If you’re planning an update to your website and wondering if you still must optimize for IE 6 users the answer is probably an unfortunate YES. But, just to be certain, you can use Google Analytics to find out. Here’s how.

Login to your account and the pull up the profile you wish to check. Then, click on ‘Advanced Segments’ on the left side toolbar. Next, click ‘Create new custom segment’ at the top right. Then you’ll want to setup your parameters. In the first ‘dimension or metric’ box, add ‘Browser’, which is located under Dimensions – System. Then set the Value to ‘Internet Explorer’. You should leave ‘Condition’ set to ‘Matches exactly’. Afterwards, we’re going to skip down to ‘Add “and” statement’. Add the dimension ‘Browser Version’ to the ‘dimension or metric’ field. This one is also located under Dimension – System. This time we’re must set the ‘Condition’ to ‘Greater than or equal to’ and the Value to ‘6.0’.

Repeat this for another ‘and’ section only this time set the ‘Browser Version’ ‘Condition’ to ‘Less than’ and the Value to ‘7.0’. This way you cover all variations of IE 6. To verify that you’ve set this up correctly click the ‘Test Segment’ button. At the bottom you’ll see a line that says “…this segment matches XXX visit”. That number should be (much) lower than the line at the top of the screen that says “Out of a total of XXX visits…”. I’ve also included a graphic here to help you set this up. Be sure to click the ‘Save Segment’ button at the bottom when you’re done.

Now lets try it out. Go back to your Dashboard and look for the ‘All Visits’ tab at the top right. Click that drop-down and select the segment you just created, leave the ‘All Visits’ Default Segment checked. You should now see a graph with 2 lines. One is all your traffic and the other is your IE6 traffic. Sift through your reports and then ask yourself if you could do without that traffic. Chances are you would rather not, especially if you run an ecommerce site. In my case, the traffic from IE6 users actually converts BETTER than all the other traffic as you can see in the report below.

I’ve included a screenshot below that will show you how to create another segment that excludes IE users so that you can compare the groups against each other. Happy Reporting!

Here is what you must do in order to run a report similar to the image above in Google Analytics that shows you the performance of each of your PPC networks. During my research I ran across a number of blog posts that explained how to do this but what I found was that most of them contained out-dated information. So keep that in mind when you’re doing your research. Always look for the post date to ensure you’re getting the best information. I’ll do my best to keep this post up-to-date as well.

First, traffic from Google AdWords will be tagged correctly, assuming you’ve turned on Tracking. It’s located under My Account – Preferences – Tracking (in the new interface). Check this now and make sure it’s set to ON.

Second, to enable URL tracking for Yahoo Search Marketing in Google Analytics you’ll have to do some tweaking. First, turn off Tracking URLs. That’s right, I said turn them OFF. To do this, visit Administration – Tracking URLs. We’re turning them off because we’re going to tag the URLs ourselves. Next, you’ll want to pull up the Google Analytics URL Builder.

Go ahead and insert your Website URL, which is the landing page you wish to use. For Campaign Source you should use ‘yahoo’, under Campaign Medium use ‘cpc’ for Campaign Term – and here is where it gets tricky – you should use ‘{OVKEY}’. This will trigger Yahoo to automatically replace that string with the keyword which triggered your ad for that click. Under Campaign Content I put the name of the ad group although you can put whatever you want or leave it blank. Yahoo Search Marketing does not have a dynamic trigger for the ad group name. Under Campaign Name again I use the name of the campaign in YSM as they do not have a dynamic trigger for the campaign name either. Finally, click Generate URL then copy & paste this into the Destination URL field when you create an ad in YSM as seen below.

Now we’re going to setup URL tracking for Microsoft adCenter in Google Analytics.  The process here is very similar to what you have to do for Yahoo Search Marketing. The difference here is the string used to capture the keyword in Campaign Term. For Microsoft adCenter you must use ‘{OrderItemId}’. Follow the same steps outlined above. The URL Builder should look like this:

And here is where you paste your Destination URL in Microsoft adCenter.

NOTES:

Editing each of your ads manually will be quite a chore. I highly recommend using something like the Microsoft adCenter Desktop tool for adCenter. And, if you’ve spent enough money with Yahoo Search Marketing you should be able to upload a CSV of your campaign. Use Excel to paste in your URLs and save yourself a lot of time.

Also, keep this in mind; even though the string for Yahoo is {OVKEY} and for adCenter it’s {OrderItemId} you will not see them exactly like that once the Google Analytics URL Builder generates the URL. What’s happening here is the tool re-write those symbols into URL friendly characters so { becomes %7B. This is perfectly normal and expected so don’t go back and change them manually.

Good luck tagging your URLs and please comment below if you have any questions. Thanks for reading!

References:

Tracking URLs in Yahoo Search Marketing

Tracking URLs in Microsoft adCenter

Google Analytics URL Builder

Microsoft adCenter Desktop

The best tool I’ve found for shortening URLs for Twitter, email, IM, facebook and just about any other form of internet communication is tr.im. This is because tr.im allows you to see analytics for all of the links you create using their product. You can also create custom URLs with security codes.

You can also configure TweetDeck to use tr.im directly from their interface to trim your URLs. TweetDeck is my favorite Twitter application build on the Adobe Air platform.

Try tr.im today.

Try TweetDeck today.