First, let us congratulate you.

You’ve got a software product, a

website that you use as an online store and, of course, you’ve got
sales.

Having this said and as you most surely are in control of your
business, there is no sense in telling you that you need to focus on
trial downloads, converting them into sales and providing good
support for existing customers. However, we decided to help you
with tracking all of these events by using a widespread free tool,
available on the internet, which really gives you an insight of your
online business.

We are going to focus on 5 issues:

ƒ Setup Google Analytics (GA) for your website;
ƒ Define goals for your website and online activity;
ƒ Get all your sales data in your Analytics tool and see what
makes them grow;
ƒ Who is your best partner? Is it Google or maybe some
blogger you didn’t know about?
ƒ Tips and tricks and a couple of resources you should
definitely know about.

Most of the implementation steps in this document are generally

applicable to any software vendor using a 3rd party shopping
cart. However, some tricks are based on features designed
specially by Avangate for the software vendors using the Avangate
eCommerce Platform.

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 Table of Contents

1. Setup Google Analytics for your website.............................. 4

2. Define Goals for your website and online activity.................. 8

3. eCommerce Analytics Data.............................................. 16

4. Analytics and User Behavior ............................................ 21

5. Tracking how many trial users buy your product ................ 31

6. Adding the first profile to your account ............................. 33

7. How much does a Download value to you? ........................ 36

8. Segmenting is pure gold ................................................. 37

9. Make Google Analytics better .......................................... 46

10. Cool tools to go along with Google Analytics ...................... 48

11. Great Blogs to Follow ..................................................... 53

12. Great Books to Read ...................................................... 55

3
 1. Setup Google Analytics for your website

Google Analytics (GA) may not be the only tool available for
advanced traffic analysis but it’s one of the most used worldwide
(see study). When we decided to write this white paper, we
started from the following facts:
ƒ Most of the software vendors using the Avangate eCommerce
platform also use Google Analytics for traffic trends on their
website
ƒ All vendors are interested in getting all their user behavior in
one place, from visiting to purchasing and even downloading
data, so correlations are more obvious and full of actionable
insights.

However, a few hacks need to be put up in place in order for

Google Analytics to fully understand your website’s traffic. The
main issue is that even if the user is part of the same process, he
needs to be sent from your website to a third party shopping cart
in order to finish a purchase.

Teaching Google Analytics that it is dealing with the same user

that takes actions within a single process of purchasing a software
product from your website will give you lots of actionable data and
lots of insights. These can be very helpful in emerging future
strategies for growing your business. Just think about how cool it

4
 would be to know how different segments of users behave on your
shopping cart, like from organic searches compared to paid
searches, and why some have a bigger shopping cart
abandonment rate than others.

Don’t have Google Analytics installed yet? All you need to do is go

to http://www.google.com/analytics and login with your Google
Account. If you don’t have one, just create a new account.

You will have to add your website to Google Analytics, which will
provide a tracking code to add to all the web pages within your
site. Google supplies two different tracking codes; you should stick
with the new one, called ga.js as Google will most probably stop
providing support starting 2009 for urchin.js.

The next step would be installing the tracking code on your

website. However, because of the hacks, you will have to do a
small “detour” before doing this. On the tracking code that is
provided, look for a code line that looks like this:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXX-XX");

In case you already have the Google Analytics code installed, look
in the source code of your website for the tracking code or any of
the lines:

5
 var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXX-XX");
or
_uacct = " UA-XXXX-XX ";

In case you are a software vendor using the Avangate eCommerce

Platform, login to your Avangate Control Panel account and access
the Web Analytics page which is part of the Marketing Tools
section in the left menu. Here is what you should get:

Figure 1 – Web Analytics integration feature in the Avangate Control Panel

Copy your Google Analytics ID (UA-XXXX-XX) code in the first

provided field (Step 1). At Step 2, the Avangate platform will
supply you with the code that needs to be installed on all your
pages within your website, just after the <body> tag.

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 Note: If you have already installed the tracking code on your
website, please replace it with the one provided through Step 2 of
the Avangate CPanel Web Analytics Wizard.

If you use other 3rd parties shopping carts use the following code
for your website:

<!-- google analytics -->

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol)
?"https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-
analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-X");
pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
<!-- /google analytics -->

Note: Don’t forget to replace the UA-XXXX-X with your Google

Analytics ID.

