Google Analytics is not the only product to announce some cool new features this week. The Website Optimiser team have also been busy introducing an Experiment API and a new reporting feature called over time charts. As you'll know from previous posts, Website Optimiser allows you to test page variations on your site to find out which content and design drives the most sales and leads for you. Read about new features below, and visit our resources to learn more.

Over time charts

If you've recently looked at your Website Optimiser reports you may have noticed something different. This week we launched another new feature designed to help you better understand the performance of your variations: over time charts.

With over time charts you can see the cumulative conversion rate of each combination over the life of an experiment. This can give you a better understanding of how your site is performing. The new charts are available for all Website Optimiser experiments, and you'll find them on the reports page.

Website Optimiser Experiment Management API

The Experiment Management API allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimiser interface. Creating and launching a Website Optimiser experiment involves a series of steps. Depending on the design of your website, the content you want to test, and how technical you are, these steps can be easy and quick or potentially difficult.

One of the most important steps in creating an experiment is adding the Website Optimiser tags to the test pages. This step can be problematic if your website uses a content management system or a third party shopping cart since it can be difficult to directly access the code for these pages.

With the Website optimiser Experiment Management API, these platforms can integrate Website Optimiser directly into their services. This week two platforms have launched their integrations: CrownPeak and Blast Advanced Media's Motivity CMS.

Both integrations allow you to create and launch Website Optimiser experiments without touching your website's code. Many other platforms are working on integrating with Website Optimiser, and we're excited about helping more businesses increase their conversion rates through website testing.

We also have set up a special Google Group for the Website Optimiser Experiment Management API. It's a place where you can discuss implementations and get questions answered. Visit the group here.

If you'd like to learn more about using the Website Optimiser API, we've got a number of resources for you. First and foremost is the Website Optimiser API site on Google Code. There you'll find complete documentation on the API and our Getting Started guide.

Free webinar
Hear about the new API from an expert, sign up for our free webinar run by the Google Website Optimiser team on Wednesday, 28th October at 5pm GMT (10AM PDT). Register here.

To learn more about Website Optimiser you can read our previous posts on the Conversion Room:

Website Optimiser - Identifying high value pages to test

Introducing the Beginners Guide to Website Optimiser


You could also check out the Website Optimiser YouTube channel.


Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team.

Yesterday our colleagues in the US announced a range of new features for Google Analytics. Just in case you missed their announcement, we wanted to highlight these new features on the Conversion Room too.

Each feature will offer you increased flexibility to customise and adapt Google Analytics for your business. We are also really excited about Analytics Intelligence - but you can find out more about this later in the post!


Check out the overview of each new feature below, written by Dai Pham from our US Google Analytics team in yesterday's announcement on analytics.blogspot.com.


Powerful.


Power users have asked us to add even more data manipulation and analysis features to Google Analytics. We've been listening, and are adding the latest power features to expand Google Analytics enterprise-class capabilities.

• Engagement Goals...and more of them! Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Watch this short video on goals to learn more.


• Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can measure your mobile marketing efforts more effectively. If you're optimising content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks. (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your normal website coming from high-end, Javascript-enabled phones.

iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Take a look at the SDKs (software development kits) and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you'll be able to see breakdown data on mobile devices and operators in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!

• Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools that you can use to perform advanced data analysis. Earlier this year, we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. So, you could see how much revenue your site received from visitors in London who searched for "bean bag". You could then "pivot" by source and see revenue by search engine for each of these city+keyword combinations. Here's a quick tutorial video.


Now we're adding Advanced Table Filtering. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Watch this video to see an example of how you could filter thousands of keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30%, and that referred at least 25 visits.

Together, these three power features let you perform in-depth, on-the-fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.

• Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment.

Flexible.

Every enterprise has unique web analytics tracking and reporting needs. Today, we're enhancing two of the tools that organisations use to adapt and customise Google Analytics. We're adding multiple customised variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom reports and Advanced Segments.

• Multiple Customised Variables: Multiple Customised Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customise Google Analytics and collect the unique site data most important to your business. If you've used the _setVar() function, the concept of customised variables will be familiar, but we've taken it a step further and added visitor, session and page-level scoping. You can use customised variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviours on your site. For example, you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged in or not logged in) and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). This incredibly powerful customisation capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple customised variables will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks but you can start learning more about them now.

• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features that we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report that you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account, and a pre-formatted Sales report template will be imported automatically. You can also now select the profiles with which you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports.

Intelligent.

Wouldn't it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Starting today, it can!

• Analytics Intelligence: We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic-driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday, or let you know that bounce rates of visitors from Manchester dropped by 70% two weeks ago.

Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.

• Customised Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or directly in the user interface when the changes actually occur.

Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then keep an eye out for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!





We hope you're looking forward to trying out these new features in your account. We will focus on some of these features in more detail on the Conversion Room in our upcoming posts, showing examples of how and when to use each feature. In the meantime, let us know what you think of our Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent new features - leave a comment or send a mail.

Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team

There are lots of different ways to learn more about Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimiser (in addition to visiting the Conversion Room!)


If you'd like to listen to an expert explain practical ways to get better results from your advertising or find out how to get the most from Google analysis tools, check out the resources below....


Google AdWords webinars:


Webinars are online trainings you can access from your computer. You can find full details of all our UK webinars here. If you would like to sign up for webinars in another language you can check out what is available here.


We've picked out some upcoming webinars that you may find interesting:

Conversion Optimiser
Learn how you can get more conversions at a lower cost per conversion from your AdWords search and content campaigns.
11/11/09 3pm Register now

Make your website work: 10 ways to turn visitors into buyers
Explore the common website design pitfalls and techniques to avoid them.
18/11/09 3pm Register now

Tracking your AdWords return on investment
Learn how to better convert online clicks into profit for your business using AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics.
02/12/09 3pm Register now

Trainings:

Seminars for Success are in depth trainings run by Google accredited organisations. You can find some upcoming Google Analytics sessions being held in Glasgow by visiting this website. You can also see where other seminars are taking place around the world.


Events:

Google will be hosting AdWords and Google Analytics sessions at the eCommerce Expo, London, October 20th and 21st. Find out more about these sessions here and register for the event for free.


We hope you can make it to some of these trainings. If you do, let us know what you think - leave a comment below or send an email.



Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team.

In our previous posts on the Google Content Network we discussed the importance of tracking your performance using conversion tracking, the networks tab and other easy to use tools within AdWords.

Today, to help you better measure the value of your display advertising campaigns, we're announcing a new feature called View-through conversion reporting on the Google Content Network.

Display ads are influential in driving purchase consideration and the overall awareness for your product or service, and with View-through conversion reporting, you can better measure the impact of your display ad campaign for those instances where your ad is seen, but not immediately clicked on. More specifically, View-through conversion reporting measures the number of conversions that occurred within 30 days of a display ad impression for which there was no ad click generated.

By using View-through conversion reporting, you can more easily compare the performance of your Google Content Network campaign with the performance of your other display advertising campaigns. This feature can also help you determine the best ways and places to advertise, how best to optimise your display ad campaigns, and, ultimately, how to spend your advertising budget more effectively.

Here is an example of how View-through conversion reporting works: Let's say you're selling pet food online and you're measuring conversions on your site's shopping cart "Thank You" pages. You've been testing running an image ad with a cute cat in it on the Google Content Network. Previously, you could only see if a visitor clicked on your ad and went on to purchase on your site. But if a user saw your colourful image ad, and later thought to visit and buy from your site, you had no way of knowing that your cat image ad had generated this business.

Now, if a visitor sees your display ad, does not click on it but then visits your site within the next 30 days to purchase cans of cat food, you'll see a View-through conversion reported on your Campaigns tab in AdWords. With this feature you can much more clearly assess how your display campaigns are impacting visitor behaviour.

Visit the Campaigns tab in AdWords to activate the optional View-through conversion reporting column. You'll need to have AdWords Conversion Tracking installed for View-through conversion reporting to work for your campaigns. However, the good news is if you have conversion tracking enabled in your AdWords account, View-through conversion tracking will automatically work for your display ads.

To learn more about View-through conversion reporting on the Google Content Network, you can visit our Help Centre. We hope this feature will provide you with better information about your campaigns and help you get the most out of your display advertising campaigns.

Posted by Ciaran Russell, Google AdWords Team.

Today, we’re very delighted to unveil our latest wave of Google Conversion Professionals.

Our network of GCPs operate across the UK and Ireland and can help you to define your business and website goals and gain valuable insights into your customers.

