Just last week, I had the pleasure of keynoting the fabulous eMetrics Conference in San Jose. While there I had a chance to sit down with my good friends Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik to discuss Jim’s latest book Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. If you are doing anything in social media, planning on it (and if not why not) then you should get a copy right away. Take 8 minutes and watch the interview below, there are some juicy nuggets in there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even kiss your money good bye. Google AdWords is one of the most remarkable advertising vehicles in the history of marketing. No matter how simple 95 characters seems to be, there is no denying the complexity of executing well. Of course, the fact that not all the rules or all the data are presented well doesn’t make it any easier. What amazes me is how most people don’t take full control over what they do control.

My associates and I have been doing several Pay Per Click (PPC) audits for clients the last few weeks and consistently we find companies have many of the same core issues:

1. Account structure – remember that they are called ad groups not keyword groups. Too many companies groups keywords together that don’t belong together; they don’t realize you can’t create an ad that is relevant for each of the keywords in the group and this can become a bigger issue if the right match types aren’t properly used.

2. Keyword, Ad and Landing Page Quality & Relevance – because the structure is off, and companies don’t maintain their campaigns well enough, the ads become irrelevant for the search queries that trigger the ads based on the keywords that were chosen. If the ads are off, I can guarantee that the landing pages are off.

3. Looking at the wrong data – It surprises me how reports are distributed and used. If all members of your team aren’t all looking at the right data you can’t make the right decisions to get the most out of your campaigns.  You can’t be making business optimization decisions if you don’t have the right data and innumeracy leads many ‘data-driven’ executives to bad decisions. They forget that statistics lie and liars use statistics.

Please don’t forget to control what you can.

The first step is understanding the PPC searcher’s buying journey and managing and optimizing the parts you can. Why aren’t you regularly optimizing your PPC campaigns from keyword management, to account structuring, to improved ads to testing and improving your landing pages? Is it lack of knowledge? Lack of resources? Lack of direction?

Why would you want to continue the drama and not enjoy lots of happy endings?

MarketMotive, which offers internet marketing courses online  is allowing each of the faculty to give away one scholarship to it’s certification courses valued at $3500 for the upcoming April 15th semester.  Certification courses include SEO, PPC, Conversion Optimization, Social Media, Online PR, Internet Marketing Fundamentals, and Web Analytics. Our faculty believe in giving back to the community, so in order to give something away as valuable as a certification, we believe someone else should benefit too.

And that is the small catch.

If you would like to win a scholarship to the topic of your choice, pick one charity web site of your choice and submit a [YOUR TOPIC] plan that helps improve the [social media, web presence, measurability or conversion etc.] for the charity. You can choose to publish it on your website and let us know about it, email to us, send it to us as smoke signals, etc.

I will publish the top 3 submissions to the conversion category and together with my readers we’ll pick the scholarship winner by April 5th. We’ll be giving away a second prize as well. Our other faculty members will pick the winners in their respective topics. At the end, the winner gets a certification, each submission would have helped a charity and I will gladly link to each submission published on a blog.

Have any questions? Just ask below.

Rules:  Submitting a plan means contestants agree that their plan may be be posted (with attribution) and/or sent to the charity.  Plans may be edited before being posted at blog owner’s discretion.  Winning plan (s)will be selected at the discretion of MarketMotive faculty chairs.

P.S. If you are planning to be at SES NY, make sure and come say hello to us there.

Google has done a fabulous job putting together learning materials for their Google Analytics IQ Lessons – where you can follow the lessons in order to pass their GA IQ individual certification test. But the following will help you get the most out of your Google Analytics with this collection of links to implement, configure and get insights from Google Analytics.

Initial Setup of Google Analytics

Google Analytics Setup Checklist

Google Analytics IQ Lessons from Google’s Conversion University with videos

A Video Tutorial to Google Analytics Setup

Google’s Support Installation Guide

How to speed up your website when using Google Analytics

8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Google Analytics Custom Variables Overview

How to Link Google Analytics to your AdWords Account

Video: How to Setup Google Analytics with Flash

Google Analytics within Flex/Flash Applications

Tools to Be Sure Your Website Is Tagged Properly

SiteScan for Google Analytics

Web Analytics Solution Profiler

Firebug Plugin for Firefox

Create and Configure Multiple Profiles

Exclude Internal Traffic the Easy Way

How to Use Google Analytics Filters to Create Profiles

Click here to view the embedded video.

