adCenter Analytics

Jim Sterne Interview at eMetrics San Francisco 2008

2008-05-13T17:19:00Z

I caught up with Jim Sterne at the eMetrics Summit last week in San Francisco and asked him how the conference got started and who it is aimed at. I then asked about the buzzwords I'd been hearing about - "segmentation" & "actionability" - what did they mean? How should marketers and website owners be employing these methods & tactics to increase business success.

One of the measurements Jim talks about a lot is "how do people feel when they come to your site?" This really strikes me as pertinent as analytics is not just about numbers but a combination of metrics which Jim talks about in more detail in the interview......

Backing Up Your Data

2008-05-06T22:49:00Z

One of the overriding theme of this analytics conference is using data to back up assumptions.

eBay did a very good presentation this morning about how their marketing teams research their customer-base through focus groups, usability studies, lab testing and even home visits. They actually send teams into people’s houses to watch eBayers at work in their own environment and in their own time. This kind of approach might yield a small sample, they’re never going to be able to canvas all 276m buyers and sellers, but it gives them something to go on when assessing a new feature, bell or whistle.

They then back up these what they find through detailed analytics and testing, processing many petabytes (!) of data in doing so.

The secret sauce seems to be a combined approach to improving the user experience and in turn increasing ROI and profitability.

You have to ask questions of the data you collect, but sometimes it’s difficult to know where to start. By asking your customers via traditional methods like surveys and suchlike, they can provide you with the ideas of how to interrogate and navigate your analytics reports to discover patterns which you can then work on to optimise or eradicate.

Competing On Analytics at eMetrics 2008

2008-05-05T22:57:00Z

I’m at the eMetrics Summit here in San Francisco and it’s struck me how passionate people here are about data. But it isn’t any ordinary data they’re passionate about reflecting on. It’s data that they manage to put some sort of context around. Context turns that data into information and as one speaker so eloquently put it, “with robust analysis and good controls we can turn that information into actionable insight.”

The keynote speech today was by Tom Davenport author of Competing On Analytics – The New Science of Winning.

He opened by admitting he was no spring chicken, certainly not hip and that his children would not befriend him on Facebook. But what he’d noticed was, that as the conference had grown over the years, he'd found that there were more and more people like him attending. What he was getting at was web analytics was finally no longer the preserve of the young hip "web crowd" and that it was becoming more and more mainstream.

The premise of his speech was taking a look at how big businesses were not only using analytics to understand user behaviour on their site and increase sales, but they’re now using it to compete in their respective markets and not just online either.

Real analytics should be where we optimise websites and businesses based on a statistical model, where we understand why users are behaving the way they do, enabling us to forecast and be able to say what the website or business should actually look like in the future.

He argued that businesses should make analytics and fact-based decisions a key element of their online strategies. In other words using data gleaned from analytics is a must, but decisions should not be made unless they are backed up by the outcomes of that data, and not just a "gut feel" approach.

This online approach has thrown up all sorts of new ways to do business offline too. The way we analysis, segment and organise information from the web can be applied to offline business enablement too.

He cited Harrahs, Marriott, Capital One and Tesco as perfect examples of how companies have integrated analytics into a multi-channel approach. They use loyalty, service, web analytics, revenue management, promotions, online shopping, call centres and branches to glean information and paint a very real picture of not only what is being done now and in the past, but also what should be done in the future.

He said that coupon redemption in the US is less than 1%, however Tesco, using its customer data via loyalty cards, manages to get 30-50% of its customers back into the store to receive discounts on products targeted to them.

So how do these big companies do it?

Well they have three main traits:

They capture the data.
They are enterprising, centralising expertise and applying a multi-channel strategy for a multi-channel organisation.
They have great leadership – the fervour for actionable analytics filter down through the company from above.

To round off he gave some "must do's" in order to stay ahead of the game in this brave new world:

Develop a test and learn culture
Think “multi-channel analytics”
Find unique metrics relevant to your business
Stop commodity reporting
Spread the analytics gospel around your organisation

Of course you don't need to have a market cap of several billion dollars to apply these tips to your own business.

