Just Say no to (not provided)

Ask me no questions…I’ll tell you no lies

This is not a rant, nor am I bitching about the countless great Google products. I can’t help feeling a little taken back by data collection in Google Analytics now. I realize this program is free and enterprise class but something has left a bad taste in my mouth. Up until December 2011 this was an outstanding program to improve your website in many ways…marketing, graphic design, conversion and (my favorite) finding your money keywords.

In case you think this is some motor mouth rant, I want to share some of the time I invested in Google Analytics…

Google Analytics Shows you Less by Hiding Logged in Users Keywords

Keywords that are labelled as (not provided) means you will not see the keywords that “logged in” Google users use to find your website. It’s not the end of the world but in all likelihood it is going to continually increase its presence in your Google Analytics reports.

Have Your Say by Voting

2008-2009-Achieved Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC)

At the time I was working with one of Canada’s premier internet marketing companies. My role was to attain the level of knowledge required to pass the GAAC test. It took the better part of one year but after plenty of theory and practical education we became one of Canada’s first internet marketing companies to pass the elite GAAC company qualification

2009- Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ)

After my contract was fulfilled with the internet marketing company I went on to complete the Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam. It was fun, challenging and left no room for posers.

2010- Google Analytics Introduction to Training Video Series

6 Sigma black-belt trained Mukesh Sharma approached me. He had heard through the grapevine that my knowledge base was extensive in Google Analytics. After several brainstorming sessions we decided to produce an extensive video introduction series on taking your Google Analytics Individual Qualification to Market. These videos would serve as an overview to the in-depth video training series we would produce immediately following the introduction.

2009- 2010- Google Analytics Training Videos

After producing the introduction we followed through with our plan and created a ten hour video training collection of Google Analytics training videos. It took us a great amount of time, effort and energy to produce these high quality videos.

2008- 2011- Supporter and Hardcore Google Analytics

Every client we perform our services for must have Google Analytics installed. If a valued client did not have Google Analytics installed we would insist on some means of measuring our campaign success and improved ROI.

Google Analytics Crossroad

Time is the most precious commodity we have. Time is money! After living, breathing, walking and talking Google Analytics for 5 years, reality has struck me right between the eyes. The primary objective for Google is their business model, not its user’s best interest. Of course there are some that would strongly disagree with me, I can respect that. You might say “What do you want for free?” My answer “The truth” In 2007 it was my decision to invest 5 years into Google Analytics, true dat! If I knew my keyword data was going to fade away in 2012 I would have started with a paid program such as Omniture.

I am not listing the above accomplishments to impress anyone or promote what I do. The reason for briefly outlining the time invested is to circle back to the phrase “there is no free lunch”. Although this software is free, I want to share some negative features about Google Analytics that I believe now make looking at other paid analytics programs worth perusing:

Google Analytics Cons

Data Privacy

If you understand the way Google Analytics works you would also conclude that Google owns your data. Sure, you can review reports and export data but the fact is their Meta crawlers see it before you do. Your data is likely used in Google’s massive Meta data set.

Google ran into some hot water in 2011 by the German authorities

“The German data protection representative Johannes Caspar has made it public that Google’s negotiation with the federal authorities about the future of its web measurement application Google Analytics (GA) in Germany have reached a dead end” Source

Google has worked to resolve this matter with German authorities.

Account Termination

If you breach any of their TOS your account will be terminated along with any of your report data. It’s not often that happens, but it does.

Support is Limited

Google does not directly support Google Analytics. They have structured a network of GAACs (Google Analytics Authorized Consultants) to address support issues. You can also call upon GAIQs (Google Analytics Qualified Individuals)

Recently (Aug 2011) a Googler shared his thought of the day with his Google+ buds…

“If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.” - DeWitt Clinton  

That is thought provoking but the reality is there are great support methods such as forums, blogs, chat, Google Instant messaging, and email available for paid products. Most notably, Google AdWords support has improved immensely.

Slows Web-Page Loading

After heavily using Google Analytics across thousands of websites I will support Google’s claim of 99.9% server uptime. I have experienced downtime on occasion where you’ll notice your web pages don’t fully load, depending on where you have placed the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code).

It is recommended that you place the tracking code above the </body> tag so your pages will fully load if there are problems with the Google Analytics Servers.

Data Limit

I do not recommend Google Analytics to big data websites. If your website exceeds 10 million requests per month you may lose some or all of the data above and beyond that limit. You should also understand above1 million requests per day may cause issues with your (Google’s) data.

No Log Files

Some businesses would prefer raw or filtered log files to include in their Meta data. These files reside on the Google servers and are not available to users.