Make sure you add the tracking code on all pages of the website in
order to avoid any errors or inaccuracies in the gathered data.
Here is a cool tool to check if all your pages have Google Analytics
tracking code installed properly: http://www.sitescanga.com/. You
can also try the WASP tool crawling option to check how well the
tracking code has been installed.

It is important to have the code just after the <body> tag. In

order to track downloads or even sales, a Java Script code will be
added after the tracking code and not before it.

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 2. Define Goals for your website and online activity

When you started your business you surely had goals set up on
your mind. Think of them and try to find out what are the
indicators that would make you say… Hey, this is what I wanted!

What we are going to ask you now is to project your business

goals into Metrics and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) that can
be measured with Analytics tools.

A metric is a measured value. For example, the number of

visitors, the bounce rate or the time spent on site are metrics.

A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a metric that echoes

organizational goals. It is decided by the company management
and not some analytics tool, providing context and leads to action.
For a software company, a possible KPI can be: the number of
downloads, the number of trial users that buy a product or the
number of software users that look on the website for support.

Check out this presentation for more details on KPIs.

8
 Tracking Downloads

Now that you have Google Analytics installed, finding out how
many users click on a download link is not that difficult. There are
two possible scenarios of tracking this action that we met so far,
depending on the way your website is structured:

Scenario 1: Users click on a "Download Free Trial" link and the

download starts immediately.

ƒ How to track the number of initiated downloads?

Just add the following JavaScript for the "on click" event of the
download triggering link:

<a href="http://www.example.com/files/software.zip" onClick="javascript:

pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/software');">

For using this hack, Google informs us: if your pages include a call
to _trackPageview, your Analytics tracking code must be placed in
your HTML code above any of these calls. In these cases the
tracking code can be placed anywhere between the opening
<body> tag and the JavaScript call.

All you have to do now is to go in your Google Analytics Account,

where you will be able to see all the data in the Top Content
Overview section, as Google Analytics will track
/downloads/software as a page view.

9
 Scenario 2: Users click on a download file link and land on a
"Thank You for Downloading" page.

ƒ How can you track the number of initiated

downloads?

You don’t need to insert any more code inside your website, as the
number of users viewing this page is equal or almost equal with
the numbers of users starting the download.

Note:
In case you implemented automatic start of the download by using
JavaScript, don’t forget to take into consideration it may be
disabled for some users, so make sure a Download Now link to
start the download is highly visible no matter what.

If you have several software products for download, make sure the
“Thank You for Downloading” landing page has a different URL for
each software product.

Having the same URL for all of your software products’ download
page will get you nothing else but the global number of downloads
on your website.

If you can’t decide upon one of the above methods, the best way
to choose the most efficient option is to A/B test it , to see which
one of them offers the best results. Google Website Optimizer
helps you do A/B and Multivariate experiments with no cost
whatsoever.

10
 For the second scenario, to go even further, label all your
visitors that downloaded your software. This way, when looking at
your Google Analytics data, you will be able to see how many
times a user that downloaded your trial returned to the website
and what sections / pages were of interest for him. To do this, you
can modify the body tag on the Thank You for Downloading page:

<body onload = "javascript:

pageTracker._setVar('Download-trial');">

You can find more details on how to set labels for visitors in the
Google Analytics Support Center .

After choosing one of the above mentioned methods, you will be

able to read data about the users that downloaded your software
in the Google Analytics website profile menu, under "Visitors" >
"User Defined", as shown in the image.

Figure 2 – User Defined segments of traffic in Google Analytics. In

our case we used it for identifying your software users
that are visiting the website.

11
 Tracking Sales

By tomorrow, all your download data will be available in Google

Analytics. How about sales? Well, as sales come through a third
party shopping cart (Avangate eCommerce Platform), we decided
to help you through our Web Analytics wizard, accessible in the
Avangate Control Panel.

Mainly, there are 2 important steps that need to be followed, but

let’s go within Google’s mind and understand the process that
needs to happen in order for the tracking to be accurate.
ƒ Google needs to understand that the same user who has
been in your website continued his session on the Avangate
Shopping Cart.
ƒ Google also needs to understand where your visitor came
from. Without any hacks, Google will see your own website
as the referrer for a certain sale, this way being of no help to
you.

