The use of custom dimensions for web shops.

Lore Van Besien, Founder of AdSpecialist, Belgium

LinkedIn: Lore Van Besien

Lore Van Besien is an ex-Google employee and started off her own consulting business as AdSpecialist in 2010. As a freelancer, she works with international and local online marketing agencies. In addition to that, she also works with Belgian companies directly, mostly in the retail and e-commerce sector. Since 2013, she is a licensed trainer in Google AdWords and Google Analytics for the Google Partner program. Together with her clients, she will always try to make data work for business by 'translating' it to actionable items.

WEBSHOP CASE - Hippeschoentjes.be

The customer journey of a visitor on a web shop might be very different according to that visitor's past.  A logged-in customer versus a logged-out visitor will probably have a different behavior. The same happens for a first-time-buyer versus a repeat buyer, or a visitor with or without a coupon code.

In this session was on how to make these different 'persona's' viewable in Google Analytics by segmenting your audience.

As a *bonus*, we were able to learn you how you can import offline data as 'weather condition' into your Analytics reporting as a segment. Are you curious about the impact of the outdoor weather on the willingness to buy of your audience?

Learned about:

• What are custom dimensions and why should you use them
• How to set up custom dimensions in Google Analytics
• How to import offline data as e.g. weather conditions  to Google Analytics

5 takeaways from Lora:

1. Replacement of Custom Variables
2. 20 custom dimensions
3. Visible on Custom Segments & Custom reports
4. Link back to your business needs
5. Google Tag Manager is powerful!

Cross-device tracking with Google Analytics

Thomas Danniau, Digital Marketing Consultant of The Reference, Belgium
LinkedIn: Thomas Danniau

Thomas Danniau is a dedicated and skilled online marketing consultant at The Reference. His wide knowledge ranges from web analytics, content marketing and SEO to content management systems and databases. In short? He adores the web. Starting his career as a web developer for e-commerce websites, his passion for web technology soon made him embrace digital marketing. With a technical background and a strategic mindset, Thomas loves going the extra mile to boost the ROI of every online marketing challenge he tackles today.

Once upon a time, we only used one PC to visit a website. After a while we were using several computers and browsers to visit the same websites. A few years ago we also started using smartphones and tablets to explore the www … We are still guessing and trying to get a grip on the customer journey between all these devices. But hooray! The time that we can measure, estimate and understand the cross device usage has arrived! Learn how to understand and setup cross device measurement. What did we learn from it and what are the benefits to understand the cross device behavior of your customers?

5 takeaways from Thomas:

1. Cross device tracking will redesign the customer journey
2. Go for a high user-ID Coverage
3. Add the user-ID to the email links
4. Add the user-ID as custom dimension for extra insight
5. You need technical knowledge to implement cross-device tracking Influencing offline sales with online interaction

Duo presemtation of David Vansteenbrugge & Dries Bulttynck, Wijs, Belgium

LinkedIn:David Vansteenbrugge

LinkedIn: Dries Bulttynck

If it doesn’t convert online, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t convert. Through some of our cases at Wijs we clearly trace patterns by closely monitoring the analytics within a holistic framework. Among other cases we talk about a classic retailer who seeks his conversions offline as well as online, but strongly realizing that on- and offline stimulates each other in sales, and this depending on the needs of the client within a specific timeframe.

Workshop:

• Not all products sell the same way. You need to adapt & change tactics.
• How to discover channels that have impact with a holistic approach in mind
• How to define budgets according to impact, not channels pur sang
• How online visits assists and supports offline sales : changing tactics drove more sales to offline with a higher conversion rate than online.

5 take-aways from David & Dries:

1. Categorise products into low and high &low involvement products

1. Work together as one team and mix it up
2. Work towards one target
3. Analyse numbers and know your margins
4. Conversions vs Profits (& Offline)

How to achieve better results & ROI with Google Analytics

Andrew Grill - IBM - Global Social Business Partner

LinkedIn: Andrew Grill

Based in London, Andrew Grill is an internationally renowned thought leader in the fields of social business and social media networks. Currently, Andrew is a Global Partner, with IBM with a remit to help drive understanding and deliver social business solutions to key IBM clients. Previously, Andrew was CEO of leading social influence platform Kred. Part strategy, part business, part technology & 100% digital he has been sharing insights on digital and social online since 2004. Prior to Kred, Andrew was Head of International Client Strategy for Visible Technologies, and CEO of commercial property website, PropertyLook. He also held senior roles in Australia with carriers Telstra and Optus. Andrew edits the leading social business blog LondonCalling.co, and can be found on Twitter as @andrewgrill/

