Segment your Traffic with the User Defined Report

Have you ever been in the Visitors section of your favorite Google Analytics profile and wondered what the heck “User-Defined” was? Well today it's time to find out.

So, what is “User-Defined?"

The user defined variable allows you to "label" a visitor if they complete a certain action on your site, such as making a purchase or visiting a key page. These labels are useful because they last across multiple visits to your site.

These labels are often called Custom Segments (or Custom Segmentation). You can see the data from these Custom Segments in the User Defined report, which is the last report of the Visitors section in Google Analytics.

How do I add these “labels” to my website visitors?

Making use of the User-Defined report in Google Analytics requires a bit of extra coding help from your IT department or webmaster, but it’s often well worth the effort.

For example, let’s say that I want to add a label of “customers” to any visitor who reaches my shopping cart’s receipt page. In order to do this, I would add an additional line of code to the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) on my receipt page. It would then look something like this:

<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"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); pageTracker._setVar(”customers”); } catch(err) {}</script>

Notice the line in bold that includes _setVar. When this is present on a page within the Google Analytics Tracking Code, an additional cookie (called the __utmv cookie) gets set on a visitor’s computer, with its sole purpose being to identify the visitor by the label (or value) that you used in the code. If you take a look at the code example above, you will see that I used the term “customers,“ the label that I want to appear in the User Defined report.

Now, on their next visit to the site, they will be identified as a part of the “customers” segment in the User Defined report, allowing you to perform analysis on all visitors who have purchased something from your online store. Neat, huh?

Can I use _setVar when someone clicks on a link instead of visiting a page?

Yes - you can also use the pageTracker._setVar function when someone clicks on an important link on your site, or makes a key selection on an important form that you want visitors to fill out. For example, if you wanted to add a custom label to any visitor who clicks on your “Live Help” applet, you can ask your IT department or webmaster to add an “onClick” event, and give them the following line of code:

onClick="pageTracker._setVar('Needs Help');"

What will this look like in the end?

When all of your coding is complete, check the User Defined report after about a day or so and you should see something like this:

After the data has been collected by Google Analytics, you can interact with it just like you would with any other report. Click on the “Goal Conversion” tab directly above the table to see how many customers have reached key pages of your site, or use the dimensioning feature to see what sources of traffic were responsible for bringing these special visitors to your website!

Are there any other ways to use _setVar?

One neat usage of the _setVar function is to use it to exclude your own traffic from reports when using a dynamic IP address. For example, let’s say that you wanted to exclude your entire company’s traffic from appearing in reports, and your company uses dynamic IP addresses.

Because it would be nearly impossible to write a filter to exclude traffic from a dynamic IP address, you can create an HTML page that is not a part of your website and add Google Analytics Tracking Code with the call to _setVar and a label of “employees” (or something similar).

Next, you can ask each employee to visit that page from their browser of choice – this will drop a cookie on their computer, identifying them as “employees.” Finally, you can then apply a filter with the following specifications to your profile, and your internal traffic will be excluded:

• Filter Type: Custom Filter >> Exclude
• Filter Field: User Defined
• Filter Pattern: employees
• Case Sensitive: No

Some technical notes about Custom Segmentation:

1. As we just talked about, when a person visits a page calling the _setVar function, the __utmv cookie is set on their computer. This is a persistent, first-party cookie that has a lifetime of two years. This means that every time a user with a __utmv cookie returns to your site, the label assigned to the user will continue to identify them as such until they either delete the cookie or visit another page with another call to _setVar with a different label.
   
   
2. The purpose behind something like a User-Defined report - and Custom Segmentation in general - is that it is not designed to be updated very often. This label, for the most part, should be a permanent one for a visitor. You should only use _setVar on pages like a receipt page of a shopping cart, or an account registration “success” page for a visitor who becomes a member of your site. You shouldn’t use _setVar on your homepage, or use several different _setVar’s with different labels scattered across many pages of your website.
   
   
3. Google Analytics - at this time - only has the capacity to store one custom segment at any one time for one website. So if you are using multiple calls to _setVar on your site, Google Analytics can only store the latest value that a visitor runs into in the __utmv cookie. John Henson at LunaMetrics – a fellow Google Analytics Authorized Consultant - has created a custom version of the Google Analytics Tracking Code that can support multiple custom segment labels at any one time.
   
