How to Test Print Ad Effectiveness Online

The best way to find out how your print ad's are performing for an online store is to create a special URL which is unique to your Newspaper Ad, which people will type in directly in response to seeing it!

So for example, you could create a url which provides some kind of incentive to type it in, like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/freeshipping

This will then redirect to your free shipping offer page.

http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html

You might need to get your developer to help set up the redirect if your CMS doesn’t support it.

To really see what’s going on in Analytics, you’ll need to add some campaign tracking script to the end of your link above (your destination URL).

To do this, visit Google’s Campaign URL Builder. Don’t get scared off, this is really easy!

Here’s an example:



What you’ll get is a link that looks like this (where the campaign tracking information is added automatically to the end of the link):

http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html?utm_source=Sydney-Morning-herald&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=Free-Shipping

If you don’t add this additional code to your url, you won’t be able to tell whether someone came through via your print Ad (or any other channel for that matter, Twitter, facebook etc – and ideally links from those channels should also be tracked).

Then, to see a report in analytics you’ll need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns.



Then voila!

Over time, this report will tell you how many people came from your Print Ad.

Here’s how it looks:



Select "Source" to sort your campaign by the sources you have defined.

In the above example screenshot, you can see that Print was responsible for 153 visits during the period.

This will really help you understand whether your print campaign is performing against other campaign channels.

You can get much more granular information if you create goals, or have e-commerce enabled analytics tracking, as you can then see revenue generated based on each campaign channel.

Now that’s powerful!

This is going to help your online sales because you’ll begin to understand where your advertising budget is best spent!

So simple.

More information is available here.

Google Analytics & Enclosed Carts!

Part two this week focuses on Goal funnels tracking in Google Analytics.
Goal Funnels are really useful because they allow you to track progress through a shopping cart for example.



So in the example above, we’re losing 39% or 317 potential customers at the final stage of the check-out process. This kind of information allows you to examine this critical step and understand why people might be leaving.

You can then potentially use tools like www.Kampyle.com to get user feedback as they exit from your site to try and ascertain the reasons for leaving.

You might find it’s something as simple as the delivery cost was higher than people expected so they left, or there was concern because they couldn’t see/find your Company Address so they lost trust and confidence and left.

There are literally hundreds of reasons why people exit your site, but until you conduct some real world user-testing, you’ll never really know for sure.

If you’re seeing people visit the FAQ page on your site during the checkout process it means you’re not answering a question they have. You must find out which question they need answering and get it on that checkout “step”! (Plug those holes!).

Do this by breaking your FAQ’s out onto individual pages so you can see which question needs answering the most.

Once you’ve got your conversion rate through the cart sorted as best you can, it can then be time to consider “enclosing” your cart.

What this means is removing all navigation, links out, animations, distraction and noise from your cart process. You’re only supplying the information someone needs to complete their purchase – and that’s it. You’ve discovered all this from testing through analytics remember!

The information needed to instil the visitor with confidence to complete their purchase is made much more prominent, such as delivery details and customer service contact details, as well as security assurances etc.

It’s also absolutely clear to visitors that they are within the checkout process and how many steps they have left to complete their purchase.

I’m still researching this – I’d like to see some real world data on whether Enclosed Carts are better or worse than “Open Carts” – but we are seeing rather large retailers like www.DealsDirect.com.au and www.OO.com.au certainly giving it a go.

And I don’t think they would have adopted the “Enclosed Cart” approach if it hadn’t been seriously tested against an “Open Cart” first!

Link to others to get traffic, but be warned!

Yesterday I had one of those embarrassing moments most of us have experienced in the course of our working lives.

I visited a porn site at work.

It was a total accident (really, it was) and it happened from a very unlikely source.

But more on that later…

When you operate a blog, you can set up trackbacks or pings. Basically what this means is you can allow other web pages which link to yours to be displayed as a link, usually at the bottom of your post.

It’s a method of displaying links from other web pages which reference your article as a form of citation.

Here’s an example on our blog (See under “Links to this Post:”):



Of course I visited the link to see what context the person who linked to my article used to reference my post. That person’s website then received another visitor (me). Other people who read my post may have also visited the link to learn more about the topic I was writing about (more visitors).

From a pure SEO perspective, I’ve often recommended that it’s better not to link to other websites as it can drain your Page Rank as you pass some of your website’s authority to the site you’re linking to.

But in this case, I think it can be useful to link to others to gain targeted traffic.

Note, there’s no search engine benefit to you by having your trackback link posted on someone else’s site – in Blogger (which is the blogging software we use, the trackback link is neatly setup using javascript, which prevents a search engine robot following the link back to the web page linking to you).

I presume, (but haven’t had time to check), that all the other blogging software vendors do the same.

But back to the porn site.

I visited the Google Analytics Blog, looking for more information about setting up analytics in Blogger (something I should have done ages ago, but hadn’t had time).

At the bottom of the Google Analytics article I was reading were all the trackback links and I clicked on one I thought was relevant to what I was interested in…



Bam!

Up popped a very questionable site, which was totally unexpected and highly embarrassing.

What’s the world coming to when even Google can get spammed?

Be careful out there!

Google analytics – brilliant!

I’m going to give Google a plug today, I think they deserve it.

For a while now we’ve been playing around with Google analytics. And what an amazingly powerful system of website performance reporting it is! Best of all, it’s free.

Most of you who own or run a website would have seen some form of Web analytics software that usually comes along with your hosting plan. The most common (free) analytics packages web hosting companies offer include Webalizer and Awstats.

Webalizer and Awstats are fine for checking the basics, i.e. how many people stopped by your site, where they came from, how long they stayed and what keywords they used at various search engines to find you, but that’s about it.

Then there’s the next level up, where you’ll often pay extra (please correct me if I’m wrong)

· Livestats,
· Clicktracks and
· Webtrends

Arguably, Webtrends is the most accurate, powerful and expensive option, with many of the major websites (globally) using the Webtrends solution.

Considering the Google analytics is free, it’s by far the best option for the rest of us!
It’s very easy to set up; it just requires you to create an account and add a small piece of code to the bottom of each page. One great feature is your ability to create your analytics account through your Google AdWords control panel, linking it to your AdWords account.







Google Analytics allows you to do all the basics, but there are several features which provide terrific insights into how people actually use your site. One feature we looked at recently was “site overlay” – where we’re able to see how people navigate your website while looking at your site! See an example below…

In the case of one particular client (a large ecommerce website in the UK), we were able to visualise the most popular products based on navigational clicks, as well as the actual revenue generated by those clicks.

They had dedicated a large amount of their home page real estate to various “specials” (which ironically weren’t receiving many clicks) so we recommended they change the home page “specials” offering to include the most popular products. This immediately increased click-through’s and revenues.

There’s way too much to go into on this humble post about all the Google analytics features available, but I do highly recommend you create an account so you can gain real insights into how people use your website.

For more information, take the Google analytics tour.

Plug, plug, plug.

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