Not Provided

Recently Google has decided that users logged into Google will no longer pass the keywords along to Google Analytics. Take a look at your keyword data, if you see (not provided) it represents logged in Googlers. The keywords they use are not being passed along to your Google Analytics reports. It sucks!

Summary

Yes, there are many pros Google Analytics has but right now I am in a bad mood and don’t feel like discussing them. All I want is access to all of my keyword data once again. (Not provided) is (not cutting it) for me. The majority of my accounts show (not provided) as the number one referring keyword.

Just Say no to (not provided)

There is no doubt that my voice alone will not influence the Google Analytics engineers. In 2007 I had the pleasure of working with some of them during GAAC training. They are a smart group! I cannot believe these brilliant and talented developers cannot find a way to give GA users back the valuable keyword data they once had. It makes me think there is an underlying objective that has nothing to do with Google Analytics users and all to do with Google’s new social push (Google+).

In short, if you are seeing (not provided) in your keyword data help yourself to voicing your opinion. Together we might make a difference!

Have Your Say by Voting

Since 2005 Google Analytics has been the choice of most webmasters and marketers. It really was a great way to see more about the behaviors of people visiting your website.

Source

The main reason for its unparalleled growth was simply the price—FREE. How can anybody complain about that? Do you recall a saying most of us grew up with: “There is no free lunch”. That phrase is ringing clearly for many web marketeers that have seriously invested time in Google Analytics.

The time investment has been both enjoyable and fulfilling. But now all that time spent learning, endorsing, using, explaining, reporting, etc may be wasted.

My beef begins with (not provided) appearing in your Google Analytics Reports. What does it mean? According to Google here’s the skinny:

Keywords not provided (not provided)

“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic.”-Amy Chang, Google Analytics team

Huh? “Only a Minority of Your Traffic”?

For me, insights into money keywords (keywords people use when they take a desirable action on your website) has always been at the top of my actionable reporting using Google Analytics as a tool of choice. I know we were told by team Google “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic”, but my Analytics dashboards are telling me a different story.

Website Example A- (not provided) up 316%

Here I have compared my last 2 months of keywords used by people to access my website against the two months prior to that. Not only is (not provide) my number one keyword but the number of people visiting this website as (not provided) are up 316%.

Translation- I cannot see what keywords (not provided) site visitors are using to find my website. The number of site visits from this source (Google logged in users) are increasing at a disturbing rate. With Google’s latest blockbuster, social search integration–expect the percentage of  (not provide)  visitors to increase ever faster.

Website Example B- (not provided) up 366%

Comparing the exact same timelines as above on a larger website, we can see the effect is even greater. In this (not provided) keyword example the increase of invisible keywords is a whooping 366% as well as my number one referring keyword.

Translation- (not provided) keywords began appearing in our dashboards around December 19, 2011. Over the last 4 months 2000 people have accessed this website. We have no idea what keywords they used. All we know is Google organic sent them, not the keywords they used to find you.

Do you Care? If you are looking for keyword data…does a bear poop in the woods?

Summary

From the many accounts I have checked, (not provided) began to appear in our analytics data around December 19, 11. Since then, it is trending up at an alarming rate. Is “alarming” the correct term to use? If you are looking for keyword data…does a bear poop in the woods?

Helpful Resources

• Not Provided- Shock and distaste at the removal of keyword data
• The beginning (not provided) spikes- Search Engine Lands weighs in, November, 2011
• A Call to Arms- Miranda Miller, January 12, 2012 calls us to arms against SOPA, Snake Oil SEOers and Google’s (not provided)

This tutorial is based on the old version of Google Analytics.

One of the best features of Google Anlaytics is the visual rich interface. It is your crystal ball into improving the results and user experience. There are a few special plugins you can use to enhance your Google Anlaytics Interface and ability to find problems. I have listed a few of my favorite plugins below. If you have other Firefox plugins that work for you please share them below by making a comment.

Inteface Primer Plugins

Recommended Plugins & Filters

Shown below are the plugins and filters I use. They all enhance your reporting and analysis abilities.  You will need to use Firefox for the Google Analytics Interface plugins. Sorry, IE users but your browser sucks for GA enhancements. The instruction are all below, right after you install firefox start supercharging your interface.

-Report Enhancer – A Firefox plugin allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

-Goal Copy- Copy any goals from one profile to another.

-Troubleshooting Google Analytics Scripts- A Firefox plugin to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. A must have for troubleshooting in Google Analytics.

-GA Profile Switching – Quickly compare one profile to another. Whatever page you are on will remain when you switch to another profile. You can also open pages in a new tab in Firefox.