Internet analysis tools can teach us an awful lot about what kinds of business decisions we should be making.

A simple report on potential search traffic while researching for a PPC campaign can tell you much about how to get people quickly and efficiently to your site. Taking a look at the demographic segments interacting with your homepage can give you incredible insight into the age, gender and geographic location of your users and you may be suprised what that picture really looks like.

With a few choice data decisions you can compete, you just have to make time for it!

Campaign Timeline Report - Track Multi-Channel Campaigns

2008-05-01T21:14:00Z

If you’re running numerous advertising campaigns over various media and channels, it can be very difficult to extract and aggregate the relevant data necessary to construct a good view of your spending, the media mix, and the performance of campaigns relative to each other.

To spare you time and pain, the adCenter Analytics team decided to bring you a new visualization called the Campaign Timeline. Its main purpose is to visualize your advertising effort and campaign performance over the last 12 months.

To start this report, navigate to the Goal section from the left-hand menu bar and choose Campaign Timeline.

The reports contains two sections, detailed below:

(1) The overall view on top represents the list of all campaigns run within the last 12 months.

Each bar shown in this view represents a campaign. The color of the campaign maps to the type of media, or channel, used (check the legend below the graph for the mappings).

If you want more details about a specific campaign you can simply hover over it. Hovering displays a legend containing information relevant to that campaign: total visits, conversion, revenue, etc.

(2) The detailed view below provides you with daily details of visits and conversions for the campaigns highlighted in the overall view. This highlight can be moved by simply grabbing the associated rectangle in the overall view.

You can view the details for each of the different campaigns by simply clicking on the rectangle that depicts that campaign. The detailed view can also be navigated directly by grabbing it, and moving your mouse in the direction you want to shift your view.

For each campaign, the detailed view provides insights on how the visit and conversion trends evolved during the campaign timeframe. The red bars represent your conversions and the blue bars represent your visits. When you hover over the bars for a specific day you obtain additional information about the exact visit and conversion values for that day.

The above gives you a good overview of what was your marketing focus across the year, what your media mix looked like, and how each campaign performed on a daily basis.

So can this report provide an instant view of the performance of each campaign in relation to visits, conversions, revenue?

Yes! Simply select the "Heat Map" option from the Coloring menu and then select the metric you want to see.

You can now navigate the chart—you can view the details for the campaigns of particular interest (top conversion performers, visit under performers, etc.), you can view various metrics via the heat map, or you can switch back to campaign type to view the media mix.

You can now navigate the chart: viewing the details for the campaigns of particular interest (top conversion performers, visit under performers ...), changing heat map metric or switching back to media mix.

To start using the Campaign Timeline report you will need to have advertising campaigns defined for your profile. To start tracking advertising campaigns you can use the creation and/or importing campaign options found in the profile settings.

You can find these options by:

(1) Browsing to the profiles list

(2) Selecting "Manage" on your profile

(3) Navigating to "Manage Campaigns"

We would love to hear your thoughts on the Campaign Timeline report. Tell us what you think via comments on this post or via a post in the forum.

Meet Microsoft at eMetrics Summit San Francisco

2008-04-30T09:56:00Z

There’ll be a host of Microsoft adCenter Analytics folk attending the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco from 5th to 7th May.

We’ll be working booth (number 40) on the expo floor and Esco Strong will be delivering a keynote speech on Atlas’s Engagement Mapping Technology too.

Making Time For Web Analytics - Eat That Frog!

2008-04-25T09:25:00Z

Late last year we did some research in the small business community in the UK.

The research which questioned 400 UK SMBs, revealed 62% of small businesses are not investing in search engine marketing. 44% of SMBs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated.

However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales.

The research also revealed three common misconceptions:

Myth 1: Over a third (34%) of respondents think it would take a day or more to set up a campaign. In reality, the time taken from opening an account to it going live can take as little as 15 minutes.

