Here are the new features.

1. User Interface refresh.
2. AdSense now integrated into GA.
3. Advanced visualizations: Motion Charts!
4. Custom Reports!
5. Advanced Segmentation!!
6. The Google Analytics API.
7. Automatic importing of AdWords cost data into Urchin.

Learn more about the new features in detail at Avinash Kaushik blog

The keywords with less than “Minimum Bid” will be marked as inactive for search and will not enter in to Google ad space. But after the years rolled by introducing this feature, now Google realized that minimum bidding option will not work out as it is stopping those keywords which may trigger ads to different highly relevant query matches. So thinking on some newly needed, they are introducing to replace their static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query.

So that no more keyword will be inactive for search and all those are now having change to enter in to the auction to get placed on the sponsored space. But the thing is AdWords will use the most accurate, specific, and up-to-date performance information when determining whether an ad should be displayed. Your ads will be more likely to show when they’re relevant and less likely to show when they’re not. This means that Google users are apt to see better ads while you, as an advertiser, should receive leads which are more highly qualified.

As the  “Minium Bid” is not required on this migration it has been changed as “First page Bid”. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They’re based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

Here is the preview of the new changes in adword interface:

If you at once log in to your adword account and wonder on not seeing these changes, do not worry… Stay cool… Google planned to roll out this features slowly on the advertisers account to test.

Trinadh was waiting there already and we introduced our self as it was the first time we met face to face. Was expecting other folks arrival to start the session but it was an disappointment for every one since only very few came from the registered numbers. Started the session by self introduction and their experience on this field and how they got in to. Suchet from CTS, Lakshmi kanth from Veetechnologies, Sherin from Bharath Matrimony…. went like that….

Palani answered to the most of the questions arised during the discussion.  Sherin’s view on current Web Analytics practice and how to impress the boss by the way presenting the data was really admirable. Being country manager of Web Analytics Association of India, Trinadh shared his plans of moving to next level by having a local WAA website with blog and forum. Got answers for many questions and useful tips from UBC course to Self marketing..  Thanks Trinadh..  It would have been really bigger event if there were no absence.. Any way, I think it is an unforgettable day in my life, enjoyed lot…  Thanks to Palani to have a deep discussion from to my personal to salemjilla.com .. Thanks for your suggestions as well. I am glad about that….

Searching me?? Sorry guys… I am the photographer…

It was a great webinar by Avinash Kaushik on the topic Web Analytics Unleashed which happened on July 18th. Did you miss it live? Do not worry it is made available to every one on their website.

WATCH THE RECAP OF WEB ANALYTICS UNLEASAHED

Context (framework)

Data, data everywhere.

In the past, there was a quest to acquire lots and lots of analytics data. If one found himself unable to make decisions, it was from a lack of data. But in reality, we have access to way more data than we know what to do with. Companies will not die from lack of data!

The goal is not to collect more data – it’s about extracting insight from this data. Clickstream data is great to help understand the “what” – which products sold, what people do within the cart, where did visitors come from. But clickstream doesn’t address the “why” of visitor behavior. Many believe “if only I had enough path analysis data, I would understand the why.” The reality is, the web is a personal medium. Clickstream data alone is insufficient to explain the “why.”

Solution? Web Analytics 2.0

Reports doesn’t measure outcomes. So it’s key to expand the number of sources you have access to. Avinash lays the framework like this:

THE WHAT: Clickstream data
HOW MUCH: Multiple outcomes analysis (measuring micro and macro conversions)
THE WHY: Experimentation and testing (A/B, A/B/C and multivariate), voice of customer (surveys)
THE WHAT ELSE: Competitive intelligence (understanding whats going on outside your business, useful for benchmarking)
THE GOLD: Insights

This webinar’s focus is on The How Much and The Why. As wonderful as clickstream data is, ttesting and things you can take back to your business.

Insightful Outcomes from Measuring Multiple Goals (The How Much)

Most ecommerce folks have an obsession with conversion rate. This is a classic mistake, as it’s only one way to measure the direct value added by your website. Shop.org reports the average conversion rate for ecommerce websites as 1.74%. That means 98% + are doing something else on the website. Many of these things are actually micro-conversions such as:

• Attracting leads for your business, or offline conversions
• Improves customer satisfaction
• Establishes you as a thought-leader or information resource (blog, articles, reports, guides)
• Attracts human resources
• Et cetera…

Every ecommerce and non-ecommerce website can learn more about how your website is truly adding value / impact to your business by focusing on the “non-converting” visits and measuring successes from them. This subtle shift in thinking will also help you value your website a lot more.

Avinash cited an example of how one company believed its website was adding $13 Million of value before measuring micro-conversions, and after realized it was really “worth” $43 Million to the business.

