track form submissions via event tracking.
You can take your form submission event tracking to the next level by tracking the fields people try and skip when submitting a form. Is everyone from your Facebook campaign willing to fill out the form, but only if they don’t have to give a last name? Do people give up on trying to contact you after the fourth form field? Event tracking can tell you all of that!
Tracking all phone calls generated from a website without purchasing call tracking software or using a dedicated website phone number is impossible. Tracking calls on mobile, however, is a completely different (and much easier) story. Any time someone “clicks to call” your business from your website, you can record it as an event in Google Analytics. Even better, with the shift to mobile, these click to call events are increasing by the minute and the amount of data you’re missing out on is decreasing.
Side note: With desktop calling programs, such as Skype, it is technically possible to call from your desktop. It’s just very unlikely.
Tracking Email Clicks on Your Website
Sometimes people want to contact you outside of a form submission or a phone call. This is where it’s helpful to track clicks on your email links. Although those email clicks may not necessarily translate into email sends, it’s helpful to know all the different ways people are trying to contact you. Additionally, you may find it useful to have an email that is solely featured on the website, that way if someone emails you even without clicking, you are able to attribute the source of that email more accurately.
Summary
Deciding what to track on your website can be an overwhelming task, but staying focused on business goals and understanding how people are using your website can lead you in the right direction. Stay tuned for part two of things you should event track coming up next week!
When setting up event tracking, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what you’re tracking on your website. I’ve dedicated two whole blog posts to this, so I won’t take the time to talk about them here. Instead I’ll start with what you shouldn’t track in Google Analytics.
Don’t Track Every Button
You may be compelled to track every button click on your website. After all, it’s free data. I don’t recommend doing this for a number of reasons. Mainly, it’s not wise to collect data for data’s sake. Collecting data for data’s sake makes it harder to drill down into the actual dimensions you need. It’s like going shoe shopping and having mens shoes mixed in with womens shoes when you’re looking for a simple black high heel. I’m frustrated just thinking about it.
Don’t Use Google Analytics As a Substitute for UX Programs
If you’re tracking all non-pageview interactions, you might be trying to shoehorn Google Analytics into something it’s not, like a UX analysis tool. Google Analytics is great at tracking many things, but user behavior and user flow within forms and between pages is not one of them. Sure, there are reports called behavior flow and event flow, but neither of them is worth their weight in salt. Take the time to look for free UX tools like Hotjar before you muddy up your Google Analytics data.
The one caveat I will add is that it is okay to add event tracking to certain features on your website to see whether or not they’re actually used. Great examples of this include a carousel, an accordion, or even a CTA that’s caused great debate in the office. In this case, you’re not trying to track a user journey, every item in the navigation or every button on a page. Instead, you’re strategically trying to collect data. For example, out of the 100 users who landed on your website this past month, only .2% of them clicked on the questionable CTA in the top right corner.
Don’t Go Over 10 Million Hits
Even though you think the data you’re collecting with Google Analytics event tracking is free, if you collect enough data you may be violating Google Analytics’ service level agreement (SLA). When you joined Google Analytics, you agreed to an SLA limiting you to 10 million hits per month per property. A hit is defined as “an interaction that results in data being sent to Analytics” where a hit could include “page tracking hits, event tracking hits, and e-commerce hits.”
If you do go over the 10 million hits, you’ve got two things to worry about. First, you’ll experience an increase in the amount of sampling of your data, meaning less accuracy for you to make decisions from. Secondly, if Google catches you, they might force you to upgrade to Google Analytics 360, which runs $150,000 per year.
Don’t Track Personally Identifiable Information
As tempting as it may be to record the names of people submitting a form, you should probably stop, collaborate and listen. Storing personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, phone numbers, or street addresses in Google Analytics is strictly forbidden.
Summary
Knowing what not to track in Google Analytics is just as important as what to track in Google Analytics. It leads to clean data for better decisions. View my other blogs for what you should track in Google Analytics (part one and part two) and how to name your event tracking.
You’ve just learned all about event tracking and the fact that you can track more on your website than you ever thought possible. Now it’s time learn how to implement event tracking and the effect it can have on your Google Analytics metrics.
How To Implement Event Tracking
Google Analytics event tracking can be added to your website one of two ways. With both ways you’ll still first need to determine your category, action, label, value (if applicable) and what exactly is being tracked.
The first way to implement event tracking is to have a developer write the event tracking in your website code and have the event sent directly to Google Analytics. Here, most of the heavy lifting lies on the developer. However, if you have Google Tag Manager installed on your website, you may want to opt for the second way.
