Hi, I'm Anna. I'm a search specialist at Koozai. This video was suggested
by Lauren at SEOmoz and is going to cover the topic of monitoring your
brand in Google Analytics. There are three areas to cover here. We're going
to look at traffic sources, onsite activity, and then how to use this data.
The first thing I'm going to start with is keywords. It's one of the most
common things looked at by SEOs in Google Analytics, and basically, it
shows you all the keywords that people are using to come to your site. So
what you want to do is use the filter option at the bottom of this report
to get simple information about different breakdowns of keywords, and then
if you need more than that and you want to add extra things
in, then move on to the advanced segment functionality. Set up your own
custom segment and include all the variations of your brand that you'd like
to track within one section. Obviously, set whether you want that to be
organic or PPC or both. Then what I'd recommend doing is also doing an
opposite advanced segment to that so that you can then track your brand
keywords versus your non-brand keywords. Then what you can do is you can
track the interaction with your site from paid search and organic search to
see how brand versus non-brand vary across the site. Really useful with
advanced segments because you can apply that to anything.
The next thing to look at is referring sites. This is harder to verify
whether they're brand or non-brand related. What you'll do is generally
when you have a look at it, you'll know which ones you've submitted,
whether you've created that listing in Yell, or whether that mention on the
forum was somebody talking about one of your products rather than your
brand. Referring sites is a bit harder, but what I'd recommend is basically
if you are setting anything up, try and make sure you can track it
yourself, which brings us on to tracking your campaign.
The way I would recommend to do this is AdWords which does it itself,
and you don't want to mess with that. Any other method, whether it's Bing
PPC, whether it's a Facebook ad, whether it's a job ad on Gumtree, you want
to use your campaign tracking URL where you can. This is a tool from
Google. It's a URL builder basically. You can put in your campaign terms,
source, medium and that sort of information. That then provides Google
Analytics with specific information about that link. That enables you to
have a lot more functionality. You can obviously split test brand things
that are going out on the Web to see which ones work best.
Then an extra special way to do this is to use the URL tool builder for
your campaign tracking with a QR code. You can use this offline in any
media advertising. You can put it on a bus stop. You can put it in a
magazine. Basically you create the URL, you add your tracking to it, and
then you build the QR code from that and then you use that in your media.
That allows you to track both offline and online brand mentions, brand
promotions. Whatever it is, you can track it now. A really useful piece of
modern technology. Just a small bar code, it's readable by most new smart
phones, anything with an auto-focusing camera can read it. It's a really up-
and-coming piece of technology that's really good and you can track it.
Bring that into Google Analytics and you'll be laughing.
Next, we're going to be looking at onsite activity. You've got your users
to the site. Now what do they do? What you're probably going to want to do
is divide up your site into sections, which ones are brand related pages
and which ones aren't. Then you want to see how many page views there are
per area and then compare these. You can see maybe whether brand pages
account for 10% of the page views of your whole website in a month, that
sort of thing. Use the page views data, use the little filter box at the
bottom in the content draw down report, and you can start to see where
things are going with your website and how each section is visited across
the site in comparison to other sections. I'd recommend to start with just
playing around, put the data into Excel, draw yourself a pretty little graph.
You can see it really nice and easily. Then track it over the months, and
that way you can see whether, for example, activity on your brand pages
might suddenly increase in one month when you're launching an advertising
campaign. It's really good to see how that works alongside your other
pages.
There's also a nice, tidier way to do this really which is less manual. Basically,
use custom variables and you can label each page with what it actually is.
So you can label all your brand pages with brand terms, categorise them
that way using custom variables. Then you see this information separately
in Google Analytics and it's really useful. You can create advanced
segments with your custom variable so you can apply that segment to
anything. You label "About Us" pages as one thing, your product pages as
another. Work out which ones are brand related and which ones aren't, and
then you can really see how people really interact with those pages much
more easily really within Google Analytics.
The next way of seeing data more easily is to set up a specific filter
within its own profile. You set up a new profile in Analytics within the
same account and then add the filter. You can choose whether you want to
segment and only see data from organic or certain keywords maybe. You can
also set it to do things like only track visits to a certain area of your
site. That's going to be really useful if you've got core brand pages that
you want to see just the activity on those, whether everybody coming to
those pages is coming from an internal click or whether they're coming
externally to those pages. It's really nice and easy to see all the
information in one little place.
The other thing that you may want to consider when you've got a brand is
that it might have other websites. If you've got two websites and your
users are flitting around between the two the whole time, you might want to
think about cross domain tracking. This basically involves an extra line or
two of code and then an extra bit of code between the links. This then
passes on the cookie information between the domains, and you can see the
referral information for the first site present on the information for the
conversion on the second site, for example. It's just one of those common
things where brands, especially big brands, have more than one domain name
and want to see how things go around.
The next thing to do is to use your data. How are we going to do that?
We've got a couple of options here. Custom reports are really useful for
giving you exactly what you want and putting it in a presentable form that
you can easily just send to somebody. So if you've got a board of directors
who want to see certain information, they don't ever want to use Google
Analytics themselves, you can basically just set up your custom report to
show exactly what you want it to show, apply an advanced segment. That way
you can show that information for that segment of traffic. For example, do
a custom report on your landing pages that are related to your brand and
apply your advanced segment to show only brand related keyword visits. Then
you've got exactly the information you're looking for. Maybe do a
comparison of those pages' interaction compared to non-brand keywords.
Custom reports you can really play around with and then obviously use your
advanced segments. Don't forget them.
The next thing to do is custom alerts. These are really useful not just for
brand monitoring but for just monitoring your website in general. What it
enables you to do is get an email when things change. For example, if your
brand related keywords, that segment that we've already set up, if that
suddenly sees an increase of 50% overnight in visitors, you wouldn't have a
clue unless you actually logged in and looked. You set up a custom alert,
tell it to give you an email, then in your inbox, first thing Monday
morning, you know that over the weekend something happened and you can see
exactly what it was. It just alerts you to when things are going on, and
it's really useful for monitoring your brand. There are obviously things
you can do with your custom alerts. You can create them for any sort of
dimension or metric, whether it's landing pages, page views, custom
variables, and then obviously use your advanced segments. You're going to
get bored of me saying that, but they're very good.
The last point is the API. This is like custom reports, it's just cooler.
You can create your own dashboard, your own spreadsheet, your own report
basically. It can be set to update automatically when you open it, with the
latest data or whatever data you choose and just show you exactly what you
want. You build it, you brand it. You just use the API to pull in the data
to show you the statistics. This is really useful for sending to people or
just using as a reporting tool, however you want to use it. It just saves
you having to faff around in Analytics. You just build it once and you've
got it. Then you can use the same template for another client or another
brand or another area of the site or a different advanced segment. There
are lots of different things to do whether you're using it or just
gathering it or applying an advanced segment to everything.
There's plenty more information on our blog all about all these sorts of
things. Also we're doing some more videos on this. Sam in particular is
doing a video on protecting your brand online. Check that out. You can
subscribe to the YouTube channel to have a look at that. Also, check out
our website. It's got loads more stuff. Thanks for watching.