Assigning “Fake Dollars”

Even though Avinash’s blog is not an ecommerce site, he measures “All Posts” clicks, as it’s a stepping stone to becoming a subscriber (in the sense it measures deep interest in his content). He also tracks “About” page views – that makes him happy. He also measures page views for his Speaking Engagements page. With each goal assigned a dollar value, Avinash concluded his blog accounts for $19,000 of value overall.

Measuring this and trending it over time is key to showing decision makers the value of the website and almost always leads to better questions.

Avinash used Fidelity Investments as an example. Since Fidelity does a lot of business in its physical locations, measuring the sue of the zipcode search box can show you customer intent by geography.

Repeat Visitors. Loyalty is certainly a measure of success. You should look at distributions of data – perhaps 40% visit once, and 2.80% visit 201+ times per month. You want to understand what kinds of content your loyal visitors are consuming. What kind of cross sells can you show them? And so on.

Visitor Recency. Another measure of success is visitor recency. Who comes every day and why? How can you better meet their needs?

Pay attention to visit number, time since previous visit, depth of visit (page views) and length of visits (seconds).

So, it’s very important to figure out what are the multiple goals, and ask yourself “am I doing anything for the 98% that are not converting?” And, “how do I extract value from that?” Measure outcomes first, then look for reasons and things to fix.

Your ecommerce website is not a one night stand. Understand how many visits are made before conversion with Visits to Purchase and Days to Purchase. Then, segment by acquisition channel to understand the differences in behavior from visitors who arrive through affiliate links vs. PPC vs. organic and so on. Paid search traffic (research mode) may take a few visits to convert. Pre-sold affiliate traffic may convert right away. Understand why your goals are or are not being accomplished.

Your Top Landing Page reports are a great place to start, then segment by traffic source.

Capturing the Voice of the Customer (The Why)

This is about giving a real voice to people on your website – not a fake voice. Give site visitors a channel to communicate and they will. The best way is to use surveys on-exit (not to interrupt the visit).

Avinash says the greatest survey in the world has 3 questions.

Why are you here? Your survey could have the following fields:

• Researching
• Looking to purchase
• Product / service support
• Check product order status
• Register a product
• Update information
• Other

Were you able to complete your task? Yes / No

This is important. What if 44% of your customers report that they were looking to purchase and couldn’t complete the task?!

If you couldn’t complete, why not?

Pay attention to the feedback! Look for “segments of discontent” and really understand what are the things that are broken. Not your web usability team pontificating on what might be wrong, but really using that customer feedback.

Avinash and iPerceptions have created 4Q, an on-exit survey that uses these key question. Oh yes, it’s also free!

Experimentation and Testing

You may have heard that many decisions are the result of the HiPPO, or Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. (Did you know this was coined by Avinash’s former employer, Intuit?) Perhaps the HiPPO is responsible for the home page design and content, and it’s hard for you to argue against the HiPPO!

A tip: Learn to prove HiPPOs wrong and quickly. Then you can create an “ideas democracy” where
everyone in the company has an equal voice and are allowed to try ideas. Google Website Optimizer can do A/B/C testing for free, or use a paid tool like Offermatica. But use something! Small, big or medium sized business, anyone can get their hands on a tool and get testing in as little as 6.5 minutes!

The simple A/B or A/B/C test is running 2 versions of a page, with one variable on each page. You are testing to see which version of the variable (like home page image, or headline) performs better against the “control” version.

MVT or “multivariate testing” is a bit sexier. Catch the webinar replay to find out if an endorsement from Oprah can sell more popcorn than a plug from the Today Show. Thanks to MVT, a popcorn e-tailer tested these 2 endorsements with various text promotions at the same time: Spotlight Gift vs. Spotlight Product vs. Customer Favorite, vs. Customer Favorite with Image A (Bags) Image B (tubs).

In this case, Combination 11, with 99% confidence, improved conversion by 24.9%.

Surveys and testing are essential to achieving True Customer Centricity. Involve customers in your website decision making process and you can make better decisions.

One more thing…

Avinash has a word of wisdom he calls the 10/90 Rule: of every $100 you have to spend on web analytics, spend $10 on the tool and $90 on great brains (your web analyst, and not someone who will just “puke reports.” Invest in good people, and even hire a consultant for a few months before bringing someone in house.

Questions

1. Should you implement surveys at the beginning, in the middle, upon exit or post-transaction?

Avinash has experimented with different approaches and prefers on exit pops up when people leave your website. The advantage is you don’t interrupt them in any way (better response quality, better participation rates). Another way is serving pop-under surveys to visitors who engage a bit more with your site than the typical visitor. The pop-under will be noticed when they close the browser.

2. Surveys and analytics – what to test first if you have limited resources?

Avinash would pick surveys because, even though there is a lot of data in analytics, but if you’re not giving your customers a voice, it’s very difficult to be customer centric. Give your customers a feedback channel. Then you go fix those problems you have on your website.

However, this doesn’t have to be either/or. Both analytics and surveys are available free through Google Analytics of 4Q.

