PPC Without Pity

Google Analytics is a fine (and free) web analytics program, but maybe you’re in the market for an alternative. Perhaps you’re uncomfortable with Google having access to your web traffic stats. Or, maybe you’re just looking for a backup for data if Google’s tracking goes awry. There are plenty of web analytics companies that would gladly take your money for one of their paid solutions. But, if you’re like me, you would probably prefer to explore some free alternatives first. Here are three free web analytics alternatives that can help you replace or supplement Google Analytics:

1. Yahoo Web Analytics – Unsurprisingly, Yahoo offers a free analytics package to compete with their rival, Google. Their features are pretty similar to Google Analytics, including custom reports, data filters, and integration of PPC campaign tracking. However, they do have one important feature that tops Google: real-time tracking. Unlike Google Analytics, which has a 24-hour lag in data, you can get near-real time stats with Yahoo Web Analytics. Installation is pretty simple, too – you just cut and paste a code snippet into each one of your pages, just like Google Analytics.
2. Piwik – Piwik is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics. You can get trendlines, charts, and basic reports that are straightforward and easy to use. All of your key stats are there (keywords, top search engines, traffic stats, referring sites, goal conversions, etc.), but customized filters and reports are conspicuously absent. If you just need basic site stats, Piwik should do the job, but if you need enterprise-level analytics solutions, it might not be entirely up to the task. However, since it is a server-side installation you’ll be able to get your stats in real-time. Also, it is an open-source project, so if you (or your developers) are pretty code-savvy you should be able to do some extensive customization. Installation is a bit more difficult than the major web analytics tools, because you need to install the Piwik program on your web server. Once you complete installation, you can either add code tags to all the pages you want to track, or have a Piwik analytics installation plugin do it for you.
3. Open Web Analytics – Another open-source alternative to Google Analytics is the appropriately-named Open Web Analytics. This program is similar to Piwik, in that it is open-source and must be installed on your web server. There are easy installation options for WordPress, so it might be a good option if your site is based on that particular content management system. Open Web Analytics reports provide all of your key information – hits, unique visitors, visitor location, and the like. They also offer some cool information options like visitor click streams, heatmap site overlays, and tagging user locations in Google Maps or Google Earth.

So there you have it: three great alternatives to Google Analytics. Got any more suggestions? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

The new Google Analytics app gallery was announced this week, and boy does it look like a lot of fun. I’m an avowed Google Analytics fanboy, so this feels like Christmas to me. I haven’t had a chance to try out any of the apps yet, but I appreciate what Google is doing by allowing analytics geeks like you and me to monkey around with their system and come up with some creative uses. I’ve always thought that the Google Analytics program was pretty open to start with – you can easily create segmentation, user funnels, and custom tagging if you’re a savvy enough webmaster.

The app gallery takes the open platform to the next logical step. By allowing independent developers to create useful apps that link into existing Google Analytics accounts, big G is making their useful (and free) analytics platform even more useful. Here’s a quick rundown of some apps that caught my eye:

Call Tracking – No specific mentions here, but I think it’s nice that the app gallery has an entire section devoted to call tracking apps. Keeping tabs on offline conversions is always a real pain for the serious online marketer, but you might find that some of the apps here give you relief. Of course, you’ll probably still need to deal with the hassle of setting up multiple 800 numbers to keep track of the calls coming in from different marketing channels. But, being able to get all of your data from offline and online sources in a single dashboard, from PPC to SEO to phone calls, is a real time-saver if you’re dealing with a large volume of conversions.

Analytics Visualizations – You probably already know that I’m a pretty big PPC geek. Well, I’m a data visualization geek, too. Infographics get me excited. I have two signed books by Edward Tufte on my bookshelf. And I think that this data visualization app looks really cool. Google Analytics already has some decent data visualization capabilities, but Analytics Visualizations really takes it to the next level. Right now, there are two options for visualizations: referrer flow and keyword tree. Referrer flow shows a linear visualization of traffic to your site, with individual pages segmented and color coded by page. You can even apply filters to drill down to greater areas of specificity. The keyword tree tool looks pretty nice, too. It takes your search queries and creates a structured word cloud to visualize both the search volume of the keyword, and how it related hierarchically with other user queries. Both tools are free, and a whole lot of fun to play around with.

