So we did a redesign, here’s what the 2 pages looked like:

Original Page

New Layout

The goal was to create a cleaner look that emphasized the desired action by isolating it above the fold. The result using website optimizer for a month showed only the chance of a slight improvement.

Original Vs New Layout

Then we added a video spokesperson to the new layout.

New Layout With Video Spokesperson Added

The video contained a spokesperson that highlighted one or two important reasons to choose us and asked visitors to enter their zip code in the box. We pitted this new page with video against the original in 2 separate experiments. In the first, the video was present but did not start automatically, the player needed to be clicked to launch the video.

In the second, the video was launched automatically.

You want to take a guess which was the winning combination?

The combination where the video needed to be activated by the searcher was the only combination that showed significant gain and it was dramatic. The desired action was taken 70.5% more often and Google was very confident that should continue – 99.9%!

Website Optimizer Shows 70.5% Increase

I learned a long time ago when selling yellow pages that when people get information on their own they trust it more. I always believed that was true of search as well. Now, I’ll add video to that list.

My takeaway from this experiment is that if you want someone to do something you have to tell them to do it— just wait until your asked to tell them. We’ve added this same spokesmodel to some local sites. She’s telling the site’s visitors to go ahead and a make a phone call, but only after that information has been politely requested.

(Full disclosure: At this time I have no affiliation with Live Face On Web. However, based on this experience, we are currently in negotiations to become a reseller of this product. Whether we do or not I do not yet know.)

Let’s face it, we never considered these metrics prior to the GA installation, and then after we hooked up GA, we had to do searches on Google just to find out what these terms meant. And now we use these terms as if they are truly meaningful. Well no more! It’s time to add a 12th internet marketing skill…

From now on we are going to use only the metrics that we can tie directly to revenue and profitably. I know that’s boring when compared with exciting things like “engagement”, believe me I know, I love it when you talk that way. However, times being what they are we must consider the more practical aspect of dollars actually going into our pocket.

Here are the Ratios and Metrics I’m going to watch from now on.

Clicks to Phone Calls Ratio. This measures your sites ability to get people who are interested in your service to call for an appointment or request a free estimate or some thing like that. Whatever the equivalent is in your company you know.

For service businesses, your website’s main job, perhaps its only job is to generate phone calls. Yet, I bet very few people are actually measuring this right now. This will helps us measure the effectiveness of our most basic internet marketing skills, keyword analysis, copywriting and website design.

% Calls Booked- This measures your ability to convert phone calls into appointments or estimates.

As a former Yellow Page rep I can remember telling clients over and over again, “All we can do is make your phone ring.” But now as part of the service we provide, we listen to our clients web calls and provide feedback.

This metric is far easier to take action on then avg time on site or the others to which we typically pay attention and the opportunity is tremendous, really. To fully comprehend the power of this metric, imagine raising booking % from 40% to 60 %. This is not a 20% increase… it is a full 50% increase in the amount of leads your generating and you didn’t need to spend anymore on advertising to generate it!

Closing % – this measures your company’s ability to turn leads into customers

Because of this metric’s proximity to actually collecting money it is already pretty well regarded by most; but I would venture there is still some room for improvement.

Avg Sale $ – What is the average sale?

Don’t leave home without this one and definitely don’t talk to any advertising people without knowing it.

Profit Margin%- the percent of each sale that goes into your pocket.

I think of this number as the dollars that make it into your pocket on your last sale— expressed as a percentage.

Focusing on and improving these stats can help you stretch your advertising dollar and bring in more sales. Which is why we pay attention to analytics in the first place. Imagine logging into your analytics package and seeing the number of unique phone calls you generated expressed as a percentage of unique visitors. Next you see the % of these calls that were booked and finally how many turned into customers and how much was spent. I see this as being the default analytics package of the near future for local service businesses. The tools are actually available for this right now, it’s just a matter of putting them together.

*Here’s a little secret: If you get the numbers for your company for each of the 5 metrics above and multiply them, it will give you the single most important number in your entire internet marketing campaign… more on that next time.

These are visitors who came to your site without first visiting a search engine, another site or some marketing tactic.

This post will take that last part – “some marketing tactic” a little further and demonstrate how small businesses can learn more about traffic from other online advertising by having Google Analytics give you all the goodies that most other portals won’t show you.

Then it will show you how to segment Direct Traffic to help figure out how many visitors came through a bookmark (favorites) and how many likely came through some offline media like yellow pages.

Let’s start by looking at Traffic Sources in GA:

Traffic Sources Google Analytics

Looking at the 2 different line items for superpages.com in the above report provides a good example of how Google Analytics reports traffic. In a nutshell, Google will report traffic from all “free sources” and show it to you. However, if you pay for it, it will get buried in Direct Traffic (unless it’s Adwords… now that’s marketing). So, if it comes from superpages.com for free, this is a referral and GA shows it , however if it is superpages pay per click … it will go into Direct Traffic – that’s what Digital Dave, means when he said “some marketing tactic.”

So, how did I get Superpages/PPC out of the Direct Traffic bucket and have it report like other sources? The answer is you tag the url. That sounds complicated but Google makes it kindergarten simple. Simply, go to the the Google Url Builder and create the new url and then use that at the sites you want to track. For superpages I created a new url for each category (keyword) I wanted to track and then let the magic begin.

Now instead of this traffic getting mixed in with Direct Traffic I get this:

Superpages.com PPC Traffic As Reported In GA

This is already way more information than I would get from the reports provided by Superpages but I can also segment it by keyword, city, landing page or anything else I can do with GA.

Perhaps even more important is that my Direct Traffic bucket now represents uh… well… direct traffic; so I can learn more about how folks are really ending up on the site… and since this traffic is VERY high quality and converts at twice the rate of Organic traffic and Three times the rate of PPC understanding it could be critical to future marketing decisions. To get a clearer picture a few more graphics will help; but first back to Digital Alex… where he explains how to figure out WHAT pages are being bookmarked on your site, which is cool info.

And then you can use this same technique to segment by Visitor type to determine which people came from bookmarks and which typed in the url directly, which in my case, probably means they came from yellow pages. Also, you can find out where the searchers are located, which is obviously important for a local business to learn whether the traffic is really quality.

Segmenting Direct Traffic In Google Analytics

Now I click on VISITOR TYPE and see this:

New vs. Returning Visitors

Using some educated guesses, I can surmise those who are returning, originally found the site through search engines, bookmarked it and returned later. The new visitors typed the url in directly and since the url is not intuitive I further surmise most of these folks came through yellow page advertising.

Now, by clicking Goal Conversion, I can see which is converting at a higher rate.

New Vs Returning Conversion Rate

This actually surprised me… I had sort of assumed the conversions from direct traffic were latent conversions and represented business obtained from our search marketing; but having seen this it looks more like it came from yellow pages or another offline source… yellow pages dissed again! This really shows how important it is to segment the traffic to better understand it. Without this information we could have easily underestimated the business coming from offline media.

If I wanted to be certain which offline media it was coming from I could do that… here’s how:
Tracking Offline Advertising With Google Analytics

And believe it or not if I wanted to track the phone calls from the Yellow Pages using Google Analytics, I can do that easily. Go to Mongoose Metrics buy a unique telephone number and place it in the ad. Mongoose Metrics will allow you to configure the phone number to a hidden page on your site so you can track the call to a thank you page on your site. Then you just need to set that up as a goal in GA. Here’s how it will look when your done:

Tracking Phone Calls In Google Analytics

But don’t forget to tag the url to the hidden page or the phone call will show up in Google Analytics as… you guessed it – Direct Traffic.