It is amazing to see that every year my gym gets over packed with people whose New Year’s resolutions are to get in shape and lose weight. Unfortunately, most of these people will disappear by the end of January and we might see them back in the year after.

To avoid such quick and unhappy ending for our Web Analytics next New Year’s resolutions, I would like to share with you few tips to help you reach most of your planned goals. Yes, some of these tips are very obvious, but we can all use a reminder from time to time.

1. Set meaningful goals for what you love to do the most.

This is the first ingredient to success; you must love what you do and what you want to be. It is true that no one was born as a Web Analytics ninja, but also not everyone was born with the ability to work with data. So if you are one of those people who don’t enjoy data, then maybe it is time to use this New Year’s resolution to reevaluate your career path and consider discovering other options that you like.

Same logic should be applied to which branch of Web Analytics you want to invest in more. Choose the concentration that you really enjoy and desire to continue advancing in, not something that your employer or the industry says is good for you. If you don’t have strong internal motivation within yourself about what you are doing, you won’t be successful.

2. Take baby steps.

Last year, my wife decided to run a 10K race. She was totally out of shape and could barely run for 5 minutes straight. She divided her ultimate goal into smaller challenges, but achievable goals guided by a running program called “Couch to 5k in 9 Weeks.” In a few months she successfully participated in a number of 10K run fundraisers!

Mastering Web Analytics is no less challenging than the 10K race. Whether you are an Analytics guru or a beginner, in order to advance your knowledge and experience in Analytics, you should set realistic goals and then take small steps that are likely to be met with success.

3. Don’t keep your resolutions to yourself.

I learned this technique from the SEO guru, Matt Cutts, of Google who always shares his 30-days challenges with his social friends and blog readers.

While I didn’t talk to Matt about his motive in sharing his monthly challenges and whether the sharing is helping him in achieving these challenges. For me though, I find myself more responsible in fulfilling my personal commitments when they are made public, especially when one or two friends show interest and decide to commit to the same resolution.

I strongly believe that resolutions are best made with groups. Friends and colleagues can gently push you in the right direction when you lose direction and motivate you when you slow down. So for next year’s Analytics resolutions, if you can find a friend or a group of friends who commit to the same New Year’s resolution together, then I guarantee you a better chance of achieving your goals [as known in analytics as “higher conversion rate” and “lower bounce rate”]. You will be more accountable to each other and give a hand to each other when things gets tough.

4. Get good mentors.

It is part of the human nature to imitate those around us. So as we are working on our next year’s resolutions, we need to make sure that we surround ourselves more often with people who carry common interests and similar career objectives and who offer us sincere advice, listen to our ideas and fears, and tell us when we have gone off track.

Analytics conferences offer good opportunity to hunt for good mentors and to connect with new Analytics friends. Although these conferences are a bit expensive, many of them offer a Social Networking pass or Exhibit Hall only pass at a good discounted price, so don’t miss these opportunities. Another good social event that no Web Analyst should miss is the Web Analytics Wednesday, which take place in many cities all over the world.

5. Fine-tune your spirituality.

It is important to add a spiritual dimension to your goals. For example, if one of your goals is to get certified in Google Analytics, you may also resolve to use that knowledge to serve your community through offering free internet marketing consulting to your favorite charity organization or government/education institutions.

There it is, folks…

I think I’m ready for a good start! Good luck in your resolutions and feel free to share them with us if you think that will help in implementing them

Technorati Tags: goals, new year's resoultions, web analytics

Today we announced our fifth strategic agreement with Google, enhancing E-Nor’s enterprise service offerings to include Google Analytics Premium. This is exciting news we wanted to share with you.

Google Analytics Premium, a paid analytics offering, contains more processing power, advanced analysis tools, and dedicated support. This new offering is a welcome addition to the already awesome features available in the Google Analytics Standard Edition – awesome just got super awesome!

Both Premium and Standard Editions of Google Analytics will receive many great feature enhancements going forward, with many coming out in the near future. E-Nor can help determine which edition is right for you and how to implement the best option for your organization.

We have supported many of Silicon Valley’s Fortune 500 companies realize tangible business results by leveraging E-Nor’s Digital Marketing Optimization Framework to drive analytics strategic planning, solution integration, advanced analytics implementations, and knowledge transfer. We look forward to working with you!

Join us for a Google Analytics Premium Webinar to learn more:

When:
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST

Visit Google Analytics Premium or call E-Nor at 1.866.638.7367.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, Google Analytics Premium, web analytics

Google Analytics has spent a huge amount of time developing out the new interface and adding many new features to it.  In the last 3 months alone, we have seen social media tracking and multi-channel funnels added.  I am confident that in the coming months many new impressive features will be coming.

