Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Amanda just wrote about how to find out what your IP address; but how do you go about excluding your traffic from your Google Analytics reports? With the old version of GA I knew how to input my IP address so it would get filtered in the reports;  but for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this in the new version. Thanks to a smart colleague (ahem, Monica) she pointed it out to me and I thought I’d “pay it forward” and show you!

Click on any of the images below for a closer view.

1. After you’re logged into your Google Analytics account and have selected your account you’ll see a little gear looking icon in the upper right hand corner. Like in the image to the right. This will take you to the settings for that GA account; this is also where you can set up assets like Custom Alerts, Goals, and Users.
2. You want to make sure that you’re looking at the “Profiles” which is the top tab in this section, then select Filters. This is where you can add, remove, and edit filters on your Google Analytics account. If you’re setting up filters for the first time, choose “+ New Filter.” Indicate whether you are creating a new filter for a profile or applying an existing filter to a profile.
3. The next steps are very easy – give your filter a name (you might want to filter home traffic and office traffic; this is a good place to note which is which), select filter type (it’s probably predefined), and then choose “Exclude,” “traffic from the IP addresses,” and “that are equal to” from the drop downs. This is where you put in your IP address! Click “Save” and voilà you have just filtered out your IP traffic from Google Analytics reports!

Pro tip!

Once you’ve filtered your traffic you should make an Annotation in Google Analytics. That way, if someone else is looking at your site metrics and they notice that traffic has dropped some in the last month, they can see that there is an annotation that reads, “Filtered out office IP traffic from reports” and be able to attribute that decline more easily. I try to get in the habit of making annotations whenever something significant may have changed on the site or that may affect the reports.

Each computer or device that communicates over the internet has a numerical label assigned to it – your IP address. This way your computer can be distinguished from everyone else. Think of it as your computer’s phone number.

You may need your IP address to set up a firewall, or sync a device or program to your computer. It is also handy to know so you can exclude your IP address from your Google Analytics results. By excluding your IP address you will block any data from your office network and get a more true picture of your website’s results.

There are lots of ways to figure out your IP address….

Jenika likes IP Chicken, but let’s be honest… she probably just likes the chicken.

Matt, on the other hand, likes the new Google feature where if you Google the phrase ‘IP address’, it will show your IP address above the search results.

Hope that helps! Got this question twice this week!

We talked a lot about mobile last year and we’re probably going to talk about it even more this year. Hopefully you’re all okay with that and hopefully you took our advice and reviewed the mobile visitors on your website and maybe even considered using a mobile site. Did you see what Google Analytics is doing with mobile analytics now? They are showing you the actual device that your site visitors used to browse your site.

Why does this matter?

There are so many devices that use different screen sizes and offer different browsing experiences. It’s a lot to keep up with! The more you understand about the types of devices people are using to visit your site, the better you can improve your mobile site to give them a good user experience. Of course there is always responsive design, which allows you to cater your website to all mobile and tablet devices. However, you may still want to give your mobile visitors a unique mobile experience when interacting with your business website. So, if you do have a mobile site, you can use the information in Google Analytics to customize their interaction. Not only will the device type help you understand how they are browsing but it also gives you some insight as to who is browsing. For example, if you have a higher number of Blackberry visits than iPhone visits, what can you learn about the people browsing your site?

Other cool mobile reporting

Not only can you see the device, you can see who their service providers are and “Mobile Input Selector” tells you if they are using a touchscreen, a click wheel, or another method to select information using their mobile device. You can also see top screen resolutions in a simple report format.

It can be intimidating to try to accommodate so many different resolutions and device types but, there are lots of tools to help you see how your website looks on different devices.

(I think) This is the third year in a row dubbed as “the year of mobile” so you should all be ready for this by now. I know I am interested to see what happens in the mobile world this year – how voice search changes mobile browsing and how that will affect mobile advertising.

I am always intrigued to learn new and creative ways that businesses/brands are using mobile marketing. Is it to nerdy to say that I’m excited to see what mobile will bring to us this year? Oh well, it’s true, bring it on 2012!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Photo credit: Artbandito

Every year Santa makes a list and checks it twice. What is he doing when he checks it multiple times? I think he’s digging deeper into his memory to decide which list each boy and girl will eventually end up on.