-Fire Bug - Take a closer look at cookie data, make sure data is correct. You must install Firebug for this to work.

There are countless other beautiful additions you can make to your report dashboard by employing filters and goals. To make the best out of your data make it more visual.

Happy Analysis

Event Tracking Example

In this event tracking article you’ll be able to see exactly how Google Analytics allows you to track interactions visitors have with videos and flash objects. The tracking system does it using the pageview metric along with time spent on each pageview. The event tracking framework is very flexible and is not just limited to flash and video players.

• Track user events with video trackingUnderstand user’s basic behaviour viewing your video content
• For an indepth analysis of special web objects event tracking is a required tracking metric
• Event tracking is available with the free web tracking service “Google Analytics”
• Get your page stats from the Google Analytics event tracking support page

html/javascript code	Button	equivalent code in my actionscript
onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackEvent(‘button’, ‘pressed’, ‘btn1′, 1);”		trackGA(“button”, “pressed”, “btn1″, 1);
onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘pressed/btn2′);”		trackGA(“page”, “pressed/btn2″);
Pick the ball up and throw it!

This experiment was borrowed from Circle-cube

Watch the calls go to Google Analytics:

1. Get firebug- you must have this Firefox plugin
2. Enable Network monitoring in this page
3. Click the Net tab
4. Google Analytics calls go out as calls to images so itf you want to see only those drill down to watch images by clicking the images tab
5. Everytime a call is fired you will see it and can even inspect it’s parameters and headers (they show up as GET_utm.gif?utmwv=…..)

See the beautiful Google Analytics reports this experiment creates!

Event Tracking truly lets users of the free web analytics software “Google Analytics” a chance to take the platform to new levels. Video and flash tracking with this metric make it easy to measure user events. Focus on the events that are important to your website goal. Use event tracking to improve the usability of videos, flash games and tutorials.

Our training is provided by Google Analytics Qualified personnel. We bring a unique mix of traffic generation techniques and measurement learning pedestals to the table. With a strong business sense and an eye for what brings you results, our technical approach to your online business will prove itself time and time again.

Topics Include

• Are all pages being tracked properly?
• How does Google Analytics Work?
• How does the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code) work?
• How do I make virtual page views to track PDF downloads?
• Where is the data found for virtual page views?
• Can I track 1 page in many accounts?
• Why do you have a website?
• What problems currently exist… broken links or bad redirects?
• How to identify what type of website you have?
• What challenges exist tracking your website- special attention items?
• What are Google Analytics Key features?
• How to create your Google Analytics account with or without AdWords?
• How to link Google AdWords to Analytics?
• What do profiles mean and how do they work?
• How do I determine and set up Goals?
• Can I block internal traffic I do not want to appear in website statistics?
• What are filters?
• How does manual tagging work?
• How to set up your Google Analytics properly for your business
• Gain insights for the webmaster, analyst, and marketing professionals
• Using Google Analytics to help optimize your online and offline marketing

30 minutes of phone or email time, one on one to learn what’s most meaningful to you

You Gotta Stay Lean to be Mean

If you are struggling with how to get actionable data from Google Analytics get yourself on track. Learn the best way to make key team members love their reports. Google Analytics performs even better when the company team has key members reviewing data. This will put a lot more money back in your pocket when your team collectively feeds the analyst with observations and feedback. Your marketing team can quickly improve the bottom line with your spending in Google AdWords. Your web design team will learn what needs tweaking and what is working well. You will end up with many ideas on how to increase conversions on your website when it is a team effort.

Don’t forget the 90/10 Rule

With any web analytics software you must consider the 90-10 rule Google evangelist, Avinash Kaushik advises. For every $10 you spend in software $90 will be required for resources to sort through your data and find gold. Source

• Do you have Google Analytics installed?
• Are you tired of staring at data and drawing blanks?
• Do you seek a mentor that can empower you with effective deliberation techniques?
• Do you ignore using filters and profiles to enhance your business data?
• Is your business lacking good, actionable business analysis?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions this powerful Google Analytics learning pad is for you. After this training session you will be in control of your data with a good understanding about what key metrics apply to you.

Tracking Your Website

After all that work, another instrumental success ingredient should be added. Website analytics gives you the ability to connect with your visitors. There are several options for website analytics but I will take Google Analytics over all of them. Google Analytics is free and stacks up against the big guns any day. It also has a growing technical support group of GAAC’s (Google Analytics Certified Companies) that can help you through advanced issues. In the beginning decide on tracking TV, radio or print- it’s nice to know Google Analytics will track this as well. Don’t forget about phone call tracking, it can also be tracked through analytics.

