UK-based websites are 5 percentage points better than their US peers at keeping mobile users engaged (with a lower bounce rate), and 2.5 percentage points better at keeping the users from desktop / laptop computers engaged. For bounce rate from email marketing, the difference was also 5 percentage points (a 14% better performance from UK websites). The comparison is based on the Google Analytics data from 209 UK companies and 95 US companies collated by Littledata. The British web industry has benefited from earlier smartphone adoption in the UK (81% vs 75% in the US; source: MarketingLand), and overall greater internet usage from UK consumers (source: Econsultancy). That should put UK-based developers in a great position to sell their experience to other countries with increasing internet adoption An example is MADE.com, a London-based furniture retailer which has used superior online customer acquisition to drive growth across the UK and continental Europe. Littledata founder, Edward Upton, explains: “It’s usually hard to get a hold of industry data to compare digital product performance against similar companies, but Littledata’s benchmarks provide a simple way for companies to find website features that are underperforming.” If your website beats those benchmarks that should not stop you improving. Whilst it’s great to know you’re doing well in a particular area, there are many comparative metrics you can check with our benchmarks to fully understand your performance overall. If your site is struggling with engaging users, then check out our suggestions on improving your bounce rate . Want to know how your site performs? Head over to Littledata Benchmark page and click 'Benchmark your site' to check your performance against others. How Littledata benchmarks work? We gather data from thousands of Google Analytics profiles, and anonymise them in a series of benchmarks, to give insight into how your marketing efforts are paying off. With this benchmark data, you can stop being in the dark about how your website performs and sign up to see how your site compares. Our customers also receive daily insight into site or app performance with our actionable trends reports. You can explore these and other benchmarks via Littledata Benchmark index page.   How would you use benchmarks in your daily work? Leave your comments below.

Google Analytics custom campaign tracking is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Let's say you were promoting your new ebook across social media and emails, how would you know which social post or email blast was the most effective? That’s where Google campaign parameters come in (also referred to as UTM). You simply add them to your URLs, which are then used in your web-based, email or ad promotions. When someone clicks on them, the custom information linked to these URLs via parameters is sent to your Google Analytics reports. If you don’t tell Google the specifics of your campaigns, then they will be rolled into existing buckets without the ability to identify them. This most commonly happens with emails and social posts that by default get classified as referrals. But once you start tagging your campaigns, you will see those social initiatives and email newsletters separated by campaign names and other information you provided. Tagged up links can also be used in email signatures, listings on other sites and social media profiles. By using campaign tagging you will understand better which URLs have been most effective in attracting users to your site or content, for example you'll see which: Email newsletter brought you the most traffic Ad was best at bringing you converting visitors Facebook post engaged the most users If you have goals set up, then you will also see how visitors from individual campaigns convert on your website. Using custom campaign data in reports You can access custom campaign data in Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns report, where you will see your various campaigns based on the parameters used in URLs. You can also switch between viewing your campaigns by source and medium tags that you’ve used. Another report you can use is the Assisted Conversions (under Conversion > Multi-Channel Funnels) that summarises how your channels, or campaigns, contribute to your conversions. To see the campaigns, you need to click on 'Other', find 'Campaign' and select it. Now you will see data related to your campaigns only. Check Google's guidance on understanding the Assisted Conversions report. Be consistent Consistency is very important in campaign tagging so make sure that the parameters you use in your campaigns are exact. For example, if you use email, Email and E-mail, Google Analytics will record them as three different mediums in your reports. So, set your naming conventions and if you have a bigger team, then agree on what they are and make sure everyone is aware of them. What tags can you use in your campaigns? There are five types of information you can pass on with the tags/URLs. Three of them should always be used: Campaign source (utm_source) - identifies where the traffic comes from, eg newsletter, google. Campaign medium (utm_medium) – advertising or marketing medium, eg cpc, email. Campaign name (utm_campaign) – what the campaign is called whether it's a promo code or specific promotion, eg winter sale. The other two, whilst not required by Google, are useful for tracking additional information: Campaign term (utm_term) - identifies paid search keywords if you’re manually tagging your paid keyword campaigns, eg red shoes. Campaign content (utm_content) – helps differentiate between same type of content or links, useful when doing AB testing or using multiple calls to