Web Analytics for Government Course in Melbourne 11 March 2010

1 Day Web Analytics Course in Melbourne on March 11, 2010

Learn how to analyse a government website using Google Analytics, Urchin or another web analytics tool.

If you are currently using a web analytics tool to analyse your department’s website or are looking to add this to your website, then this course is for you.

Who Should Attend?

Managers & professionals working in Government, web developers working on government websites

Pre-requisites

None. A basic understanding of websites and search engines is recommended.

What You Get

• 1 full day of face to face training.
• A detailed 91 page printed course manual for each attended.
• Copies of the slides used in the course.
• A certificate of attendance.
• An example Excel KPI spreadsheet with the key formulas to track the success of your website.
• Access to additional course materials, utilities & resources not available to the public on the Panalysis website.
• A discount voucher 2 hour personal consulting & coaching session in Google Analytics & other professional services.

Learning Outcomes

After attending this training session you will be able to:

• Understand what Google Analytics can do.
• Install and configure Google Analytics.
• Perform analysis on your website using Google Analytics.
• Explain how Google Analytics can add value to your department.
• Understand which reports you should use in Google Analytics to be effective in your running your website.
• Set measurable business goals for your website and explain how Google Analytics can help you achieve these outcomes.
• Use a range of Google Analytics reports to analyse your website’s performance against these goals.
• Identify the visitor’s "primary purpose" for visiting the website and whether succeeded.
• Evaluating the effectiveness of content on the website.
• Understand common pitfalls / misinterpretations of Google Analytics reports
• Discuss important issues in planning new business strategies based on analysis of your business’s website.

For more information:

More information is available or contact:

Panalysis Pty Ltd
Tel: 1300 368 553
Suite 2, Level 3, 71 Longueville Road, Lane Cove, NSW 2066 Australia

Email: admin@panalysis.com.au

Registration form for: Melbourne, March 11, 2010

Two new articles published about Google analytics – annotations and grouping pages

Benjamin Mangold has just published two new articles on his blog Google Analytics Results about how to make better use of your Google Analytics reports.

The first article is called Make Notes in Google Analytics with Annotations – this takes you through a step by step process for setting up the annotations feature.

The second article is called Q+A: Grouping Pages in Google Analytics – this takes you through constructing a basic content drill down and how to do advanced table filters and profile filters.

Ben is a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant – his company Mangold Sengers offers basic, intermediate and advanced Google Analytics training courses.

I have attended his courses in both Google Analytics and Google AdWords training and have found them very helpful.

Using Google Analytics to Track Email Newsletters (and RSS feeds)

I often get asked how can I see if my email subscribers are looking / reading the newsletter I send out. Google Analytics provides you with an easy and free way of doing this. Today I will take you through the process step by step.

1. You need a Google Analytics account

• Set up a Google Analytics account
• If you don’t have one – all you need is a gmail email address
• Register here http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Place the code in the footer of all your web pages (How do I add tracking code to my website)

2. How does it work?

• Tracking email campaigns in Google Analytics uses a process called link tagging
  – for example the eGovernment Resource Centre Newsletter uses link tagging Eg., http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/newsletters/200809.html would be modified to look like: http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/newsletters/200809.html#?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=aug2009news
• When someone lands on your site after clicking on a tagged link from your newsletter (or RSS feed), Google Analytics removes the information from the URL and puts it in a cookie
• This way Google Analytics can now link all that particular visitor’s actions on your site from that email link.
• You can then view the results in the Google Analytics interface

3. How do you make the tags?

Google provides a tool called the URL builder –

 

• Campaign Source (utm_source) – Required. Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source.  Example: utm_source=egovnewsletter
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Required. Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click.  Example: utm_medium=email
• Campaign Term (utm_term) – Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.  Example: utm_term=government+2.0
• Campaign Content (utm_content) – Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.  Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.  Example: utm_campaign=aug2009news

For example I use the following for the eGov site:

• For email newsletter content : #?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=aug2009news
• For RSS feed items : #?utm_source=rssfeed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssaug2009
• Why use the # ? This stops the campaign tracking urls being spidered by search engines and appearing in the search results.

4. What do you see in the GA interface?

Your campaign data is listed as ‘Other’ in your Traffic Sources section

For the eGov site this = 12.56% of visits for the month

You can also segment you data and look at what topics visitors arriving via your newsletters look at on the site – but that is a topic for another day.

So that’s how you track visitors to your site who arrive from your email newsletters or RSS news feeds. Have fun and experiment.

How do you calculate the ROI of your government online campaign?

