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.
• 
  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.

Turkeys are thawing, pies are baking, people are traveling and it is a time to be thankful. Thankful for health, family, friends and everything else in your world. So how about a little time to reflect on your internet marketing strategy and how well you are doing! Grab a cup of cider and let’s talk about some changes in your marketing that you should be proud of!

7 Changes in Your Internet Marketing That You Should Be Thankful For

1. Increased site traffic – This is s big one! Compare your website visits from last year to this year. Are they up? Then you should be thankful! That means more people are searching for you, coming to your site from social media, reacting to traditional marketing campaigns and, all-in-all, experiencing your company and wanting to learn more.
2. Blog subscribers – If you have a blog, how many more subscribers have you got over the last year? I think many of us will see that more people are subscribing to our blog. Check your RSS counts and the number of people who signed up to have your blog sent to their email. If you have more subscribers this year than last that means people like what you have to say and they are finding it valuable.
3. Social Media Presence – Take a few minutes to appreciate any positive changes you see in your social media presence. Are your pages getting more subscribers? Are people interacting with your content more on social networks? Are you getting more inbound traffic to your site from social media sites? Social media is where your next customers and your current customers already are. You should be proud that you are engaging with them and that you can see results from the time and effort you are putting in.
4. Lower bounce rate – Your bounce rate tells you the number of people that came to your site and left right away. If your bounce rate is lowering it is a good indicator that you are being found for the right search terms, you are providing the information people are looking for and that people find your website engaging. Those are all good things to be striving for with your website content.
5. Mobile traffic – We have been talking a lot about mobile and that is because more and more people are accessing the web on-the-go from their smartphones. Hopefully by now you have addressed how your site looks in mobile browsers and fixed any snafus you came across. Now that your site is tuned up for mobile visitors, you should notice more engagement from your mobile site visitors!
6. Increased pages per visit – Take stock of the stickiness of your site. Once people come to your site, see if they are sticking around to get more information. See if a person who lands on your products pages ends up reading a few blog posts or poking around in your About Us section.
7. Goal completions – Creating goals for your site makes analyzing trends on your website easy to get in a moments notice. Set up goals for clear paths and conversions you hope you are getting from your site visitors. Adding a value to those conversions also helps you value to those web visits. More goal completions mean your site is performing the way you had hoped and you should be especially thankful for that!

So this holiday when we are thankful for all we have we should spend a little time being thankful for what we have accomplished with our hard work. By regularly maintaining your website you will see that the conversions, inbound traffic and stickiness of your site continues to grow.

Are there any other internet marketing efforts you are extra proud of this Thanksgiving? Did you close more business from LinkedIn? Did you start a blog? Have you picked away at an editorial calendar that helped you organize your content? Tell us we would love to hear what has worked for you this year!

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to speak at Social Media FTW here in Portland. Social Media FTW is a nice local conference helping local businesses figure out all this social media stuff. I had the tough task of talk about social media planning, policies and measuring at the end of a long day of great content.

I tried to make it as fun as possible but thought I would take a few minutes to talk about some of the more advanced features we talked about here and give you more resources to get started.

Google’s URL Builder

You may have noticed when you click on a link on a social media site or someplace else, that when it opens in your browser it is much longer. It may contain ?utm and then a bunch of numbers. What that long link is doing is tracking where that link came from, perhaps from what network and campaign. You can do that too!

Using the Google URL Builder you can tag your links with the Source, Medium and Campaign Name of you links and keep track in Analytics how that particular campaign link worked. Take that long link, shorten it with a service like Bit.ly and post it to see how it performs.

Creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics

By creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics you can create reports tailored to your specific needs. For social media you can put multiple sources together. The example I gave was to aggregate all of the different traffic you have coming from Twitter (even though now we have t.co).

Once you have that segment set up, you can compare how your Twitter traffic is performing versus all of the other traffic from your site etc. This can tell you more about the Twitter users that come to their site, what they are interested in and how engaged they are.

Google Custom Reports

You can create a Google Custom report and just display the information that is most important to you, just the way you want to see it. To set up a custom Social Media Report you can choose the Metrics that are most important to you, then add a Filter to include all of your social media URLs for the sites you are participating on.

Once you have that set up, you will have a Custom Report that just lets you look at that data you want. You can compare social media site to social media site and even compare date ranges (how one month did to the last).

If you cannot see this video, watch it on YouTube

Multi-channel Funnels

This is so cool (in a nerdy way). Social Media is hard to track the ROI of because often it isn’t the last action someone does before completing a sale or making the deal. It DOES help in the decision making process, in building trust and in getting your content, products and services in front of new eyeballs.