Here are some of the services they provide:

• Full implementation of analytics and site optimisation tools
  
• Improvement of marketing effectiveness
  
• Website enhancement through analysis and testing
  
• Help tailoring your product & service proposition for maximum results
  

The latest additions to our network include:

• Vivaki (part of the Publicis Group)
• Latitude Group
• Epiphany Solutions
• iSpy Search Marketing

You can read more about our partners and how to contact them from the 'expert help' tab, where you can also read case studies showing the impact our GCPs have had on different businesses.

To hear tips and advice from our partners you can also check out this YouTube video.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Programme Manager

In August, we posted a Conversion Optimiser case study and Patrick left a comment asking how to manage campaigns effectively once you have enabled Conversion Optimiser. So today we are responding with tips on how to manage your bids to find the most cost-effective solution for your business. Thank you all for your comments to date, keep them coming!


On average, advertisers using Conversion Optimiser see a 21% increase in conversions while decreasing their CPA by 14%*. However, to get the best results for your business, you will need to set your maximum CPA (cost-per-acquisition) carefully, potentially trying a few different CPAs before deciding what level works best for you.

*This analysis compares the performance of Conversion Optimiser campaigns with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimiser. The actual impact will vary from campaign to campaign

How do I decide on a maximum CPA?
In order for your business to be profitable, you will have a maximum amount that you can spend on each sale or lead before advertising costs exceed the value from the successful conversion. This is your break even point.

Take time to work out how much you can, or are willing to, spend securing conversions, while still returning a profit. Once you know this, you can set a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid and Conversion Optimiser will manage your CPCs for maximum results. There's no hard and fast rule when setting CPAs - but you will know your business best.

How can I maximise conversions and ROI?

Setting a maximum CPA is similar to setting a maximum CPC in that you can restrict the traffic you are getting for a campaign if your CPA is set too low. If you find that you are getting fewer conversions than you would like, try increasing your maximum CPA in small increments. Let Conversion Optimiser run for a few days at a CPA level that you want to try and monitor the results by seeing how many conversions you get at this new cost, and how much profit you make at this new level.

Remember, the lowest cost-per-acquisition may not always lead to maximum profits for your business. If you can get more conversions at a higher price-per-conversion, do the total additional profits outweigh the additional costs?

A simple example...
Say you make €10 profit on each t-shirt you sell before AdWords costs. If your average cost-per-conversion is €2, and you are getting 100 conversions per week at this cost, then you would make €800 profit on the sale of t-shirts after advertising costs.

However, if you raise your maximum CPA to get an average cost-per-conversion of €3 you get 200 conversions per week, because by bidding more you get more conversions. You would then make a profit of €1,400 after advertising costs.

Let Conversion Optimiser run for a few days at each CPA level that you want to try, then monitor the results.

Do I focus on specific problem areas?
As CPAs are set at the ad group level, changes to the maximum will affect all keywords in the group. If you find that some of your keywords are performing well at your current CPA, but you would like to improve the performance of others, you may consider breaking out your ad group into smaller groups.

Try leaving your top performers in the current ad group and placing some of the weaker keywords into a new ad group within the same campaign. Now you can adjust your CPA on your top performers to get additional conversions, while monitoring and tweaking keywords with less traffic to ensure that they are profitable for you.

I need a lower CPA to remain profitable, what impact will this have?

Say you need to lower your current cost-per-conversion for some products to maintain profitability. In this case, gradually reduce the Ad Group max CPA over time and monitor the results. You should expect to see a decrease in traffic, clicks and conversions as you lower your max CPA. However, each conversion should fall to or below your desired cost level.

I want to make the most out of my budget

If you are not meeting your campaign's daily budget, but are willing to do so, then you can try raising the max CPA for some of your ad groups. This lets you see how many more conversions are available at the higher CPA level.

Alternatively, create a new ad group, with new keywords, for your campaign. Conversion Optimiser allows you to test broad match keywords to see what your potential customers are searching for, while still looking to only show your ads when a conversion is likely. Using the search query report, find out what specific keywords are leading to conversions and add these directly to your campaign for maximum results.

To learn more about Conversion Optimiser visit this website, where you can find out how to activate Conversion Optimiser in your AdWords account today.

Posted by Faustina Clifford, Google AdWords Team.