Myth 2: Some 56% cite cost as a top reason why SMBs will not invest, with a quarter of all SMBs thinking the best keywords are already taken. Actually, SMBs can invest as little as 10-20 pence per click or a monthly budget of around £5.

Myth 3: Many are put off by the idea that it sounds too complicated – with the overwhelming majority (89%) thinking it was more difficult than online banking. However, SMBs can easily manage accounts from their desk and are likely to see immediate results from just a few simple keywords.

I guess if many of these website owners had visibility into their traffic through web analytics it might persuade them to spend a bit more time marketing them online.

If you’re thinking about trying to understand your website visitors a little better then ask yourself these questions:

How are people finding your site?

Do they come direct?
Do they come via a search engine? If so what KWs did they use?
Are they referred by another site, maybe a link from a blog that has recommended your product or service?

Who are the people visiting your site?

What age and gender are they?
Where in the world are they accessing your site from?

What are people doing once they reach your site?

Do they leave having only checked out the first page they landed on?
How deep into your site do they go?
How long did they spend on a particular page?
Did they buy, download, or sign up for anything?
Do they come back?

Answering these questions isn't difficult if your have your site tagged for an analytics. What's tricky is getting into the rhythm and the habit of pouring over the data, setting yourself goals and taking action.

One of my favourite time management books is called "Eat That Frog" by Brian Tracey:

"There's an old saying that if the first thing you do in the morning is to eat a live frog, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it's probably the worst thing you'll do all day."

Now I'm not suggesting that web analytics is wholly unappetizing, but setting aside some time to do some reporting or analysis first thing every morning will pay dividends.

You'll find that frog slowly turns into a prince (or princess!)

KPIs: An Actionable Few

2008-04-21T03:25:00Z

I'd guess most of you who have web analytics configured for your site are paralyzed by reports. You're adrift in a sea of numbers, at risk of drowning; hoping management will be distracted by another colorful pie chart and not notice. Every analytic solution can generate a perfect storm of data that obliterates the horizon in innumerable details. Where's the insight? What's important? What should be done next?

Reporting isn't analysis. That's far from obvious for most of us. Our analytic tools are very good at reporting. It's a trivial effort to generate another report; it's a good deal of work to analyze the significance of the data and test your hypothesis. It's little wonder we're willing to confuse one with the other.

I'll use my own example as representative. Several years ago I was hired to run the digital advertising initiatives for a company that had pioneered digital projectors. I needed to manage eCommerce, display advertising, bulk email, SEM, the lot. I wrote specifications for web analytics and sold management on a high end solution that gleamed with more chrome than a 1949 Chevy Coupe Deluxe. The program generated an impressive number of reports which I dutifully copied and graphed and forwarded to management who dutifully ignored them. There was simply nothing they could use, nothing they could act upon.

For a metric to be useful, it must be actionable. If you can't
influence it, for good or ill, it's makes no difference.

The work of web analysis normally goes something like this. The performance of a particular metric randomly draws your attention. It might be an alarming number of visitors failing to complete your check out process or the lackluster performance of the landing page for an advertising campaign. You develop a hypothesis that attempts to explain the behavior that you're witnessing. You take action to either reinforce or inhibit that behavior, depending upon your goal. You test your hypothesis. Then you wait and watch to see if the behavior moves in the desired direction. If it goes as expected, you're a hero. If not, you quietly revert your test and hope no one noticed. Actually, a test that fails to confirm your hypothesis is just as valuable as a success. It can help inform your next hypothesis.

Choose Your KPIs Wisely

There are plenty of metrics you could mess with but you probably have time for only a few, a manageable few. Those are the six or seven metrics most important to your organization's goals, your key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a stratospheric view of your site's health. To understand the reality on the ground, you'll need to get your hands dirty with the details. KPIs are directional, pointing to where you should start grubbing.

