Thankfully, Google is not oblivious to the need for more in-depth attribution funnel analysis. This past spring, they introduced AdWords Search Funnels, which finally gave AdWords advertisers the ability to drill down and see the search paths that visitors use when clicking through to their sites.

And last week, Google added additional features to these reports, including an increase in the conversion history window and a way to sanitize conversions that were potentially affected by cookie deletion bias.

Are you using the AdWords Search Funnels yet? If not, read on to find out why you should.

With Search Funnels, we can now get data on first touch attribution from AdWords. You can segment by first clicked campaign, ad group, or keyword in the First Click Analysis report to see these upper funnel newbie visits to your site.

I'm a big fan of the Assist Clicks and Impressions report. It helps me see how certain campaigns are getting visitors to our clients' sites (or, in the case of an impression, how they're generating brand awareness) and converting them at a later date through another campaign.

Let's say you notice that one of your ad groups hasn't been converting as well as you'd like. You do some cost/profit analysis, based entirely on last click attribution, and determine that it's hemorrhaging money. Makes sense to cut it off. Stop spending money if you're not making money. Business 101, right?

Would you think twice about cutting spend, however, if you found out that this ad group had assisted other campaigns and ad groups with a huge number of conversions? Maybe you still cut the spend, but now you monitor the effects it has on other campaigns just to be sure.

For anyone who wants to really dig deep, there's the Top Paths report. At first glance, I was pretty disappointed with this one. It defaults on a view that shows you when a segment assists itself:

Apparently there's a lot of self-assisting going on in AdWords. While this data might prove useful for some, I wanted to see how different campaigns or ad groups or keywords helped each other out. To get this information, just change the dimension to one of the Transition Path reports, and you'll see only the paths that include different entries:

The Search Funnels report can be found by clicking the Reporting tab, accessing the Conversions area, and then clicking on the Search Funnels option on the left side of the screen.

Take a look and be sure to consider the entire funnel—lower and upper—when making decisions about your online marketing. And leave a comment if you've had success in using the AdWords Search Funnels reports.

It's not Top Landing Pages.

Before I unveil the report that ROIers use to do quick landing page analysis, let's find out why we're not big fans of the built-in Top Landing Pages report:

• It only shows entrances, bounces, and bounce rate
• It doesn't tell us conversion data for our landing pages
• It can't show the revenue generated by our landing pages

Thankfully, there is a way to get what we need for robust landing page analysis out of GA. Hit the jump to find out how.

The first method is the easiest. We just use an existing Google Analytics report, and segment by landing page. Just browse to Visitors > Map Overlay. Then use the dimension dropdown to select Landing Page:

Check it out:

Sure, Entrances and Visits aren't the same metric, but that's not really why I'm at this report. I'm here because I want to see how these landing pages stacked up when it came to getting visitors to sign up for my newsletter or buy my widgets. It wouldn't be the first time that I've seen a page with a higher bounce rate net me more cash than one with a slighter lower bounce rate.

So the Map Overlay report is fine and dandy, but you're probably wondering, "Why isn't he talking about Custom Reporting yet? Does he know there are Custom Reports now?"

Yes. He does. And you get a gold star, because this is a perfect case for why Custom Reports are awesome. If a built-in report isn't doing it for you, just build your own from scratch and start using the new one instead.

Here's a Custom Landing Pages Report:

Now you can compare everything you need. I've separated the Goal and Ecommerce data on separate tabs, but you can try and cram it all on one tab if you'd like. Add that bad boy to the Dashboard and you're good to go.

How do you like to check your landing page performance in Google Analytics? Leave a comment and let us know!

But chances are, if you're reading the ROI Revolution blog, you're on a high speed internet connection. If your webpages are loading in nanoseconds with your T1, how are they faring for those visitors who aren't as lucky as you? You know, the ones on crappy cable modems and DSL and (gasp!) the dreaded dial-up?

Does it matter? Well, it depends. If you're a gaming website or Internet marketing blog, most of your audience is probably on broadband. But if you're running a site for a retirement community in Florida, then my grandma is hitting your Flash-encrusted site in her AOL browser and she's waiting. And waiting. And waiting. She's a patient old gal, my Meemaw, but she's not going to wait all day. She's going to point her browser and her pension elsewhere.

Aside from your visitors, your site's load time is also important to Google. Not only does page load time affect your AdWords Quality Score, but according to Matt Cutts, it's going to be playing a bigger role in the organic search ranking.

So read on to learn how to optimize your landing pages' load times, and maybe make a few bucks off my Meemaw.

Before you start trying to speed up your site, you should probably find out whether or not it has slow load times in the first place. There's no use beating a dead horse.

First, just log into your AdWords account and check the Keyword Analysis field. From the keywords tab, hover or click on the the status icon (). You'll get a message about that keyword and its destination URL's Quality Score. It looks like this:

Red text is bad. Green text is good. If the landing page load time has no problems, you're golden. At least as far as AdWords is concerned. But what about your visitors?