What is Google Analytics Premium

Google Analytics Premium looks and feels like Google Analytics Standard Edition, the interface we are all familiar with. It includes more processing power, advanced analysis, and dedicated support.  Below is the list of differences that will only be in Premium

Processing Power

• Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month
• Faster, intra-day processing for up to 1 billion hits per month
• Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing
• 99.9% on Collection up-time
• 99% on Reporting up-time
• 98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)

Advanced Analysis Tools

• Up to 50 Custom Variable slots
• Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests
• Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)

Dedicated Support

• Dedicated Account Management
• Phone & Email support 10 hours per day, 5 days per week
• Implementation Consultation & Tagging Audit
• 24/7 Product Emergency Escalation Support, if the product is ever outside of the SLA

I strongly feel that this is a very strong edition to the Google Analytics offerings.  It is targeted at a very specific audience, who has very complex needs and require high levels of customization.  For, the average Google Analytics user, they will never require these features.  For those that have large data sets and much higher levels of needs, many of their needs can now be met.  If you have any questions about Google Analytics Premium or Google Analytics in general, I encourage you to contact me or leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: Delicious, Google Analytics Free vs. Premium, Google Analytics Premium, Paid Google Analytics, web analytics

Today, Google Analytics released Real-Time, a new dashboard that will show your website traffic and certain metrics as it happens. Google Analytics has shown they are committed to the free version, by making this feature free and available to all starting today. The data that is shown only has a delay of 1-2 seconds from when a visitor clicks to one of your pages.

Here are the links to the topics and posts you requested; feel free to contact or email if you have any other questions or comments.

• Tracking Online and Offline Campaigns with Google Analytics
• Google Analytics URL tagging Kit (download the spreadsheet here)
• Analytics Reporting Framework Whitepaper
• Use cases for Custom Variables
• Analyze and Optimize for Mobile

Two other notes:

• You should have received the slide deck by now
• The follow up Q&A online webinar is scheduled for Friday 9/30 at 8 AM pacific. You should receive an invitation early next week so mark your calendar!

In preparation for the Q&A webinar, please add your questions and/or comments here and we will get those answered ahead of time or review them during the webinar.

Thanks again and happy analysis!!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

Before Channel Groupings

For this view I have filtered the report to only show Paths that include other, which are the undefined Channel Groupings.  This isn’t a very useful view, as there is not much analysis that you can do with it.  You don’t know what other is, but after going through the steps later in this post you can break these out and you will have paths that look like this instead:

After Channel Grouping

Above is a report that provides much more information, and is more appealing to look at.  Instead of being presented with a bunch of “Other” we have broken apart other into the marketing channels that we have been tagging correctly using Google Analytics campaign tracking.  This is extremely useful as you can start to analyze how the various marketing channels you are using such as QR Codes, Banner Ads, and even offline media are contributing to your site conversions.

How To Create Channel Groupings

To create your own Channel Grouping like the one presented above, you select the Channel Grouping dropdown and select “Copy Basic Channel Grouping template…” which will copy the settings for the default view that you see in MCF’s.

After clicking on “Copy Basic Channel Grouping template…” you will be presented with the view below.  This is how Google has chosen to categorize the channels in all the reports for MCF’s.  As you can see the “(Other)” channel comes from a rule that Google made if something doesn’t match any of the conditions above.

When you click “Add new Rule” which can be found under the last channel that has been created, you will be presented with new options to create your new channel, which should look like the image below.  Here we have grouped everything that contains “affiliate” in the Medium and grouped it together with a pretty color.  The amount of different combinations are very extensive.  An example of this is for AdWords you could split the Channel into two Channels, those that came from  display advertisements and those that came from paid search.

After you have applied and added new rules for your campaigns your should have a nice list of all your channels, with channel specific colors to make your reports more appealing and easily readable, as shown below.  Again the possibilities of different channel grouping are many.  Google uses a suggestion of making Generic Keywords vs. Branded Keywords, you could incorporate this into the new template you just made by making another copy of it.  You could split your organic search into the two keyword groups, and go from there.  I foresee channel groupings being essential to providing support to marketing questions that arise.  In a meeting a question that may be asked;  “Is social media really worth the time invested?”  To help provide insight into this, you could start breaking apart the social media channels and see which contributes to conversions.  Channel Groupings is my favorite feature of MCF’s, and I have a feeling it will be most peoples as well.

Technorati Tags: Bubbles, Channel Groupings, Colors, google analytics, Multi Channel Funnels

To reach this goal, marketers need a guide to help build the marketing accountability that analytics, and smart people, bring to the table.

I hope to provide this guide and structure in my 7-Step Analytics Reporting Framework whitepaper. This framework will help marketers navigate through seas of data and reports and leverage insights to impact their business.

You can download the full whitepaper here.

And for those of you on the go, here’s a quick outline of what to expect:

1- Define your requirements

Clearly identify what you need to measure and extract key data to measure your performance. This is the foundation for all following steps.