Your KPIs will vary with the purpose of your website and your business goals. For a commercial site, KPIs are most likely related to revenue. I've borrowed the commercial KPIs recommended by Jason Burby and Shane Atchison in their book Actionable Web Analytics (Wiley Publishing, 2007).

Overall Conversion Rate
Average Order Size
Items per Order
Step-by-Step Analysis of the Conversion Funnel
Conversion Funnel Defections
First-Time Versus Returning Buyers
Effect on Offline Sales

Your purpose is to move the needle in the desired direction.
You will have established a goal for a KPI - or more likely,
your manager will have set the goal - but influencing the
trend is the real work of web analysis.

Conversion rate is immediately obvious - increasing the percentage of visitors who do what you hoped they would. Increasing the average order size and items per order both indicate greater yield per conversion and the efficiency of your online sales process. Analyzing the conversion funnel - the sequence of steps necessary to complete a purchase - and reducing the percentages of customers who drop off from one step to another can have a substantial influence on your overall conversion rate. Repeat customers cost less and provide a good indicator of customer satisfaction. And finally, your website may have an impact on offline sales, whether store front or phone center sales. Using discount codes or toll-free phone numbers that are available only on your website can help measure that impact.

You'll have noticed the importance of trending in the definition of Burby and Atchison's KPIs. Your purpose is to move the needle in the desired direction. You will have established a goal for a KPI - or more likely, your manager will have set the goal - but influencing the trend is the real work of web analysis.

Non-Commercial KPIs

For content only sites that don't sell anything Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics An Hour a Day (Wiley Publishing, 2007) suggests the following KPIs:

Visitor Loyalty
Recency
Length of Visit
Depth of Visit

Visitor loyalty is the non-commercial equivalent of first-time versus returning buyers. It provides an indication of the success of your content. Recency measures the time between visits. Length of visit is the measure of how long visitors spent on your site per visit while depth of visit is the number of pages viewed per visit. Depth of visit is the KPI formerly known as page views which has gotten a lot of bad press recently but remains a powerful metric when placed in context. In all, these four are a good indication of your visitors' engagement with your site.

Segmenting each of your KPIs into several different groups-by referrer, for example, by advertising campaign, or demographic if you're using adCenter Analytics-is a powerful technique. Drilling down into the data and analyzing the behavior of groups of visitors defined by a common characteristic can provide a more granular insight into your visitors' intent and understanding intent is the first step in providing relevance.

KPIs change over time. They aren't chiseled in stone and delivered by Charlton Heston. They need to adapt to the competitive landscape and your organization's changing goals to remain relevant.

The Bottom Line

KPIs provide a view of the health of your website, pointing the direction for further investigation, analysis, and testing. They offer a manageable handle on the complex reality of your site, a handle useful for both analyst and management. Choosing the right KPIs has a big impact on managing the success of your site and your business.

Site Optimization Using adCenter Analytics Treemap Report

2008-04-17T00:54:00Z

Traditional charts and graphs typically show only a single metric: page views, visit duration, and so on. Sometimes, it can be useful to get a combined view of how two metrics are interacting.

We’ve added a new visualization to adCenter Analytics to provide this — The Treemap.

You can find The Treemap Traffic View Report in the Reports tab under Pages & Content

Traffic View

Consider the following example, based on the Treemap Traffic View. Each page is represented by a rectangle, and the size of the rectangle indicates the number of page views. The colour represents the number of bounces—darker for more bounces.

At a glance, it’s clear that ‘Washers’ is underperforming and should be investigated further—perhaps there is an error on the page? The Treemap even helps you to get started: hovering over the Treemap brings up key statistics.

Treemaps actually show a third piece of information: they’re a visual representation of the nodes in a tree. In the above example, the tree is defined by the URL folder path. The user can immediately compare the performance of the ‘Products’, ‘Solutions’, and ‘Markets’ portions of the web site.

In addition, hovering over a given page brings up additional statistics for that page, along with the option to ‘drill down’ and show just that branch of the page hierarchy. The example below shows just the ‘Products’ branch of the web site.

