Who wants to segment their reports in 10 mins?!

I do!! Throw away the Reporting Squirrels and become Analysis Ninjas (thanks Avinash – I have had a great Tuesday!!)

Today – I have been totally immersed in Google Analytics – and I am totally in lurrrvvvveeee. A very fitting Valentine’s Blog…

I started this morning by reading a post from the guys at Wired
This framed my mind for the day – guilt, no – framed now, yes! All I was thinking – “I am going home to Blog about something amazing today” – and here I am.

What I have learned today…..the Nail in the coffin Day for GA. Google Analytics has to be one of the most amazing tools I have come across. It’s online analytics capabilities have shot through the roof, it now uses powerful Advanced segmentation and Custom Reporting – and its FREE!! NADA!! In a recessionery period surely we should be using tools like this that can give us Gold Dust for turning data into insight and therefore £££?!?! Being a Total numbers and Search freak it it totally doing it for me right now ;o)

And that Gold Dust – Avinash is amazing – I read loads of his blog today – giving me a mineful of information and How-To’s on getting this stuff out of GA. Advanced Segmentation can narrow reports down to my Brand Terms – I can now see what these Brand Term customers are buying, looking at – how are they behaving differently? My all time goal – which I will have nailed by the end of this year – The Search conversion Funnel. It took 10 minutes – that’s right – 10 minutes, no phoning IT, no request to my analytics provider – me, little old me – a coffee break time to get this insight – wow….

Being totally dependant on conversion rate is so limiting. Broad, Generic Keywords are doing their purpose by driving traffic to the site – a potential customer we then need to engage, nurture and guide through their decision making process to eventually convert. We choose to keep or chuck a KW based on conversion – so those Traffic driving KW at the top of the funnel totally miss out on any of the glory – it was all down to that Long Tail, specific, model number plus brand KW? I don’t think so. But how do we measure the effectiveness of these very different KW? They have different objectives, give them different measures!! Avinash – thank you!!