2- Know your channels

Pageviews alone won’t cut it anymore.  Different media platforms require different measurement approaches and techniques. Understand the characteristics of your channels and how to track each of them.

3- Trim your metrics

When it comes to reporting, apply this strategy: “less is more”. Just because you have a lot of data doesn’t mean you need it all.

4- Segment for context

Absolute numbers and aggregates hide a wealth of insight and can be very misleading. . Segment and allow “context” to give your data meaning.

5- Put intelligence at your service

Let computers crunch the numbers. Let reports detect and flag significant changes in your key performance indicators automatically. (If you are not a Google Analytics user, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and leverage its powerful Intelligence engine.)

6- Integrate reporting

Data from your website offer just few pieces of the puzzle. Incorporate data from mobile, social, offline, competitive, etc. and look at the big picture.

7- Automate

Tired of manual reporting? Automate your reports. This gives you more time to do proper analysis.

Bonus Step

Channel Attribution & Multi-Channel Funnels

Download the full whitepaper here. Feel free to comment and share.

Technorati Tags: analytics framework, analytics requirements, channel segmentation, digital marketing, google analytics, marketing optimization, report automation

There are 5 new reports and today I’ll give you a brief overview of a few.  The first report you’ll see is the overview.  Here you can see there where 1,261 conversions and of these 405 were assisted.  Assisted means they used a combination of traffic sources.  This could mean they visited our site twice from referral.  The later reports will break this down more.

Assisted Conversions is next up.  This starts to break down those assisted conversions and shows which channels contributed and whether it was first click, last interaction, or both.  The  values in this table are derived from the values that we assigned to our goals.  This conversion value will be especially useful if you have e-commerce enabled and setup in Google Analytics.  Keep in mind that in this report you can change to look at first click vs. last interaction and these are not mutually exclusive.  A visitors path could look like Organic -> Direct – > Organic and in this case Organic would get both a first click and last interaction conversion.  An awesome new feature in this section is the ability to make your own channel groupings, which for example could be a list of branded keywords and this can all be done on the fly.

The Top Conversion Paths Reports, display the conversion paths in a very user friendly manner.  For the example below you can see that most of the users who are converting on this site, stick with the same channel.  When looking at this and other reports, it is important to not just look at the overview as we have done for these examples, but also to drilldown and look at individual goal and e-commerce conversions.

These new reports open up many new layers of analysis.  Multi-Channel Funnels complements the recent update to sessions.  We will be providing more posts, about more detailed analysis that can be done inside of each of these reports.  If you have any unique insights into how you are going to use these reports leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, Multi Channel Funnels

Even though I was psychologically prepared by my friend Brian Clifton to see some non-sense in the report, I have to say that I was shocked to find out that the ranking criteria was the number of hits to the site.

My first hope was that their definition of “hits” is not the one we teach in Analytics 101 and hoped that at least they actually meant “visit” instead of “hit”, but after reading the attached notes to the report I found them clearly stating that the number of hits, “does not indicate the number of times a particular page on a website has been visited, but in many instances will include multiple components (e.g. text, images, videos) each of which are counted.”!

What is wrong with “Hits”?

I still remember my first personal website back in the days where “hits” was the only metric that I could use to measure the success of my site. At that time we knew that the hits report is like a garbage bin for all file requests from the web server [html, CSS, JavaScript, images, PDFs,…], but we were still happy for the small piece of information about our sites.

It is important to know that if two sites are visited the same number of times and the same number of pages are viewed in each site and one of the sites has more images, CSS/JS calls, and file downloads, the site with more server hits will rank higher in the Department for Transport’s report!

The use of hits may have been acceptable 10-15 years ago as the industry was not equipped with the right tools nor educated enough on what to measure and analyze, but now as we have advanced in the digital analytics sphere there is no excuse to use these outdated metrics in our analysis. The hits report is so useless that in reality it does not tell you anything about your site and visitors and certainly deserves the acronym that Katie Delahaye Paine gave to “hit”: How Idiots Track Success.

The example above illustrates the uselessness of the “Hits” report. By looking only at the number of “Hits”, Site A is doing much better than Site B and that is probably due to different factors that have nothing to do with the user experience (i.e. more CSS and JS calls). Once you look at other more relevant metrics like Visits and Pageviews, you will clearly see how bad Site A is doing compared to Site B. The numbers show more visits and pageviews, more time on site per visit, less bounced visits and more importantly higher conversion.

Good news!

I am happy to see the Google Analytics site [second in the list] being visited by some government employees (Civil servants as they are called in the report), which gives me some hope that next year’s report will be based on more meaningful metrics rather than the useless number of Hits report.

Related Posts

• Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets
• Asking the Next Question To Improve Online Customer Experience
• Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply The “Three Layers Of So What” Test

Technorati Tags: hits, pageviews, time on site, web analytics, web metrics

The old post referenced the traditional/syncronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code. This new post features the newest release by Google, which is the asynchronous code execution.