Referrals View

adCenter Analytics also uses the Treemap to display referrals—traffic entering your site from other sites, such as search engines.

In the following example, the size of the rectangle shows the number of visits, whilst the colour indicates the value of the conversions.

In this case, the ratios of referring web sites, natural search and direct navigation are clear, and for each the breakdown of referrers can be further investigated.

Thanks,

Jonathan

Vanessa Fox Audio Interview - SEO & Web Analytics

2008-04-13T21:25:00Z

One of the best things about attending search marketing conferences, is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the speakers and moderators who are always willing to impart their wisdom and experience.

At Search Marketing World in Dublin a couple of weeks ago, Vanessa Fox kindly agreed to have a chat for 10 minutes (in a very noisy corridor) about search engine optimisation (SEO) and analytics, and how marketers can use analytics to inform decisions they make about what and how to optimise.

Vanessa is Entrepreneur in Residence at Ignition and is features editor at Search Engine Land.

Getting Granular: Segmenting with adCenter Analytics Beta

2008-04-10T20:46:00Z

Digital advertising—whether via search engine advertising, email marketing, display ads, web sites, whatever—is about relevance. It's about matching your message to the intent of your audience. If you understand this one bit—if you truly, totally, and unequivocally get it—you're already well ahead of your competition.

The value of adCenter Analytics is in tracking
behavior in increasingly granular segments in
order to provide increasingly relevant content.

Remaining relevant to your customers' intent presupposes that you understand that intent, and not just from a high altitude, 20,000 foot perspective but at the granular, gritty level.

Segmentation

Understanding your customers' behavior in increasingly fine increments is called segmentation. It isn't necessary to understand individual behavior, it may not even be desirable given the point of diminishing returns, but segmenting your visitors into smaller groups defined by common behaviors allows you to better understand the intent of that group.

Let's get concrete. Say you're advertising widgets on Microsoft adCenter. (Change the name to Google or Yahoo, if you'd like, and the example remains equally valid.) Keeping it simple, let's say you have only one ad group in your campaign. All of the keywords in that ad group share a common landing page:

www.example.com/LandingPage.html

When someone clicks on your search ad and arrives at your landing page, adCenter Analytics already knows both the search engine that referred the visitor and their query. You can easily view adCenter Analytic’s Conversions by Referral report, drilling down by search engine to the actual query. Congratulations, you’re already segmenting your traffic.

If you’re running paid search campaigns and bidding on phrase or broad match types, the query string passed by the referrer—the search engine—may not map directly to your paid keyword. Say the keyword in your paid search campaign is “award winning widgets.” The ad that your visitor clicks might be triggered by a phrase match on “winning widgets” or a broad match on “widgets.” It’s the query you’ll see in adCenter Analytics, not the paid keyword. (Of course, if you’re only bidding on exact match type, the query is the keyword.) Without knowing which keyword in your search campaign was responsible for the referral, you can’t know which is more valuable—which actually generates revenue and how much.

For a metric to be useful, it must be actionable. In our example, you need to map your paid search visitor to the actual campaign keyword. You decide to add the keyword to your destination URL in adCenter.

Your landing page URL now looks like this:

www.example.com/LandingPage.html?keyword={Keyword}

(For more information on building dynamic destination URLs, see Dynamic Text in adCenter.)

When your ad is served, the value of {Keyword} is inserted into the URL. In our example the keyword is "award winning widgets." That keyword will appear in the URL whether the ad was triggered by a phrase match on "winning widgets" or a broad match on "widgets." You can now easily track the success of your keyword using adCenter's Conversion by Referral report. But what can you do to increase your conversion rate for that keyword?

Divining Intent

One superficial but effective tactic is to program your web page to insert the keyword as a page title. In our example, the page title generated by this bit of coding, properly capitalized, would be "Award Winning Widgets." Going a step further, you can make some assumptions about their intent based upon their keyword. They may be comparing your widgets with your competitors so you write a paragraph about your product's competitive advantages and dynamically insert it into your landing page whenever the URL includes that keyword.

