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In this post we want to outline some of the common types of business objectives websites will often wish to assess through the measurement of metrics - in other words key performance indicators (KPIs) - and how this can be done with the functions and features available within Google Analytics.

Common Objectives

Here is a quick break down of some common website business objectives:-

• Increase revenue
  • Increase conversions (orders/sales)
  • Increase basket values (up sell / cross sell)
  • Increase repeat sales
  • Increase leads

• Increase brand awareness
  • Increase targeted traffic
• Increase profit
  • Reduce CPA
• Increase engagement
  • Increase "community" sign ups
  • Increase social media interactions (bookmarks, "likes")
• Increase the effectiveness of communications
  • Increase email subscriptions
  • Increase RSS subscription
  • Increase dialogue (comments, forum posts, forum sign-ups)

We cannot hope to capture every type of objective here but these are likely candidates. Lets take a look and see how we might measure these in Google Analytics using the metric data available.

KPIs - Increase Revenue

One of the best ways of increasing your net income or bottom line is to increase revenue (as long as you maintain your margins). Google Analytics provides two measures for calculating revenue where you have known revenue generating locations on you website:-

• Via assigning a fixed monetary value to an achieved goal (email sign-up £4.00 value)
• Via ecommerce reporting (injecting the order details directly into Google Analytics)

Goal Values

The fixed nature of the goal value means you need to know the value of a lead or email sign-up to your business for this to have any real purpose as a revenue calculator. Whatever the goal is you're assigning the fixed value to, there is the simple rule of thumb for calculating it value:-

Total number of "goals achieved"  divided by the total revenue to come from these goals (regardless of conversion achieved from the goals themselves)

So for example :-

• 1000 enquiry form completions
• resulted in 250 sales
• with a total value of £25,000

Would mean you record the value of a completed enquiry form as £25 because:-

• £25,000 divided by 1000 enquiries equals £25

Ecommerce Reporting

Google Analytics has a script you can add to your order thank you page where you can inject additional order data; here's a break down of the additional data:-

Transaction Data

• Transaction ID: your internal transaction ID [required]
• Affiliate or store name
• Total
• Tax
• Shipping
• City
• State or region
• Country

Item Data

• Transaction ID: same as in transaction data [required]
• SKU
• Product name
• Product category or product variation
• Unit price [required]
• Quantity [required]

By adding this data into your order completion page these metrics then become available throughout Google Analytics standard reports as an ecommerce tab and as an ecommerce category in the secondary navigation - giving you quick and easy access to revenue and conversion data (in any one of the many available default reports). Remember that advance segments and custom segments will give you access to even more detailed revenue and ecommerce data views.

KPIs - Increase conversions

With the ecommerce reporting in place this becomes very easy to track. You simple go to the ecommerce category in the left-hand navigation of Google Analytics and can then view this data.

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Google Analytics will allow you to see total revenue, conversion rate, average order value, product performance, specific transactions, visits to purchases and days to purchase.

KPIs - Increase basket values

This is very easy to track and measure once Google Analytics is configured to receive ecommerce data - you simple view the standard E-commerce > Average Order Value report.

KPIs -Increase repeat sales

This can be tracked using the standard Visitors > New vs. Returning report and then selecting the the E-commerce tab within the main content area. First you'll need to choose two reporting periods to compare in the calendar (top right) - click on the date to show the calendar function then check the "Compare to Past" box and set both dates, then click apply.

In the main content area header under the summary data there is a drop-down menu which by default has "Visits" set as the metric - change this to "Transactions" to compare order volumes. Job done!

KPIs - Increase leads

Again very easy to track once you have your lead form's "Thank You" page set as a URL Destination goal. To view this data use the standard Goals category and all its sub-page reports to view volumes between two desired reporting periods you wish to compare using the calendar "Compare to Past" functionality.

KPIs - Increase brand awareness

Clearly having more people know about your brand, business and product offering is a good thing, but how do you measure this in Google Analytics? The answers (metrics) are in the Traffic Sources category and the KPI you want to measure is the level of "targeted traffic".

KPIs - Increase targeted traffic

This is designed to see how effective you advertising and marketing efforts have been.

This is a slightly more involved assessment as are looking at three types of potential traffic source volumes (Visits) and their sub metrics (Bounce Rate, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Revenue, Transactions, Conversion Rate). These are all standard reports and metrics so should be pretty straightforward - but it will require your time to actually analyse the data.