There’s more to the picture than meets the eye here. You can track email, PDF downloads, links, banners or even offline advertising. To tag links your URL is tagged with a query string that tells Google Analytics additional information. You can use the Google URL builder for free to build your.

Tracking with Tags has 6 Basic Elements

• Destination URL- The page your visitor ends up on.
• Campaign (utm_campaign)- The complete marketing campaign E.g. wholesale campaign.
• Medium (utm_medium)- How did the person find your website? E.g. Referral, Email, Search Engine or Paid Traffic.
• Source (utm_source)- Name of the campaign. E.g. Christmas-08-banner.
• Content (utm_content)- Used to identify differences between ads, email newsletters or banners.
• Term (utm_term)- The main phrase or keyword you are promoting (Anchor text)

Find the ad, text link or banner you want to tag and open it in an html editor. The code will look something like this.
Link Browser Displays

Learn Google Analytics

Source Code

<a href=”http://galearning.com/google-analysis/google-analytics-video-training/”>Learn Google Analytics</a>

Change the original source code to the tagged version using the manual tag builder or hand coding, whichever you are more comfortable with.

Original Code

<a href=”http://www.galearning.com/join.php”>Learn Google Analytics</a>

Modified Code
<a href=”http://www.galearning.com/faq.php?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=learn%2Bgoogle%20analytics&utm_content=may%2F09_empowered&utm_campaign=empowered%2Banalytics” mce_href=”http://www.galearning.com/faq.php?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=learn%2Bgoogle%20analytics&utm_content=may%2F09_empowered&utm_campaign=empowered%2Banalytics”>Learn Google Analytics</a>

Code was generated using the manual tool builder.
In this example I am using Facebook but the coding logic can be used to manually tag any important traffic source where you control the coding. E.g. Email campaigns, other advertising engines like Yahoo! or Bling and banner campaigns.

• Publish your modified code- It’s really that simple! Once you upload the the modified code Google Analytics will show you data on that source. How well do they convert? How long do they stay on your site. Where and why do they leave? These are 3 simple questions that are answered in Google Analytics.

When the destination urls are appropriately tagged they will show up in your reports completely defined.

On this website we have goal funnels set up that log purchases. In this case we can multiply 3322 visits X .81% (conversion rate) = 27 purchases. How much did we spend on our marketing efforts? How many sales were made? What is the value of a lifetime business relationship?

Bottom line…

What is your ROI?

Finally, you can create a Facebook Advertising filter in Google Analytics that filters only CPC traffic. By doing this you will be able to see your Facebook paid traffic alone. If any natural traffic comes from Facebook it will show up segmented.

The highlighted line is traffic from your paid advertising with Facebook and the second line is natural traffic that came to your site through links that were not tagged (non-paid)

How to Create a Facebook Profile

Go to your profile settings and create a filter.

Filter Name: Facebook Only Traffic

Filter Type: Custom>Include

Filter Field: Campaign Source

Filter Pattern: facebook

Case Sensitive: No

Before you go ahead and install analytics let’s make the following considerations. One important choice you need to make before creating a Google Analytics account is whether you are going to use Adwords for advertising or not. In simple terms, if you are going to use AdWords then you should create (and join) your account starting from Google AdWords.

After you have created your Adwords account go to My Account>Account Preferences>Tracking> Edit, then check the box.

After you have completed automatic tagging simply click the analytics tab you see above and follow the simple, step-by-step instructions. So as an Adwords user, if you went ahead and just created your analytics account first you would not be able to join them. When Adwords and Analytics are joined, improving the ROI picture is a lot clearer.

Now you will have full access to Adwords data in Analytics.

Pages that are in a frame set are actually more than 1 page. For example your site may include 2, 3 or more frames in a page. Sometimes (not often) the best option is to build in frames. Regretfully, when you use frames it is harder to spider for search engines and will inflate your statistics in Google Analytics.

A proper installation of tracking code will include placing the tracking code on all framed pages.

Frame Example

Live Page Example

All 3 Frames count as page views

The page above is made up of 3 pages. If the tracking code is placed on the framed pages Google Analytics will log 3 page views per visit (one for each frame). It is important to note your pageviews will appear more inflated with frames because of that. The other consideration is if visitors are able to access your frames by a search engine or other source individually. This can often occur with main frames. It is best to make sure that frame is tagged along with others that have the same possibility.

Framed Pages Appear in content reports sequentially.

If you are using an iframe tag within its HTML code special consideration is needed. If the parent frame is tagged and the iframe is not you may be missing out on visits. Pages in frames can be viewed in sequence looking at Google Analytics navigation reports.