Just like when Santa makes “the list” as the first step in assessing the behavior of the children; we look at web analytics to assess the visitors of our website.

It’s easy to see high level data about your website like how many people have visited your site in the past month or what the site’s bounce rate is – but what about their behavior? Google Analytics makes it easier for you to understand the types of people visiting your website using Behavior Reports (Figure 1.1 below).

What can you see in Behavior Reports? What insights can you learn from these reports?

New vs. Returning – This report shows a ratio between the new traffic as compared to the returning traffic to the website in a given time period.

• If you have a high percentage of new traffic that means you’re doing a good job of making your site visible online.
• If it’s low then you’ll want to review things like your SEO, social network profiles, content strategy, and even directory listings to include your URL. You might even want to create a PPC campaign to obtain new traffic.
• If you have a high percentage of returning traffic that means that the content on your site is helpful and people are continuing to return for more. Maybe you have a login section for current customers or a training section that gets a lot of return visitors. If this is the case, make it easy for your returning traffic to find the content they are seeking quickly.
• If your site isn’t getting a lot of return traffic you might was to assess things like your blog or FAQ section. Is there information important enough for people to return back?

Frequency vs. Recency – This report helps indicate how interested people are with the information provided on your website.

• One view displays Counts of Visits (frequency) and the other displays Days Since Last Visits (recency).
• Counts of Visits shows the number of times users have viewed the site in a given time period, how many pages were viewed as compared to the percentage of the total visits.For example (Figure 1.2 below) you can see that 54 visitors have come to the site 9-14 times in the given time period and viewed 129 pages in that time frame. In most cases you’ll notice that those that only visit the site once account for a majority of the visits in a certain time frame. You may notice the counts of visits decrease after 1 and then spike back up at 3 or 7 which might help you understand the research/buying cycle of your audience better.
• Days Since Last Visit shows similar information but you’re looking at how many days lapsed since the previous visit. Many times, if your site gets a high percentage of new traffic most of the visits are coming from people who account for “0 days since last visit” in this report. However, this report will help you understand how often the people that are using your site are returning back for more information. Do you post your blog on the same day each week and people are returning to the site because of that? This can also give you some feedback about offering a promotion or changing certain sections of your site to keep it fresh for users that are returning.

click to enlarge | Figure 1.1

click to enlarge | Figure 1.2

Engagement

• The engagement report is measured by Visit Duration or you can see Page Depth. These are similar to the data you can see in the Overview Report (Avg. Time on Site and Pages/Visit). With this report you can see how engaged your site users are by understanding how long they are spending on your website and how many pages they are viewing each time they visit.
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  click to enlarge

  The Visit Duration report shows the duration in seconds and the respective visits of each time range. This shows you how engaged with the site the users are in relation to the time they are spending on the site. For example (right), you can see that 187 visits occurred where the users stayed on the site between 181 and 600 seconds (3 – 10 minutes). Pay attention to the amount of time that you see users are the most engaged and viewing the most pages; this could be a goal to aspire to for your site. If you notice that people that stay on the site for 181-600 seconds have the highest pageviews (except for 0-10 segment) then look to this as a goal for the site; to have the avg. time on site be 3 minutes.

• You can understand the engagement of the site visitors in a different way by looking at the Page Depth, or how many pages people are visiting when they come to your site. Chances are the highest number will be 1 page and then the traffic will taper off; make sure the traffic doesn’t merely drop off.

Dig Deeper into the Data

These reports are just the tip of the iceberg. You can always learn more about your site’s user behavior by adding second dimensions to the reports. For example, if you’re reviewing new traffic vs. returning traffic you can select “source” as a second dimension. This will break down and show you, of those who came to your site via “Bing” how many were new and how many were returning in a given period. Also, with each report you can add advanced segments to filter the report in order to obtain more granular data. You can always dig a deeper to understand your site traffic behavior better.

Remember, it’s all relative.

You better not pout and you better not cry! There is no ideal number for everyone to try to reach for each of these reports. The key is to understand your site goals and which milestones you should track to make sure you’ll meet your goals. Plus, when it comes down to it the more you learn about your audience the better you can serve them; just like Santa finds out what all the good children want for Christmas.