Start with A/B testing – it’s straightforward and easy to do. Make dramatic changes and test them. Then tackle multivariate tests, with small tweaks here and there. Start with high Bounce Rate pages in your testing.

Register here for the Chennai event.

UPDATE:

“As the event was scheduled for Saturday (09-08-08), we had some difficulty in finding a suitable venue. Hence, we are forced to postpone the event to Sunday (10-08-08).”

- Palani Balasundaram (Host)

• The fun clickstream analysis you should do
• Interesting ways to listen to your customers
• Why you need to fall in love with experimentation (and all it takes to fall in love is six minutes)!

Register for the Free Webinar

There will also be time for your questions.

All attendees qualify to win 1 of 5 autographed copies of Avinash’s top-rated book, “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.”

Guest Speaker:

One of the most sought after speakers in the world, Avinash Kaushik is Google’s analytics evangelist and author of “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” (www.snipurl.com/wahour) and “Occam’s Razor.”  Avinash is also the co-founder and chief education officer of Market Motive and is on the board of directors of University of California Irvine and several companies.

Some Mobile Analytics vendors are Amethon, Mobilytics, Bango, TigTags, Xiti, and AdMob.

I will write more about the Mobile Analytics soon since I did not get hand on experience and hope I will implement it on one of my site’s mobile version.

Yesterday there was a discussion about Mobile Analytics in Web Analytics forum where VP Product Marketing, Bango addressed their Mobile Analytics Tool and I have given that below.

- On Mon, 7/7/08, ed_wu@dell.com <ed_wu@dell.com> wrote:
From: ed_wu@dell.com <ed_wu@dell.com>
Subject: [webanalytics] cell phone analytics
To: webanalytics@ yahoogroups. com
Date: Monday, July 7, 2008, 10:14 PM

Hey all,

I know my question is a little bit off topic for this group but I hope you might be able to point me to the right direction. Yes web analytics is a hot topic, but has anybody heard or had experience with cell phone analytics? I’m not even sure if “cell phone analytics” is the right name to use. But the basic idea is to be able to track the mobile ads which are becoming popular, not just in the states but in other countries, i.e. China. The advertisers have no idea of their ROI without similar tools like GA or Ominiture in that field. Particularly I want to know:

1) if there is such analytics technology/tools being built already?

2) who are the leading vendors in this field?

3) any resources might help me understand more?

Any idea would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ed

From: webanalytics@ yahoogroups. com [mailto:webanalytics@ yahoogroups. com]
On Behalf Of Praveen kumar
Sent: 07 July 2008 18:32
To: webanalytics@ yahoogroups. com
Subject: Re: [webanalytics] cell phone analytics

Hi Ed,

You are at the right place for this question and you can call it as “Mobile Analytics, instead of “Cell Phone Analytics”. This is the Industry standard term I have seen so far. Bango Analytics should be a nice mobile analytics tool and can even track the mobile advertising campaigns.

http://bango. com/tour/ information/ analyze.aspx

I did not get chance to do ananlytics for Mobile sites so you can try that and give feedback.
Itz free.

Regards,
Praveen Kumar C
Internet Marketing Survival – http://www.cpraveen .com/blog

——————————–

Thanks for the pointer Praveen.

Ed if you have any questions about web analytics for mobile feel free to
give me a shout. Bango Analytics (http://bango. com/analytics) currently
focuses on campaign tracking where we use link redirection technology to
accurately identify and record individuals clicking on your mobile ads
and marketing campaigns. In the next couple of weeks we will launching
our page tracking technology which uses a simple image tag to track site
navigation. Again this uses our unique user ID technology. If anyone
wants to give the new stuff a try then drop me an email via andy at
bango dot com.

You will find some info on this and other mobile stuff on our website
http://bango. com <http://bango. com/> and some things of interest on
http://mobilesoapbo x.wordpress. com/.

Andy

Andy Bovingdon

VP Product Marketing, Bango
http://bango. com <http://bango. com/>

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Google Webmaster Tools is a resource to gauge the visibility of your pages on Google. It shows you which of our search queries drive traffic to your site and lets you see where your site is included in the top search results. You’ll even be able to identify your top content and view the words that other sites use to link to it.

Google Analytics provides further insight on how people land and navigate on your site, regardless of whether they arrive through Google search, pay-per-click ads, or other means. You can see which geographical regions people come from, view your top landing pages, and compare the effectiveness of all your ads, e-mail newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, and keywords on Google and other search engines.

Google Website Optimizer then enables you to act on the information you’ve gathered about your site and make concrete improvements. After identifying your high-traffic but low-converting pages, you can test different combinations of content to determine which one most yields the outcome you’re looking for.

With Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

If you are a Adwords user, you can export the site list from the CSV output of Ad Planner and run your Placement Targeted camapigns efficiently. Hope you are interested in testing this tool so you should sign up here for the invitation to join this beta tool.