For many online businesses this is the busiest time of the year, so we thought we'd put together a few tips to help make sure you're capturing those last minute and post-December 25th conversions. These are tips that can be implemented quickly, but which can have a big effect on the performance of your ads.

1) Check your AdWords campaign budgets. If the campaigns are regularly reaching their daily budgets, this means your ads may not be showing for every search on your keywords. Remember to budget for increased traffic during this period so you don't miss out on any potential sales.

2) Retailers, make sure you're also showing ads from December 25th onwards. In 2008, "traffic to retail websites started to increase significantly on Christmas Day*", and Boxing Day was "the busiest time of year for online retailers*." This presents a great opportunity to take advantage of increased activity on the web during this time.

*Experian Hitwise - The 12 days of Christmas - Planning for a Successful Christmas 2009.

See the Google Insights for Search graph below for search volumes related to the term 'sales' in the UK in December 2008. To learn more about using Insights for Search check out this previous post.

3) Have a look at which ads and keywords in your campaigns are performing best. If there's a certain call-to-action or special offer in your ads that seem to be attracting more customers than others, test these in your lower performing ads to see if this has a positive effect on consumer engagement.

4) Finally, if your budget is tight but you want to prioritise what you spend, filter your keywords by performance indicators like conversion rate or clickthrough rate (CTR) in the Keywords section of your Campaigns tab in AdWords. If you're already meeting your budget each day, you can then pause the keywords which are under-performing over the festive period, which should mean more of your higher performing keywords can show ads more often.

We hope you found these tips helpful, and that your AdWords ads are working to gain you even more business over the festive season!

Posted by David O'Donovan, Google AdWords Team.

A few weeks ago, we announced a set of new powerful, flexible, and intelligent features for Google Analytics. Yesterday at SES in Chicago, Phil Mui, Senior Product Manager for Google Analytics, announced an additional set of features that build on these same themes to make your life as an analyst easier.

Check out Phil's description of each new feature below, as post on the Google Analytics blog last night....


Annotations

Do you ever wonder about an inexplicable change in your traffic? Or forget exactly when you launched something, or who was responsible? After scratching your head, did you have to chase down different departments in your company or go digging through old emails to get an answer?

For instance:

• Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down?
• When did the new display ads campaign launch?
• Who's responsible for the checkout page redesign and when did it go live?

Running around asking everyone from marketing, IT, and product doesn't scale. More and more large companies are using Google Analytics, so we wanted to cut down on the mileage you need to cover to account for everything that happens to your website and online marketing.

This week, the wild goose chase is over -- you can now easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened" with the launch of Annotations in Google Analytics.

Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers.

Taking its usefulness even further: Annotations can become your central repository, or logbook, for all online marketing and website design actions within your business. So even if you have multiple marketing teams, agencies, or webmasters, or if you have employee churn or other disruptions, you can always see which events may have caused conversions to increase or decrease. No wonder this has been one of the top requested features in Analytics for such a long time!

Custom Variables now segmentable and available in custom reports

Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customise Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. In Google Analytics, not only are you able to define multiple custom variables, each custom variable is a name-value pair and can be assigned one of 3 scopes: page, session, or visitor. Each custom variable name and each value is an arbitrary string defined by you pertinent to your business needs.

When we announced Multiple Custom Variables in October, the only way to view metrics on these Custom Variables then was to open the standard "Custom Variables" report in the Visitors section. This week, a user can create an advanced segmentation based on any key, value, as well as key-value combination of all Custom Variables. In other words, if you've created a Custom Cariable, you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports.

You can also create Custom Reports with any of the key or value dimensions associated with any Custom Variable. Now, you can see how a segment defined by Custom Variables behaves along any of the metrics available in Google Analytics.

The ability to create visit segments and custom reports based on Custom Variables is critical in maximising the full potential of Custom Variables. Users can now slice and dice their metrics by decorating their site traffic with the appropriate key-value pairs.

New Analytics Tracking Code Setup Wizard

One of the more daunting tasks in setting up analytics on any site is to manually configure the tracking code for specialised situations, such as multiple subdomains, cross-domain tracking, mobile web tracking, PHP sites, campaign tagging, etc.

Well, fear no more. When you create a profile, you'll notice a new tracking code setup wizard in Google Analytics. This wizard automatically generates the appropriate tracking code according to the setup options specified by you.

New version of Analytics API

Later this week, there will be a separate announcement about a set of very exciting features to our Analytics API. Here's a little preview: support for Advanced Segmentation will now be available through the API.