With Google Tag Manager you can implement Google Analytics event tracking yourself, without involving a developer. Once you log into Google Tag Manager, select the Google Analytics event tag and fill in your category, action and label. Next, set up your trigger – when the event tracking will fire (occur). This trigger may range from an anchor tag ID clicked on one of your CTAs to a click url for your PDFs to the visibility of “thank you” text for form submissions.
The Effects of Event Tracking on Google Analytics
After you implement event tracking, it’s likely that you’ll start to look into your Google Analytics. The first thing you may notice is a drop in your bounce rate. That’s because by default, event tracking is not a non-interaction hit. To better clarify, let me dive into hits, non-interaction hits, and bounces for a minute.
Bounce rate can drop after you implement Google Analytics event tracking.
Every time you have an interaction on your website that results in data being sent to Google Analytics, it’s called a hit. As mentioned in the beginning of this post, Google doesn’t track most of your interactions by default, limiting the number of hits Google Analytics receives. Whenever you implement event tracking, you begin tracking interactions that weren’t tracked before, which sends more data (hits) to Google Analytics. By default these hits are not non-interaction hits.
A bounce on your website is defined as an instance when only one interaction was had on your website before a user leaves. Now that you’re recording more second interactions on your website, you’ve got less bounces, which lowers your bounce rate. If you’re ever interested in event tracking without lowering the bounce rate, have your developer label these events as “non-interaction” hits or do it yourself in Google Tag Manager.
Summary
Knowing how to implement Google Analytics event tracking and its effect on your data will make a world of difference when making data driven decisions. You may be tempted at this point to track everything under the sun. But before you do, read about what not to track with event tracking so you can be sure you’re only tracking metrics that matter.
One person downloaded a pdf on your website, another person clicked to call you, a third person wanted to get directions to your store and a fourth person signed up for your newsletter. Congrats! Google Analytics is tracking none of that by default. That’s right my friends, in order to track any of the actions I listed above you have to dive into the deep dark world of Google Analytics event tracking.
The Definition of Event Tracking in Google Analytics
Google defines events as “user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load.” Google uses a really vague definition because the types of things you can track with Google Analytics event tracking is almost endless. A good rule of thumb is that whenever you interact with a website but your URL doesn’t change, assume that your interaction isn’t going to be tracked and you’re going to need to implement event tracking. I listed a number of examples at the beginning of this article, but other examples include a click to email you, a visit to your social profiles, or scroll depth on a particular page.
Since Google Analytics event tracking is a different dimension from a pageview, it’s stored in a different location from a pageview. Any Google Analytics event tracking is stored in the behavior tab on the left-hand side of your Google Analytics screen. While you can technically track flows between events and pageviews in Google Analytics, the reports you can pull are limited.
Each event in Google Analytics must consist of three parameters – a category, an action, and a label. Additionally, a value can be added as an optional parameter in your event tracking. For example, if someone clicks to call your company and you know that every call is worth $5 to you, you can add in a value of “5.”
Naming these parameters correctly will help keep your analytics organized and easily understandable by anyone else who looks at your Google Analytics. How to properly name your event tracking will be discussed in a later blog, so just hold tight for now.
Summary
Learning about the ins and outs of event tracking is a large undertaking. Now that you know what exactly event tracking is, read about the implementation of event tracking, the effects event tracking has on your data, how to name your event tracking, what to track with event tracking and what not to track with event tracking.
What four types of goals are available in Google Analytics?
The four goal types in Google Analytics: pages per session goals, duration goals, destination goals and event based goals. While pages per session and duration goals can both be valid measurements of success, in this blog we’ll go into the difference between destination based goals and event based goals. These two goal types have their pros and cons, and if done incorrectly, both types of goals can either under report or over report the amount of goal completions that occur.
Destination Based Goals
A destination goal is a goal that is completed every time a user lands on a particular url, such as a thank you url. In this instance, destination doesn’t mean that the url you specified is the last one a user hit – rather it means that a user visited that url at some point during their time on your website.
Destination goals are the easiest kind of goals to set up. Additionally, many advertisers, such as those who use Facebook ads or display ads, use destination goals, so you can ensure you have the same Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across channels without any extra website development time.
There are still a couple of things to look out for when creating a destination based goal in Google Analytics. First, check to see if your urls always force a trailing slash or always remove the trailing slash. Failing to check this and then using the “exactly matches” criteria can mean you miss getting credit for some conversions. If you’re not sure about whether or not a trailing slash is always used, you can use regular expressions when determining your goal criteria like I do above.
Another thing to look out for when looking at your destination goals in Google Analytics is whether or not it can be accessed outside of your preferred page path. For example, if you have a thank you page that loads after someone fills out a contact form, make sure that the thank you url can’t be accessed without filling out the contact form first. If you can access the thank you url regardless of whether or not you filled out the form, it can lead to an inflation of goals, which is just as bad at missing out on goals that happened.
