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If you want a Google Analytics then might I recommend these two excellent books:

Google Analytics Shortcuts by Justin Cutroni
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Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
http://tinyurl.com/4cd6p8

I know both of these guys and they are very very good at what they do (so buy their books right away and you won’t regret it!).

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.

For the first question I am going to cheat. Rick just asked a question via email about Geo data and its accuracy (especially that Virgina often shows up high).

Here is my reply and I think it answers your question:

Rick,

You are right, you’ll see Virgina high because of AOL and often Georgia (Atlanta) high because of Earthlink.

Two things are changing the impact of those problems.

Both AOL and Earthlink are a lot less used and powerful than they used to be, hence the problem is reduced now. But if your customer demographic skews AOL/Earthlink then of course the impact will still be there.

Most web analytics tools are now using more sophisticated ip/geo location to identify the right visitor source. Recently I read some where that it is now 80% accurate (which is very high I think).

Besides if you compare the trends then you can still see impact from other cities.

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.

Great post. I have a question. How/where did you get the baseline numbers to make the 1st Geomap chart from? Was there an existing campaign going on that they captured these from or did the numbers come from elsewhere like a visitor geography report showing existing traffic levels from these locations?

How much faith can you put into visitor geography reports? It seems like some of the data shows the location of internet service providers used by users instead of users themselves. This can be misleading.

Do you have any suggestions for creating Geocharts in terms of software?

The graph is in good old excel so really not a big deal.

Perhaps you are struggling with how to get the data for “leads, campaigns, and tactics”.

Three things can be awesome:

1) It is just a matter of ensuring that you are tagging all the sources that you want to track. So make sure that your affiliate or banner or paid search or email or other campaigns have url’s pointing to your site that are encoded with the right tracking.

This post on the Google Analytics Blog shows one example of how to semi automate campaign tagging with the URL Builder:

* Where Did My Paid Search Traffic Go?

2) Make sure your pages are tagged properly with the web analytics code. You will need this, for example, to get a accurate count of leads / goals / conversions.

3) Good old segmentation! What your client is asking you to do is essentially segment the traffic and outcomes and layer that on the graph (which is exactly what I have done in the graphs in the post). Use the segmentation capabilities of your tool to pull out the data for segments you are interested in.

Hope this helps a bit, good luck!

-Avinash.

thanks for your blogs.

Another great post. What so amazing to me is that media today is bought and measured in silos while from the consumer’s point of view there is no difference. And in this case, offline drove traffic online.

I can envision some web team giving each other high-5’s for a successful online campaign oblivious to the fact that their traditional media counterparts just spent 10x budget which drove more people to the site.

I also would think TV, PR and Event Marketing would have the same effect to a website.

Anyways great post. You sure are lucky to work with smart guys like Nick

-SS69

http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/07/increase-in-subscribers-with-longer-gap.html

The lessons from the Audio Campaign were invaluable in understanding the dynamics of driving traffic to the site and now the client it going with a robust portfolio of campaigns (audio and more).

I am positive as the product gains wider recognition and the company matures we will end up seeing trends that we typically expect. But at this stage in the life cycle it was not surprising.

I am afraid that in this case I can’t share any specific success metrics, the client is not comfortable with that. You understand.

But I can say that the campaign was very positive in terms of the ROI (actually traffic far exceeded expectations).

The cost per acquisition was not quite what I have seen with paid search for other such companies but it was close, for this client.

The more delightful thing (as I point out in the post above) was the precious learning about how people behave and get to the site.

Thanks for the kind words, I am thrilled you found the post to be of value.

-Avinash.

One think I’d expect to see in the charts, is that the radio ads should have a longer effect i.e rather than just getting visits during the campaign, I’d expect to see a general rise even after the campaign ended (hence the quality of the campaign for a longer term can also be measured).

Secondly, a question: Is there a chance you can share some numbers such as conversion rate or cost per visit from the radio ads converted as visitors? i.e. if you invested $100K in radio, and the difference in traffic (organic, branded, direct) was 100K visitors then radio ad visits would cost 1$ each… I think this maybe be a number a lot of us could appreciate as a benchmark (even without the exact theme/vertical).

Thanks Again!
Ophir