   
4. On the other hand, Google Analytics uses what they call the “first association” of the session for visitor session calculations. If you are using multiple calls to _setVar on your site, be aware that if a user runs into the first one, and then runs into the second one in the same visit, their Goal Conversion and Pages per Visit metrics would be attributed to the label of the first encounter with _setVar.
   
   
5. For page view calculations, Google Analytics uses the most recently defined value. So if a person runs into the second instance of _setVar on your site, all of their pageviews afterwards - including the current pageview - will be attributed to the second _setVar’s label, even though as we just learned in #4 above, visitor session information is attributed to the first encounter of _setVar.

A full, technical explanation of _setVar and the User-Defined Report can be found here.

Summary

The User Defined report in Google Analytics is a great place to start segmenting your traffic. With a little bit of help from your IT department, you can not only begin to collect awesome data, but you can also begin to gain advanced knowledge about what makes your VIP website visitors register, sign-up for your newsletter, or purchase something from your online store. This will definitely help you become that Analysis Ninja that Avinash Kaushik loves to talk about!

Written by Joe Teixeira of MoreVisibility, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

Help customers find their way with new Google Maps gadget

As an AdWords advertiser, it's important for you that potential customers find you on the Internet. If your business has one or more physical locations, it's just as important that customers can find where you are.

To help your customers find your business locations, you can now add customized directions to your website from Google Maps. With the Google Maps directions gadget, you no longer need to write out and update multiple sets of directions from the North, South, East or West. After all, customers are looking only for directions from their specific location, and they may not know which direction they're coming from.

(click to view larger image)

We wanted to make the process of implementing the gadget on your web site easy for you. You can pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses, a generic zip code or even a set of latitude-longitude coordinates. Customers only need to enter where they're coming from and are able to print their directions with a single click. And if they would prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

(click to view larger image)

Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. Then test and create your own directions gadget here. The Google Maps gadget is available in 23 languages.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the Google Lat Long blog for a more detailed walkthrough of the gadget's features.

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew

Use YouTube to drive awareness and conversions

If you'd like to expand your advertising to YouTube, consider using YouTube Promoted Videos. You can make a video about your business and then promote that video alongside relevant YouTube search results. Similar to AdWords, YouTube Promoted Videos lets you decide where you'd like your videos to appear on YouTube, place bids in an automated online auction, and set daily spending budgets.

Last week we launched "Call-to-Action," a new feature that allows you to add a clickable overlay to your Promoted Videos. This allows you to drive viewers to a website off-YouTube, which can help you drive more conversions and generate engaged, well-targeted traffic for your brand or product.

You can learn more about this new conversion feature of by visiting the recently launched YouTube Biz Blog. To start using Promoted Videos today, visit ads.youtube.com.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

ALM Is Not A 4 Letter Word

Asset and Liability Management (ALM): Three little letters that few marketers want to think about.

But lets face it, given the economy, delinquencies and shrinking margins, the more intelligently we can discuss our balance sheet, the more effective our marketing efforts will be to the institution's bottom line.  And the more effective our marketing is to the bottom line, the more we can justify larger budgets (or salaries!!!)

Some Balance Sheet issues to consider:

• What is the bank's margin (essentially, the difference between what you earn on loans and what you pay on deposits)?
• What percentage of your deposits are in Time Accounts (CDs)?  What does the maturity cycle look like?
• Does the institution have a positive or negative Gap (If Fed rates drop tomorrow and your deposits reprice - what will it do to the bottom line)?

In short, are you needing deposit or loans?  Should those loans be fixed or variable?  It directly ties to what your department needs to be promoting to your customers.

Finally,  if you're not on your institution's ALCO committee, ask to sit in every so often. You'll gain a much greater understanding for why upper management may ask you to change directions every couple of months.

 If you need more "ALM 101" try:

• Take advantage of education opportunities through the ABA or CUNA
• Take your CFO out to lunch
• Call MarketMatch and let us help (sorry had to get a sales plug in)

Have a great July 4th weekend.