Firstly let's look at the traffic sources and what they can tell you about your marketing efforts:-

• Direct Traffic
• Referring Sites
• Search Engines

Direct Traffic - ostensibly this should tell you whether your base-line traffic is growing (i.e. how many people know your website and visit it). Usually this traffic is derived from people who know your URL and fully or partially typed it into their browser address bar, or people who have you in their browser history or people who have bookmarked your website, or people driven to the website from an external application (e.g. a desktop email client such as Outlook, Mac Mail or Thunderbird).

The two direct traffic metrics you should be interested in are:-

1. Direct Traffic - overall volume increases (indicating "buy-in" by consumers to your brand when comparing a "current" time frame to an equal measure of time in the past)
2. Direct Traffic - UTM segmentation by campaign (used to track email marketing referrals via a desktop email client that would not be listed as referral traffic as there is no "referrer" per se)

The beauty of using the UTM campaign metric is that you can see what users being referred from email communications did on your website - where they went and what they did - which is often not possible with the email reporting metrics alone as these are concerned with user behaviour relating directly to the email (delivery, open rate etc) and conversions. So make sure all you email communication contain full UTM parameters on all links to your website and they are clearly and logically labelled so you know which emails generate the best desired responses and which bit of the email users responded to.

To view your email campaign metrics in Google Analytics go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns and use the drop-down menus in the content area to select the metric you're interested in:

• Medium (email)
• Campaign (the campaign name for any series of related email e.g. "spring-offers")
• Ad creative (the specific name/label of the creative used in the mailer e.g. "so-25pc-001")

Referring Sites - As with direct traffic you want to compare volumes of visits (not percentile of total traffic - this is meaningless in terms of growth assessment).

More visits means your link building and social media strategies are likely to be working. If the referral URLs tally with where you have been targeting you SEO and social media efforts then you have a clear measure of success.

Try reporting week-by-week or month-by-month figures to assess the "velocity" of growth.

To assess how targeted the traffic is, you'll want to cross-reference the Bounce Rate, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Revenue, Transactions, Conversion Rate for the two comparable reporting periods. This is easy as punch as these metrics are provided as standard on the Site Usage and E-Commerce tabs in the content area.

• Bounce Rate - you should be looking to lower the percentile of people who immediately leave the website
• Pages/Visit - you should be looking to increase the number of pages viewed per visit (although there is a natural limit whereby users are not finding what they're looking for - inefficiency often through poor IA usability - so delve into click-paths and cross reference with conversion rates)
• Avg. Time on Site - you should be looking to increase your users' time on your website (although again like page views there is a tipping point of efficiency so check pages and categories individually to assess engagement/consumption is where you want it)
• Revenue - you should be looking to increase this!
• Transactions - you should be looking to increase this too!
• Conversion Rate - you should be looking to increase this as well!

Search Engines - you should assess this traffic by volume and keyword spread. To do a basic measure of the keyword spread you'll need to look at each assessment time frame individually and see how many records exist at the bottom of the content table and then compare these two figures.

Each record represents a unique keyword phrase so the number of records tells you how many unique keywords are driving traffic to your website (your keyword spread or universe).

You should also assess how your brand is doing by applying filters to your keywords for any "brand" related terms (the filter is found at the bottom of the content area).

You can search for multiple brand terms in one filter using the "|" pipe separator between keyword variations allowing you to aggregate all brand terms in one result set; e.g.:-

friends of the earth|foe|foe.co.uk

Would return all keyword searches containing a partial match for the strings "friends of the earth", "foe" or "foe.co.uk".

As with referral traffic you should assess the targeting of your search traffic (how qualified it is) through performance metrics - looking at Bounce Rate, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Revenue, Transactions, Conversion Rate as an objective measure of how keywords are performing over time.

KPIs - Increase profit

Google does have some limitation when it comes to measuring the real cost of advertising and marketing and calculating how much it costs to get an order/sale/lead (usually known as the "cost per- acquisition")

KPIs - Reduce CPA costs

A great way to increase profit is to reduce the cost per acquisition (CPA) for each order or lead.

To measure CPA you need:-

• a unified view of all channels and marketing/advertising spend
• a unified view of all elements in the path-to-conversion (clicks and impressions)

However, measuring this meaningfully in Google Analytics is thorny as its attribution model is limited and real costs cannot be resolved currently.

There is no easy way to see the real-world CPA within Google Analytics as Google's attribution model and path-to-conversion model is currently one-dimensional. Attempts to move their model in the right direction such as AdWord's "Search Funnels" path-to-conversion reporting only see part of the picture and still uses a "last-touch" attribution model so CPA and ROI calculations are skewed.

In order to get a full picture of conversion activity and attribute that activity/cost within your conversion model it is necessary to aggregate the data from your marketing channels into a unified online marketing reporting platform that fully reports the chronology of a path-to-conversion and allows you to weight each channel accordingly.

At Strange we have our own proprietary technology that allows us to provide clients with this unified view and path-to-conversion data across all channels. You would need to build or source a similar system in order to have a fuller picture of what your online marketing is doing.

In the diagram below we illustrate what needs to be analysed to allow you to manage and optimise your marketing efforts to reduce CPA. In this diagram we have the various channels on the left - then the user journeys and their interactions (impressions/clicks) with your media/marketing messages that lead to a conversion with chronological reporting and CPA calculation.

Currently Google's attribution model is "last-touch" meaning only the last element in the users' interactions with your marketing message is ever considered as having contributed. This skews real cost and overestimates the value of direct response channels such as PPC, SEO and email over awareness channels such as display and off-line campaigns.

You can get specific time-date-stamp data for almost all online advertising activity and therefore it is wise to bring this data together into a unified view.

We favour multi-touch attribution which means that ROI is spread across all elements that helped the user towards a conversion and you gain a real insight into what's working.

No doubt with Google's (Double-Click/Content Network) revenue stream increasingly coming from display advertising and non-search channels they'll be keen to present a more sophisticated conversion/attribution model in the future that helps illustrate in objective terms the direct effect of display advertising and other channels on awareness and search volumes. Watch this space!

KPIs - Increase engagement

Average time on site, page views per visit and bounce rates are all good indicators of engagement - but are there any black-and-white figures that can be relied on 100% that indicate engagement levels and can be reported within Google Analytics?

KPIs - Increase community sign-ups

This KPI tells you how engaged users are with any community you've established by measuring how many people have joined it - the volume of sign-ups and their velocity is what you need to measure.

In Google Analytics this is simply a case of setting the community's sign-up "Thank You" page as a URL Destination goal and then measuring this via the Goals category.

KPIs - Increase social media interactions

This KPI tells you how compelling your product offering or content is by measuring the number of times users share or "like" a page as they pass the page on to their social network peers.

In order for Google Analytics to be able to measure in-page "clicks" where you have not actually called another page but have interacted within the page, then you'll need to ensure "event tracking" is in place.

This is now standard Google Analytics functionality and merely requires your website development team to add additional JavaScript into your existing links. These will pass category (required), action (required), label (optional) and value (optional) data through to Google Analytics as events.

This means you could pass the following data:-

• Category: Share
• Action: ShareTwitter-/category-name/product-name
• Label: ShareFooter

or

• Category: Like
• Action: LikeImage-/christmas/elves
• Label: LikeImgAdjacent

Take some time with your event tracking nomenclature/naming schema as you want to capture as much data as possible and allow for filtering and aggregation. In the examples above we know what type of interaction was used (share function) , who we shared with (Twitter), which page was shared, and where on the page the user interacted (Footer). All useful data that you should capture.

KPIs - Increase the effectiveness of your marketing communication

All marketing communications is about talking more effectively to your target audience - but how do you measure this?

KPIs - Increase email subscriptions

This KPI tells you how engaged users are with your brand, sales promotions, content or product offering by measuring how many people have subscribed to your mailing list or newsletter.

In Google Analytics this is simply a case of setting the email subscription "Thank You" page as a URL Destination goal and then measuring this via the Goals category.

KPIs - Increase RSS subscriptions

As with email subscriptions you'll probably want to know how many people are subscribing to mailer or blog RSS feeds. As these are XML documents they do not support Google Analytics tracking within the XML file itself. Not a problem - we can use "event tracking" to count the clicks on the RSS subscription link.

So even if you're using a service such as feed burner, by adding some simple JavaScript into the link, Google Analytics Event Tracking can capture these click events and report whatever you wish to call them:-

• Category (required) - e.g. RssFeedSubscription
• Action (required) - e.g. RssFeed-/category-name/page-name
• Label (optional) - e.g. RssFeedHeader

This information is great as it lets you know which pages and content are engaging users and getting them interested enough to sign-up to more of the same.

KPIs - Increase interactions & dialogue

Again, it is great to know how many people are leaving comments on your blog posts, articles and content; also how many people are writing reviews, uploading images or videos, or rating products. All these can be tracked in Google analytics via either Goals or Event Tracking depending on your URL structures and CMS platform/templates.

Once you're capturing this data you can then start to benchmark your website's level of engagements and measure improvements over time.

Conclusion

Google Analytics offers a huge amount of insight from click-stream data. Using basic set-up elements such as E-commerce data, Event Tracking and Goals you can see most of the vital metrics that underlie the most common key performance indicators. These will let you know if your online business is moving in the right direction and take the appropriate decisions to streamline and optimise your business.