Please note that I am not going to re-do the entire post, just the code portion.

So here is the code update:

Traditional Snippet (Synchronous):

function validate()
{
isEntered(document.getElementById('name'),'name');
isEntered(document.getElementById('email'),'email');
isEntered(document.getElementById('phone'),'phone');
isEntered(document.getElementById('company'),'company');
isEntered(document.getElementById('comments'),'comments');

frm.action='/thankyou.aspx?src=contact_us.htm';
} 

function isEntered(el, field_name)
{
     if((el.value=="") || (el.value==null))
     {
     pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact_us.htm/empty/'+field_name);
     }

     else
     {
     return false;
     }
}

Asynchronous Snippet (NEW):

function validate()
{
isEntered(document.getElementById('name'),'name');
isEntered(document.getElementById('email'),'email');
isEntered(document.getElementById('phone'),'phone');
isEntered(document.getElementById('company'),'company');
isEntered(document.getElementById('comments'),'comments');

frm.action='/thankyou.aspx?src=contact_us.htm';
} 

function isEntered(el, field_name)
{
     if((el.value=="") || (el.value==null))
     {
	 _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/contact_us.htm/empty/'+field_name]);
     }

     else
     {
     return false;
     }
}

Related Posts:

• Optimize Form Length with Input Analysis

Technorati Tags: form optimization, google analytics, web analytics

Please note that I am not going to re-do the entire post, just the code portion.

So here is the code update:

Traditional Snippet (Synchronous):

<script type="text/javascript">
var srcPage = getDomain (document.referrer);
var parameter = get_parameter('id');

function get_parameter(name)
{
  name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
  var regexS = "[\\?&#]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
  var regex = new RegExp(regexS);
  var results = regex.exec(window.location.href);
    if( results == null )
      return "";
    else
      return results[1];
}

function getDomain (thestring) {
  var urlpattern = new RegExp("(http|ftp|https)://(.*?)/.*$");
  var parsedurl = thestring.match(urlpattern);
      if( parsedurl == null )
      	return "";
      else
        return parsedurl[2];
}

if (parameter == '1')
{
    window.location.hash = "utm_source="+srcPage+"&utm_medium=press_release&utm_campaign=hurricane_katrina";
}
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>

Asynchronous Snippet (NEW):

<script type="text/javascript">
var srcPage = getDomain (document.referrer);
var parameter = get_parameter('id');

function get_parameter(name)
{
  name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
  var regexS = "[\\?&#]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
  var regex = new RegExp(regexS);
  var results = regex.exec(window.location.href);
    if( results == null )
      return "";
    else
      return results[1];
}

function getDomain (thestring) {
  var urlpattern = new RegExp("(http|ftp|https)://(.*?)/.*$");
  var parsedurl = thestring.match(urlpattern);
      if( parsedurl == null )
      	return "";
      else
        return parsedurl[2];
}

if (parameter == '1')
{
    window.location.hash = "utm_source="+srcPage+"&utm_medium=press_release&utm_campaign=hurricane_katrina";
}
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowAnchor', true]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

Related Posts:

• Tracking Traffic from Press Releases in Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: google analytics, press releases, web analytics

Samantha Bedford of Location 3, Thomas Bosilevac of Mashable Metrics, and I will be cover the “A Few of My Favorite Tools” session on Friday October 21, 2011 from 1:10-2:00pm.

As our dear friend Jim Sterne said: “Consultants are tool agnostic” and “they certainly have their favorites and they know how to use them.”  Come join us to learn about some of the coolest analytics, integration, and visualization tools out there.

Early Bird Registration ends September 2nd, so register now and take advantage of the early bird special. Oh, and you can even save more, by using this 10% Promotional Speaker Discount code: EMOSSPEAK.

Don’t miss out!  Join us and the eMetrics folks to “celebrate 10 years of turning data into insight” If there is a specific tool you would like reviewed, please reply in the comment section below or email me directly, feras @ e-nor dot com.

Thanks
Feras

Technorati Tags: analytics consultants, analytics tools, data integration tools, emetrics new york, feras alhlou

In the last two weeks, we had back-to-back conferences and it was great to meet friends and learn and share experiences with the brightest minds in the industry. We participated in SMX West and had a one-day Google Analytics workshop in San Jose. We then participated in eMetrics (and the Web Analytics Association Gala dinner) and co-sponsored and spoke at the first Google Analytics User Conference GAUGE 2011 in San Francisco, (and somehow still managed to get client work done!).

I wan to specially thank the workshop attendees at both SMX West and GAUGE for their commitment and investment in learning Google Analytics and the great questions and discussions we had. I promised to provide a list with a number of useful posts and help topics, so here it is. Enjoy!