Does it work? You'll have to test your changes against the original, unchanged landing page. AdCenter Analytics will tell you if your modified page prompts more visitors to do what you hoped they'd do-buy your products, request your information, or subscribe to your newsletter. If they do, you have a winner. If not, at least you know what doesn't work and that has value, too.

Segmenting Three Deep

It's a good suggestion to segment any key performance indicator to a level three deep in order to understand the meaning of the statistic in greater detail. We've already segmented by search engine referrer and by keyword but what if your ad group has several different ads, each with different ad copy and a slightly different appeal? Wouldn't it be helpful to know which ad is driving sales and which is simply costing you money?

It's almost a trivial matter for you to add another adCenter parameter to your destination URLs which now looks like this:

www.example.com/LandingPage.html?keyword={Keyword}&adid={AdID}

Now the same keyword can be tracked separately for each ad, providing insight into the effectiveness of your ad copy. What could be more actionable than knowing which ad is generating revenue-and how much?

Bottom Line

Segmenting your web traffic can provide additional insight into your visitor's behavior, insight that can be acted upon to improve your conversion rate. Understanding their behavior and divining their intent is a prerequisite to providing more relevant content. It's more work, no doubt, but the work can have a huge effect on your bottom line.

Ian Thomas Interview - Gatineau, adCenter Analytics & Beyond

2008-04-09T07:38:00Z

A few weeks ago, on a typically dark and rainy day in Seattle, I bumped into Ian Thomas, Microsoft's Director of Customer Intelligence. He kindly agreed to have a chat about web analytics for the adCenter Analytics Blog.

In this interview, Ian takes us though his role, the story behind the adCenter Analytics Beta and what customers can expect from the team in the next few months.

adCenter Analytics - Running Basic Traffic History Reports

2008-04-07T08:25:00Z

Last week we talked about How To Get Started With adCenter Analytics and showed you tools for auto-tagging your website.

Today, we'll show you how to run some simple reports to track how many visitors you have had to your site, and how many pages they viewed.

When you log into adCenter, click on the Analytics Tab, and then Profiles and you will see the list of sites you have created profiles for.

A green status light means the tool has been collecting data and you are now ready to view some reports.

Click on View under Reports for the Profile you want to see data for.

Depending on how long data has been collecting for, you will see a screen that looks a bit like this:

On the left hand side find the Reports Menu. Click on Traffic & History and two options will appear.

“Visitors” is the number of unique users that have been accessing your site and viewing content over any given amount of time.

“Page Views” are the total amount of pages that were viewed by those visitors.

The number of page views is very often larger than the visitor total, as a user may look at more than one page of your site while browsing it.

A quick way to see how many visitors have been to your site in February would be to hover your mouse over the February segment of data. A tiny pop-up will appear with that month's visitor statistics.

In this case the site received 1501 unique visitors in February.

In order to see how many pages those visitors perused, click on the Page Views option in the Traffic & History menu.

You can get a quick view of data by hovering your mouse over the week or an actual day too.

To get a detailed breakdown of your traffic for a given month, week or day, simply click on the data segment and it will highlight in orange.

Below, you will see a graph showing the detailed traffic for that given time selection including Visits, Page Views & Bounce Rate.

Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of your visitors that viewed just a single page of your site when they arrived. They may have perused the first page on which they landed but did not explore the site further. A high Bounce Rate might be OK for a blog, as readers may only arrive to read a single post. But if your site is selling products or services, you'd want users to spend some time navigating your site, so a high Bounce Rate may be a signal that you need to investigate further.

We’ll talk about analysing reasons for Bounce Rates, and how to take action in more detail in a later blog post.

The final way you can run a basic Visitor or Page View report is by clicking on Select A Custom Date Range.