To Meet and Exceed Your Goals, You Must Have Them Set Up

How to setup Goal Tracking

Why It Is Important to Monetize Your Goals

10 Must Track Google Analytics Goals

How to Setup Ecommerce & Lead Tracking

Video: Tracking Ecommerce with Google Analytics

How Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking Works

Installation & Setup of Ecommerce Tracking

Tracking Lead Gen Forms

Google Analytics Variable List

Tracking Conversion across Multiple Domains

Call Tracking in Google Analytics White Paper

How To Track WordPress Signups and Comments With Google Analytics

Google Analytics: script to track outbound links and downloads

Tracking Email with Google Analytics

Working With Filters

Matching Specific Transactions to Specific Keywords

Intro to GA Regular Expressions

Video: How to Setup Google Analytics Filters for Better Traffic Reports

Make Internal Search Work For You

5 Easy Steps to Enable Google Analytics Site Search Tracking

Google’s How do I set up Site Search for my profile?

Track How Often a Link on Your Website is Clicked

How To Track Internal Links in Google Analytics

Tracking UI Level Links: An Open Source Script

How to Setup Google Analytics Campaign Tracking

A 4 Step Approach to Google Analytics Campaign Tracking

Twitter and Google Analytics: What to Track

Adding Twitter Search to Google Analytics

Tracking Universal Search results

How to Make Reports More Accurate

How to Maximize Google Analytics Site Overlay Tool

Decrease Bounce Rate by Using target=”_blank” on External Links

Google Analytics Hack – obtaining full referring URL

Google Analytics Reports

Video: Google Analytics Dashboard: Measure Your Web Site’s Success

How to view Google Analytics Funnels for Segmented Data

Find Poor Performing Campaigns and Keywords

Google Analytics Benchmarking: How do you Compare?

Have Your Reports Emailed to You

Google Analytics Motion Charts Overview with a PPC Example

Setup Advanced Segments

Video: Creating Custom Reports

Click here to view the embedded video.

Find Out When Your Campaigns Suck with GA Custom Reports

Video Tutorial: Hacking Google Analytics for Keyword Research

Use Annotations to track website changes:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get More Out of Google Analytics With Plugins & Hacks

The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection

The Complete Google Analytics Power User Guide

How to Export Google Analytics Data to Excel via the API

Google Analytics data in Excel Plug-in

Have you seen other great tutorials to get the most of Google Analytics that should be included? Please let me know.

Last week, I moderated several sessions on Emerging Trends at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. A couple of the sessions were about measuring social media. That same morning announcements were made regarding the deals Twitter had struck with Microsoft Bing and with Google. With Microsoft Bing also announcing a deal with FaceBook. The gist of the deals, is that now your tweets or status updates can be found on the search engines.

I think of this as a behavior changer in several ways. First off, people will start optimizing their tweets for real time search on the engines. This may lead to a whole new level of search engine spamming. How will Google and Microsoft deal with the increase in hashtag/trending topic spam?  Who is already building the tools to optimize Tweets for trending topics and hashtags? Will these irrelevant tweets train search users that this content is not worth clicking on?

The other question it opens up is that if you publish content on your site, then push it out over Twitter and FaceBook and someone finds it on Bing doing a search – where should the credit for the referrer to your website go to. Will it be credited as a search referral, a Twitter or Facebook referral?

If you want credit to go to your content creation team and to find out which “channel” was responsible for the ultimate referral, content teams are going to have to be trained to ensure that they are using tracking urls on their Tweets. Scott Calisse from MTV Networks shared how his team created a custom tool using Bit.ly and Google Docs that the content team could insert their original url and the tool would spit out customized links for them to copy and paste with all the proper tracking codes in place for each channel (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). How will you train your content teams to remember to always do this? Scott shared with us that even if the team doesn’t do it today, they can still sort it out organically, but with this new Google/Bing integration that won’t be the same.