• New Google Analytics Version Announcement (and beta sign-up form)
• Campaign Tracking & Google Analytics Tagging Kit
• Using GA to track and optimize Mobile traffic
• How to set up Goals in Google Analytics
• How to Customize Google Analytics to enable Page/Section Content Grouping
• ShufflePoint – For Google Analytics Report Automation into Excel and PowerPoint
• Internal Campaign Tracking using the GA Site Search

Thank you again for participation and attending the training sessions and I hope to see you soon!

Feras

Technorati Tags: Advanced Analysis, emetrics, feras alhlou, GAUGE, Google Analytics User Conference, google analytics workshop, SMX west

Take a look at the workshop agenda and drop me a comment or an email if you have any other questions.

The morning session is marketing/business focused and the afternoon is more tailored to webmasters and techies. Analytics sits in between IT and Marketing, and to do it right, you really need to be aware of what’s involved in both aspects.

And rest assured that your questions will be answered. Even if we didn’t have time to cover a specific topic in-depth during the day, myself and one of our senior analysts will be available during the breaks and after the seminar for Q&A and hands-on review of your GA account and any data/analysis questions that you might have.

Register today and save $100 with this promo code (smx100feras).

I look forward to seeing you at the seminar!

Thanks,
Feras

Technorati Tags: analytics training, google analytics seminar smx west, google analytics workshop, SMX west

When the analysts clicked on the segments’ URLs, they imported the report structure exactly as it was configured under my login. But when they saved the segments under their login, the segments were saved under wrong profiles!

Why to share segments?
First of all we need to know that Advanced Segments and custom reports in Google Analytics are tied to the user login and not to the account/profile under which these segments are created in. So if two users have access to the same profile but they are using different login to access the GA account, the segments created by user A are not accessible to user B unless they are manually shared by user A. So, all the amazing segments and custom reports that E-Nor creates under their Google Analytics login will not be visible to their clients who are using a different login credential, even though both E-Nor and their clients are logged into the same GA account.

What went wrong with the segments I shared with our client?
When our client’s analysts clicked on the shared segment’s URL, the segment showed up by default under the first profile of the first account that the login of each user has access to. Because the relevant profile applicable to the segment was not the first profile in their accounts list, they failed to add the segment to the right profile and when they later logged in they were unable to allocate the segment under the given profile.

Disclaimer

The “share” functionality in the Advance Segment and Custom Report is good as long as the recipient of the shared segment applies the segment to the right profile using the “Visible in” menu (See point# 6 of this post). But if you want to make the life of the recipient much easier then follow the simple solution provided below.

Solution:

After looking at the Segment link and other GA reports links, I noticed that if we add the Profile ID to the link URL as parameter, then the segment will be populated under the right account and the right profile. So the solution is simply to attach the profile ID with the segment link

How:

Let me translate the above solution to 5 simple steps to follow:

1. How can I get the profile id?

Google Analytics assign a unique ID for each profile. This profile ID is different than the account ID [UA-123456-1], which we add to the website pages along with the JavaScript pixel. In order to find the Profile ID, just log in to Google Analytics and locate the account and the profile under which you created the “Advanced Segment”. Click on Analytics Settings > Edit, and the Profile ID will be in the upper left corner of the profile settings page.

2. How to create advanced segments and custom reports?
This is not the focus of this blog post, nevertheless, to learn how to create your own advanced segment read the following help topics:

• How do I create and use advanced segments?
• Quick Start Guide for Custom Reporting

3. How to get the custom segment Link?

Click Share for the relevant segment or report. [Go to Advanced Segments > Manage your advanced segments > Share > Copy the URL]

4. How to add the profile ID that I got from step# 1 to the segment Link URL that I got from step# 2?
Very simple! Just append the Profile ID [ex. id=18900120] to the end of the segment link URL

• Original Segment URL:
  http://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/add_segment?share=8VkOriwBAAA.RD_MY1rbVaEf7ayaUJLvVB_VBXDuTSw4FuVR3CYvPg_WSW-vkcaxJt62unrUjoT_byTGuV-Esw8bgJ8bhvuYDA.HHCYnjuOnWMaNIngCF4wVw

• Enhanced Segment URL:
  http://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/add_segment?share=8VkOriwBAAA.RD_MY1rbVaEf7ayaUJLvVB_VBXDuTSw4FuVR3CYvPg_WSW-vkcaxJt62unrUjoT_byTGuV-Esw8bgJ8bhvuYDA.HHCYnjuOnWMaNIngCF4wVw&id=18900120

5. What is next?

Send the enhanced segment link to anyone who has access to the Google Analytics account. When the recipient clicks the link, a template of your advanced segment or custom report loads under the correct account and correct profile.

