5 minute read. Bringing together what we’ve learned about tracking conversions, outreach and audience segments. Lesson 5 of 5.
Google Analytics is all about focus: ignoring the data that overwhelms you and focusing on actionable data that helps you make improvements to your online work.
In this tutorial, we’re going to look at an example that combines three techniques we’ve learned – conversion tracking, campaign tracking and custom segments – to start to uncover our most valuable, actionable information.
You can follow along through this example, but the lessons in this session will make more sense when you have set up some goals (to track conversions) and tracked the links you send out in one or more outreach campaigns. We will combine these two techniques with a custom segment that will show you the value of focusing on actionable data.
Example: Selling tickets online
In our hypothetical example, we are organizing an event, and are selling tickets to the event online. To promote the sale of tickets, we are going to send a series of emails to our newsletter list, tweet about the event on Twitter and purchase some online advertising.
Google Analytics will give us a lot of information about all our site visitors, but we want to focus on the data that tells us how to improve our outreach and website and thus sell more tickets.
Let’s walk through the steps we would take.
Step 1: Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track a conversion
In this example, our website is designed to encourage people to buy a ticket to the event we are organizing. A ‘conversion’ in this case would be whenever a visitor registers and pays for a ticket. We set up a ‘destination’ goal in Google Analytics to track whenever someone reaches the ‘Thank you for registering – here’s your receipt’ page on our website. [If this step doesn’t entirely make sense to you, please review this tutorial session on destination goals]
Step 2 : Track our promotion efforts by changing the links we send out
We are spending a fair amount of time and money on promoting this event online – we want to have some sense of which outreach methods helped us sell a lot of tickets and which did not.
We will do this by appending some information to each link we send out in different media – social media, email and online ads – so that we can see how many ticket sales each method generates. [if this doesn’t sound familiar, please review the session on campaign tracking] We have five days to promote this event, so we will be tweeting, emailing and running ads for the entire week.
For each outreach method, we will specify a Source, a Medium and a Campaign and adding that information to the links we send out. The particular campaign tag will be “Event-02-2014”. The tagging for different marketing channels is explained below.
Tracking Twitter results
We’re using HootSuite to manage our Twitter account, so we can use the integrated Google Analytics campaign tracking to add a bit of information to each URL we tweet.
For Campaign Source we specify ‘Twitter’, Campaign Medium is ‘Social Media’ and Campaign Name is the same for each outreach we do for this entire promotional effort, so ‘Event-02-2014’. We use a different ‘Campaign Content’ value for each of the 15 promotional tweets we post during the week.
Tracking our email results
We are sending out our email via MailChimp, so we can easily track the sales generated by each email we send out.
We enable Google Analytics tracking in MailChimp, and the links in our emails are automatically tagged – there’s nothing more for us to do. The Campaign Source is the name of your list in MailChimp, the Campaign Medium is ’email’. We specify a unique Campaign Name in the settings for each of our emails.
We end up sending 4 promotional emails to our list that week.
Tracking our online ad results
Finally, we are running ads with Google Adwords, and by enabling automatic tracking we can see which ad version leads to the most traffic and ticket sales.
Because we have enabled ‘Auto-tagging’ under Tracking in the ‘My Account’ tab of our Adwords account, we automatically see a lot of detailed information about each ad we create with Google. The Campaign Source will be ‘google’ while the Campaign Medium will be ‘cpc’ (for cost-per-click). We run four different ads with Google, and track the results of each one.
Now that we are tracking ticket sales as goals in Google Analytics and we have added some tracking information to each of our outreach efforts, we’re ready to examine the effectiveness of each of our email, social media and online ads.
Step 3 : Create a custom segment to examine each of our outreach efforts.
The quickest way to see the impact of our campaigns is to look at the Campaigns link under Acquisition on the left hand side of the reports page.
But we can get a lot more detailed information on each campaign by creating a few custom segments to track specific outreach efforts. Let’s focus on the results of our email outreach as an example.
Click on the ‘Segments’ button, then on ‘+ Create New Segment’ just below that once the panel opens.
To track the results of our email campaigns, give the custom segment a name, in this case ‘Email from “Event-02-2014” Campaign’ then click on “Conditions” to add some filters to the segment.
Our first filter only wants to include emails, so we choose as conditions:
Include > Medium > Containing > email
and we only want to look at the emails that are tagged with this particular campaign, so we only include visits to URLs tagged with the particular campaign parameter:
Include > Campaign > Containing > (not set)
and add an ‘AND’ statement
Exclude > Campaign > Exactly matches > Event-02-2014
This custom segment looks at email as the source of the traffic, and also makes sure that the traffic is from a campaign – not some other, mislabeled source of traffic.
Once we enable this custom segment, all the data in our Google Analytics account is (temporarily) focused on traffic that comes from email campaigns that are from this particular campaign.
Until we uncheck that custom segment, every report we look at will only include traffic from our email campaigns. We can focus in on the behaviour of our visitors from email, and see how we might improve our site to increase their conversions.
To focus on the visitors from a particular email, we add a further ‘AND’ statement to our custom segment:
Include > Campaign Name >
Step 4 : Ask (Better) Questions
Now we can focus in on the behaviour of visitors who came to our site from that one particular email newsletter we sent out. We can also focus on the behaviour of visitors who ended up buying tickets (converting) on our site.
Where did they land on our site?
Check Content > Site Content > Landing Pages
Where did they leave our site?
Check Content > Site Content > Exit Pages
What conversions occured from this particular email?
Check Conversions > Goals > Overview
What paths through the site did visitors who converted take?
Check Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path (this one is a little advanced!)
You are asking questions about the behaviour of a very specific segment of your audience, and focusing in on their behaviour. You are now using Google Analytics in a much more focused way to help you answer questions about the effectiveness of your online work.
Now you’re focused
By setting up goals, tracking your email newsletters as campaigns and creating custom segments, you have now focused the data presented by your Google Analytics account on useful information.
You can see only the site traffic generated by the email you sent out, and focus in on the visitors who did exactly what you wanted them to do: buy a ticket to your event.
This is the key to using Google Analytics: stopping the deluge of data and focusing in on the data that gives you answers to the one question you want to be asking:
how can I get more conversions from my website?
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