Pion – Well, now this is interesting. Pion offers an app that lets your forgo the tagging system in Google Analytics for an easier installation with more complete data. The Pion analytics app doesn’t use javascript tagging like a normal Google Analytics installation. Instead, you install Pion on your web server, tell it your GA unique ID, and it communicates directly to your Google Analytics account what’s going on with your web traffic. It’s an interesting concept, and could be really helpful if you tend to make a lot of new pages and don’t want to bother with checking every single one for correctly installed Google Analytics code. I haven’t tried it, though, so I can’t vouch for its accuracy. Anyone out there have any experiences or opinion?

Some apps are paid, but many are either free or have a free “lite” version of the paid app. I encourage you to check around and see if there’s something you can use. The app selection is a bit sparse right now, but that’s to be expected for a brand new marketplace. In time, I’m sure we’ll see dozens of really cool apps show up. So keep an eye out – you may find a Google Analytics app that serves the purpose you’ve been looking for.

On Thursday, the Google Analytics blog announced an upcoming browser-based opt out for Google Analytics tracking. This is huge news for not only webmasters who use Google Analytics tracking, but also on us PPC marketers who rely on this data to make marketing decisions. Details are scarce at this point, but it looks like Google will allow users to opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing a plug-in in their browser. Granted, not every user will be savvy enough to install this on their web browser, or even know what this means. But I’m willing to bet that there are enough web users concerned about their privacy that we’ll start to miss a significant percentage of Google Analytics data once this thing goes live.

This is clearly a reaction to recent uproars about internet privacy, such as last year’s threat to ban Google Analytics in Germany. Google really needed to throw a bone to its critics, and I guess this is it. They are definitely running the risk of incurring the wrath of their PPC advertisers, though.

I must admit I’m a little ambivalent about this development. The internet user in me applauds Google’s advocacy for the privacy of their users. However, the internet marketer in me laments the loss of precious web analytics data that will help me make decisions about my PPC campaigns. But take my opinions with a grain of salt. After all, I am one of those hypocritical marketing types who spends all day managing web ads, then installs ad blockers in his home computer’s web browser.

So will this mean the end of Google Analytics? It’s too early to tell. But once this plug-in situation is finalized, I’ll be interested to see how it affects my Google Analytics data. Keep an eye out for this implementation to make sure you don’t get blindsided by a loss of stats in your own Google Analytics account. If you see the plug-in implementation take a wrecking ball to your site usage data, it might be time to consider a move from Google Analytics to a more complete analytics package like Omiture, Woopra, Yahoo Web Analytics, or any number of other analytics providers. I really like Google Analytics as a tool, but a web analytics package is only as good as the completeness of its data. If Google wants to stand up for privacy at the expense of its advertisers, then I may have to make the painful choice of going with another analytics provider.

Earlier this month, Google released a beta version of new code snippet that enables asynchronous tracking in Google Analytics. So what exactly is this, you ask? Well, under the current setup of Google Analytics, code is read sequentially by the user’s browser. When a page loads, first the header is rendered, then the body, then all of the elements in the body, etc. Most people put their Google Analytics snippets just before the close body tag, so the analytics script is one of the last things executed by the browser. If a user is having issues with Javascript or slow load times, sometimes the code snippet won’t be executed and you won’t get accurate data. You could move the snippet higher in the code to solve the loss of tracking fidelity, but due to the sequential nature of browser rendering, there may be a page load delay as the browser tries to execute the Google Analytics Javascript before it executes the rest of the HTML code.

With this new asynchronous tracking snippet, the Javascript code is executed separately from the rest of your scripts and HTML content. This means that you can put your tracking snippet higher up in the page code and not experience a page load delay as the browser executes the code. Think of it this way: the old Google Analytics code was a one-lane road, where cars (or in this case, scripts) couldn’t pass each other. Asynchronous tracking opens up another lane, where your Google Analytics code can zip by the rest of your sluggish code without impacting site load times.

So what does this all mean for PPC? Well, the main benefit of this asynchronous tracking is an improvement in site load times. And site load time is a commonly overlooked factor in landing page optimization. Consider this paper by Ron Kohavi and Roger Longbotham. In a web experiment, they tested the effect of site load times on Amazon.com. They found that for every 100 millisecond increase in site load time, sales decreased by 1 percent. One hundred milliseconds! That’s only a tenth of a second. It’s barely perceptible, yet somehow has a drastic effect on the psychology of e-commerce. A poorly implemented analytics tracking snippet could probably hold up your site loading time by this amount.