Watch full video here: https://vimeo.com/104477125

And I really enjoyed this video on social topic played by Anrew Grill

Thomas Cook Case: using & implementing Google Tag Manager

Stefan Callebaut, eCom Web Analyst of Thomas Cook, Belgium

LinkedIn: Stefan Callebaut 

What I'm really into is to create a data confidence based on total analysis of where data is derived from, what the percentage of correctness is, and whether it can be used in a safe way. Too many times I've been in situations where the wrong data was used for the right reasons. And my role has always been to create clarity.

We had a problem at Thomas Cook: before analytics change within the change process might have taken several months (using Jira planning). Not only cause for frustration, but we missed several opportunities as well.

Solution: We Integrated Google Tag Manager and unified datalayer to provide speed of change. We redefined the role scheme for the different teams and integrated 1 tag Solution on European scale. We started using a Unified Data Layer with common Dimensions on all websites.

Our result:

• Speed of change from months to weeks (or even days) 
• Role as web analyst changed from reporting and set-up to more front-end tasks
• 3rd party integration is much easier now Duo Presentation with Boy Martin

Key takeaways from Stefan:

New defined roles for IT/web analytics/front-end developer will lead to:

• A ‘speed of change’
• Direct control on what is being pushed on the website
• Happy bosses

But be aware that:

• Dom scrapping is an ad hoc solution
• Analytics job will become more technical

Act on your data with Remarketing & create Advanced Audiences

Julien Cornet, Senior eBusiness Consultant at Semetis, Belgium

LinkedIn: Julien Cornet 

With a background in International Relations, Julien started his career in the world of diplomacy. Business minded and data driven, he is now Senior E-Business Consultant at Semetis since 2011. Over the last three years, Julien has assisted and managed complex Digital Marketing projects. He has also accompanied key clients in their Digital Business Intelligence strategy. Julien Was a speaker at the Search University in 2013, and attended the Google Analytics Summit in May 2014.

Google has launched remarketing in 2010 through Google AdWords. It has evolved a lot and in 2012 Remarketing was possible within Google Analytics and without inserting extra-tags. This workshop aims at explaining how to use Google Analytics for the creation of advanced audiences to be used in your marketing strategy. It focuses on implementation planning, strategic options, concrete examples, best-cases and reporting within Google Analytics.

Takeaways from Julien:

• Remarketing is always on
• Use data:
• Understand your business and product circle
• Understand user’s buying circle
• Deliever positive user experience
• Frequency capping
• Deeplinking
• Use technology
• Use advanced segmentation
• Use Smart lists
• Always be testing!

Google solutions for measurement challenges

Kerri Jacobs( Head of Platforms, Analytics, Google, USA)

Kerry gave us a vivid and powerful presentation with lots of insightful data. Here below are some slides.

Top 5 ways to instantly ruin your analytics practice from Kerri:

1. Hire a data hoarder
2. Speak a different language from the CMO
3. Expect attribution to lead to peace and love
4. Be a partial tagger
5. Work with data deniers

The Analytics Home

Daniel Waisberg, Analytics Advocate of Google UK

LinkedIn: Daniel Waisberg 

Daniel WaisbergDaniel Waisberg is the Analytics Advocate at Google, where he is responsible for fostering Google Analytics by educating and inspiring Online Marketing professionals. Both at Google and his previous positions, Daniel has worked with some of the biggest Internet brands to measure and optimize online behavior. He is also the Founder of online-behavior.com

“I will talk about some of the challenges of building a data centric organization. More specifically, about what types of professionals we should have and where should they sit in the organization. A question that I am trying to answer: how can I make data ubiquitous in my organization?”

Takeaways from Daniel:

For "Customize your data visualization using Google Analytics API” by Neda Sekkat & Chloe Pierard and more visit www.gauc.be

There is also a full report available only in Dutch: http://www.dailybits.be/item/google-analytics-user-conference-verslag-gaucbe/

So, we met and went through the existing website design and Google analytics usage data and my designer-friend was amazed by the experience, insights and the things she could learn and take away for use in her new design. Even her client couldn’t say ‘No’ after she gave a few examples of Google Analytics data, on which she based her new design.

Thumbs up to my friend!