action, eg logo or text link. How to tag your campaigns? It’s easier than you might think. You can do it manually if you know how, but the available URL builder tools online make it super simple to tag your links correctly. But if you're using Adwords or Bing then you can enable auto-tagging so you don't have to worry about tagging them. For websites use the Google URL builder tool to append URL parameters. For Android, use the Google Play URL builder tool to append URL parameters. You also must have Google Play Campaign Attribution set up in your Android SDK. For iOS, use the iOS Campaign Tracking URL Builder to append URL parameters. You must use Google Analytics iOS SDK v3 or higher for this to work. For manual tagging, you need to enter a question mark after the URL and before adding your parameters. Then pair up the parameters with their values, eg utm_source=newsletter, and separate campaign parameters with an ampersand. After the question mark, parameters can be placed in any order. You'll end up with a link that'll look something like this: http://www.littledata.io/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=welcome, which is ready for use in your promo activities. Auto-tag your campaigns To make campaign tracking and tagging simpler, we have created a tool in Google Sheets that automatically creates a tagged up link. You'll need to fill the values for parameters and the formula will do the rest for you. To use it, you'll need to make a copy to store in your own Drive (via File option). Get campaign tracking sheet with URL builder   Got questions? Comment below or get in touch!

Demographics and interests reports in Google Analytics give you additional insight about your users, allowing you to do analysis based on age, gender and interest categories. You get a much better idea of who your users are and the setup is so quick to do, there's no reason not to. To get this information, you need to do minor tweaks to your Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Those changes will allow Google to share anonymised data about your site or app visitors, and once set up, you can use this information to understand the behaviour patterns of your users by different profiles. You will be able to see: If a particular age group converts more Whether you get more visits from males or females from a particular country or city If your users are more into travelling, movies or social media You'll also be able to: Build remarketing lists Build segments for more detailed information about your users Target your ads to specific users What reports will you get? Demographics Overview: snapshot view of your users by age and gender Age: Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions metrics by age group (below 18 are not included) Gender: Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions metrics by gender Interests Overview: top 10 interests of your users in 3 areas: Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments and Other Categories Affinity Categories (reach): view of users by their lifestyle with Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions metrics broken down by Affinity Categories In-Market Segments: view of users by their product-purchasing interests with Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions metrics broken down by In-Market Segments Other Categories: more specific view of users with Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions metrics broken down by Other Categories How does Google get this data? Google collects demographics and interests data from the third-party DoubleClick cookie for web traffic and anonymous identifiers for mobile app activity, like the Android Advertising ID and the iOS Identifier for Advertisers. But Google is unable to collect this data if the cookie or anonymous identifier isn't present, or if there's no profile information available. As a result, this data may only be available for a subset of your users. This will be shown on the report as a % of traffic the report represents. When is threshold applied? There are occasions when data is withheld from your reports to ensure the anonymity of users. For example, this might happen when you don’t have enough data for a particular age range or gender. When the threshold has been applied, you will see a notification below the report title. 3 simple steps to set this up 1. Enable the feature in Google Analytics Go to Admin > Property > Property Settings. Scroll down to Advertising Features, and set the option to Enable Demographics and Interests Reports to ON. Now save. 2. Enable the feature in Google Tag Manager Go to edit your GA pageview tag > Configure Tag. Under the tracking ID, tick the Enable Display Advertising Features box. Save the tag, and you've got one last step to do. 3. Enable the report in Google Analytics For this go to Audience > Demographics > Overview report. Click Enable, and you're all set. You should see your demographics and interests data within 24 hours of enabling the feature. We also provide consultancy services if you need help with more advanced setup.   Further reading: Tracking registered users with Google Analytics and GTM V2 How to use demographic targeting in AdWords  