This evolution in the portability of content just reinforces the trend those of at the eMetrics summit heard about from Darren Mauro of NPR.org. He shared with us how they are seeing an ever growing demand for being able to download podcasts as opposed to listening to them live or streaming online. People like to engage with the content they want, when they want it; just like DVR usage on TV. Of course that makes tracking it and understanding its usage and engagement infinitely more difficult.

I’m really curious what do you think the implications of these deals will be. Please share in the comments or link to posts you have below.

In my last column I covered the first three of seven online marketing challenges. Marketers often find they need to:

• Reach more people.
• Reach better people.
• Have more resources.
• Improve testing and usability.
• Redesign.
• Obtain better metrics.
• Improve conversion rates.

Let’s consider the latter four challenges:

4. “We need better testing and usability.”

• Evaluate how easy it is to buy from you.
• Determine if your visitors quickly can find what they’re looking for.
• Check out the ease of your check out process.
• Collect feedback from visitors.
• Set up tests to watch how visitors actually behave.
• Isolate which variables are most important to visitors.
• Determine which offers work best.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• What motivates people to buy even when a site isn’t usability-friendly?
• If usability is the only critical factor, why haven’t our conversion rates kept pace improved usability?
• Are we testing the wrong things?
• Is the solution to our problem in a metric we haven’t looked at yet?
• Which variables really matter?
• How can we tell whether pages up or down the click-stream are affecting the page we are testing?
• Do our tests include a hypothesis for the outcome?
• Does a viable theory support our hypothesis for the outcome?
• Do we use a statistically meaningful sample size to validate (or refute) our hypothesis?
• Do we have a framework for evaluating our results so we can make informed decisions?
• What can we learn from a test that we can apply to other situations?
• Can we create different click-through paths for different audience segments so we yield a cumulatively higher conversion rate rather than the best average conversion rate?

5. “We need to redesign.”

• Isolate what isn’t working and what is.
• Write copy that is more persuasive.
• Use illustrative and persuasive images.
• Refresh your company image.
• Update your technology.
• Determine whether you need to re-conceive your site because too many elements bog down the original design.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• Do we need a redesign or can we work with what we have?
• Exactly how would a redesigned site better serve our visitors?
• If the best-converting sites are often boring in their design, are we willing to design our site with that in mind?
• Can we achieve the same goals with incremental changes?
• Will we incorporate a scientific testing methodology into our redesign so we can optimize click-streams based on a prediction of how different audience segments engage with the site?

6. “We need better metrics.”

• Measure the impact on conversion of every element on your site.
• Determine if your Web analytics program is set up correctly.
• Turn all your data into knowledge you can act upon.
• Measure whether your predictions of visitor behavior are accurate.
• Identify the campaigns, keywords, site elements and audience segments that give you the best return on your investment.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• Can we better implement the Web analytics program we currently use?
• Do we understand exactly how each metric affects our financial statements?
• Are our metrics based on our visitors’ buying cycles and personalities, or on the design of our Web site?
• If our metrics don’t tell us how to refine our Web site to meet visitor expectations, are we gathering the wrong data?
• Have we designed an intentional path so our metrics can separate the signal from the noise, or are we simply trying to divine order from randomness?

7. “We need a better conversion rate.”

• Define the minimum acceptable return on investment from your traffic.
• Remove obstacles to conversion.
• Reduce shopping cart abandonment.
• Design lead generation forms so more visitors complete them.
• Improve your content’s ability to persuade.

That’s a start. Next you must ask yourself the bigger questions:

• How will our conversion rate affect our advertising and promotional budget?
• If we attract a smaller audience that converts better, we’ve increased our conversion rate. Are we prepared to reduce our conversion rate if we can generate more sales at a higher net profit?
• Could a strategy that increases the conversion rate fail to produce the most overall sales or best results?
• Assuming our offering is good, have we identified all the reasons why a visitor wouldn’t convert today, in seven days, in 30 days, in 60 days, etc.?
• What percentage of visitors would we expect to lose to each of those reasons?
• If we identify the reasons why a visitor wouldn’t convert and the projected conversion rate remains 20 percent, why would we set an even lower goal? (Answer: In the absence of data to the contrary, you have no reason to set a goal lower than that. Surprised?)

