Google Analytics (GA) is quickly becoming the analytics package of choice for many companies.

This is not surprising. I mean, it’s FREE!

But that aside, some of the more intricate functionality and customizable components of GA hold real value, and should be utilized. This article is part 1 of a two-part series on Google Analytics Profiles and Filters.

GA filters do just what their name implies. They filter out data so you can more easily find the pertinent information.

Profiles allow you to create different data sets with varying filters for separate reporting. Incorporating these separate profiles and filters into your GA setup can help you analyze data more accurately and efficiently.

Then, if you actually act on your analyses, you can potentially increase your site’s conversion rate.

Profiles and Filters Work Together

An important concept in GA is the idea of separate profiles. You should create a separate profile for each set of data you want to analyze, and then apply the appropriate filter(s) for each profile. It is easier to explain by example, so the rest of this post is a list of what I consider to be must-have profiles & filters, and how to enable them.

(Read the full article…)

One of our clients – Ifbyphone - just announced some new functionality that will make it a LOT easier for advertisers to track phone leads by advertising campaign and pull the data into Google Analytics. We're especially excited about what this means for Search Engine Marketing campaigns, although it can be used to track calls from any kind of advertising.

We've always been frustrated when our SEM campaign ROI has been underreported because we didn't have an easy way of telling what phone calls originated from Search. Even in those cases where we had a sense for how much call volume our Search campaigns were driving, we could never attribute the calls to the originating Campaign or Ad Group so we could adjust bids and spending to ensure we were getting the most out of the campaigns.

Some advertisers have developed a basic multiplier they apply to their web leads/sales to account for the lift from phone sales we all knew was happening even though we couldn't measure it. That's better than nothing, but not very precise or actionable.

Some more advanced advertisers have set up custom 800 numbers for various campaigns so they could get more granular call data. But in most cases they had to manually marry up the web data with the phone data, usually weeks or months after the fact. This enabled some better intelligence, but still fell short of having one system tracking everything in real time.

But with Ifbyphone's new system, now we can achieve the vision of having web and phone lead data reported in ONE system. And not just any system, but the very popular Google Analytics. See Thomas Howe's review of this new capability from Ifbyphone here: Simple and Brilliant.

More on how it works on the Ifbyphone blog here: Phone Mashup for Tracking Call Data in Googe Analytics.

More detailed information will be coming out shortly.

As with many things, it will take some good planning and upfront work in order to get the most out of this new capability. But the bottom line is that this solves a big problem for a lot of advertisers. If you drive a decent amount of call volume from your campaigns, you owe it to yourself to check out this new tool. It's an easy and low-cost way to make sure you're spending your advertising dollars more intelligently. Who can argue with that?

I’m sure most of you know that Google Analytics (GA) Content reports display pageviews and unique pageviews, along with other metrics.

Did you know, however, that you can create and track virtual pageviews? You can create a virtual pageview anywhere that you can call a javascript method. This virtual pageview will show up everywhere in the Content reports section that a ‘real’ pageview will.

This means you can track clicks on Flash movies, different CSS layers, pdfs, images, docs…the list goes on.

I am going to give three examples of how you can use virtual pageviews to help increase and track conversions, but first I’ll demonstrate how to set them up.

(Read the full article…)