Sure, the new asynchronous tracking snippet promises greater accuracy in Google Analytics (always a good thing), but I think it’s the improved site load time that’s going to make the real impact. Good PPC marketers should always pay attention to what their analytics programs are telling them. But maybe we should be paying attention to what our analytics snippets are doing to our pages, as well. Having a web page that loads slowly and awkwardly could be costing you sales and conversions, and you wouldn’t even know it.

This week in Google Analytics news: German officials are trying to ban websites based in their country from using Google Analytics (you can read the full story at TechCrunch). They claim that Google is collecting personally identifiable information without users’ consent, and that this could potentially break privacy laws. To me, this is a great example of people being terrified of technology that they don’t understand.

Before all the German villagers bust out the pitchforks and torches, let’s get one thing straight: Google Analytics does not collect any personally-identifiable information. Period. As a frequent user of Google Analytics, the most I can tell about someone is what city they (or most likely, their internet service provider) is from, what pages they’ve visited on the site, and how long they spent there. Sure, there’s a lot else that I could do with that information to improve my website or marketing campaigns, but there is no freaking way that I could decode an individual’s identity from my Google Analytics data. And that’s assuming that I would have the time or inclination to do so, since there’s no way I could possibly benefit from that information. The value of Google Analytics comes from analyzing web traffic data in the aggregate, not on an individual level.

Of course, the majority of the German government’s ire is likely directed at the data that Google itself collects. Everyone likes to paint Google as this totalitarian vacuum of internet data, parsing our identities and dirty little secrets in their data centers. Let me ask you this: assume you were leading a company that collected petabytes of data every day. How the hell could you even look for one individuals data in all of that mess? What possible benefit could you get from that? Picking the needle of one user’s data out of the mile-high haystack of Google data would take hours (maybe even days) and cost a ridiculous amount of money in payroll and resources. Even if Google wanted to figure out your individual browsing history, it would not make economic sense for them to do so. Like I said before, the value of Google data is in the aggregate, not in the individual.

If Germany is so worked up about web analytics data, why aren’t they going after Omniture, Woopra, or any number of other web analytics providers? I’ll tell you why: because the bureaucrats who want to make this happen probably don’t even know they exist. Everyone knows who Google is. Just say that Google is collecting data from web users, and the average layman knows what that means. But try to say that similar analytics solutions can be had by installing a javascript tag or looking at web logs? Only us geeks would get that.

Web analytics is not a threat to online privacy, and causing a ban on it would do a great disservice to web users everywhere. Without analytics data, you can’t improve for usability, or determine what the most-needed features of your website are. I sincerely hope that the folks in the German web industry wake their government up to what a stupid, ill-advised idea this is, and stop the Google witch hunt.

When managing a pay per click advertising account, it helps to have a lot of software tools to help you manage your account, discover new keywords, track success, and perform split-tests for you. There are a lot of people out there who would love to sell you an expensive software package to accomplish these tasks. But, in my experience, everything you need to do in a PPC account can be accomplished through free tools that are easily available online. Read on for my choices of the six best free PPC tools:

6. Google Insights For Search – This tool gives you access to the vast amount of data that Google has collected on keyword searches and internet traffic trends. Simply type in the search terms you want to learn more about, select the time frame and geographic area you want to analyze, and you can view trends and relative popularity of any search term that has enough search volume to matter. This is great for discovering how popular your PPC keywords could be, as well as getting a look at likely seasonal trends before they happen.

5. MSN AdCenter Desktop – MSN AdCenter usually has the lowest traffic of the big three PPC providers, but this will soon change once Yahoo’s web properties switch to Bing search. If you’re doing PPC on either Yahoo or Bing right now, you’d better learn MSN’s tools now before your traffic increases drastically. Fortunately, MSN has recently released a desktop editor for their MSN platform, although it is still in beta. If your account meets the right requirements, you could be eligible to download it – see the above link for the steps you need to take. This desktop editor can help you make mass changes to your MSN AdCenter account, like adding multiple keywords, creating text ads in bulk, or other mass campaign/ad group changes. It certainly makes managing an MSN account a lot faster, since you don’t have to wait for multiple pages to load and re-load like in the web interface.

4. SEO Book Keyword Tool – There are lots of good keyword tools out there on the web, most of which are provided by the search engines themselves. But who wants to go back and forth between multiple keyword tools to make a single keyword list? SEO Book has a really awesome aggregator that pulls keyword data from multiple keyword tools like Google, Yahoo, and WordTracker. It’s one-stop shopping for all your keyword research needs. This tool does require that you have an SEO Book account, but registration is free. You also get access to a lot of other SEO Book resources, so it’s a pretty good deal.

