Some really interesting new features are just being introduced to Google Analytics. For a good summary, I’d recommend Google Analytics releasing 4 new functions to offer more user-centric insights on Marketingland. In summary, they’re about understanding the ‘user journey’; perhaps the most interesting makes it possible to easily view how individual users interacted with the site, even across multiple sessions. If you wanted to discover, for example, how the users who actually filled in an enquiry form got to that point, this is what you need.

Tracking examples across multiple sessions can be illuminating. Recently I looked at one of our clients’ online store data, and found a buyer who visited the site 3 times in a fortnight, and even went to the checkout on the second two occasions, but didn’t buy the product. Then they came back 10 weeks later and bought the product in three clicks! And this doesn’t seem unusual.

On all of the visits after the first, the source of the visit was a Google search, demonstrating how people who return to a website often just use Google to get there, probably searching for the company or product name. If you’d just looked at the last visit, you’d credit the sale to a Google search, but that may not have been the case for the original visit.

Google Analytics releasing 4 new functions to offer more user-centric insights

There was a nice article on the MarketingLand website last month called SEO & website design: Everything you need to know, which was a good introduction to integrating SEO ideas into your website from the start, rather than trying to bolt them on afterwards.

So far, so good. Few people would disagree with this approach. However, what made this article stand out to me was that it came from a company which offers web design services and seems to practice what it preaches. Normally, good advice on SEO tends to come from specialists who are in business to salvage the disasters caused by bad web design and insufficient knowledge from the site owners.

Now, I don’t know the company concerned – I don’t know many web design companies, to tell the truth. But if only all web designers came with this sort of insight, it’d save a lot of businesses a lot of money on sorting out their search engine optimisation after the damage has been done. Next time you choose a web design company, ask some serious questions.

We all need to advertise. Even those businesses which claim not to, must have some public profile which can be counted as advertising. In “I love advertising,” said no one ever on Marketingland, author Chris Glushko says: “Consumers have long been unable to avoid advertising, often viewing it as a necessary evil. But the times, they are a-changing.”

Nowadays there are many ways to avoid advertising, especially when it comes to broadcast or online media. And if adverts don’t start getting more useful, avoiding them is exactly what buyers will do.

I recently heard the argument: “That’s where print wins out over online media for advertisers. You can’t block the ads in print”. Yes, but you’re rather forgetting that readers can ignore print completely in favour of going online.

We should all be taking the word ‘useful’ to heart. Look at every piece of promotion you do, and ask: “What’s in this for the prospect?”

Further reading: “I love advertising,” said no one ever on Marketingland