Wondering why your bounce rate is so high and people are not sticking around? Here are some methods you should consider to improve user engagement with your content, conversion rates and sales. Bounce rate is the percentage of single page sessions or visits where the person didn’t engage further than the one page within your site. You shouldn't worry about the high bounce rate if your site visitors are meant to find what they were looking for on a single page. But if it's important for your site that users stick around for either reading more content or going through further pages that lead towards conversion, then you should review your options for reducing the bounce rate. By decreasing the bounce rate you can improve your ability to engage more users and eventually get them to convert. There are a few reasons why you would have a high bounce rate: Single page site or landing page Incorrect setup Wrong audience Design Usability User behaviour Low quality content You can identify your worst performing content by looking at the bounce rate in the Landing Pages report (under Behaviour > Site Content). If there is a high percentage of people leaving the pages without continuing their journey, then review those pages with the suggestions below. You should also check the average time spent on those pages. If users are leaving after a short amount of time, then you should look closely at what may be driving them away and if there are any improvements you can make to keep the visitor on the page for longer, or how to encourage them to visit other pages. Guide users through your website with additional links Users might leave your site after seeing a single page that contained the information they were looking for. If they got what they wanted and don’t care about actively exploring your website, then think about similar pages within your site that might be of interest to your users, and link to them within the content. You could link to: Another blog post covering similar topic from a different angle A case study to increase the credibility of your work Related blog post that the reader might like Best practices of using your product Case studies on how others have achieved results with your product Your product demo or webinar This can be applied to any pages from product and features to blog and about your team. Blog posts on Moz Blog are a great example of providing additional links that are useful and relevant. Improve your page load Your page loading time has a major impact on how quickly people will leave your site, which should be obvious to everyone. Slow site speed can be very discouraging to your potential customers and drive them away. How long would you wait for a page to load, before going elsewhere to a quicker website? A study from WP Engine found 32% of online users will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. What's more, the study found websites that load in under 2 seconds convert at a rate three times higher than those which take 5-10 seconds to load. In cases where the page load takes 5 seconds or longer, bounce rates increase by 90%. Check Google PageSpeed Insights for more detail on why this matters and how to improve your page speed. Make content readable It is difficult to read large chunks of text that consists of long paragraphs, too much jargon and bad formatting. With our shorter attention span and higher impatience, the more user friendly you can make the text, the better for your site performance. There are a number of ways you can improve the readability of your content: Large headings Bold subheadings Bullets and lists Shorter sentences and paragraphs Less or no jargon Write like you talk Use images Bold keywords where appropriate Add a relevant call to action on the landing page If you have a landing page for converting visitors, whether it is for getting them to enquire or sign up, you need a relevant and prominent call to action (CTA). At Littledata we use CTA in two places on the landing page - top and bottom - to help the user enquire about our services much quicker. I also like Intercom product pages, which have some awesome animations and illustrations, and a call to action that fits the theme. Your CTA could be focussed on getting your users to: Call the company to talk about the product Fill out a form Sign up for a trial Click on banner ad Watch video Subscribe to a newsletter Visit another page within your site or external site Econsultancy has collected examples of some awesome calls to action so check them out for inspiration. Check your landing pages meet visitor expectations If people expect to sign up for a free trial of your software product, but are instead taken to a homepage without a visible way of doing so, then expect a lot of bounces. Invision uses Adwords to promote its free platform plan. Once you click through, you see immediately the content you expect and the option to sign up. If you purchase some of your traffic, make sure you check what information visitors see on your partners’ site before clicking on the link. When we recently ran a number of tests to improve the bounce rate for our client, we were baffled by some of the improvements not having much effect. After further investigation it came out that the visitors on the partner sites were getting the wrong information about what they were clicking on. No surprise then that they were leaving the site so soon. For search engine results, review your page titles and meta descriptions, and make sure they match what the person will see on the page when they click on it. Set external links to open in a new window By providing an external link that opens within the same window, you are forcing your users to leave your site. This will not only affect your bounce rate, but you will also be increasing your exit rate. Instead of interrupting their journey this way, set any external links to open in a new tab. Avoid distracting users from the content Whilst some popups can be relevant to the content of the page and important for your aims, a badly timed popup can be very off-putting for your site users. Your landing page is there to convince the visitor to stay so if your popup displays instantly, you're not letting them see your content that they came for in the first place. Test different timings to see what works best for your users, but I'd be surprised if quickly displaying popups reduce your bounce rate. Autoplaying random songs can also be highly annoying. Especially when it's not the kind of song you listen to, on full blast, and hidden somewhere so it takes you ages to find the music to pause it. Just no.   