3. Google Website Optimizer – Have you heard about how awesome split-testing and multivariate testing are, but the thought of doing all those statistics makes your head spin? Well, you’re in luck. With Google’s Website Optimizer tool, all you need to do is create a few variant pages, cut and paste some javascript code snippets, and the tool does the rest. It even crunches the numbers at the end to tell you conclusively which of your variant pages performed the best. And, with it’s multivariate testing feature, you can choose a set of elements (buttons, images, blocks of text, etc.), and the tool will automatically mix them up in different combinations to see which is the most effective. Split testing your landing pages couldn’t be easier.

2. Google AdWords Editor – After managing accounts with AdWords Editor, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. In fact, I hardly ever use Google’s web interface to work with PPC accounts anymore. This desktop application lets you download your account info, make whatever changes you need, then upload the changes to the web interface. It’s easy to copy and paste any element, from campaigns down to keywords. You can even select multiple keywords and change bids by percentage or dollar amount. I could do a dozen posts about all the features that it has, so it’s probably better to just read Google’s own documentation about this product. And, of course, it’s 100% free. Probably one of the best bargains on this list, considering the wide range of functionality it has.

1. Google Analytics – If you’re going to run a PPC account effectively, you must have a reliable web analytics system in place. Period. You need to be able to keep track of your web traffic, monitor how your organic and paid site traffic is interacting, and look at what keywords people are using to find your site. Google Analytics does all of this for free, and is incredibly easy to implement – just cut and paste a javascript snippet on to every page of your site, and you’re done. What’s more, there are infinite filters and segmentation formulas to allow you to customize your data. You can even set up alerts to let you know when key metrics are rising or falling. With all of this functionality, you’d probably expect to pay a hefty monthly fee for the privilege. But, unlike a lot of similar web analytics packages, this one is 100% free.

Got any more great free PPC tools? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

Whenever you’re split-testing factors in a pay per click advertising account, it’s easy to slack off and skip a rigorous analysis of your results. Option A got a higher conversion rate, so it must be better than Option B, right? Well, sometimes you just have to do the statistical legwork to verify your results. It’s easier than you think.

First, a quick primer on statistics. Whenever you create a research project testing two factors (like two different text ads, or two different match types for the same keyword), you’re bound to get different results for each factor by the end of the test. But you need to know whether this difference was caused by the factors actually being different, or if it just happened by random chance. Here’s where statistical testing comes in. Calculating the difference between two groups can be easily done by performing a “z-test.” You can get all the boring details at Wikipedia’s page on z-tests, or if you’re more interested in the result than the process, you can find a lot of online calculators that will do all the hard work for you. You can find a really good one at the Dimension Research z-test calculator here.

Calculating a z-test is easy. You just punch in your sample group size from your first group (in most cases, you’ll use the total number of clicks on your test factor), type in your frequency or percentage (number of conversions or conversion rate), then repeat the process for your second factor. Hit calculate, and you’ll get a result called your “confidence level.” The confidence level is the statistical chance that the result you are testing did not happen by random chance alone. Therefore, if you get a 95% confidence level on a z-test comparing Text Ad 1 to Text Ad 2, you’re 95% sure that one of the ads is better than the other, and it did not happen randomly. You’ll want to shoot for a 95% confidence level, since this is the acceptable level of confidence for most academic statistical tests.

The Dimension Research calculator also gives you confidence levels for one-tailed and two-tailed tests. Use the one-tailed confidence level if you’re trying to test if one factor is better than the other, and use the two-tailed level if you’re trying to test that the two factors are equal.

After running a few statistical tests, you’ll probably find that a lot of split-tests that initially looked significant aren’t very significant at all. By adding statistical rigor to your marketing tests, you can ensure that your analysis is accurate. You won’t make mistakes in judgment if you trust the numbers.

Now that everyone and their mother seems to have a smart phone or other internet-capable mobile device, it has become more important than ever to keep tabs on mobile traffic to your website. Google Analytics offers a “Visits From iPhones” segment by default, but if you want to get data on all of your mobile traffic, you’re going to have to cook up a solution on your own. Fortunately, the build-your-own-segment functionality in Google Analtyics can help you do just that.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to track all of your mobile visits in Google Analytics!