This functionality enables you to see data for any given number of days, weeks or months. You may want to see your site's traffic for just a three week or six day period. This lets you click on your desired start and end time values and see how much traffic you have received during that date range.

Do check back soon as we'll be delving into some other reports in a little more detail.

Cheers

Mel - adCenter Community Team

Auto-Tag Your Site in 5 Minutes with adCenter Analytics

2008-04-01T13:31:00Z

On Tuesday, Mel wrote about how easy it is to get set up with adCenter Analytics. When creating a new profile, he mentioned that you have the choice between manually inserting the tracking script or automating the process.

This latter option can help you get your website ready for adCenter Analytics in just a few clicks. It is a much easier option than adding the script by hand to each of the pages you want to track.

1. If you have the information about the FTP location of your website (FTP Server Name, Username and Password), you can select "Automatically insert the tracking script" on the profile creation page.

2. You are brought to the automatic tracking script insertion page. Notice that Internet Explorer* informs you that an add-on is available.

3. Click on the bar and select “Install ActiveX”

4. When the following security message is shown, click on install.

5. Once the ActiveX is installed, you can click on the Start script insertion wizard button to start the insertion process.

6. Proceed with “Automatically insert tracking script”

7. Fill-in relevant information about your website location by providing FTP connection information. None of this information will be stored by Microsoft. The wizard is performing all its operations from your computer directly.

(1) Type in the address of the FTP server on which your website is located. For example: ftp://myserver.hoster.com
(2) Type in your user name on this FTP server. For example: user.name
(3) Type in the password for that user name on this FTP server. For example P@ssWord

8. The wizard will look for all HTML files on your website. Once done, you can proceed with the insertion, by clicking on “Insert Script”.

9. The operation might take several minutes depending on the size of your website. Do not close the dialog box until the operation has completed!

10. You can check the result of the operation by viewing the tracking script insertion report. In a future post, I will explain how to get the most out of this report.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Olivier

* The automatic-insertion option is currently compatible only with Microsoft Internet Explorer. In future releases we plan to make the option compatible with additional web browsers.

adCenter Analytics - How To Get Started!

2008-03-31T20:59:00Z

adCenter Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps you easily understand web site user engagement and online marketing campaign performance.

You can track audience behaviour from click to conversion, segment data by age and gender or simply run a report to see how many visitors have accessed your site, where they came from and what content they looked at.

You can be up and running with adCenter Analytics is just Four Simple Steps!

Step 1 – Register

adCenter Analytics is in Beta at present and access is by invitation only. To be considered for participation please complete the invitation request at:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics-registration

Step 2 – Sign Up

Once your invitation request has been processed, you will receive an e-mail with an invite code similar to the code below:

“7a9c466e-0f67-4a4a-b9af-029af-02b0ea4e2611”

Follow the prompts in the e-mail, and sign into adCenter. If you do not have an adCenter account, you will be able to create one in a few simple steps. Once you have signed in you will be directed to the Analytics welcome page and prompted to enter the invite code. Enter the code and click “Next.”

Step 3 – Create a Profile

Click on the Analytics tab at the top of the page and you will see two icons: Profiles & Users

Click on the Profiles icon to add the URL of the site you want to track with adCenter analytics. To add a Profile, click on the Add New Profile button.

In the profile name box, type a display name to identify the web site or blog you are tracking, the domain or web site address, and select a time zone. If appropriate, check the “Automatically adjust for daylight savings changes” box and click “Save”. If you are manually inserting the tracking script onto your web pages then check that radio button and click "Save."

You can automatically insert the script using our wizard. Check back for a post on that on Thursday...

Step 4 – Adding the Tracking Code to your web site

You will be prompted to add a small piece of Javascript code to every page of your website that you want to track. You’ll need to copy and paste the code snippet just before the </body> tag in your site’s HTML.

Once your site goes live with the new analytics code added, Microsoft adCenter Analytics will begin collecting data within a few hours!

On Thursday, Olivier Dabrowski from our product team in Dublin will be showing you how to auto-tag your site, making it even easier to get up and running with adCenter Analytics!