With multi-channel funnels, what you will hopefully be able to do is track each touchpoint that someone had with your website. Maybe they found you on a social network first, then later they Googled you and maybe the final sale was made when they saw your PPC ad, clicked on it and contacted you. With Multi-Channel Funnels, Google Analytics is trying to track that.

With that information you can see all the different places someone came into contact with your website, notice trends in the conversion paths, see where your overlap is and get an idea of how many impressions it is taking for people to convert on your site

For Multi-Channel Funnels to work you need to go to the New Version of Analytics (top right hand corner) and have goals set up on your site to track conversions.

If you cannot see this video, watch it on YouTube

Social Interaction Analytics

With Social Interaction Analytics you can finally measure the impact of the social sharing buttons on your website. This is also in the new version of Google Analytics. What you are doing is adding some modifications to the javascript Google gives you to put on your site. After this is set up, you can see what social actions are happening on your site and compare that data against itself month on month, quarter on quarter etc.

This one is pretty complicated. Google explains it here, Social Media Examiner explains it a little better here (for us common folks).

There you go! That is enough information to get you into some serious trouble! Thanks so much to everyone who made it to my presentation. The full slides are below. Let me know if you have any questions!

Using a service like Google Analytics, you could drown in site data if given the opportunity. What if you just want to know if your website is doing better than it was before? Here are 5 easy things to measure.

You can look Year on Year, Monthly or Quarterly, whatever works best for you. Just be sure to give yourself enough time elapsed for some good data and trends to appear. To compare past data to current, drop down the date range and click on Compare to Past (as pictured).

• Time on Site UP – How much time are people spending on your website? Are they spending a few moments or are they sticking around to learn more about you, your company or your products or services? Longer time on site typically means that the user is more engaged. They could be researching you for an upcoming buy or enjoying your content.
• Multiple pages UP – Like above, seeing users visit more than one page on your website shows that your website content is engaging them. Keep an eye on the average amount of pages people are viewing. Maybe even take a look at the page they exit on and make sure that page is up to snuff. You could be losing an opportunity by not optimizing that top exit page better for conversion.
• Sharing of your content UP – Where is your website content going? Keep tabs on where your content is being shared. You can do this in a variety of different ways: set up Google Alerts to see when your name is mentioned on the internet, keep an eye on Inbound Traffic Sources and take a look at sites that are unfamiliar to you, monitor social media sites for your links and name mentions, etc.
• Links back to your website UP – As mentioned above, keep an eye on Inbound Traffic to your site. Look at all unfamiliar sites to see if someone has blogged about you or mentioned you on their website. You can also use a tool like Yahoo Site Explorer to see who is linking to you. Search Engines love inbound links so make sure your website is fostering these linking relationships.
• Bounce Rate DOWN – Your Bounce Rate is when someone comes to your website and only views a single page or leaves quickly. Generally speaking, it means they got to your website and did not find what they were looking for. Keep an eye out for pages with a high bounce rate and see if they need a tune-up. Remember though, blog posts may have higher bounce rates because people come for that single post and then move on.

There you go! That should get you enough data to feel like you have a grip on if your site is performing better than it was before. Putting together a simple report with this information is great to show your CEO, Board or even your staff. Even if you don’t have to report site data to anyone, it is good to have on hand just in case the question comes up. You don’t want to miss an opportunity because you don’t have data to back you up.

Yesterday I spoke to the Mid-Maine Chamber about Social Media for Business and I am putting the finishing touches on my Measuring Social Media presentation for Social Media FTW. Needless to say, I have been thinking a lot about measuring social media, web marketing and even SEO.

Before working at Hall, I worked for a large radio station group. Before the radio station, I worked for a small magazine. In those years of experience I don’t remember clients or advertisers asking for the ROI of their ad. It was just something they did. In the case of radio, they usually were happiest when someone came into their store and said ‘I heard your ad on the radio’.

So why the demand now on ROI for online marketing? I have a few ideas but I will stick to the point – Online marketing is more measurable than any other kind of marketing.

I am a numbers girl. I like them. I could drown in them and with online marketing you have more numbers than you know what to do with.

With web advertising, you can see exactly how many people clicked on your link, went to your landing page or converted on your site.

With SEO, you can see how many people searched for you, whether your ranking for key search terms rises or drops, how much of your website traffic comes from search engines, how many people are linking to your website and so much more.

Social media, the belle of the ball, is being falsely accused of being unmeasurable. There are lots of key data points you can measure in social media.

• Traffic to your site data
• Fan/Follower data
• How often people interact with your content
• How well some content performs over others

So where is all the worry coming from? These days we need to justify our cost and spend with actual results and not just hope. Find the data points that you feel are important to show success and start measuring!

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