More on Frames

Take a ride on the conversion train by understanding three simple concepts that make pay per click work for you. Pay per click marketing begins when someone enters a keyword into the search engine. Search engines display natural result pages and paid advertisements for the searcher to choose from. You’ll want to understand the types of keywords people use and what’s in their minds at the moment. It will increase the amount of business you generate from PPC advertising.

In search engine marketing you have to be a train conductor that flawlessly delivers the cargo . Think of cargo like conversion and the train has three cars.

Choo Choo!

1) Selecting Keywords

One overlooked fact about keyword selection is the varying types of keywords that exist. Different breeds of keywords result in different behaviors and actions taken by the people that interact with your website. Regardless of what you think and I think, the final judge of your keyword sweet spot will be the people that visit web pages. If we can get a head start by understanding the keyword categories that exist it is more likely your pay per click campaigns will convert better.

11 Keyword Types

1. On Page- Appear in the text on pages, all known as contextual.
2. Effective- keywords that convert from on page keywords to interesting keywords. These are keywords you can find in analytics or server logs. They are the words people use to successfully find your website.
3. Competitor- Keywords your competition uses that you also use in more targeted ways.
4. Client – Supplied by the client and considered to be profitable.
5. Experimental- When new keywords are introduced to ideas and have not proven themselves yet.
6. Exotic- From other tools like Word Tracker or keyword Discovery that have not proven themselves to you.
7. Site Search- Used on your site via internal search by visitors that want to dig deeper into your website.
8. Pay per Click- Keywords that are being used in PPC campaigns. We can break these keywords down even further into CTR, conversion and impressions. ** If each one was in a circle, 3 circles can overlap to form the PPC keyword sweet spot
9. Money Keywords- **A very small overlap where all types of keywords intersect to form a sweet spot.
10. Marketing Longtails- Longer key phrases that describe marketing terms for your business.
11. Technical Longtails- Phrases that are longer and described technical aspects of your business.

2) The Perfect Advertisement

After selecting your group of keywords that will hopefully be money keywords it’s time to develop advertisements that directly and effectively speak to those keywords. Knowing what is in a searcher’s mind when they enter a certain keyword is an important concept to grasp for effective ad content writing. Ideally the advertisement speaks directly to solving the problem of the key word entered. The most popular form of pay per click advertising is Google AdWords. When you compose your ad unit using Google Adwords you have 4 basic areas to customize – Headline, description line one, description line two, display URL and destination URL.

Adwords Visual Significance & Character Limit

When you create advertisements you can enter the data in the text fields you see above and use dynamic keyword insertion for higher click-throughs. This is done by inserting “{keyword:default text}” (include curly brackets and contents).

Think about it for a moment, if you enter the key phrase ”same day flower delivery” and the advertising echoed the same keyword you entered in the headline, what ad would get your click? Once you have set up your ads you may also want to use website optimizer to help you test performance of different ads and keyword combinations. Google Adwords is a powerful program that can bring you surgically targeted site visitors which convert to action or break you very quickly. To use this pay per click program at an optimum level a certified professional is highly recommended. Once you determine your CPA (cost per acquisition) you’ll want to be constantly improving it.

3) Crafting Landing Pages

Crafting the perfect landing page begins with deciding on the goal. It may be a lead form you want filled out or a product purchase, the landing page is strategically created to increase the odds of goal fulfillment (conversion).

Finally we have the visitor on our web site and it’s time to make money with our online business. After the keyword was entered and the ad was clicked the power of persuasion is solely in the hands of your landing page. With your landing page there are also critical components that are integral in converting a web site visitor to action.

• A clear call to action placed in the top fold
• Bite size content messages designed to trigger the next action in your sales funnel
• A simple and easy method to make contact with your company by phone or lead form
• The item they are looking for is no more than two clicks away
• Using free Google tools such as web site optimizer are to run AB or multivariate testing

With paid traffic you will want to measure and study the movement of visitors through your sales funnel.

This is the most efficient way to improve conversion with much less guesswork … employing the power of data driven decision-making. It is an ongoing cycle for the simple reason that markets are always changing, some more frequently than others. Where did pop culture come from?

Other Pay Per Click Recommendations

Link popularity will also help bring other traffic to your landing pages that may convert. If you have some spare time on your hands go over to Squidoo and make a lens pointing to your PPC landing pages. This can also boost your PPC and SEO results. You can also include links on your landing page to other landing pages. Once your visitor has completed their action by filling out your lead form or making a product purchase why not try to upsell by leading them to other offers? Place your own blog insert your RSS feed on the final goal page to increase time on site and give your visitor more of what they came for. Make sure you perform analysis & optimization on your landing pages on a regular basis.

Make the Best out of Your PPC Advertising !