There are no quick wins when it comes to improving your bounce rate. Keep making the improvements with your reader in mind and testing which changes work for you best. So I hope this has been helpful. If you have any experiences with methods mentioned above, do share in the comments below. Further reading: A win for the UK digital sector: UK sites perform better than US sites in benchmark 5 common Google Analytics setup problems to look out for How to accurately track time on site with Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager Stuck with reducing your bounce rate? Contact our certified Google Analytics specialists for help with your bounce rate or other advanced tracking.  

Analysis and reporting are the most time-consuming aspects of site or app performance tracking in Google Analytics. If you ever wished or thought if only it was quicker, then this post is for you. There are a number of techniques you can implement to speed up your data analysis and number crunching. Here I’ll cover 6 of them. Schedule email reports Google Analytics dashboards are a great way to monitor metrics that are important for your business. But instead of logging in every day or week, or however often you tend to check them, schedule automated email reports instead. At Littledata, we have a select few metrics that we keep track of on a weekly and monthly basis. The whole team gets an email report on a specified day, allowing everyone to get the latest stats without someone on the team having to get those numbers manually every time. To set this up, go to the dashboard that you want emailed to others (or yourself), click ‘Email’ and fill in the details. If you're scheduling the email to go to your team on a regular basis, why not add a nice message in the email body. To edit the scheduled emails you've set up previously, go to Admin > View > Scheduled Emails (towards the bottom of the list). Access your reports quickly Shortcuts in Google Analytics allow you to quickly view the reports you use most often. Even better, they remember the settings you applied to any report. So if you apply an advanced segment or another customisation to the report, saving it as a shortcut will remember your preferences. Except for the date range - that won't be remembered. You can find the shortcut option just below the report title, and once added, you'll find your shortcut reports at the top of the reports list in the left panel. Search for reports you can’t find If you find yourself wondering where a particular report is, use the search found at the very top. Instead of having to go through an extensive report list trying to find something you vaguely remember seeing last month, you get suggestions of what you might be looking for as you type. So you only need to remember or guess part of the report title that you're looking for. Use keyboard shortcuts Did you know Google Analytics has keyboard shortcuts? They allow you to move around the report much quicker and the date range keyboards make a big difference to a workflow. Picking date ranges can be tedious and annoying so I've found these to be the best. If you're already using keyboard shortcuts on your devices, you won't need convincing of their usefulness. To view this complete list of shortcuts in Google Analytics at any time, use a shortcut: ? Set up goals to understand your website visitors Goals are valuable in understanding how well your site or app helps you achieve your objectives. Unfortunately, we see a lot of businesses who either find it too complicated to set up or have done it incorrectly. Speaking from personal experience, it only takes a little practice to get the hang of it, and once setup, you get essential conversion data in your reports. You'll be able to evaluate your marketing efforts and campaigns much more effectively. Check out Google's guidance on goals and my guide on how to set up a destination goal funnel. See trends quickly with Littledata reports We have a clever tool that looks through all of your Google Analytics data and finds the most interesting changes to report on. There are over hundred of GA reports so getting automated summaries that you can act upon will save you hours of work. Littledata tool doesn't require installation and it's quick to set up - all you need is an existing Google Analytics account to sign up with for free. The reports you'll get are also great for presenting to colleagues in meetings, as other users have said. To get your reports, go to Littledata homepage, enter your website into the box and click 'Get started.' We're also working on bringing you benchmarking information, customised tips on how to improve your Analytics setup and what you should be tracking. Pro tip: Manage complex data with query explorer tool Whilst, not the quickest to get used to, Google's query explorer tool can be powerful for those working with large and complex datasets. Some of our biggest clients' websites get millions of hits a month, which can cause discrepancies in data analysis (especially when data is sampled). So I use the query explorer tool to verify the data that clients ask for. To use this tool, you will need to know your metrics from dimensions and learn more about how to use segments, filters and query building.   If you've got questions on any of the above, don't hesitate to comment below or get in touch!  