I really hope that companies and brands start to use more data / web-analytics-driven approach before they start rebuilding their website and applications.

Now, you surely want me to get to the point, namely: 

• to learn more about features we looked at;
• to know more about which data of Google Analytics can provide you with some relevant insights before you start rebuilding your website;
• furthermore how the Analytics data can help you identify where you can improve visitor/user experience and so on.

For us all started within Behaviour section in a key-learning feature:

In-Page Analytics

One of the greatest Google Analytics features is a visual assessment In-Page Analytics, which allows you to see how customers interact with your web pages and helps you to find answers tothe following questions:

• Where my website visitors do click the most? Where they don’t click at all or less?
• How good my website layout is?
• Do my visitors find what they are looking for?
• Which content is most interesting for them?
• How good are my call to actions? How visible are my important content elements?
• Which menus work the best?
• Which links are being clicked on?
• etc

How does it work?

Control bar

At the control bar you can choose the metric you want to see in the report: e.g. clicks with more than 5% etc and set a threshold for visualizations of that metric in your report by choosing between features as ‘show bubbles’(these indicate the links users clicked.), ‘show colors’ (this feature applies different colors to bubbles of different values. ) or ‘browser size’ (this feature lets you see the portion of your page that is visible without scrolling to the percentage of traffic you identify.).

There is also a Page layout feature available.

Page layout

Page layout is a feature of Browser Size that lets you select the general alignment for the primary content on your page (Left, Center, or Right) so the Browser Size feature is aligned with that primary content.

To know how to use Google In-Page Analytics visit: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2558864?hl=en&ref_topic=2558810

There is Page-Analytics Chrome extension available here for download:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh?hl=en

Then we moved to Audience section the second very important feature as:

Visitors Flow

Visitors Flow is a graphical representation of the paths users took through your site, from the source, through the various pages, and where along their paths they exited your site.

This flow helps you to see which way visitors make on your site. Where they start and where they say you ‘bye’ or ‘good-bye’. When you are selling a product, or have a ‘donation’ page, contact form, subscription form, or in the case of the client of my friend it was the series of products it helps you to see how many steps visitors/users make through the website to find what they are looking for. In the case of my friend client we could see that some navigation paths to the products pages could be much much easier and shorter.

Furthermore in Visitors Flow you can see which landing pages for different online and offline campaigns are so good that visitors continue to stay on your website and browse further. Which pages can be the best pages to trigger the potential commercial interest.

Other important features:

Site search report

The Site Search reports provide information about:

• how many of your traffic uses the search engine on your site.
• the search terms your traffic uses.
• how your traffic engaged with your site as a result of their searches (e.g. whether they refined their searches, viewed more pages, or exited).

Google Analytics Content Experiments

With Content Experiments Google Analytics found different approach to a standard A/B testing and multivariate testing. Content Experiments uses an A/B/N model, where you are testing up to 10 full versions of a single page, each delivered to users from a separate URL.

Average time on site

Average session duration is: total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions.

Bounced rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

Site Speed

The Site Speed reports measure three aspects of latency:

• Page-load time for a sample of pageviews on your site.
• Execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track (e.g., how quickly images load, response time to button clicks).
• How quickly the browser parses the document and makes it available for user interaction.

Finally, always learn from your top performing pages!

Knowing that one-page designs are quite popular, we new that these problems should already have a solution. After some research, we found out that these issues are quite common and there are blogs around on this topic.

Here is what we have found.

High bounce rate

Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

In case of one-page design, there are no other pages (as all information is presented on one page and the menu scrolls down to the relevant sections on this page), so the bounce rate should be very high. It’s normal for a such website format but can be change fixed.

Here are some helpful blogsposts on how you can do it.

http://aroundanalytics.com/trick-to-solve-high-bounce-rate-of-google-analytics-in-a-one-page-site/

http://analytics.blogspot.be/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-bounce-rate-in-google.html

Tracking direct links to menu/site sections

The second issue is related to the way links to sites sections are structured (for example, link to services section looks like this: http://www.statsfish.com/#services). Unfortunately, this kind of 'anchored'-links are not tracked properly in Google Analytics by default, but this too can be fixed by changing the standard tracking code and making sure we register page visits with anchor information (if available).

Tracking anchored menu clicks

The previous code solves only part of our problem. It will track the direct visits to anchored section links (as it works on a pageview level) but will no help with tracking menu-links or internal site links, because clicking on these will not result in page reload.

This is done by using custom events, which you can integrate on any element / event on the page.

In the blog below you can also find find a very good explanation on how do this:

http://white.net/blog/tracking-clicks-on-anchors-in-google-analytics/

There is also a handy code generator which can help you to create event tracking code.

http://www.seoweather.com/google-analytics-event-tracking-code-generator/

How to Track & Analyze Scroll Depth in Google Analytics

Because with one-page design user can just scroll to the different sections of the page, sometimes we also want to track the scrolling behavior in order to see which sections are visit most etc.

Take a look this blog, to find one possible solution for this:

http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2014/04/scroll-depth-tracking-analysis-google-analytics/

Otherwise there is a handy jquery plugin available:

http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/

New ga.js function

If you use Universal Analytics, remember that Universal Analytics uses a new tracking script called analytics.js which is different from the classic ga.js tracking script and has a different syntax.

Read more in this blog:

http://www.creare.co.uk/track-custom-events-universal-ga

For more documentations on event tracking consult Google Developers guide:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events

Good-luck!

Let's take a look at the most popular free analytics tools.

Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/)

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It's the most widely used website statistics service. The basic service is free of charge and a premium version is available for a fee.

Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Piwik Analytics (piwik.org)

Piwik is a free and open source web analytics application written by a team of international developers that runs on your own webserver.

Piwik displays reports regarding the geographic location of visits, the source of visits (i.e. whether they came from a website, directly, or something else), the technical capabilities of visitors (browser, screen size, operating system, etc.), what the visitors did (pages they viewed, actions they took, how they left), the time of visits and more.

Open Web Analytics (www.openwebanalytics.com)

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is open source web analytics software that you can use to track and analyze how people use your web sites and applications. OWA is licensed under GPL and provides web site owners and developers with easy ways to add web analytics to their sites.

Besides classical tracking features, OWA comes with built-in support for tracking a user’s entire “in-page” experience including mouse movements, scrolling, and key-presses as domstreams that can be later played. OWA offers both Javascript and PHP trackers and supports e-commerce tracking, campaign tracking and action tracking.

Yandex Metrica (metrica.yandex.com)

Yandex.Metrica is a free tool for measuring website traffic and analyzing visitor behavior and the effectiveness of advertising.  Yandex.Metrica helps you increase the conversion rate and lets you monitor the key effectiveness indicators of your website, analyze user behavior, and evaluate the efficiency of your ad campaigns.

Clicky Web Analytics (clicky.com)

Clicky is real-time traffic intelligence for your website. With Clicky enabled, you will understand where your visitors are coming from, how they interact with your site, and to some extent who your visitors are. Accurate logs of every visitor and click on your website combined with advanced segmentation and analysis tools help you make prudent decisions and ultimately control the destiny of your website.

Clicky is designed to be the easiest web analytics service you've ever used. Services like Google Analytics do everything except take out the trash, but you probably don't know what any of the data means. With Clicky, everything just makes sense.

AWStats (www.awstats.org)

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. Data is visually presented within reports by tables and bar graphs in easy to read web pages. 

Designed with flexibility in mind, AWStats can be run through a web browser or directly from the operating system command line. Through the use of intermediary data base files, AWStats is able to quickly process large log files, as often desired.  AWStats is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

And if this list is not enough and you want some more, please take a look at the extensive overview of analytics tools here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

Here are a number of introductory presentations and resources which will help you get the basic idea of what it is all about.

Animated presentation on ‘What is A/B Testing’.

The Simplest A/B Testing Guide

And here is a great introductory article:

https://learn.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/201921737-Strategy-Lesson-Introducing-A-B-Testing-and-Optimization

Split-testing basics

Here is a nice video on the basics of split-testing:

Case-studies

The website of Visual Web Optimizer (one of the tools, used for A/B testing) include a broad range of case-studies, explaining the merits of A/B testing in business context:

https://vwo.com/ideafox/

There quite a number of case studies and user stories on the website of another very popular A/B testing tool Optimizely:

http://blog.optimizely.com/category/casestudies/

https://www.optimizely.com/customers/customer-stories

As a thought leader Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web analytics, and combines that framework with the philosophy that investing in talented analysts is the key to long-term success. He is a staunch advocate of listening to the consumer, and is committed to helping organizations unlock the value of web data.

Here is a nice video-interview with Avinash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byaWdbjKwnM