Take care,

Eric

Using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Together -- in 60 Seconds

A couple of months ago, we published a post on making your site a closer. But, before your website can close a sale, it has to get the visitor's attention. Presenting your visitor with a landing page that's relevant to what she's looking for is the best way to start the conversation and proceed towards the conversion or sale. Of course, you'll want to pair your landing pages with the appropriate keywords and ads. But, what else can you do to get more visitors to become customers?

Google Website Optimizer can help you identify the copy, images, and page layout combination that is most effective at getting visitors to convert. The key is to use Google Analytics to find out which landing pages are least effective, so you can start working on those first. Our first Google Analytics + Website Optimizer in 60 Seconds video shows you how.



Do you have a tip on using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer together? Feel free to post a comment and share. And, be sure to check out the techie guide for more advanced Website Optimizer tips.


Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

New Interface Thursday: You said it, we're fixing it!

We released the new AdWords interface early to get your feedback on it as soon as possible. And you haven't disappointed us! We receive thousands of comments every month covering likes, dislikes, and ideas for ways to further improve the AdWords interface. We read your comments carefully to prioritize the areas to work on next.

And we've made a lot of progress on the top issues our advertisers reported, so today we wanted to share these improvements with you.

Less horizontal scrolling

When working with certain browsers and monitor resolutions (especially 1024x768), you told us you needed to scroll back and forth in order view data tables and controls. We've now condensed the layout of AdWords pages and width of columns in order to eliminate the need to scroll horizontally. If you're still encountering this issue, please let us know.

If you'd like to further condense the view of your account, remember that you can customize your columns. Try hiding columns that aren't important to you and move other columns around to quickly compare important metrics side-by-side.

Support for Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5

Those of you working with the newest versions of Safari and Firefox will be happy to know that the new AdWords interface now works with these browsers. We'll continue to work to support the latest versions all major browsers in the future.

Faster load times

One of our most important goals with the new interface was to improve the efficiency of day-to-day campaign management tasks. We've heard from some advertisers that while integrated reports and roll-up tabs help them quickly access and act on important data, the data didn't always load as quickly as they'd hoped.

We've worked to improve the speed of the interface with the latest releases, and hope you can now see a noticeable improvement. However, our work isn't done, and we'll continue to focus on shortening load times with upcoming launches. For the fastest experience, we recommend using the following browsers: Chrome, Firefox 3+, Safari 4, or Internet Explorer 8.

Searching for keywords

We heard many of you are looking for quick ways to search for keywords, ad text, or campaign names within your account. In previous posts, we talked about how you can use filtering to focus on the data that matters to you.

While text filters allow you to search and act directly on the data you see, they also take a few clicks to set up for the first time. To help you work more quickly, we've added a new shortcut that lets you quickly search by text under the 'Filter and views' menu on any tab.

Try it on your Keywords tab to quickly find all keywords containing a specific term.

Educational materials

You told us you'd like more help with transitioning to the new interface. In addition to New Interface Thursdays and our new interface website, we recently started a series of free educational webinars, featuring the product team. Sign up now for the next webinar on July 10.

If you haven't been using the new AdWords interface to manage your campaigns due to a specific annoyance, now's a great time to to log in and see how the interface has improved. And please, keep your feedback coming. Just click on the Send Feedback link at the top right corner of your account to share your thoughts.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Google Ad Planner has a new look

On June 24, Google Ad Planner turned one year old, and what a busy year it's been. Marketers and media planners worldwide now manage tens of thousands of media plans with Google Ad Planner. Additionally, with publishers directly contributing their own site data and sharing their Google Analytics traffic numbers, we continue to provide you the most accurate data measurements for your media planning. We've also steadily released a variety of new features over the year based on your feedback, including pre-defined audiences, more site filters, and additional demographic data.

To celebrate these milestones, we've given Google Ad Planner a facelift. Starting today, you can find sites and manage your media plans even faster with the redesigned Google Ad Planner interface.

Screenshots of old vs. new Ad Planner interface

We've kept all the best features from before, but the new interface streamlines your research and media planning by making features easier to find and use. Simply enter the URL to jump directly to a site's profile page and see Ad Planner's rich profile data for the site. We've also improved your campaign management by allowing you to easily merge and copy media plans.

We hope you'll take advantage of the new Google Ad Planner interface. Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out our new look and to find out more information about Google Ad Planner.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew