Last month we held three Google Analytics Master Classes in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney. We had close to 1000 advertisers, agencies, bloggers, developers, and technophiles joining the events to learn more about web analytics. For those of you who made it out, thanks for your participation and interest. We hope you found the speakers helpful and learned a few new Google Analytics tricks!

Today we are making available videos of all the talks from the Singapore event. We kept each session short - no speaker goes longer than 20 minutes - so that we could offer these tips to you in convenient, bite-sized portions.

You can find Product Manager Beth Liebert’s keynote below. Please check out the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog for the full list of videos.



Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, JAPAC Google Analytics Lead, Global Technical Services

In order to help you make even more informed decisions about your AdWords keywords, ad groups and campaigns, we're excited to release a new set of reports in your AdWords account: AdWords Search Funnels (beta). Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad clicked before the conversion takes place, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.

What is AdWords Search Funnels?

AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:

Why is this useful?

"Search Funnel enables us to create a better experience for our customers by helping us understand how they search for our products," said Beth Hirschhorn, Chief Marketing Officer from MetLife, the largest life insurance company based in the United States. "It is an important tool to help de-code consumer shopping habits and thought processes, which we can relate back to our online as well as offline advertising."

By showing which ads your customers and clicked before ultimately converting, Search Funnels gives a more complete picture of the value of your keywords, ad groups and campaigns. Let's look at an example.

An online vacation service called Flyaway Vacations is running AdWords campaigns for vacation packages in Hawaii. Their ads link to a site where visitors can book any or all parts of a package that includes flights, a hotel, car rental, and surf lessons. Suppose on March 10 someone searched for "hawaii vacation" and saw and then clicked on an ad for Flyaway's Hawaii package. A click was registered in their AdWords account. Then, two days later, the same person searched for "flights to hawaii" and saw another ad for Flyaway, but didn't click. An impression was registered in Flyaway's AdWords account. Finally, three days later, the same person searched one more time, this time for "flyaway hawaii." This time they clicked the ad, visited the site, and purchased the Hawaii vacation package.

Instead of showing only a purchase conversion for the "flyaway hawaii" keyword, Search Funnels will show an assist click for the keyword "hawaii vacation" and an assist impression for the keyword "flights to hawaii". Testing the value of assist clicks and impressions is important for evaluating and understanding the true value of all of your keywords.

Search Funnels not only help you understand the keywords seen by converters, they also show you those that weren't seen. For example, in the Flyaway campaign, it's possible that another keyword, such as "hawaii surf lessons," didn't contribute any assist clicks or impressions, or last click conversions, indicating that this may be a keyword that's providing little conversion value. Assist information is an additional data point you can use when making strategic budgeting decisions, from the campaign level down to the keyword level.

Search Funnels also show the "Path Length," or average number of clicks and impressions prior to conversion, which can help you understand and target repeat visitors. Additionally they show "Time Lag," or the amount of time it takes a customer to convert after seeing or clicking on your ads for the first time, which can help you determine lead time for seasonal campaigns. These breakdowns can help you understand your customers' behavior and create strategies around that information.

Over the next few weeks, the Search Funnels beta will be rolled out gradually to all accounts in the 'Conversions' section under the 'Reporting' tab. To activate them, you must either have AdWords Conversion Tracking running or import goals or transactions into AdWords from Google Analytics. Keep in mind that Search Funnels are only available in your AdWords account (not in Google Analytics), and will only show data for keywords that show up in at least one conversion path. Search Funnel data is currently limited to search ads showing on Google.com, for ad impressions and clicks within 30 days of the conversion.

Posted by Matthew Davison, Account Strategist

This is a partial cross post from the Inside AdWords Blog

Have you ever looked at aggregated data in Google Analytics and wished there was a way to analyze individual audience segments? Google Analytics now makes this possible with advanced and custom segments.

Different types of visitors - whether new, returning, organic, or paid - behave differently to each other and have vastly different expectations. Advanced and custom segments can be a key tool to understand what your visitors want, and how to cater to them. Website owners tell us that they want data about audience segments that visit their site to improve their user experience and conversions.

You can take advantage of this new feature immediately with predefined segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors, iPhone users). You can also tailor segments and create your own custom advanced segments. You can also share custom advanced segments with other users across accounts.

I've included below examples of advanced segments that I've found most helpful.

* Bounced visits

* Visits that dropped out of the funnel

* Brand keyword visits

* Brand keyword (organic) visits

* Brand keyword (paid) visits

* Non-brand keyword visits

* Non-brand (organic) visits

* Non-brand (paid) visits

* Visits from Country X

* First-time buy visits

* Return visit buys

Head over to the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog for even more.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer

Google Analytics recently announced a new set of features which builds on last year's enterprise-class feature launch. Some of these will add power to existing capabilities, like the ability to track mobile websites/apps and using an advanced table filter to perform data analysis. Other features will provide new flexibility to further customise and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your business. These include the addition of custom variables to the tracking API and easier sharing of Custom Reports and Advanced Segments. Finally, the introduction of Analytics Intelligence allows users to set up specific alerts to signify changes in the data patterns of site metrics and dimensions over certain time periods. All these features nicely come under the mantra "Powerful. Flexible. Intelligent"

Come join Customer Solutions Engineer, Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, from our Southeast Asia office in a 45 minute webinar that will provide an overview and demonstration of these features so you can start using them for you and your clients today.

There will also be opportunity for Q&A, so please be sure to ask your questions beforehand through our Google Moderator event.

When: Friday 30th October 2009
Time: 11am Singapore and Malaysia, 10am Thailand, 2pm Sydney, 4pm New Zealand
Register for this event here

Posted by Jane Beaven, Third Party Training Manager APAC

AdWords reporting in Google Analytics helps online advertisers measure the impact of paid visitors to their site and business. The insights and actions based on these reports help search advertisers optimise their online campaigns, their overall site experience, and maximise their conversions. Recently, we've received questions from advertisers about why they see a discrepancy in their accounts between the number of Google Analytics visits and AdWords clicks.

There are a few reasons why this happens even if your Google Analytics implementation is correct. We've listed four steps below to help address this problem and keep discrepancies to a minimum.

* Step 1: Check that you have the basics covered. Check that you have linked the correct AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, applied cost data to the right profiles, and that auto-tagging has been enabled in the AdWords account.
* Steps 2 and 3: Identifying the culprits. Look through the AdWords reports to identify campaign and keyword landing pages that are contributing to the discrepancy.
* Step 4: Fix the problem. For each of the problematic landing pages check that:
o The correct Google Analytics Tracking Code is implemented
o The Google Analytics Tracking Code is in the right location in your HTML source code
o The auto-tagging parameter is present in the URL of the landing page that the visitor ends up on
o You are not using a combination of auto-tagging and manual campaign tracking parameters
o Paid visits are not being filtered out in your profile

You can learn more helpful best practices by reading the full guide on troubleshooting Google Analytics visits and AdWords clicks discrepancies.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer
This is a partial cross post from the Solutions for Southeast Asia Blog