6. What if I receive a segment link that doesn’t contain the profile ID?

Happy Analysis

Technorati Tags: advanced segment, Custom Reports, google analytics, Segmentation, web analytics

For those of you on the go, here’s a quick glance at the material I covered.  Try to make time to read each post in-depth, even if you have to read it on your smart phone!

1 – Look for Mobile Trends

In the first post, I detail how to monitor and analyze mobile traffic using key performance indicators. This is best done by customizing your GA settings to receive mobile traffic reports, custom alerts, and for the enthusiast, using the Google Analytics data export API.

2 – Give Your Reports More Dollar Power

So you’re mobile trends are positive, do you just throw the data to your boss? No. You always want to give your reports more dollar power. The second post centers on the power of presentation. If you’re CEO can easily connect the dots, two bottoms will be covered — your company’s and yours!

3 – Act on Your ROI

The average analytics guy will stop at step 2, but the third post encourages you to do more. Additional segmentation and leveraging  AdWords’ reports will allow you the much needed visibility into campaign performance to maximize your results.

And There’s More!

For tor the technically inclined, and to get a more comprehensive perspective on your mobile presence, there is more you can do. Check out the code site page on mobile to:

• Track native iPhone or Android applications
• Track activities on websites from low-end mobile devices

And be on the lookout for  niche analytics solutions specifically built for mobile.

Remember, it’s never too late to start maximizing your company’s mobile investment and implementation. Be sure to check out each post for more details and practical tips.

For more analytics tips and insights, follow @ferasa on twitter.  Happy analyzing!

Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, mobile analytics, mobile traffic, pay per click, search engine marketing, Segmentation, web analytics

That post was geared towards those who already had a good understanding of URL tagging. How about the beginners? In this post, we will try to address both beginners and advanced users. Does either of the bullets describe you?

• You are familiar with URL tagging, but need to find a way to automate the process using an elaborate tool
• You are looking for a brief how-to guide on URL tagging.

If the answer is yes, keep reading. Actually, keep reading either way – this was just a poorly crafted attempt at being dramatic.
Although url tagging isn’t a hot new topic, proper planning and tagging is fundamental to improving visibility into campaign performance, overall accuracy and proper attribution of campaign conversion data. Some of the most common questions we get asked are related to URL tagging, so we figured it was time to share some of the tools we use internally to help make the URL tagging process less mundane and more bulletproof.

Why should I continue reading? Here’s what you’ll get…

1. Online URL Tagging builder
2. An Advanced URL Tagging Kit (Excel based), and yes, it’s free!
3. A video guide & practical tips

Ok fine….How do I get started?

Start with the end result of tagging – a pivot report with Channel Segmentation.
Impress your boss and brag about your marketing channel and campaign segmentation skills, show them a sample report like this one (and get additional help/resources for your analytics team!) and then proactively follow the steps and tools in this post.

Let me explain why the above report is so powerful:

• All your campaigns – online and offline are segmented and properly tracked
• The pivot data is in an analysis friendly format
• The raw data is available and easily exported from GA (extracted into Excel via the API)

The three tools listed below will help you set up proper campaign tracking.

1- Online URL Builder

If you’re trying to learn how to build properly tagged URL’s or just need a tool to facilitate building a quick link or two, this tool will serve your needs very well. It’s quick, easy and available online here:

http://www.e-nor.com/url-builder.aspx

Simply enter the appropriate values, and then press the Generate URL button, and you’re done.

2- The Google Analytics Campaign Segmentation | URL Tagging Kit (beta)

The URL builder above is great for onesey twosey links, but woefully inadequate if you have more than a few links to tag (who doesn’t?) For a more robust method, check out E-Nor’s URL Tagging Kit. This Kit provides an automated method to tag many urls at the same time for multiple campaign variables. Using the URL Tagging Kit offers the ability to tag in bulk, updates formulas, error checks and prepares final tagged URLs for distribution to the campaign manager and then off to Quality Assurance.

Input Parameters:

Output Tagged URLS!!!

For beginners, just use the default settings and tag away!

For advanced users, here is what you get with this beta version:

• Auto concatenation of tag fields
• Error checking
  • Space character is handled gracefully
  • Character case is auto-fixed based on selection
  • Leading/trailing spaces are trimmed
• Your choice of querystring parameter character (? Or #)
• Auto-creation of final static version of the tagged URL

Download the URL Tagging Kit here

3- Online Video Tutorial

Don’t have time to read? Just watch the short tutorial below

(for whatever reason, I can’t seem to get full screen mode enabled on this video. Click here to watch the video on Youtube with full screen enabled.)