Although not an out of the box solution, some Google Analytics users may choose to send a virtual pageview instead of a real pageview to Google Analytics as a way to ensure users don’t hit a thank you url multiple times. From a development perspective, this may take as much work as the event based goals mentioned below.
Event Based Goals
Event based goals are goals based on event tracking. Google Analytics event tracking is additional tracking added in by a developer to record website actions such as button click or clicks to external urls. Each event sent to Google Analytics passes through a category, an action, and a label, allowing you to both aggregate and segment your events in Google Analytics. Event tracking can be easy to add if you have Google Tag Manager, however just like destination goals, there are a couple of things to look out for.
The first problem with your event-based goals is that if you don’t set up any form of validation for your event tracking, then there may be an inflation of goal completions. For example, if you fire an event each time someone clicks the “submit my email” button on your website, but don’t bother to check whether or not a user actually submitted a valid email, you may be reporting more events than actually occurred.
The next problem with event based goals has to do with how you type in your event category, event action, and event label whenever you set up your goal. In order for the goal to fire, your category, action, and label all have to match exactly what comes into Google Analytics. That means if you decide to get fancy and have a label that is generated programmatically based on certain event specifics, you need to account for it when you create your goal.
The best way to get around dynamically generated categories, actions, and labels is to either use regular expressions or leave your programmatically generated field (most likely your label) empty. An empty field when creating your goal won’t cause any problems, since only one dimension of your event tracking is needed (category, action, or label).
Another downside to creating event based goals in Google Analytics is that the event tracking code you use can’t be reused for advertisers without modification. The fancy footwork required is greatly decreased with Google Tag Manager, however, there’s still some footwork required if you’re not familiar with Google Tag Manager.
Summary
Tracking based on events versus destinations can be an easy decision for marketers, but it’s necessary to learn all the pros and cons of each before you start down a path. Both options can either inflate or deflate your number of conversions, so make sure you vet the functionality of your website thoroughly before committing.
To achieve anything in life, you need to set goals. Google Analytics isn’t any different. By setting up goals in Google Analytics, not only are you making sure that your website KPIs are in line with your business goals, but you’re also making sure that you have clearer insight into the actions a user takes before completing those goals.
Conversion Rates
You have 4,392 sessions to your website and out of those 4,392 sessions you had 51 sessions where a user signed up for your newsletter. That means your conversion rate is…involving too much math. Luckily for you, when you set up goals in Google Analytics, this conversion rate is automatically calculated for you.
The conversion rate you see in Google Analytics is really beneficial if you’re using a last click or last non-direct click attribution model. Last click or last non-direct click attribution models refers to the last channel or last non-direct channel a user visited before they converted. Last click and last non-direct click models can give you a great idea of which channels are closers, which devices close faster, and more.
The Multi-Channel Funnel
If you’re you’re curious to see how people are interacting with you across all channels before converting, then the multi-channel funnel is for you. This report shows more than just which channels are the closers. This report can show you what started someone thinking about your product before they eventually converted.
The information that you get from the multi-channel funnel report is only available if you enable goals in Google Analytics. Even more gnarly, if you’ve been paying attention to my millions and millions of posts about UTM coding, you can get an idea of how people are interacting with your individual messages across channels.
In my opinion, the multi channel funnel report combined with UTM coding is one of the most valuable aspects of Google Analytics because it tells you what to say to a customer, when to say it, and where to say it.
Retargeting
I won’t say the “r” word (retargeting) too loud for fear of the GDPR boogeymen coming to get me in my sleep, but if you’re keeping track of who has completed a goal on your website, you are also by default keeping track of those who have NOT completed a goal on your website. This gives you a great pool for people to re-pitch to, fine-tuning your message and A/B testing to help get a sale.
Retargeting isn’t only for small conversions. Retargeting can also help you if you have a much bigger product to sell or a much longer sales cycle. By setting up both small and big goals in Google Analytics (for example, sign up for our newsletter and fill out a request for a sales member to contact you), you can retarget those who have completed the smaller goal, as they’re often more likely to complete a larger goal.
Keeping the same KPIs across Google Ads and Google Analytics
As the old saying goes, don’t let the fox guard the hen house. By adding goals in Google Analytics and then importing them into Adwords, you can ensure you have the same KPIs (key performance indicators) for both your paid and organic campaigns.
This isn’t to say that you should always use the same KPIs across every medium. For example, display campaigns, which are mainly used to create awareness and not to convert users, so you would want to measure the success of a display campaigns by looking at the number of impressions. However, an apples to apples comparison may help give you a gut check on the successfulness of any given campaign.
