To be successful, ecommerce sites require information about site visitors.

What sites are the top referrers? Which search engine produces the most traffic? How long do visitors remain on-site, what is their pathway through the site, and what pages do they exit from?

One method of collecting this information is often referred to as using 3rd party cookies. If you use 3rd party cookies, are you aware of the privacy concerns, and will you be liable for a privacy policy breach?

What’s A “Cookie” Anyway?

A cookie is a message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file called cookie.txt. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

Information gained with cookies helps the Web server track such things as user preferences and data that the user may submit while browsing the site. For example, a cookie may include information about the purchases that the user makes (if the Web site is an ecommerce site), or the cookie may “remember” the user’s contact information so the user will not have to re-key it on future site visits.

1st Party and 3rd Party Cookies Distinguished

There is an important difference between 1st party and 3rd party cookies. If you use 1st party cookies, they are passed to a visitor by your site, and the data generated remains with your site. On the other hand, if you hire an independent company (such as Google with its Google Analytics program) to pass the cookie, that cookie is called a 3rd party cookie.

Privacy Concerns With 3rd Party Cookies

Privacy concerns arise from the fact that the data generated with 3rd party cookies resides on the servers of the 3rd party — not your server. The fact that you do not control these 3rd party sites and their use of this data has raised concerns among many users. For example, users have questioned whether these 3rd party sites aggregate the data among many sites and report ecommerce trends to the media, or whether the 3rd party sites use the data for purposes of cross-website profiling and ad targeting.

And what is your legal obligation to disclose the use of 3rd party cookies? In the European Union, it’s illegal to pass cookies without informing users that you do, what they’re used for, and how they can be avoided, and it’s generally believed that the failure to adequately disclose the details of the use of 3rd party cookies is a violation of EU law.

In the US, there is an evolving debate regarding the same issues, and the answers are less certain.

Conclusion

It’s recommended that if you use 3rd party cookies, you clearly disclose in your privacy policy the distinction between 3rd and 1st party cookies, and how they’re used and avoided.

Be careful, however, in amending your Privacy Policy because amendments may not be effective retroactively for data collected with 3rd party cookies prior to the amendment.

If you’ve ever wondered ”How do I come up with goal values if my site is not an e-commerce site?” The answer: you can probably come up with intelligent values for your own set of goals. For example, if you know that 1 out of every 100 PDF downloads on your site results in a $500 sale, you can assign a value of $5 to that download. Other examples of goals are newsletter sign-ups, product sales, and visits to your “contact us” page.

The answer can be found in the sometimes overlooked $/Visits column found in the Google Analytics conversion reports, including Campaign Conversion, Source Conversion, Overall Keyword Conversion and CPC vs Organic Conversion. In fact, because this metric is found in so many reports, you can compare per-visit values for organic search referrals, paid keywords, CPC campaigns — and almost anything else you can think of. It’s a great comparison metric that can help you shift your marketing budget to high-performing traffic sources and keywords.

 

 

 To calculate $/Visits, Google Analytics adds and averages the total “revenue” from your conversions. This revenue might be from e-commerce sales or from static values that you assign to non-ecommerce goals. Thus, as with any endeavor, goals and goal values are necessary. You’ll need to set them up in order to see metrics such as $/Visits as well as ROI and RPC (Revenue per Click), which you’ll find indispensable for optimizing your keyword buys.

Once you have defined a value for these pages (which you can set in the Goal Value field within your Goal Settings page), you can better conceptualize the value of your website and your online advertising. Then you can explain it to others with data, to back up any marketing or design choices you make. You can also measure the success of your design or marketing experiments, by observing goal values to find out what works best.

What is the average value of a visit from a certain website worth to you? Can you, for instance, measure the average value of a visit to your site from someone who clicks on your AdWords ad as compared to someone who gets to your website by typing your URL directly into their browser? (See google[cpc] versus direct[none] in the image below - click to enlarge.)

By Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team & Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Google announced a new cost per action program that will be rolled into its AdSense program. Why are we talking about that in a series that covers building a web site from scratch? Keep reading to find out.

Affiliate marketing has been around for quite some time.  Networks that help put together affiliate managers with affiliate marketers have also been around for a while.  These types of activities are often referred to as “cost per action.”  Essentially what that means is that an affiliate marketer will get paid by an affiliate manager for performing a certain action (such as generating a lead or a sale).

By far the two largest affiliate networks are Commission Junction and ClickBank.  Both of these companies are probably quaking in their boots right now.  The reason is simple: Google is entering the cost per action fray.

When Google entered the search engine market we saw the face of search change. When it entered the cost per click fray we saw the face of that market change. Therefore, it does not take a crystal ball to realize that Google is probably going to change this market as well. Part of the reason why this prediction is so easy to make is because this new program is going to be rolled into the wildly popular AdSense system.

That means that blogs, and other authority sites which are widely successful at converting visitors to regular “customers,” can now get involved in the cost per action “business” without having to modify their web sites very much, thanks to the way that Google will be integrating this new system with AdSense.

Unfortunately, this program is still very new.  In fact, as far as I am aware, it was really only released in the middle of June; and as usual, Google has released this program to a limited number of people on an invitation only basis.

So what does this really mean?  Why am I talking about this now in an article series about building a web site from scratch?

The reason is simple: planning.  Let me explain some of the potential behind this program.

Imagine for a minute that a company which has a web site, and is not very good at converting web site visitors into leads for their business, decides to spend $50 to obtain a lead using the new Google program.

You, however, have a blog with lots of loyal readers.  You can decide to throw leads to this other business at a cost of almost zero (or at least at no additional cost over and above what you already have) and make more money than you ever could with the basic AdSense pay-per-click program.

Or perhaps a company looking to boost sales offers web sites some set amount of money to make a sale for them.  You find out that this is a product that you already know, use, and like, and would recommend to people anyway.  The amount of money you could make generating sales for other companies is truly huge.

In fact, you can now begin to operate in somebody else’s business, without having to actually BE in that business. If you know how to convert visitors into customers, you can scale a business to almost any size because you don’t have to worry about producing packaging or shipping a product.  You leave that to the actual company.

To say that the potential of the field into which Google is now entering is large is like saying Mount Rushmore is a big hill. People with the ability and the know-how to convert visitors will be able to easily and rapidly enter new markets and make lots of new money, all through what Google is now doing.  As I said, the potential for this goes very, very far beyond the AdSense pay-per-click program.

Now let’s swing this into the web site that I am creating.  It is one thing to have a blog that people will come to read and like. It is not exactly the same thing to have a blog which will actually convert visitors into people that will perform actions just because you ask them to.

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Google Analytics has been updated with several bug fixes and feature improvements. Here are some of the biggest updates:

https://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=32828 

If you have or need Google Analytics installed or configured contact me.

I can typically install & configure Google Analytics in about 3 hours.

1. Apply for a free Google Analytics account at GA Sign Up Page
2. Once you get the code implement Google Analytics on your website in parallel with your favorite expensive analytics tool
3. Get a comfort level for delta between the two sets of key numbers (you know visitors, conversions, page views etc etc) and create a multiplier (my tool shows visitors 10% higher and page views 10% lower than Google). You will use this multiplier in future to compare year over year trends if you want to.
4. Cancel the contract with your favorite expensive analytics vendor and take that $50k or $100k or $200k and: 1) Hire a smart analyst for between $50k to whatever maybe your areas great salary 2) Put the rest of the money in your pocket.

Makes a lot of sense when put that way, doesn’t it? You can save a lot of money, just by switching to a free utility like Google Analytics. You will be able to extract just as much value from GA than your old tool, in fact my prediction is that it will be a lot more.”

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