Wondering if Samsung Galaxy is more popular than iPhone when engaging with your content? Then set up the User-ID view to see your logged in users’ activity and evaluate behaviour by the device. With the activity data you collect in the registered users view, you can improve the analysis of your customers' behaviour by seeing which devices are used to sign up and access your website. To summarise the benefits: You get access to the Cross-Device reports, which allow you to analyse which devices your users use to engage with your content. See what the Cross-Device reports look like. You improve your understanding of logged in users who often engage with the site's content differently than those who aren't registered. You get a more accurate user count. In your standard analytics view, a new user is counted every time your site visitor switches to a new device or starts a new session. With the registered user view, you give each user a unique ID, which helps to stitch together various activities carried out by the user. You can find out which devices users prefer for different engagement activities across multiple sessions. This helps with tailoring your campaign and content to different devices and activities. To set this up, you need to have the user ID stored in the data layer. If you don't have it set up, scroll to the bottom for an advanced hack. Now let’s look at how to set up the tracking by using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager V2. Looking to implement the User-ID in your tracking code? Check Google’s guidance. Enable the feature in Google Analytics Firstly, enable the User-ID feature by going to  Admin > Property > Tracking info > User-ID. Read through the short policy on what you’re allowed to track and not. Google is very strict about tracking personally identifiable information so you are not allowed to send any personally identifiable information, such as names and email addresses. But numbered IDs or hashed emails are fine to use. To agree to the terms, follow the steps and click ‘create.’ Create the variable in Google Tag Manager Now go to GTM variables and click 'new'. Select Data Layer Variable type and use the name stored in your data layer, e.g. uid or user ID Add the variable to your pageview tag Go to edit your pageview tag and click on More settings > Fields to set. Click Add field, enter the field name as &uid and select the variable you’ve just created - eg {{uid}} or {{userID}}. Test you're seeing activity in the newly created registered users view with your login, or a test one if you have it. Don't forget to publish your GTM container for tracking to work. Advanced hack If for some reason you can't get your developer to store a user ID in the data layer, there is a way around it. We've created a javascript variable to get a username off the page and hash it prior to sending it to GA. For this, you need to pick a custom Javascript type variable and enter the script below into the custom javascript field. This javascript requires either your developer or you to customise it to work on your page (see the notes in the second and third lines). function() { //dependent on using Jquery selectors //replace '.menuTitle small a' with the selector for your username var name = $('.menuTitle small a').text(); var hash = 0, i, chr, len; if (name.length == 0) return hash; for (i = 0, len = name.length; i < len; i++) { chr = name.charCodeAt(i); hash = ((hash << 5) - hash) + chr; hash |= 0; // Convert to 32bit integer } return hash; }; If you need help with any of the above, don't hesitate to comment below or get in touch!