Practical Tips

• Google AdWords offers an “auto tagging” feature, if you turn it on and you connect your AdWords account with your Google Analytics account, you are all set. No manual URL tagging are required.
• Use URL Tagging for campaign types, such as:
  • Newsletters
  • Email
  • Banners
  • Affiliate
  • Shopping Comparison Sites
  • Non-Google CPC, CPA or CPM based advertisements
  • Press Releases
  • TV
  • Radio
• Basic UTM tagging only applies to your domain(s) and does not apply to external domains.
• Check which querystring parameter your site supports: ? or # (if you are using # as your querystring parameter, make sure you read the reference from Google Code on the _setAllowAnchor command)
• Establish an insightful naming convention for your team & stick to it!
• Ensure a QA process is in place:
  • QA naming convention (including upper and lower case) and if you use holiday_2011, don’t use FALL-2011 for the same campaign.
  • Check links to verify landing pages render properly.
  • Verify final tagged urls in all final content.
  • Verify information is passed to Google Analytics as planned.

So there you have it. Tag, Track, Segment, Analyze and Optimize!

Advanced User Notes:

• For advanced users and those interested in multi-channel attribution, you can make use of the Multiple Custom Variables (MCV) feature in Google Analytics to measure first, last (and in between) campaign attribution
• If you are running social media and online viral marketing activities and you are active in blogging, on Twitter and Facebook, you should include “off-site” measurements in your overall campaign analysis.
• Here’s a nice post on the GA blog detailing a solution that requires no tagging.

Related Posts

• Tracking Online and Offline Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics
• URL Tagging help topic

Technorati Tags: api, google analytics, pivoting, Segmentation, url builder, url tagging, web analytics

What is considered “direct traffic” in Google Analytics?

Direct Traffic represents visitors who typed the URL directly into the web browser, clicked on a bookmark to arrive at your site, or clicked on an untagged URL in a desktop based application that link to your site.

What is the issue:

By default, Google Analytics attributes a visit and its conversions and sales to the last traffic source; that is what we call Last Click Attribution model. An exception to this rule is a “direct” visit. If a visitor returns to a site directly, the last traffic source before the direct visit will still get credit for that visit’s activities. This behavior is disliked by (few) analysts who prefer to look at the “direct” traffic like any other traffic sources.

Here is a simple example to illustrate the issue:

You are a web analyst at forever21… you ran a huge online campaign for the back to school sale (banner, email, social media, affiliate,..) now you want to measure your brand awareness in the market. You want to see how many people because of your branding efforts visit your website directly by typing your URL?

A few months after the end of the campaign you still see visits are tracked as “paid search”, “email” and “banner”. You see a very small number of “direct” visits. In the budgeting meeting you shared the numbers with the board and you decided to spend more $$$ on marketing because you haven’t reached your brand awareness goals yet.

Hold on! Do you know that most of these “paid search”, “email” and “banner” visits that you see today in your report are “direct” visits?These campaigns did their job months ago and now the whole universe knows about your brand and comes to your site directly.  Unfortunately, you have no insight about these “direct” visits because of the rule that “direct” visits do not override previous traffic sources for 6 months!

Can we change this rule? If this will answer your business needs and save you money, of course we can

Solution:

Simple! Just credit visits to the last campaign/traffic source regardless of whether the visit was a direct or non-direct visit. See the table below for a comparison between the default GA reporting settings and the “True Direct” solution settings:

How:

We will need to run some JavaScript code before firing the Google Analytics tracking code. This JavaScript code will check:

• the value of the URL of the page that loaded the current page (Output: URL or Null)
• the current page’s URL (Tagged with Google Analytics campaign UTMs or not tagged)
• if the value of the referring page is NULL and the current URL doesn’t contain any UTMs, then update the URL with the following utm parameters utm_source=(direct)&utm_medium=(none)&utm_campaign=(not set)

Why do we check whether the current page is tagged or not?

Sometimes pages are loaded without referring information, yet they might have been manually tagged with campaign parameters to force GA to credit the visit to a certain channel. We do not want these pages to be overridden by our “direct” parameters.

Example: http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html#utm_source=cnn.com&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=thanksgiving

The traffic source for this visit will be:

• Source = cnn.com
• Medium = banner
• Campaign = thanksgiving

Click here to view the entire code segment

Let us explore the code, section by section:

function get_referrer() {
var source = document.referrer;
if (source == null || source == “”)
return “direct”;
}

This portion of the code will determine the URL value of the page that loaded the current page (referring page). If the value is NULL, the function will return “direct” indicating that the current page was not referred by another site.

function get_parameter() {
var urlstr = window.location.href;
var results = urlstr.match(/[\\?&#]utm_source=([^&#]*)/);
if (results != null)
return “tagged”;
}

This portion of the code will determine if the current page is manually tagged with Google Analytics campaign parameters.

if (srcPage == “direct” && parameter != “tagged”) {
window.location.hash = “utm_source=(direct)&utm_medium=(none)&utm_campaign=(not set)”;
}

This portion of the code will check the values returned by the two functions above. If the visit has no referring information (direct) and the URL is not tagged with any Google Analytics campaign UTMs, then the page URL will be updated with Google Analytics UTM parameters setting the source and medium for the visit to “direct”

Page URL
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html
New URL
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html#utm_source=(direct)&utm_medium=(none)&utm_campaign=(not set)

* Notice that we did not use window.location.href function because this function will reload the page with the new URL, which is not what we want to happen. We just want to update the URL, without affecting the visitor experience, in order for the Google Analytics tracking code to attribute the visit in a certain way.

