Showing posts with label google adwords. Show all posts

Monday, 8 May 2017

A Guide to Setting Up Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics is a versatile reporting and tracking system that turns out valuable data regarding the performance of your website. Launched in 2005, it is an easily operable system, even for beginners. It also has many advanced features that can help with the creation of complex reports, track visitors’ movement paths through the site, and monitor conversions of goals you set at specific intervals. The service is free, although a premium option is also available for advanced users and corporations.

The benefits of Google Analytics

The data received through Google Analytics provides in-depth knowledge regarding the various performance aspects of your website. Through these reports, you can track the performing and non-performing areas also. You can track marketing campaigns, integrate Google Adsense and Adwords to see reports regarding revenues earnings site-wide. You can also track e-commerce dealings, campaigns and keywords to identify the best revenue sources.

Google Analytics account

The first step of using Google Analytics is to create an account on the Google Analytics website. You need to sign up with your existing Google account and start creating a new account there. Be sure to enter your account name, website name and URL address in the requisite fields. Then you need to select the “Data Sharing Settings” at the bottom of the displayed page. By default, all four types of data are selected. Click on “Get Tracking Id” to proceed to the next phase.

In this context, you may also configure the “User Management” tab in the Admin area. Here, you may set up accessibility options for different users of your website with regards to Google Analytics reports. There are four permissions available – ‘Edit’, ‘Collaborate’, “Manage Users” and “Read and Analyze”. In this page, you will also be able to view all the webpages where you have enabled in Google Analytics reporting.

Tracking code

Agree to Google’s “Terms of Service” page for continuing to the next page. You will get the tracking id here. It will start with the prefix ‘UA’. You need to copy this code and come back to your website. In your website’s Google Analytics Settings Tab, copy this code to the “Tracking Id” text box and click on “Save Settings”. This will link your website to the Google Analytics site and enable exchange and processing of data between them.

Adding Google Analytics to WordPress

After creating your WordPress website, the next step of setting up Google Analytics is to add the tracking id to your WordPress site’s pages. There are three ways of achieving this integration:
Manually enter the JavaScript tracking id before the closing <head> tag of your webpage. Repeat this for every page of your website or you may track selective pages in this manner.
In most regular WordPress themes, you may create a child theme and add the tracking id in the header.php file, in the same position as the manual entry (discussed above). More advanced and premium themes have a separate place of entering the tracking id in the Settings menu.
Use a plugin for Google Analytics and configure the “Web Property” tab by putting the tracking id there.

Google Analytics currently uses asynchronous loading to ensure the faster processing of webpages and not affecting page loading speeds. This mode ensures that the tracking code executes only after the entire page is loaded in the user’s system.

Now that Google Analytics has started functioning for your website, you need to wait for 12 to 24 hours, depending on your website’s traffic, for report generation.

Different reports in Google Analytics

The ‘reports’ area of Google Analytics provides access to the different aspects based on the data collected from your website. These reports are generated from the date of installation of Google Analytics only. There are several categories in the ‘reports’ section:

Dashboards

This section allows users to display any report from a large number of pre-made reports generated by Google Analytics. There are two sections – Blank Canvas and Starter Dashboard. You may create your own kind of reports in the Blank Canvas section. The starter dashboard is the area where you may preview the various reports available.

Shortcuts

As the name suggests, this option allows creating links with the reports you use on a frequent basis. The menu displayed at the top of every Google Analytics report has this option where you may add a ‘shortcut’ of the same. From this menu, you may also email the report as an attachment or save it in different downloadable formats.

Intelligence events

This option allows you to track daily, weekly or monthly occurrences as per your choice. These trackable events include clicks, visits, page views, sales conversions, bounce rates and so on. This page allows the creation of alerts also, which may be applied in general to all traffic or upon specific criteria fulfillment. You may choose an alert parameter among a number of them provided, with the freedom to set up the value of the alert triggering. These alerts may also be received through email.

Real time

This section generates reports involving the visitors currently accessing the website. The default ‘Overview’ page shows the number of live visitors with graphs available for per second and minute views for the last half an hour. Most visited pages and referrals, top social traffic and content are also displayed in this section.

Audience

You will find over twelve different reports in this section. Audience reports include analysis on visitor demographics, location and the platform used for viewing your website. This section is important for determining the type of customers who are interested in your website.

Acquisition

This section provides information about the origins of the people visiting your website. The reports include data about referrals, channels, paid and organic search engine traffic, along with a comprehensive breakdown of social media traffic to your website.

Behavior

The behavior section lets you know the activities of the user upon their visit to your website. These include the user’s site searches, landing pages and exit pages. This provides valuable data about the user’s preferences in the website over a period of time.

Conversions

This section offers valuable e-commerce reports regarding product and sales performance of the website. It can also track transaction speed and purchase time of the user. The conversion page may also be used for advanced reports like Goal Creation and Monitoring.

Thus, you can now install Google Analytics on your WordPress website, monitor its performance and formulate strategies and tactics for your website’s improvement with proper data analysis.

Your next step

Now that you know how Google Analytics can help you track your online campaigns why not give it a go? You can start by learning how to set up GA to track email list sign-ups so that you know which of your marketing campaigns drives you the most subscribers.
Your thoughts?

How has Google Analytics helped you improve your website? Did you use it to learn anything about your website that you didn’t expect? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Thursday, 13 April 2017

The Beginner’s Step by Step Guide to Google PPC

WHEN it comes time to promote your product or service, one of the quickest ways to get results is with paid advertising. This is typically called pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine marketing (SEM).

There are a number of options to pick from for your paid advertising needs.

The most notable is Google Adwords.

But before you create an account and start advertising, you will need to lay some groundwork in order to get the most out of your Adwords campaign.