Meeting Your Challenges

Answering the bigger questions requires:

• Objective, critical self-appraisal.
• Intimate knowledge of your business.
• Detailed knowledge of your marketplace.
• Familiarity with your audience and their objectives.

In review:

1. Begin with a new set of assumptions: The problem is systemic, not granular.
2. Embrace a new perspective: See what customers see. Understand the questions customers ask as they try to solve their goals.
3. Ask a bigger question: Why do customers buy?
4. Develop a new strategy that reflects this perspective. How can I answer questions the customers ask and help them buy?
5. Remember, it’s too early for tactics. Understand the big picture and how it affects the customer’s system for buying.

These are the ingredients of success online.

We hope they help guide you through the process or help you reconsider your strategy.

Google Analytics provides some great information about what is happening on your website. But what if you want to take it to the next level? Thanks to the many smart people who have created these wonderful hacks and plugins to get you some powerful additions to Google Analytics. Please note most of these need the truly awesome GreaseMonkey FireFox extension.

I’d also highly recommend the following 3 books for anyone trying to get the most out of Google Analytics:

• Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics
• Avinash Kaushik’s (Google’s Analytics Evangelist and blogger extraordinaire) monumental Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
• The just released follow up book by Avinash Kaushik Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

1. Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics – it pulls the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content Detail reports automatically, with links to the social media sites for your pages. It pulls in data from Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, with more to come.

2. Get Email Alerts from Google Analytics – With this script, you can get an email when any of your websites drop in visit or page view counts (or anything else you want).

3. Better Google Analytics Firefox extension – This wraps up several scripts into one. Among the MUST HAVE plugins. This super-script will allow you to:

• Auto press the “Access Analytics” button, if it is displayed
• Remembers settings you set when you switch between profiles, and allows you to open another profile in a new tab quickly.
• Allows you to export any report available as CSV to Google Spreadsheets.
• Converts percent values to absolute values in tables.
• Provides one-click access to year-over-year reports in Google Analytics.
• Sorts the visible table rows.
• and Adds Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo InLink Metrics to your content detail reports.

4. The Google Analytics Report Enhancer – Get enhanced segmentation, you will also be able to segment by transaction, adgroup, and referral path anytime a segmenting opportunity comes up. Now you can see exactly which transactions are attributed to each source, medium, source/medium, keyword, campaign, new or returning visitors, and more. You also get the ability to see the raw number of conversions for each goal you have as well as goal revenue.

5. Unusual Keyword Trends in Google Analytics With Greasemonkey – provides a “What’s Changed” report which tells a) which referrers have sent most traffic in last few days and b) which have sent most traffic where they never did before.

6. Google Website Optimizer multivariate experiment data to show up in Google Analytics – While Google Website Optimizer by itself can give you a quick look at which combination is best at improving conversion, it tells you nothing about transactions, revenue, micro-conversions, navigation, segmentation by source, and bounce rate. If you integrate Google Analytics into your Google Website Optimizer experiments, you will get much richer data, and be able to get a true idea of how your test is doing.

7. Google Analytics Notes – Keep track of events by adding notes directly into Google Analytics.

8. SiteScan – A Google Analytics Diagnostic tool designed to provide you with a complete audit of your Google Analytics setup. SiteScan is a free way to ensure that your Google Analytics is configured properly on your website. The most comprehensive web analytics debugger is the WASP Firefox extension.

9. Goal Copy Extension – The Goal Copy extension records all of the values in a Google Analytics Goal Settings form. You can then navigate to another profile where you want to put that copied goal and paste all of those values into the new form. That way, you can get your goals from one profile to another without all the tedium.

10. The Google Analytics API – Use the Google Analytics Data Export API to download Analytics data in the form of Google Data API feeds. With the Data Export API, you can embed a customized dashboard in your website to display the most commonly viewed or requested page statistics for all your reports users. Or, you can integrate your Google Analytics Data with other website data that you might be tracking in a separate system.

11. Google Analytics to Google Docs Greasemonkey Script – do a one-click export to create a Google spreadsheet for analyzing Google Analytics data.