First, make sure you have the right tracking code on your website.
If you haven’t modified your tracking code with the one provided
by the Avangate CPanel Web Analytics section, please do so now.

Secondly, you need to have the tracking code installed on the

shopping cart.

12
 How to do that? It’s simple: add exactly
the same code you have added to your
website within all your shopping cart
templates files, just as stated by Step 3
or the Avangate Web Analytics Wizard.

In order to do this, go to your template Figure 3 – Getting to Interface

Template Files by using
files by quick searching for “templates”, quick Search.
as shown in the image.

Once inside this section, access all the template files you have
created for your shopping cart and add the tracking code just as
shown in the bellow image.

Figure 4 – How to insert the Google Analytics customized tracking

code in your template files

13
 Please make sure all the template files have the tracking code
installed, as leaving only one file aside can create accuracy
problems in the data you receive.

At this point, Google Analytics understands that the user that

enters your shopping cart is the same with the one that just left
your website.

However, the tracking is still not 100% accurate. Let’s say the
user just arrived from Google while searching for your product
name. So far, for Google Analytics, everything is crystal clear.
However, when the user clicks on the Buy Now button on your
website and arrives to the Avangate Shopping Cart, Google
Analytics gets troubled. Even if he knows that it’s the same user
that has just been on your website, going from your site to the
Avangate Shopping Cart will make him think the your website is
the source of the user’s visit. Of course, that is not true as the
user came through searching on Google.com for your software
product.

If you don’t take any measures at this point, all the sources for the
conversions will be referred to your website by Google Analytics,
and that is not correct.

Google Analytics works on first party cookie settings, so in order to

help him understand what really happened, we need to help him
copy the data from the cookie within your website to the cookie
that is set by Google Analytics on the Avangate platform.

14
 Fortunately, Google provides a little hack to make this work. So, in
order to help Google get all the data about your visitors, you need
to add the following code to all your Buy Now links or any other
links that send the user to your shopping cart pages.

If you are using forms in order to send users to the shopping cart,
you need to modify your form source code to look like this (add
the “onsubmit” Javascript action):

If your Buy Now link looks like this:

<a href="https://secure.avangate.com/order/product.php?PRODS=1">Buy
Now</a>,

it should be modified in order to look like this (add the “onclick” Javascript
action):
<a href="https://secure.avangate.com/order/product.php?PRODS=1"
onclick="pageTracker._link(this.href); return false;">Buy Now</a>

The above hack helps Google Analytics (GA) copy all the user
details from your websites’ cookie to the cookie set up on the
shopping cart.
<form name="name" method="post"
onsubmit="pageTracker._linkByPost(this)">

So, now, even if the user jumped from your website to the
shopping cart, Google Analytics will know that he has arrived
initially from the search engine. If he finishes a transaction, GA
will be able to correlate that transaction to the Google keyword
that brought the user to your website.

15
 3. eCommerce Analytics Data

This step is the one that probably many of you are most interested
in: How can Google tell you the profit that a certain keyword or
referrer is bringing you?

Knowing this will definitely help you find out how to better invest
your budgets in your marketing campaigns. Will it be Paid
Advertising, organic SEO or maybe getting as many reviews from
bloggers as possible? This is the moment to find out.

First of all, you need to let Google Analytics know that you are an
eCommerce website so it will activate this function for you.

In order to do this, login to your Google Analytics account, click

the edit setting link for your website, access the editing profile
settings and activate eCommerce tracking, just as shown in the
image bellow.

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 Figure 5 – Activating eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics

All you need to do is to get back to the Avangate Control Panel

and add the following code to your After Sale Message section:

<script type="text/javascript">
pageTracker._addTrans(
myOrder.refNo, // Order ID
myOrder.idAffiliate, // Affiliation
myOrder.totalPriceUSD, // Total
myOrder.taxUSD, // Tax
myOrder.shippingUSD, // Shipping
myOrder.city, // City
myOrder.state, // State
myOrder.country // Country
);
for(i = 0; i < myOrder.productsInOrder.length; i++)
{
pageTracker._addItem(
myOrder.refNo, // Order ID
myOrder.productsInOrder[i].id, // SKU
myOrder.productsInOrder[i].name, // Product Name
myOrder.productsInOrder[i].category, // Category
myOrder.productsInOrder[i].priceUSD, // Price
myOrder.productsInOrder[i].quantity // Quantity
);
}
pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

17
 The After Sales Message section was
designed by Avangate in order to
customize the way the “Thank you for
purchasing” page will be displayed to the
user. All the code added to this page will
execute only when a user will finish a
purchase.