So let’s cover a few basics before you launch your SEM campaign.

Set Your Goal(s)

Depending on your business, you will have different goals.

For example, if you sell products online your goal will be to make a sale. If you offer a service, your goal could be a contact for more submission.

The important thing is to know the URL a user must visit in order to be a success.

Without knowing what success is, you can’t measure the effectiveness of your Adwords efforts.

In the case of an e-commerce site, this will be the URL a user gets to after successfully submitting their payment. For a service based website, the URL could be the “thank you” page they get after submitting a form.

Once you know the URL, in Google Adwords you will need to create a conversion tracking pixel.

Here’s how to do it…

In your Adwords account, click on “Tools > Conversions” – you will see a screen like this:

Click on “Select” for “Website”.

From here you will need to fill out some additional information such as:

Name – This is where you will name the conversion. You will want to make it something that you can easily recognise and understand in your reports.
Value – Here you will enter how much the conversion will be to your business. A few options will be provided like:
- Each time it happens (same value for all conversions)
- Value of conversion will differ (by purchase price)
- Don’t assign a value
Count – Decide whether you want to count one or all conversions.
Conversion Windows – This setting allows you to set options for tracking conversions.
- Conversion window – The default is 30 days and it sets the cookie on the visitors' browser. If that user in that browser comes back to your site and completes the conversion within 30 days (or whatever you have set) it will be tracked in Adwords as a conversion.
- View-through conversion window – The default for this is also 30 days and it tracks the views of your ads. Particularly display ads on Google’s Display Network. If a user views the ad, but does not click and eventually converts on your website they will be tracked as a conversion.
Include in “Conversions” – Enabling this setting will simply create a “conversion” column in your reporting. If you are just starting out, enabling this is preferred.
Attribution model – Google Adwords gives you a handful of options to determine attribution.
- Last click – Using the last click attribution will credit the conversion to the last-clicked ad and corresponding keyword. (This is the most commonly used attribution model)
- First click – Choosing the first click attribution option will use the first-clicked ad and corresponding keyword for crediting the conversion.
- Linear -When you pick the linear attribution setting, it will distribute credit equally across all clicks.
- Time decay – Picking the time decay attribution model will give more credit to the clicks that occurred closer to the point of conversion
- Position-based – The way that position-based attribution works are that it allocates 40% of the credit to both the first and last-clicked ads (including the corresponding keyword), and then uses the remaining 20% of attribution to spread out across the other clicks.
- Data-driven – While this option is currently in BETA, it will split the credit for the conversion based on previous data for this conversion action. Please note that this will only be available to accounts with enough data.

Once you have entered all of your choices, you will need to save and continue in order to get your tracking code.

On the following screen, you will get a recap of your selections and an option to edit to make any last-minute changes.

Below that you will see the code for the tracking script that will need to be added to your “conversion” pages. These are essentially the “thank you” pages a user will get to after submitting a form or completing a purchase.

The code will look something like this:

You will need to copy the whole script and add it inside the <body> tags of your page template. If you are not sure how to do this, you can email the information to your web developer to implement.

After the code is installed, it will track your conversions moving forward.

Connect Google Analytics To Google Adwords

While tracking conversions are important, don’t underestimate the need to track all your website traffic.

Hopefully, you have Google Analytics installed on your site already. If not, I suggest you stop right here and get it set up ASAP.

If you are already setup with Google Analytics, you are good to go.

Once you have decided to use Google Adwords, linking your Adwords data into Google Analytics can be done in a few steps.

After implementation, you will have a better understanding of how your paid traffic interacts with your website.

But before we begin, you will need to make sure you have the following access:

Google Analytics – Your account will need to have “edit” permissions that will allow you to make the necessary changes.
Google Adwords – You will need to have admin access to the Adwords account.

Have the right access?

Cool, here’s what you will need to do in order to link Adwords to Analytics:

Login to your Adwords account and click on the “gears” icon in the upper right
Click on “Linked Accounts”
Click the “view details” link under the Google Analytics section and then click the “set up” link next to the site you want to link to Adwords

If you have multiple views, select what views you want to link. If you have one view, it will be the only one to select.
Either way, click “Import Site Metrics”
Click save

That’s it.

You have now connected Google Analytics and Google Adwords.

Virtual fist bump.

To view this data in Google Analytics, you will want to go to “Acquisition > Adwords > Campaigns”.

Here you will be able to view your campaigns and the data associated with it. You’ll notice to the right that you can see conversion data as well.

There is a ton of great insight to be had through Google Analytics.

Among some of my favourite reports are the “Keywords” report and the “Search Queries” report.

If you have been around long enough, you might know that Google Analytics used to show the keywords a user searched for to get to your site through organic search. However, a few years ago, Google removed this option and gave us the infamous (not provided).

However, if you connected Adwords to Analytics you can see the keywords you bid on that someone clicked to get to your site. While it is not organic searches, it can give you some nice insight into what people are actually searching for to get to your site.

The “Search Queries” report will show you what phrases (searches) someone ran in order to trigger your ad and click through on it.

Not only can this data help drive your decisions in Adwords, but it can also be used to influence content creation and other tweaks to your site in order to better serve the traffic your website gets.

Data Drives Decisions

By implementing these two approaches, you will have started to lay a solid foundation to more accurately track your Google Adwords efforts.

When you start to pay money, you will know that your data is being properly tracked so that you know what is or is not working by being able to analyse the data from your campaigns.

Without tracking traffic and conversions, how do you know if it is really working or not?

It’s really hard to know.

That’s why having the right data being measured and analysed, you can confidently make decisions based on your data.

Have you implemented these two techniques for Adwords yet?

Let us know in the comments how you use this to drive decisions.

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