Summary
Between not having to manually calculate your conversion rates by dividing the number of goal completions over the number of sessions, seeing how users interact across your different marketing mediums, retargeting those who haven’t completed the desired action on your website, and having an apples to apples comparison of success across mediums, goals in Google Analytics are a no brainer. Check on my other posts on how to set up goals, and you’ll be showing the ROI for your marketing efforts in no time.
Learning about website analytics is just one part of what I’ve learned over the years. Another part was learning about the working world. This career corner post is all about how to be a better employee.
Hold yourself accountable. Just because someone isn’t checking up on you or constantly pushing you to do your best, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold yourself to a high standard. When you do that, you’ll be taken seriously.
Come with solutions, not problems. Everyone has difficult days at work. If you find yourself needing some advice, try and come up a solution first. While not every problem will have a simple solution, thinking of a solution first will help stretch your strategic thinking skills.
Perception is reality. As much as we would like to think reality is reality, the truth is that perception plays a much larger role in our jobs than we think. Don’t be shy to talk about your recent accomplishments or the improvements you’re making to office procedures.
People are more likely to work well with people they like.
While no one likes a brown-noser, make sure you’re kind to coworkers.
Participate in office activities that allow you to connect with your
team without talking about work. On that same note, don’t get a
reputation as someone who is difficult to work with and don’t burn
bridges. The business world is smaller than you think. You will gain
very little by speaking negatively of old coworkers and employers or
being a stick in the mud on every project you work on.
In the world of data and analytics, the war between Facebook, Google and other online channels rages on, leaving you with disconnected data and an uncertain path on how to proceed. Using pixels and tags is one way to connect the data and in the post below, you’ll learn how UTM coding is another way to connect disparate data sources.
What I Like About Facebook Insights That Google Analytics Doesn’t Provide
Have you ever seen a Facebook post that makes you laugh just enough to “like” it, but not enough to distract you from Facebook stalking your new coworker? Everyone has. That’s why organic Facebook metrics are based on overall reach, impressions, and engagement. That is to say, how many people your post reached, how often people saw it, and what they did when they saw it.
Facebook bases most of their metrics on the post and page level because they don’t want users to leave their website. The longer a user stays, the more ads they can serve a user. The more ads they serve a user, the more money they make. But if you’re paying for the ads a user is seeing, Facebook actually gives you another layer of data.
For boosted posts and ad campaigns, Facebook will offer you a Facebook pixel to put on your website, allowing you to now track user interactions beyond Facebook. This means any time someone views a page, adds an item to their cart, completes a purchase, and more after viewing your Facebook ad, you’ll know! More than that though, you’ll be able to have a layer of demographics like age and gender that you wouldn’t otherwise get.
Lastly, the Facebook pixel allows you to have data on view through conversions – the idea that you saw an ad, and although you didn’t click on it, eventually that ad caused you to make a purchase.
What I Like About Email Reporting That Google Analytics Doesn’t Provide
Email reporting provides a wealth of data that you can’t get from Google Analytics, namely open rate. Open rate is arguably one of the most important email metrics because if someone doesn’t open your email, there’s no chance they’ll receive your message. Open rate is so important that some email systems even have the ability to A/B test subject lines. After all, who doesn’t want to expose more people to their message?
If you have a more complex email system, the data you get doesn’t stop there. You can get view through conversion information like you get with Facebook (those who viewed your email and eventually took an action, just not when they opened up your email).
The last really important feature of email reporting is the fact that it stores personal information. While this may seem like an obvious benefit (an email system that stores emails…whaaaa?), it’s a huge contrast from Google Analytics, which forbids any personally identifiable information (PII). With the personally identifiable information email reporting gives you, you can segment your audiences and build user personas. If you’re feeling fancy, you can even use incentives to fill the gaps of information you don’t have (give us your birthday and we’ll give you a cookie).
Why I Still Recommend UTM Coding with Facebook Insights and Email Reporting
Unless you have a database dedicated to combining Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and analytics from your email platform, it’s likely that Google Analytics is your main source of truth for all your web analytics. Without enhancing your Google Analytics data with information from your other marketing channels, you won’t be able to know which online campaigns are the most successful at driving a conversion. You also won’t know how people are interacting with specific messages across different channels.
Essentially, if you’re looking at your different channels in a silo, you’re missing out on the bigger picture. UTM coding helps create that larger picture within your existing platforms. While social media management platforms like Hootsuite can provide you with out of the box analytics on your different social media profiles, it’s UTM coding that brings all that data into your Google Analytics account – your one source of truth for all web activities.
Effective marketing requires you to gather as much information as possible about your messages across different channels and learn which ones are and aren’t working. UTM coding can be the glue that sticks Facebook and email to your Google Analytics data and make sure you’re being the best marketer you can be.