The After Sales Message can be found

under Marketing Tools or by just typing
after sale in the quick search box. Once
entered, copy the following code (as
provided in the last step of the Web
Analytics wizard) in your After Sales
Message box (see figure 8):

Figure 6 (up) –

Getting to the After Sales

section in the Avangate
Control Panel.

Figure 7 (left) –

The customized tracking

code for ecommerce
tracking provided in the
Web Analytics sections of
the Avangate Control
Panel.

18
 Figure 8

The customized
Google Analytics
tracking code
inside the After
Sale Message; it
must be placed
above any other
code in the page.

You will get all the data within your Google Analytics Account. The
eCommerce section in Google Analytics is active and is gathering
data from your sales. Just after a few days of transactions, you’ll
be able to see something very similar to this report:

19
 Figure 9 – eCommerce Reports as seen in Google Analytics.

20
 4. Analytics and User Behavior

At this point, everything is in place for gathering all the data from
your website and shopping cart, but just owning the data is not
going to boost up your sales.

You must get actionable insights from your data, like:

ƒ I need to treat differently trial users from new users.
ƒ Google organic searches are bringing me lots of traffic but
few conversions. Maybe it’s time to focus on other
keywords.
ƒ Lots of users exit through the terms and Conditions page.
Maybe there is something wrong with it.
ƒ All the users having Java Script disabled bounce, as they
cannot access the website.

Please notice that the insights are unique for every website and
software business, so the above are just pure examples.

On the following chapters we will focus on being able to answer as

many possible questions like the ones above. The answers should
provide solutions for improving your website and boosting your
sales.

21
 What is you conversion rate for purchases?

When you started your online business, you probably had many
goals in mind, but there is one we are sure we can guess:
Increase your sales.

It’s time to see in real time how this happens, so you don’t have to
wait till the end of the year or the semester to see how you are
doing.

A valuable report you’ll get is to see why your sales increased and
decreased over time. Maybe we’re overreacting a little, as Google
Analytics will never be able to answer the “Why” question, but it
will give the hint towards the “guilty” factors. From there,
answering the Why question is just a matter of testing or
observations.

So, let’s set up the first Conversion Goal tracking under Google
Analytics. Go to your website profile settings and, under the
Conversion Goals and Funnels section, click the edit link:

Figure 10 – Google Analytics goals management dashboard

22
 Setting up Purchase Conversion Goals
For purchases a conversion will occur every time a user ends up
on the Finish Purchase page on your shopping cart. Here is how
you set up a Conversion Goal:

Figure 11 – Setting up a Goal for tracking completede purchases

Note: As a vendor selling your software through Avangate, just fill

the fields exactly as shown in the image above.

Here is where we go a step further. Wouldn’t it be nice to find out

how many users enter your shopping cart, through which page
they enter and where do some of them abandon the shopping
process?

To do this, you need to set up the funneling. Follow the

instructions, just as shown in fig. 12:

23
 Figure 12 – Setting up funneling steps for monitoring abandonment rate through
the Avangate shopping cart

Note: leaving the “Required Step” checkbox unchecked will insure

that you will get data on all the users entering the shopping cart,
no matter what the entry point is. Otherwise, the funnel will only
show the visitors coming through the Step 1.

24
 Having this done, a brand new report is going to be generated
under your website’s Analytics data. Click on the Conversion Goals
menu item under your website reports and you will get a report
that looks like this:

Figure 13 – Goals overview in Google Analytics

Special attention should be paid to the Funnel Visualization chart

for the purchase goal, where cart abandonment will be easy to
understand.

25
 Figure 14 – Funneling overview for completed transactions in Google Analytics

26
 On the left you can see the main entry points for a certain setup
step and on the right you have the main exit points within the
shopping cart steps. In the middle, you get all the data that stays
within your shopping cart from one step to the next one, until
users “touchdown” on your finish purchase page.

Setting up Download Conversion Goals

As the Number of Downloads is going to be an important

performance indicator, assuming that you tagged you software
links as shown earlier, here is how you setup a conversion goal for
downloads:

Figure 15 – Setting up goal conversion tracking for software downloads.