Cheers

Mel - adCenter Community Team

What's New With adCenter Analytics?

2008-03-26T00:42:00Z

Hello, I am Jigar Mody a Program Manager on the adCenter Analytics engineering team based in Redmond. Our team was very happy to bring a new beta refresh of our analytics service to you a few weeks ago. This release has many new features and significant performance improvements, and it incorporates a lot of functionality requested by our customers.

We Heard You!

Here are some of the new features/enhancements that were made based on the feedback we received from our customer:

Tag Me, Please

You told us that tagging your websites manually is the biggest cost you had in instrumenting your site. So we've incorporated the Site Auto Tagging feature that will make this tedious and time consuming process easy. Now you can reap the benefits of web analytics without going through the pain of manually inserting the script on each of your existing pages. Here is a screen shot of the tool.

I have used this to tag 2 sites for my friends recently and I absolutely love it. It is way better than manually inserting script on all the web pages that I did for my site before. This tool only compatible with Internet Explorer at the moment but will be available on other browers by the time we come out of beta, if not before.

Stand alone adCenter Analytics account

You told us that you did not like signing up for adCenter just to use the analytics service. With this refresh you can sign up for an analytics only account. We would encourage you all to check the adCenter offering, as it has some cool functionality for the advertisers.

How do I compare my traffic for different time periods?

Another common request you had was how to quickly and easily compare site traffic for two different time periods. We have a new feature that allows you to do just that. Here is an example for comparing data from a site between 2 weeks.

To be honest, I was a little skeptical when I had first heard about the little arrows to quickly show the trends. Well now when I see it in action I am amazed on how effective they are.

How can I find what portion of my traffic is Male in age range 25 and 34?

You asked, “How do I view my traffic data that is segmented with two attributes age and gender?” We have introduced new functionality in this refresh that allows you to view you data segmented by both age and gender.

Here is an example:

This is one of my favorite functionalities as it helps a richer drill down, and correlation across the site data. To get to this you will have to go to the standard segmentation view (same as previous beta) with either age or gender. Now you can re-segment the report based on the other attribute. In the above example, I first segmented the report with Gender, than I further segmented the Male segment with Age attribute.

Other New features?

My Campaigns

This refresh has many new reports that allow you to focus on your ROI. There are several features that allow tracking and reporting for ecommerce, advertising spend, site and content, goals and ROI tracking and reporting. For example, if you are an adCenter PPC customer, you can link your analytics account to your paid search account – this will automatically import your campaign and performance data and associate that with your analytics for enhanced conversion tracking.

There is also support for importing other campaigns including Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, as well as email, banner, and offline campaign data. This allows for a unique view of all of your campaign data in a unified UI and report.

Here is an example of the Campaign Report:

Campaigns include cost information which allows CPA to be calculated on conversion. Furthermore, the conversion reporting for these campaigns and ecommerce now include the ability to add the value of a conversion for each conversion, allowing for reports on total revenue, average purchase value, and ROI.

TreeMap for advanced visualization

In many cases, it is difficult to determine what pages are important, or to view more than one attribute at a time. One of the advanced visualizations in this release is the TreeMap report for viewing pages. Here is an example where page views are shown with shading from bounce rate. In this example, it is easy to tell that the profile.aspx page is the only often viewed page with a high bounce rate.

There is a similar view for referrals which is very useful in determining which referrers are leading interested customers to your site and which are bringing folks that exit right away.

Engagement by the numbers

There are series of new loyalty and engagement reports in this release. They include New and Repeat Visits, Visitor Loyalty, Depth of Visit, Length of Visit, and Recency of Visit. Some of these reports are broken out in to buckets to make is easier to understand.

This is an example the Length of Visit Report:

The Depth of Visit Report:

These reports help you in measuring Visitor Loyalty and Engagement.

Do check back next week when we'll start diving a little deeper into all this great functionality......

Thanks - Jigar