On your Google Analytics dashboard page, look for the button at the top right labeled “Advanced Segments”:

Advanced segments button in Google Analytics

Click on it to open up a menu box with your default segments, along with a few links. On the left side of this box, click on the link to “create a new advanced segment:”

Create a new advanced segment

On the next screen, open up the “Systems” option under the “Dimensions” menu. We’ll be adding a few “or” statements from this category. Let’s start with “Browser.”

Dimensions box in Google Analytics

Drag the “Browser” box over to the dotted box marked “Dimension or Metric:”

Dimension or metric

Now it’s time to add a value to this statement. You can leave the second field at “matches exactly” – the other options work better when we’re dealing with numerical factors. In the “Value” text box, you can either add in text of your own, or choose from the drop-down menu. Here, you can enter in several browsers that are mobile-only, like “Opera Mini” or “BlackBerry9530.” If you don’t see any mobile browsers in the drop-down, it means that you haven’t received any visits from users of these browsers yet. You’ll need to create a new “or” statement for every mobile browser you want to add. Just keep repeating the steps until you’re done.

Once you’re satisfied with your mobile browser selection, create another “or” statement and drag over the box marked “Operating System.” For this one, we’ll choose several operating systems of mobile devices: iPod, iPhone, Android, Danger Hiptop (powers the T-Mobile Sidekick and other devices), and any other mobile OS’s you might see in your drop-down selection. As with the browser selection, you’ll need to create a separate “or” statement for every OS you want to cover.

If you’re feeling particularly analytical, you can even add screen resolutions to the mix. Create another “or” statement and drag over the “Screen Resolution” box. Common mobile device screen resolutions include 320×396 and 320×480 (iPhones). Once you are finished creating “or” statements for all of your mobile conditions, you can test out your segment by clicking on the “Test Segment” button on the right side of the page.

Google Analytics does not support tracking visits from all mobile devices, but this segment should represent a good portion of your mobile visitors. Just activate this segment when reviewing your Google Analytics reports, and you can start figuring out what kind of behavior you’re seeing on your website from mobile visitors.

What keyword positions work the best in a PPC campaign? It’s a pretty common question, but there’s no straightforward answer. Like a lot of other factors in pay per click advertising, you need to do your research and check your web analytics numbers to see what works best for you.

If you have Google Analytics installed and linked to your AdWords account, it’s easy to get information on what keyword positions are working for you. Just follow these steps:

Getting to the Keyword Positions report in Google Analytics

1. Select your “Traffic Sources” menu on your left sidebar.
2. Open the “AdWords” drop-down menu.
3. Select the option “Keyword Positions.”

And you’re done! This report will give you traffic metrics (total clicks, impressions, CTR, etc.) for your AdWords keywords at the listed positions. If you have goal conversions set up (and you should), then you can even get information on what positions your keywords convert best at.

Once you get an idea of the positions that get you a good conversion and cost-per-conversion rate, then you can start making bid adjustments to make sure you hit those positions more often. This is yet another example of how accurate web analytics setups can really improve your ROI for pay per click marketing campaigns.

As helpful as PPC conversion tracking scripts are, they are far from infallible. While Google, Yahoo, and MSN have all been gracious enough to offer up free conversion tracking solutions for their respective pay per click advertising platforms, we all have our horror stories about how they’ve failed us. Maybe you’ve missed several days of tracking due to a glitch, or you are the owner of one of those cantankerous types of websites that just doesn’t want to play well with conversion tracking javascript. In any case, you should probably think about having a back-up method of tracking conversions in case your standard conversion tracking doesn’t work or experiences an error.

Fortunately, Google Analytics has a function that works pretty well. Just set up some conversion goals in your Google Analytics profile (you can find the how-to guide here) that are identical to your PPC conversion tracking goals. It’s easy to set up a simple conversion tracking goal. Just pick a catchy name for the goal, then copy the link to your “thank you” or confirmation page (or wherever you have your conversion tracking code) as the Goal URL. You’re done! Of course, you can always create fancy funnels and reports, but if you just want a simple backup for your existing conversion tracking that’s all it takes.

Not only will this help you keep track of conversions even if your account conversion tracking gets all wonky, but it will also help you get a second opinion of sorts to see if your conversion tracking is inaccurate. If you are running multiple PPC search engine accounts and directing them all to the same conversion page, the Google Analytics conversion goal reports will help you get an aggregate view of your total conversions without having to flip back and forth between accounts. You can use Google Analytics’ segmentation options in reports if you want to split your conversions up by search engine again.