For better understanding on how to create Goals for your website

for different actions, we recommend accessing the Google
Analytics Documentation center and the Google Support Group.

27
 Even More Value

There is even more to understanding the value of your traffic. A

special metric, called $index, has been implemented by Google.
You will notice it as it’s included in your content overview reports,
just as shown in the image.

Figure 16 – The $index metric under the Top Content report in Google Analytics

Here is a very good explanation of this metric:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-
in&answer=86205

So, to summarize, $index tells us the value of a page that a user

visits before landing on a goal page. That value is determined like
this: (Goal value (if assigned) + eCommerce value) / Total number
of visits on that page.

At this point, Google Analytics can track your eCommerce

transactions, which means that $index will automatically be

28
 calculated for all the pages on the websites that users visit before
buying.

But another goal of your website is to increase the number of

downloads. It would be great to find out which pages within your
website are most valuable for creating downloads.

You can deal with it in 2 ways. The easy but not so accurate way:
give the value of 1 dollar (or whatever value you consider right)
for every finished download.

The little bit more difficult but much more accurate way: calculate
how much a download values for you and setup that value for the
goal. How do you do that? The following chapter is going to focus
on this.

What did we get so far?

ƒ eCommerce tracking in place. Your sales data will be
available in Google Analytics and not only that: you’ll be
able to know which of your online campaigns (banner or
link exchange, PPC or organic keyword, blogger or
download website) is bringing you most profit.
ƒ Conversion Goals tracking for purchases and downloads.
You know what pages within your website are most
responsible for triggering purchases.

29
 ƒ Shopping cart abandonment rate monitoring. You can
make customizations on the pages where the users
abandon the shopping cart in order to decrease this rate.
Sometimes, even a small change to colors and layout can
improve the user experience so he doesn’t get lost in the
process.

30
 5. Tracking how many trial users buy your product

We currently know how many downloads and sales occur. You

would think that just dividing the number of downloads to the
number of sales would come up with the conversion rate for
download to buy. Well, why not be sure of it? You might be
surprised by the actual data and being surprised is a good thing in
this case.

Knowing for sure will help you take the right decisions for
improving things. No matter how good they are, they can always
be better.

You need to build special links or a special landing page for all the
users that come from buying links within your software. The
special link method has usability advantages, as the users can be
taken directly to the shopping cart, without any intermediate
pages.

In order to differentiate your buyers that come directly from your

software product a few parameters need to be added to the
shopping cart link. It is important to make sure that this method
does not interfere with your shopping cart functionality.

31
 Google offers a 3-step wizard for building the special links. By the
third step, the application will generate a new link:

Figure 17 – Create special links with Google Link Builder for tracking buyers
coming from your software product.

If you already use special links for users coming directly from the
software links or buttons, include the above parameters.

The Traffic Sources Overview "pie

chart" from the Google Analytics
default dashboard shows you the
number of users that came directly
from your software - they are found
under the "Others" label.

What if you already use special parameters to identify users

coming from your software? In this case, in order to leave the
links intact and get actionable data immediately, make a 301
redirect for all the users coming from your software to the same
link, but with the parameters in the image above included.

32
 6. Adding the first profile to your account

Just as Brian Clifton describes it in his book, Advanced Web

metrics with Google Analytics, a profile is a set of configuration
parameters that define a report. In other words, the same website
may have different profiles which will show up within the Google
Analytics Settings page and that will gather data from your
website in different manners.

You can set up a profile for gathering data that only comes from
search engines, or that only comes from referrers. Ever interested
how new visitors vs. returning visitors behave on your website?
Ever wanted to ignore all the visits that come from your company
or home IP? We’ll get back to this later and for now we will
concentrate on creating a profile for tracking just the visitors
coming from your software product.

After clicking on the Add Website Profile on you Google

Analytics Settings Page, select the “Add a Profile for an existing
domain” radio button and select the website that you use for
downloading and selling your software. Give it a custom name,
just like we did in the next image, and click Finish.

33
 Figure 18 – Creating a new profile for your website in Google Analytics

Note: Don’t forget to personalize it according to your Regional

Settings (Country and Time Zone)

At this point, the profile is going to gather data from all your
visitors. We need to filter and include in the profile only the
visitors coming from your software product.
So, create the following filter just like in fig. 19 and apply it to
your profile. We’ll assume that, just as shown earlier, the value for
the Campaign Source variable is going to be ‘software’. You can
name it as you wish; just don’t forget to be consistent when
applying the filter to the newly created profile.