In addition, new data dimensions and metrics will be made available, including those in our recently announced features.

Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics Team.

We recently launched an exciting new feature in Google Analytics called Analytics Intelligence and today we want to tell you all about it.


Analytics Intelligence will automatically alert you to significant changes in your website's traffic. In addition to automatic alerts, you can also specify custom alerts that you would like Analytics Intelligence to monitor and highlight for you!

You can find Intelligence reports in the right hand menu within your Google Analytics account. Reports are divided between daily, weekly and monthly alerts.

Automatic alerts:


Google Analytics looks at past performance information from your website and makes a prediction about your expected performance. If there is a big difference between what actually happens on your site, and what Analytics Intelligence expected would happen, you'll see a green bar appear in the bar graph above the alert details. The significance rating found to the right of every metric can help you gauge the performance of your site according to the expected target performance.


In the example below, you can see that Analytics intelligence expected an increase in traffic of 75-79%, but actual traffic was up 91.93%. This triggered Analytics Intelligence to alert us via the green bar graph. When you click on the bar graph you are then shown details of the alerts for that time period, in this case a weekly alert. Automatic alerts are applied to historic data in your account as well as all new data going forward.

Custom alerts:

With a custom alert, you control what Analytics Intelligence will alert you about. To easily create a custom alert in your account follow the steps here. When using a custom alert it's important to define what information is important to you and what exactly you would like Analytics Intelligence to monitor for you. Unlike automatic alerts, a custom alert does not trigger when used with historical account data.

Not sure why you'd use a custom alert? Here are 5 really useful applications for this new feature:

1. Revenue Drop Alert

This condition is triggered if traffic from the medium 'cpc' (meaning paid traffic), such as Google AdWords, has a revenue decrease of more than 15% compared to the same day in the previous week. We selected 15% to account for normal fluctuation, of course you can select a percentage that makes sense to your business.

We selected the 'Same day in the previous week' over compared to 'Previous day', because certain days (e.g weekends) might have lower revenue rates as a matter of fact. So we want our alert to only trigger based on week-week performance.

In our example we used Revenue as our metric which will only apply to websites using E-commerce reporting. However if you measure return on investment using goals and goal value you can just as easily change this metric to Goal Value to get the same insight.

2. Landing Page Bounce Rate Increases

This alert allows us to examine the performance of a specific landing page. If the bounce rate of the page increases by more than 20% an alert is triggered.


Use Case:


Running a large website with multiple departments separated by different categories with different stakeholders?

Example:

/electronics/
/fashion/
/kids/


You could change the dimension condition to 'Starts with' /kids/ to monitor the performance of the kids section of the website. Of course bounce rate is just a suggestion. You may try other metrics such as revenue.

3. Campaign Performance

Launching a new AdWords campaign on the Google Content Network with lots of interesting creatives for Christmas or any special promotional period? Want to be notified quickly on its performance? Create some alerts...

Alert 1:

Alert 2:

We create 2 alerts because we want to monitor performance in both directions positive / negative.

We used compared to "previous day", because an online retailer would typically see a steady increase in sales leading up to Christmas day.

The first alert lets us know that our campaign is increasing in revenue which is great! The second alert informs us that something may be wrong or the campaign may require tweaking.

If we start to see a negative trend we can click on the alert in the Intelligence interface and it will tell us what changed in our website's traffic. This can help you pin-point what area of your campaign needs work.

4. Keyword Performance

If you know a particular keyword is important to your return on investment, you may want to monitor it more closely by creating an alert. This can be especially important for seasonal keywords where many advertisers could be competing for top listings in search results.

The above alert will let you monitor any drop in expected visits, and give you the opportunity to make changes to your advertising to compensate.

For those paying close attention, this will include both organic and paid traffic. However when you view the closer details of the triggered alert you can easily distinguish between the 2 traffic mediums by using "group by" dimension

5. Country Performance

If you are specifically targeting a region using Google AdWords and want to ensure you get a consistent number of visitors, simply select the dimension Country/Territory. If you need even more granular detail, select the dimension city and provide a value such as Munich.

This alert could also be useful for monitoring non AdWords traffic such as local newspaper, television or radio advertising.



Want to learn more? Check out this YouTube video on the Google Analytics channel:





Thought of any other useful reasons to use Custom Alerts? Let us know, drop us an email or post a comment below.


Posted by Gavin Doolan, Google Analytics Team.