Attribution

Why Do I Need To Set Up Goals In Google Analytics?

 

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. 

 

Stay in the know with email updates!

* indicates required

Where to Use UTM Coding 

 

In our blog about UTM Coding 101, we went over the basics of UTM coding, specifically source, medium, ad content, and campaign. Now that you’re familiarized with the basics though, it’s important to know where you should use them. 

Use UTM Coding for Offline Advertising 

UTM Coding can be great at tracking offline marketing efforts that often times don’t have a direct ROI. For example, if you have a print ad or a billboard, there will be almost no way to track your ROI without a UTM coded vanity URL. 

A vanity URL is a unique web address that is branded for marketing purposes (example: funinthesun.com would be a vanity url that you would want to use instead of your regular url gregsbeachwear.com). A vanity URL is more beneficial than a long url since people are less likely to type in all of the url (gregsbeachwear.com/billboard-promo). 

When we assign the vanity URL for our offline marketing effort, we can then use a UTM code when we redirect it to the main site: (ex: gregsbeachwear.com/?utm_source=billboard&utm_medium=offline).  

Use UTM Coding for Email Content 

Email marketing programs have come a long way. In some cases they can even attribute view through conversion (i.e. someone who viewed an email, didn’t click on it, but then later made a purchase on your website). The downfall of almost all email marketing programs, however, is that they’re recorded in Google Analytics as direct traffic (see my blog about sources and mediums if you’re unfamiliar with this term). 

Right now you probably don’t believe me that you’re getting almost no credit for your emails in Google Analytics, but luckily there’s a way to test this out. By using the real time feature in Google Analytics, click on a link in one of your emails and find out what Google deems the source and medium to be. 

Once you’ve decided that you do want to UTM code your email links, take this opportunity to begin testing out different creative, calls to action, and email formats to see which versions are driving visits to your website. 

Use UTM Coding for Social Post and Social Buttons 

While Google is normally pretty good about attributing the right source and medium for your social posts, if you’re featuring posts that go to the same page multiple time or you’ve got special book buttons like the one you see below, it may be useful to use UTM coding. 

If you want to take your UTM coding a step further, you can test out targeting different audiences, posting at different times of the day (especially with platforms like twitter), or different creative (especially with such visually-centric mediums such as Pinterest). 

Use UTM Coding for QA 

In an ideal world, we’d have a view in our Google Analytics account just for our own IP address. But in the event where we don’t have permission to filter out our own IP address, or if our IP addresses are anonymized to comply with GDPR, a UTM code may be your best bet for QA (Quality Assurance). 

A test UTM code can be as simple as example.com/?utm_source=test&utm_medium=test

Lastly, this test UTM code may be helpful to QA your IP exclusion filters in Google Analytics. By asking the organization you’re filtering out to click on your test UTM code, you can see whether or not their traffic came through. 

Summary 

UTM Coding can be used anywhere and everywhere – whether you’re doing quality assurance on your website or tracking marketing initiatives across digital and traditional channels. Each opportunity to track is an opportunity to learn more about your audience and can increase ROI if done properly. Check out my other blog posts about UTM coding best practices with UTM coding part 1 and UTM coding part 2 or dive into why you still need UTM coding even though you have Facebook Insights and email report.

Stay in the know with email updates!

* indicates required

Google Analytics Basics: Traffic Sources and Mediums 

 

Knowing the basics of Google Analytics sources and mediums can help set you up for success as you go onto bigger and better things in the world of data and analytics, such as UTM coding. This is why my first post in my UTM Coding series is all about Google Analytics basics – traffic sources and mediums. 

What Are Web Analytics Programs?  

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics software used by over 29 million websites (source: https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics). Its popularity comes from the fact that a) it’s free and b) it comes from the ever powerful Google. That combination is pretty hard to beat. 

People love web analytics programs because they help measure basic web traffic, including how people found your website, what pages they visited when they were here, when they visited (time, date, day of week), how long they stayed on your website, and more. We refer to the “how people found your website” dimensions as traffic sources and mediums. 

Google Analytics Sources, Mediums, and Channels 

For every visit to your website, Google Analytics (usually automatically) attributes a source and medium. A source is defined as the specific origin of your traffic. Examples of sources are facebook, linkedin, pinterest, google, yahoo, bing, yelp, yellowpages, bbb, and more. A medium is the category of the source. Examples of mediums are email, social, organic, ppc, cpc, and referral. 

Once Google receives a source and a medium, it places the traffic in an even larger category, called a channel. Examples of channels are: email, social, organic, direct and referral. As I said before, Google will always give a source and a medium to your traffic, however if that source and medium doesn’t fall into one of their predefined channels, Google classifies it as (other). 

Google's Predefined Rules for Each Category

Google’s Predefined Rules for Each Category

As you may have guessed it, (other) isn’t very helpful when you’re looking for a 30,000-foot view of your data, which is why you want to avoid (other) whenever possible. Luckily, you can avoid (other) by following a few simple rules 

How to Properly Categorize Your Source and Medium to Avoid Getting (Other) 

One of the most common reasons traffic gets attributed to (other) is because the source or medium is capitalized. I try and always avoid capitalization because it’s the easiest way to keep everything consistent. It also makes it easier to pass off UTM coding to someone else in your absence. Examples of improper capitalization are: 

    • Facebook 
    • FACEBOOK
    • Organic 

Google will also categorize your traffic as (other) if the medium is not part of their system-defined channel groupings. Examples of mediums not included in Google’s channel groupings are: 

    • offline 
    • boosted
    • paid 

If you decide you want to use these mediums but avoid the (other), have a Google Analytics expert modify your channels before you deviate from Google’s rules. For a full list of what’s acceptable in the eyes of Google, visit here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3297892?hl=en&ref_topic=6010089.

Google Analytics Direct Traffic 

When Google is unable to attribute both the source and medium of your website traffic, the visit gets classified into the “direct” channel with a source of “direct” and a medium of “none.” While you may think this doesn’t affect you, if your company sends our any emails, it might. Many email programs don’t communicate properly with Google, traffic from email subscription lists often come through as direct traffic. 

With Google Analytics, you can test if your email is coming through as a direct visit with real-time reporting from Google Analytics. If your test proves positive and your traffic isn’t getting properly attributed, it may be time to learn about UTM coding, which allows you to override the traffic sources and mediums Google automatically assumes. 

Summary 

Knowing the basic rules of Google’s sources, mediums, and channels can help you lay the groundwork for bigger and better data analytics initiatives, like UTM coding. Whereas small mistakes can cloud your Google Analytics insights and lead to erroneous analysis. If you already know the basics of UTM coding, read ahead about best practices for UTM coding – part one and part two.

Stay in the know with email updates!

* indicates required