34
 Figure 19 – Creating your first filter in Google Analytics

Apply the Purchase Conversion Goals, just as you did for your
general website profile. Having all this set up in place just within
this profile, Google will show you exactly the number of purchases
that occur from users coming from your software.

35
 7. How much does a Download value to you?

Don’t forget to activate the eCommerce tracking for this new

profile as well. It’s all you need to do to find out the amount of
money that comes into your account from all the sales.

Divide that amount with the total number of downloads, and you
will get exactly the value of a download for your business. Take
this number and put it in the Goal Value box for Download
Conversions you set up earlier. Make sure to make this update for
all your profiles.

36
 8. Segmenting is pure gold

Segmenting your visitors will give you real insights of how

different type of visitors or different sources of visitors value to
you. Actually, by creating a profile for visitors coming directly from
your software product, we considered them a segment of traffic
that has something in common: they are all trial users, therefore,
their purposes for visiting your site and their behavior might be
different than the users who visit you for the first time.

Also, there are different behaviors from users coming from a

search engine or users who just clicked a paid advertising banner.
There are users who come from seeing a review or returning users
who are typing your URL in the address bar. All of them behave
differently, especially from the perspective of their visit purpose.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to track all of them on different

profiles? This is possible. In the next pages, we will present the
filters and settings that need to be put in place in order to track:
ƒ visits coming from organic search engines
ƒ visits coming from AdWords paid advertising
ƒ direct visits
ƒ visits coming from a partner or a referrer
ƒ new visitors
ƒ returning visitors

37
 First of all, create 6 new profiles (you can create up to 50 profiles
in Google Analytics) just as shown earlier in the document. Name
all the profiles according to the above 6 different segmenting
rules. Create a filter for each profile just as shown in the following
images:

Visits coming from organic search engines

38
 Visits coming from AdWords paid advertising

Direct visits

39
 Visits coming from a partner or a referrer

New visitors

40
 Returning visitors

Every one of the above filters should be applied to its own profile.
However, here are a couple of filters that can be mixed with the
ones above, or be used as independent ones.

Tracking the traffic to your website, ignoring your IP address

41
 Tracking subdomains

When deciding to track subdomains, add the following filter in

order to be able to differentiate them in your analytics data.

42
 There is also a little hack that will show you how to track the real
keywords that users are searching when clicking on your AdWords
ads. The following 2 filters go hand in hand with the Paid
advertising filter presented before. When applying them to the
selected profile, make sure you respect the following order:
1. Only Paid Search filter (presented above)
2. AdWords Advanced Filter – part 1
3. AdWords Advanced Filter – part 2

AdWords Advanced Filter – part 1

43
 AdWords Advanced Filter – part 2

You can find out more information about the above filter at the
following address:
http://www.getelastic.com/exact-keywords-google-analytics/

Don’t forget to add the conversion goals you’ve set up for the
main profile to any profile you might create. After all, how
different segments of public convert on your website is what you
are after. Also, don’t forget to activate eCommerce tracking for
each of the profiles.

A good trick to help you visualize data better is to personalize all

the main dashboards for any created profile with their specific
data. For example, for all the visits coming from search engines,

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 show on the dashboard the following reports: Top content,
Keywords, Top landing pages and Conversion Goals. Conversion
goals should be kept on your dashboard on all profiles.

Until now, you got a lot of answers for questions like:

ƒ How many sales and downloads occur?
ƒ Who is your best partner for increasing sales or
downloads: a search engine, a blogger or some referrer?
ƒ What pages in the website trigger the most sales or
downloads?
ƒ How many trial users actually buy your product?
ƒ How do different segments of traffic behave on your
website?

It’s a good start for finding out how to act and increase your sales.
However, try not to fall in the pit of owning more and more data,
but not acting on it. Always think in the context. Always have the
website, search engine or partner website opened and try to
visualize the data that Google Analytics serves you.

Try to think like the user. Whenever you are ready to act, do it by
testing. If you discover that people don’t see the download button
very quickly, test by either making it bigger or by positioning it
better. See what results work better. Try Google Optimizer for
this. You can have all the testing data linked within your Google
Analytics Account.