Governments are often notorious for announcing campaigns and publishing press releases without optimizing content on their websites to enable visitors to find information to back up the campaign announcements.

So I was really pleased to read this great article by Augustine Fou at Clickz the other day called "How to use search to calculate the ROI of awareness advertising".

This article hit the nail on the head about what Government should be doing: ie.

• make sure the website or content sections on websites are set up before releasing the press release. A classic Victorian Government example was the announcement of the Bushfire Royal Commission. Everyone wanted to read about the Royal Commission from the official source, yet it took a number of weeks for this to happen. When they did release the Royal Commission website, they appeared not to take out a Google AdWords campaign to support its release. As you can see from this screen shot, the ABC is really well optimised for bushfire royal commission, and the government is not.

• make sure you search engine optimise your website so that the specific information which is announced is easily linked to from the press release, so that the visitor can easily find the supporting information they are seeking – government should be a lot better at doing this than they are in reality (read my earlier article entitled: "How to increase traffic to Government websites with press releases");
• ensure you are using an analytics package, such as Google Analytics (its free and fully integrated with Google AdWords!) to establish how successful or not the announcement, banner ad, search engine marketing and so forth, really is. Putting campaign tracking on your email newsletter links, or on links from press releases or ads you want to track will give you great information to analyse the return on your investment.

Hopefully this will change when one day governments take the web as seriously as they do their television, radio and print campaigns. Until then, how do you work out the return on investment for your government online campaign ……?

Free tools you can use to do Keyword Research – Part 1 – Google Tools

There are a number of free tools you can use to do keyword research for your websites. In part 1 of this series, I am going to look at free tools which Google offers. I recommend you add these to your favourites and use them regularly.

1. Google Insights for Search – I have published something earlier on this one – its a great service! The tool lets you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Google provides some good examples of how you can use this tool in their Insights for Search Help section. It is really easy to use.

2. Google Trends – lets you compare multiple terms and graph their usage in Google over time. Google returns broad search patterns. You can search for the last 30 days, 12 months, a particular year or month within a year.

3. Google Trends for Websites – provides you with information about the traffic and geographical location of visitors to websites. It allows you to compare traffic for between one and five websites. It also gives you what other sites they visited and what they terms they search for. This tool appears to role all of the websites with a vic.gov.au domain into the one bucket – so it is a little difficult to compare eg., health.vic.gov.au with betterhealth.vic.gov.au. However, you can use it at the aggregate level to compare state domains and the keywords visitors are using to get there.

4. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. You can tailor the results present to the language and country of your choosing. Because I am accessing this tool from Australia, when I first access the tool it defaults to the English language and Australia as the country. If you change this to United States as your country – you get a very different results set. It all depends on who your target market is as to what keywords you research. You are provided with match types to choose from which are broad, phrase, exact, and negative. Keywords shown will also give you search volume trends for the past 12 months – the month with the highest volume of traffic is listed in the next column.

5. Google AdWords Traffic Estimator – This tool will provide you with an indication of keyword search traffic and cost estimates for your chosen keywords/phrases. For each keyword you are provided with a maximum cost per click, search volume, estimated average cost per click, estimated ad positions, as well as an indication of the clicks your ad may receive for this keyword, and the average cost per day for this keyword. The estimates Google provides are based on how much you have bid and your geographical areas you are looking to target. You don’t need to use Google AdWords to use this tool. Use the keywords for your organic search engine optimization.

6. Google Analytics – your Google Analytics account will tell you the keywords and phrases which are driving traffic to your site from search engines. Also if you have Site Search enabled you will be able to see easily what keywords your visitors are are searching for in your internal search engine. Google Analytics provides help on configuring your profile to enable Site Search to appear in your reports.

Next time I will look at tools which are not provided by Google!

Enjoy!

Google Online Seminar on Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and Optimizer available

Google has made available its online seminar on how to use Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Website Optimizer, recorded on July 8 available on YouTube. It runs for just under one hour.

Google Analytics and Search Engine Optimization

Rod Jacka at Panalysis in Sydney, has just written a series of articles on how you can use Google Analytics in your search engine optimization practices to ensure you make optimum use of the title tag in your web pages.

• Find Missing Keywords in your Page Titles
• How to find missing page titles using Google Analytics and Urchin
• How to use Google Analytics and Urchin to Improve Search Rankings

Rod also offers a series of training workshops in Google Analytics including:

• Advanced Google Analytics
• Increase the Effectiveness of your Website & Advertising with Google Analytics
• Improving Advertising Results with Google Analytics
• Web Analytics for Government Agencies & Departments

and a free white paper – Getting Results From Your Website.