12. Get Detailed PPC Keyword Data from Google Analytics – This filter shows exactly the Search Term (i.e. keywords that are searched on) rather than just the Bid Term (i.e. the keywords that triggered a PPC advert). For example, if a visitor searches for “sony digital camera” and you have an ad configured for the keywords “digital camera” as a Broad Match in Google AdWords. With this filter the same search will show “digital camera, (sony+digital+camera)” in any Google Analytics report that shows keywords (e.g. Marketing Optimization -> Search Engine Marketing -> Overall Keyword Conversion) or any time you cross-segment against keywords.

13. Analytics KPI gadget for iGoogle – This widget allows you to see important KPI information from Google Analytics directly in iGoogle.

14. Google Analytics Reporting Suite – Using Adobe Air the Google Analytics Reporting Suite brings Google Analytics to the desktop.

15. Customize the list of recognized search engines – Adds 60+ additional search engines for detection (rather than listed as a referrer) and differentiates regional variations e.g. google.co.uk, google.com, msn.se etc.

16. Script to capture first and last referrer in Google Analytics – From my friend, Brian Clifton’s book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

17. Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way – Make sure your data isn’t polluted with your own or your company’s clicks.

18. Tracking Your Twitter Tweets with Google Analytics – This method will track anyone visiting the site as a result of your tweet, regardless of where they clicked on the URL. It doesn’t matter if it’s in an email client, hosted email app. etc.

19. The Official Google Analytics blog – Get the latest from the Google Analytics team. They also publish the excellent Conversion University.

20. Google Analytics Help Center – The official forum to get your questions answered about Google Analytics.

21. Google Analytics for iPhone – Access your Google analytics on your iPhone.

22. Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog. This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. This WordPress plugin also gives you the possibility to track downloads with Google Analytics based on a set of extensions you specify and adds the possibility to track all image searches as organic and collect their keywords.

23. Multiple Profile Greasemonkey Script – If you have multiple profiles setup for your google analytics account, you will be able to select a new profile to view you will see the same report you were just on, but it will be for the new profile which you selected. Also, if you wish to compare reports from two profiles, there is an option to view the new profile in a separate tab.

24. The Enhanced Google Analytics Firefox Plugin – is designed to allow analysts to get more action out of what changed in the Referring Sites and Keyword Reports.

25. Kampyle/Google Analytics Mashup – this plugin allows you to incorporate the feedback you get from using Kampyle on your website (you need account for both) and integrate it with your Google Analytics.

26. Excellent Analytics is a simple Excel plug in that lets you import web analytics data from Google Analytics in to an Excel spreadsheet.

27. Google Analytics IQ Lessons – become qualified in Google Analytics. Includes lessons and videos.

28. Insights For Analytics – you can now easily view traffic patterns for the keywords you are analyzing in Google Analytics inside Google Insights.  You can select up to 5 keywords at a time and Insights For Analytics will automatically grab the date range you are viewing and send that to Google Insights as well.

29. Polaris for Google Analytics – Adobe Air desktop application for Google Analytics.

30. Google Analytics hacks to obtaining full referring URLs – Provides two ways to get full referring urls into Google Analytics.

31. Google Analytics YouTube Channel – some great video content produced by the Google Analytics team.

32. Integrating Google Analytics with a CRM
- This post offers a couple of ways to do this.

33. Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder – a more visually appealing and intuitive version of the Google URL builder with additional options such as changing the conversion attribution, parameter separator and creating a short URL for easier distribution.

Please help me maintain this list as the one place to find all the Google Analytics plugins, hacks and tricks. Do you know of any others that should be on the list?

What happens if your onsite web analytics look good, but you still aren’t drawing conversions?

Mike McDonald, of WebProNews caught up with me after one of my site clinics at Search Engine Strategies for an interview on Creating a Self-Service Sales Cycle.

After looking at the analytics, I saw that not a single page had a bounce rate over 20 percent and no page had an exit rate bigger than 30 percent. However, the conversion rate was under 1 percent. In other words, customers knew how to get around the site but did not know how to buy. This is a case where landing page optimization isn’t enough.