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to find the average download time for your site. This will alert you to potential problems with specific pages. Just sign into Webmaster Tools and click your site's URL. If you haven't already set up Webmaster Tools, go ahead and do that. We'll wait for you.

Done? See, I told you we weren't going anywhere. Now go to the Diagnostics area and check out Crawl stats. The third graph on the screen shows your site's average load time.

But if you want to make absolutely sure, you've got to experience your site firsthand. So, go buy an eMachine from 2001, find one of those old AOL floppies, and then...

Haha! Just kidding! You just need to put Charles in charge of your load times.

Charles is a Web Debugging Proxy app for Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. It allows you to all sorts of fun stuff. You can record your Internet traffic, view SSL traffic, and throttle bandwidth. How does this this help us with load times? Well, by throttling your bandwidth, you can simulate slower Internet connections. This means you can browse your site as if you were my Meemaw, on her dial-up connection.

I want Charles in charge of meeee!

So, after you find out which pages are taking eons to load, what do you do?

Start by minimizing HTTP requests on the guilty pages. This is just a fancy way of saying, "Get rid of excess stuff." According to the Yahoo Developer Network, "80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end," and most of that time is spent downloading all the junk on your page. Get rid of that junk and the page load faster. Get rid of the images you don't need, reduce the image size and quality for those you do. Make it look good, but keep it simple.

There's a bunch of other things you can do to reduce page load time. Check out Yahoo Developer Network's Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website for the lowdown, and don't forget: a fast page means a happy Meemaw. And you don't want to see Meemaw when she's angry.

Hey, look! It's a gaggle of GAACs!

Not all of our time at Google is spent jumping around on trampolines and pegging each other with balls. For four days, Google Partners from around the world convene in Mountain View to talk about the state of analytics and optimization, learn from one another, and push the limit when it comes to supporting our favorite free analytics platform.

Click for a rundown of what we covered...

Day One: Google Website Optimizer

• Dan Siroker, former director of analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and founder of the online multiplayer game CarrotSticks, talked about how his team used Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, and other free tools to help Obama win the presidential election.
• Sandra Cheng, Product Manager of Google Website Optimizer, and Trevor Claiborne, Product Marketing Manager of Google Website Optimizer, talked about the future of the free website testing and optimization tool. There's some exciting stuff coming, not least of which were the recently announced over-time charts and the experiment management API.

Google Analytics Product Marketing Manager Eva Woo and her magical margarita machine. I want one for the ROI office.

Day Two: Google Analytics

• The keynote, by Avinash Kaushik, was, as always, eye-opening and in-your-face. We <3 Avinash.
• Phil Mui, senior product manager for Google Analytics, discussed the roadmap. He touched on engagement goals, mobile reporting, and multiple custom variables, all announced a week later.
• What am I most excited? Analytics Intelligence, an algorithmic intelligence engine for Google Analytics to provide automated alerts for significant changes in your site's metrics. We've been using it in beta and we're glad we can share it with all of our clients!
• After all of the announcements, we headed to Sky High Sports in Santa Clara and did our trampoline dodgeball. All of our practice paid off when we were unceremoniously destroyed in the first round.

Day Three: More Google Analytics

• Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, talked about using Google tools to "predict the present" and glean important intelligence about the current economic situation. Very cool stuff.Lots of discussion on the Google Analytics API, as well as some exciting developments in the works for Google Analytics and advertisers. We can't say much yet, but it's really a great time to be using Google Analytics!

Day Four: Urchin

We heard some awesome news from the Urchin team on the development of the Urchin software. Stay tuned to the blog for more news as it comes!

That's about it. In spite of our crushing dodgeball defeat, it was a great time and we were glad to chat with analysts from all over the world. We can hardly wait 'til next year. We're all secretly hoping next year's event is Slamball.

Slamball.

Yeaaaah. Not so much.

When it comes to testing new webpage designs in Google Website Optimizer, speed can be essential. You want to get the experiment out the door as soon as possible so you can get preliminary data. Sometimes this means that things slip through QA. Browser testing is exceptionally finicky and time consuming. Not every office has a spare Mac sitting around, and with three different versions of Internet Explorer still in wide use—and no easy way to install all three versions on a single PC—it's no small feat to make your page variations all work perfectly in every popular browser.

With just a few Google Analytics Advanced Segments in your arsenal, however, you'll be able to see whether or not your new pages are functioning fine in all the right browsers. Hit the jump for details.

First, you'll need to create a new Advanced Segment for each landing page in your experiment. Check out Segment 1 and Segment 2 for more detail.

Next, apply both segments to your reports and head to the Browsers reports. This report defaults to the pie chart, but I like to switch back to the data table:

Now check out each browser and pay attention to the Bounce Rate column for each Landing Page segment. If one particular browser has a Bounce Rate that seems particularly out of whack, drill down and check out the versions. Then, using your findings, test the page live (if you can) or use a site like Browsershots.

What other browser testing tips or tricks do you have to help ensure that your site is fit for all visitors? Share them in the comments.

* "No two browsers are not on fire."