This is a quick follow-up to my guide on how to exclude referral spam from your Google Analytics data. Filters exclude or modify the data from the time you add them and don't have any effect on previous traffic. This is where segments are very useful. Not only can you use a segment to view a cleaner version of your historical data but you can also test the setup of your filters. I've also found the Google's filter verification option quite unreliable but with the segment, you can verify the results yourself and see results straight away. Here I am going to show how to add segments to include valid hostnames and exclude spam referrals from your data. Add a segment to include valid hostnames Creating a filter to include visits from valid hostnames only is the first step you need to take to exclude spam referrals from your Google Analytics data. Test your valid hostnames regex by firstly going to Audience > Technology > Network > Hostname. Create a filter by clicking on ‘Add segment’ and then ‘New Segment’. Now select the conditions tab on the left, under advanced. Set up your filter with the following conditions: Sessions Include Hostname Matches regex (and your regex, eg yoursite|googleusercontent, in our case it's littledata|googleusercontent) Click on ‘Preview’ button on at the top to check which hostnames you are left with. Your list should look much cleaner and only display domains you used in regex. Add a segment to exclude referral spam Like before, you want to test this trigger when viewing a relevant report so go to Acquisitions > All Traffic > Referrals. Create a segment with the following details: Sessions Exclude Medium exactly matches referral AND Source matches regex (and your regex) Whilst filters have a limit of 255 characters, the advanced segment has much more character space to use. I've bundled all spam referrals into one long regex of 900 characters. But as explained in the guide on removing spam traffic you might have to break it up into multiple expressions or filters to fit them all in. By adding those two segments you can not only test that your filter setup is accurate but also view your historical data without fake traffic. If you need help with any of the above, leave a comment below or get in touch!

Do you know how many people start completing forms on your website, but don't complete them? Do you know which fields cause them difficulties? This is a guide to field-by-field form tracking using GTM. By tracking each element of the form separately, you will see how many people start filling out the form but then decide not to submit it. Once you understand where people drop off you will be able to identify any parts of the form that may need improving. The enquiry form on our website has four elements that I am going to track: the name, email and subject fields, and the button to submit the query. In summary, the set up will work like this: Create a trigger that will act as the firing rule for the tag Create a tag to track clicks on the field Repeat for each field So to set up the tracking of form fields and submits in GTM V2, follow these steps. Enable built in variables Firstly, you will need to enable built in variables. You will need Form ID variable and if similarly to our site you have the same enquiry form placed on several pages, then Page Path variable as well. These variables will allow you to track clicks on the form and on which pages the form was clicked on. The page path variable returns the URL part that comes after your main domain, eg /blog. Create the trigger For your trigger, you will need to find out the field ID you want to track. To find out the ID, if you are using Chrome browser, right-click on the field and select ‘Inspect Element’ It will look something like id=”name” so name here is the unique ID that you need to use with the trigger. If you do not have a unique ID associated with the field you want to track, ask your developers to add it in. This will make the tracking much easier. Now in GTM, go to Triggers tab on the left and click 'New'. You are creating a 'click' trigger, which you want to fire on 'all elements'. Save the trigger. Create the tag Go to Tags tab and click 'New'. Select Google Analytics and tag type 'Universal Analytics'. I send the following event tracking parameters to GA: Category: Enquiry form Action: Click on name Label: {{Page Path}} Now select 'Click' to select the trigger ‘Click on name’ as your firing rule. If there are any pages where you don’t want this tracked, then you will need to create a separate blocking trigger. Here is an example of a trigger for a contact us page that I want to exclude from tracking here. You can create your blocking trigger in a pop up window without leaving the tag. Repeat Follow the steps above to create the trigger and tag for each following field, and amend form ID’s and event field values for each. Test your tags in GTM debug mode and GA real time to make sure the details sent through are what you want. Once tested, publish your container and if you need any further help with any of the above, leave a comment below.   Further reading: How to track file downloads in Google Tag Manager V2 Tracking registered users with Google Analytics and GTM V2