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 9. Make Google Analytics better

Google Analytics is a great tool, but when you use it frequently, it

shows some glitches. Having many profiles, trying to access
certain type of data can be sometimes pretty difficult.

Here are 4 scripts that can enhance your Google Analytics

Experience. They work with GreaseMonkey, which is a really cool
plugin for Firefox, which allows you to customize the way a
webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.

1. Show 100 by Lunametrics. Helps you automatically show all

your profiles from the website profile list in Google Analytics.
2. Google Analytics Report Enhancer by RoiRevolution. Brings
up tens of new reports in Google Analytics. It also calculates
for you “True Time on Site”, which is the average time spent
on site, excluding all bounces.
3. Google Analytics Downloader by Juice Analytics. Adds a
highly valuable button to your keywords and referrers
reports, stating who sent you unusual traffic. Really great
info can be brought out of it.
4. Cleaner Profile Switching by Erik Vold. With this simple
script, when you 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

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 reports from two profiles, there is an option to view the new
profile in a separate tab.

Try not to rely only on the data that Google Analytics serves you.
There are many tools that can definitely help you in getting to the
desired result: better understanding, more sales.

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 10. Cool tools to go along with Google Analytics

WASP
WASP is the Web Analytics Solution Profiler, a specialized Firefox
extension aimed at web analysts and web analytics
implementation specialists, who want to do quality assurance and
understand how their web analytics solution is implemented. It’s a
great plug-in that will help you debug any issues that might
appear in your websites tracking. We also recommend their blog,
which has great resources:

Google Website Optimizer

This is a tool provided by Google; you have to

register or sign in before using it. It’s an easy-to-use tool for
testing site content that delivers actionable results to increase
your conversion rate. Google Website Optimizer’s strong asset is
that it allows you to carry out loads of tests at the same time for:
headlines, images, prices, offers and buttons. By means of
Website Optimizer, you can obtain significant increases of the
website conversion rates, of the time spent on your website and
last, but not least, an increase of your visitors’ satisfaction with
the website. But what does this tool really do? The answer is...
testing in two ways:

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 ƒ Run A/B experiments (compares the performance of
entirely different versions of a page)
ƒ Run multivariate experiments (compares the performance
of content variations in multiple locations on a page
simultaneously)
Lately, several Google Website Optimizer authorized companies
appeared on the market. Future Now has really valuable resources
on how to use Google Optimizer on their blog, Grokdotcom . For
instance the 10 Minute Guide to Testing with Google Website
Optimizer (PDF) is a very nice list with the most important things
about this tool. We also recommend another article: 101 tips for
Google website optimizer .

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search, a further

development of Google Trends, charts how often a particular
search term is entered, relative the total search volume across
various regions of the world, in various languages. This tool also
enables its users to make a comparison between the volume of
searches between several items or terms.

Google Insights for Search can be used as a crystal ball, a tool to

predict the evolution of search volumes for some terms. A very
cool feature is that it also shows related keywords that have big
increases of searches. One of the assets that we consider of vital

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 importance is the graphs, conducting comparative analyses for
different terms. You just have to insert some keywords, select the
region and the time you are interested in and voilà: you get a
comprehensive graphic with the search volume evolution.

Ad Preview Tool
Judging by its name, this is a tool by Google AdWords that just
previews the way your site will look in the Search Engine Result
Page (SERP).
What are the benefits of using this program? First of all, you’ll get
a hint of how your ad will look like, and secondly, you will see the
contextual placement of your ad, i.e. whether your ad has well
defined keywords. Thirdly, you get improved location targeting for
your ads. You can also refine the results page by adding location
attributes and values manually to the URL of the ad preview
page. Optional attributes include a target country,
longitude/latitude coordinates, regions, and cities. In the U.S., you
can also set a target ZIP code or designated market area (DMA).
Generally speaking, the Ad Preview Tool provides "clean" search
results page for a given keyword, domain, language and
geography. This way, you can monitor your local campaigns in
different areas (you shouldn't employ it for national campaigns).
Nevertheless, you should take into account the "relativity" of this
tool - the SERP won’t look the same at all times. For more details
about this tool, check out "Google's Ad Preview Tool Gotchas You
Should

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 Compete and Alexa
Compete and Alexa can provide good insights on how your
competition is standing. Follow them, learn from their mistakes
and improvements and make sure you are on top of things. For
any of the tools provided, context is very important. For example,
learning the approximate traffic of your competitors can be easily
linked to their back links. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to get access to
this data.

