getstats – promoting the understanding of statistics
Data is becoming more and more important in every sphere of society. This is underlined by companies like Google that have it as their mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Major consulting firms are acknowledging the emergence of data-driven decision making as an emerging global trend. This is a trend that is not only limited to business world. We are increasingly being exposed to statistics and data in our everyday lives.
The Royal Statistical Society is launching its 10 year campaign for statistical literacy on World Statistics Day: 20/10/2010. The vision for the campaign, known to its friends as getstats, is “a society in which our lives and choices are enriched by an understanding of statistics”. Please visit http://www.getstats.org.uk for more information and to show your support As a company operating in a data-driven industry, we are proud support this global initiative.
Drill down to search query level in Google Analytics
In our second Google Analytics post focusing on paid search, we illustrate the use of very useful reporting tools in Google Analytics for gaining some quick and actionable insights into into your paid search campaigns. A useful three-tier strategy is to
- Focus on the major performance shifts at a campaign-level
- Identify the keywords in the campaigns that are driving those shifts in performance
- Zero in on the actual search queries to look for opportunities
Lets consider the above strategy at the hand of an example from a multi-product retail site.
Step 1 – Identify major shifts in Campaign-level performance
Below we show quarter-on-quarter shifts in campaign revenue for all paid search campaigns for the first 2 quarters of 2010, from the Campaigns Report under Traffic Sources. We include filters to focus on the higher traffic non-brand campaigns. Predominantly there has been strong growth in revenue across most campaigns. We can now drill down to a keyword-level to understand which keywords are driving the strong growth in some of the categories.
Step 1: Identify major shifts in campaign performance
