Avinash, what about these "not set" issues? Is there a way to simply not have these displayed?

My dashboard is looking very different recently, partly due to reading most of your posts n latest book. ('actionable insights' love it!) But many of these, in both keywords>>goals and in ppc>>goals for example I still get these "not set" figures.

It seems these are actually 'totals' and they don't have an effect on the other stats (apart from percentages) but they are very annoying.

Like pretty much every other web analytics tool, out of the box, Google Analytics will always give credit for the conversion (download) to the last "campaign".

Campaign is: a referring website, a email campaign, organic click, ppc ad, affiliate promotion, twitter link, etc.

Here is some quick scenarios to really help you nail this down… :)

PPC click -> email link -> conversion. Credit (the source in this report showing conversion) goes to email link.

Email link -> PPC click -> Organic click -> conversion. Credit goes to organic click.

Email link -> PPC click -> Organic click -> Direct -> conversion. Credit goes to organic click.

Direct visit. -> conversion. Credit goes to direct.

Hope this helps.

Avinash.

However, I am having trouble pinning down what Google actually defines as the "source".

So, for example, if my goal is a product download, I would expect that typical behavior for a good proportion of customers would be:

google search for products of the type they are looking for.
Browse a few and bookmark
come back direct to the sites they are interested in to download.

So, in this instance is the source of my conversions "google" or "direct"?

I have spent quite a while searching for a definitive answer to this, with no success – if you can help, or point me in the direction of some help, I would be really grateful.

Kind Regards

C

I am not sure that you are identifying "qualified" traffic. I think you are identifying converting traffic % (or outcomes %, as you say leads etc), and plotting it over time. This of course is very meaningful but it will only apply to a smaller fraction of your site.

I tend to think of "qualified" traffic as, just as an example, say all the people on the site who were "in the game" to purchase something (and compare it to overall traffic). So maybe qualified traffic is all Visitors who saw a product page. Or came on the keyword Purchase Now. Or something like that. Then you can understand two things:

1) Of all the traffic you get how many were actually in the game to
purchase, hence qualified. This is very helpful to know.

2) Of all qualified traffic what percent purchased? This tells you how
efficient you are.

It is hard to quantify qualified traffic, in a older post I had touched on that thought:

Measure the Real Conversion Rate & “Opportunity Pie”

-Avinash.

Since qualified visitors are site visitors that you identified as a desired target or lead, you can choose to throw that ultimate equation into "qualified" visitors.

For example: eCommerce — (Total visitors who bought your product) per Overall Visitors for the past two years. * Total revenue can be applied off the report to that ratio… Is that cheating??

Lead acquisition site — Total Leads per Site Visitors. You can always assign $$ value to the equation as well.

The point is, the ultimate report should reflect ultimate outcome against different date range so that your marketing or optimization efforts are reflected into the bottom line.

If possible, maybe segmentation by traffic sources could be applied to the data as well. Showing as a bar graph in one chart…

Thanks for this nice article Avinash, it really gets us thinking about the bottom line, and what to represent to key stakeholders.

FYI, the site link attached to my site is one post I wrote about that kind of reflect my point here.

http://www.zoommetrix.com/traffic-analysis/simple-way-to-identify-percent-of-qualified-visitors.html