Search Engines Webmasters Tools

These tools provided by search engines will give you a very good
hint on how well your website is indexed, the main issues the
crawlers discover and so on. You can also submit your sitemap to
them and you will always know the status of your indexed pages.

Try:
Google Webmasters Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer Center
Live Webmaster Tools

Crazy Egg
While Google Analytics has a
feature of showing the Website
Overlay with the links clicking
situation, unless some specific implementations are done, it’s

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 pretty much off target when it comes to provide actionable data.
Crazy Egg is a specialized tool that can provide a picture of where
people clicked on your site. This tells you what’s hot and what’s
not, so you can make changes that matter. It has a free service
plan, as well as paid ones.

iPerceptions 4Q
Avinash Kaushik introduced this permission based
on-exit survey that provides an easy to deploy, use
and analyze the framework, in order to get 4
answers that no website owner can live
without. Surveys are powerful and can yield much deeper
insights about the customer experiences on your website, helping
you get a broader image about your visitors’ behavior.

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 11. Great Blogs to Follow

Most of the information we put in this ebook comes from what

we’ve learned and experimented on from great bloggers out there,
whom we thank for the great job they are doing. Here is who we
recommend:

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Avinash’s blog is a must for anyone interested in web analytics.
With non technical approaches, he can make anyone understand
what web analytics is all about. He is also the author of the much
acclaimed book “Web Analytics – One hour a day”.
Check out the interview Avinash Kaushik gave for Avangate.

Luna Metrics Blog

On the other side is a very technical blog. The folks at Luna
Metrics are Google Analytics authorized consultants and get very
deep into technical implementations on analytics tracking code.
They also spend a lot of time helping others on the Google group
especially created for Google Analytics support.

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 The Official Google Analytics Blog
It's all about the latest news, tips, and resources straight from the
Google Analytics team.

Other blogs that are worth following:

• Juice Analytics
• Rich Page Ramblings - Web analytics insight, website
optimization and reviews!
• Immeria – an immersion in web analytics
• Web Analytics Demystified
• Web Analytics World

Other great places with resources for the Analytics Industry:

Web Analytics Association Yahoo Group
Web Analytics Association Website (WAA).

We encourage you to become a member of WAA, as they provide

great webinars and other resources for all its members.

While all of the above resources are focused on general web

analytics we also invite you to follow the Avangate – Software
Business Blog, where we will do our best at offering you
specialized resources for software vendors.

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 12. Great Books to Read

There are 3 books we highly recommend:

The first one is “Web Analytics – One hour a day” by Avinash

Kaushik, which is a great intro in the Web Analytics World. After
reading his book, you will be half way there when talking about
mastering web analytics. The other half will come from the
experience you will gain while testing and acting on the data you
get.

However, Avinash doesn’t go too much deep into how Google

Analytics works, but rather explaining how general web analytics
functions. For Google Analytics mastering try Brian Clifton’s book
“Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics”.

While these 2 books will help you really understand what’s with all
that data you get from your analytics tool, Bryan Eisenberg from
Grokdotcom will help you take some actions and make those sales
hit the roof. And as one can never be 100% sure of the action he
takes, he recommends to “Always Be Testing”.

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 Did you find this ebook useful?

If you enjoyed reading this ebook, please take a few moments to

give us feedback. We respect and value your opinion.

Can you think of any ways to improve it? Are there any other
subjects you would like us to approach?

Please send us feedback!

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 About Avangate

Avangate provides solutions for electronic software distribution and reseller

management, assisting software companies worldwide in successfully selling their
products online and at the same time efficiently managing a distribution network.

The company’s offer includes an eCommerce platform incorporating an easy to use and
secure online payment system plus software marketing services and additional
marketing and sales tools such as an affiliate network, automated cross selling
options, software promotion management, real time reporting, 24/7 shopper support,
and the ARMS reseller management program specifically designed for software sales.

More information can be found on the corporate website, at www.avangate.com

Avangate
Van Heuven Goedhartlaan 937, 1181 LD Amstelveen, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 208908080 Fax: +31 202031309
Email: info@avangate.com Web: www.avangate.com
.member of GECAD Group, delivering innovative IT solutions Worldwide since 1992

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