Bonus: Defining a Search Term as Direct Traffic

Sometimes out of convenience or laziness visitors reach your website by entering your domain name or business name as a search term in a web search engine (ex. google, yahoo, bing). Those visits will be attributed in GA as organic search visits, even though, the only difference between the two visits is that in one visit the URL was typed into the web browser’s address bar and the other was typed into the browser’s search box.

In my opinion, these branded searches should be dealt with as direct visits. In GA we have the option to do that so if you are convinced, then let’s configure Google Analytics to treat certain search terms (our brand) as direct traffic.

The configuration has to take place at the code level. It will be simply adding the _addIgnoredOrganic() method inside the Google Analytics tracking code for each keyword we want to track as direct traffic.

The custom Google Analytics tracking code will look like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxx-x']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowAnchor', true]);
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredOrganic', 'e-nor']);
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredOrganic', 'e-nor.com']);
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredOrganic', 'www.e-nor.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function () {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>

Congratulation, now you don’t only have access to the direct visits data of those who visit your site for the first time as direct, but you will have insight into all direct visits regardless of whether they took place during the first, second or even the tenth visit.

Related Posts

• Tracking Online and Offline Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics
• Excellent Analytics Tip #18: Make Love To Your Direct Traffic
• Tracking Traffic from Press Releases in Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

As I typically do after a workshop, here are the answers, links, and additional references to questions raised that we didn’t have time to address in full details. Feel free to drop me an email if you have an account specific question.

• Weighted Sort in the Google Analytics reports. One of my new favorites features, I love it when Google Analytics does the heavy lifting for the analyst
  • Weighted Sort Definition & Examples
  • A link to a recent post by Avinash on the greatness of Weighted Sort
• Multiple Custom Variables (MCV), they can be used in many different ways. Here are some ideas:
  • Segmenting on user attributes
  • More examples on segmenting by visitor actions and selections
  • First and Last Touch Attribution
• Tools to test Google Analytics code on your site
  • GA blog post on tools to debug your tracking code and Google Chrome Extension
  • WASP
• Payment Gateway & eCommerce Integration
  • Paypal
  • Using Google Checkout to track Google Checkout Orders
• Search and Replace Filter:
  • An example on how to clean up dynamic URLs and make your page names much more meaningful in the GA reports
• Google Website Optimizer (GWO)
  • Using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer together
  • Customize for multiple subdomains
  • Control script customizations
• Internal Campaign Tracking
  • If you are using a parameter in the URL (e.g. to track an internal campaign, www.mydomain.com/?src=logo) and you don’t want to use the “?” but rather use the “#” in the URL (www.mydomain.com/#src=logo), here is the code you should add to recognize the “#” in the parameter

  _gaq.push(['_setAllowAnchor', 'true']);

• Quality Assurance
  • Many of you asked about validating their Google Analytics implementations. A Metric and Reporting planning process as well as a QA process should be in place. This will ensure your implementation will lead to the desired results. In addition, Audits and Validations by third party consultants can be very useful. Here is a link to what E-Nor offers for Google Analytics Audits and Validation (other Google Analytics Certified Partners offer similar services)
• Follow up Webinar: speak with you all on Friday at 10am Pacific

Again, thank you all for attending the workshop and I hope you start putting all the power of Google Analytics in use to help you improve the performance of your website and get better ROI on your marketing campaigns.

10/19/2010 Update

Some of you asked for more technical details on flash and video tracking, here are the links. Enjoy!

• Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash & Gadgets
• Event Tracking in Google Analytics
• Video Tracking using Event Tracking in Google Analytics

Feras

Technorati Tags: google analytics, smx east, training, web analytics, workshop

If you are not attending our Google Analytics workshop at SMX NYC, and happen to be in or around Chicago, you don’t want to miss our upcoming half-day seminar at Search Engines Strategies (SES) Chicago at the Hilton Chicago on Friday October 22, 2010 from 1-5pm, buy your seminar pass today at $845!

There are a number of search marketing workshops taking place on the 22nd, so check out any of the morning sessions, and more importantly (we’re not biased ), make sure to attend E-Nor’s session in the afternoon. Mark your calendar and register today.

So why should you attend?

Sure, you want to spend your training budget, add something to your resume and just really want to meet in person (and these are all valid reasons) but what else can SES Chicago do for you? Well, if you are struggling to go beyond basic web metrics of visitors and pageviews and want to move into actionable insights, this seminar will put you on the right track. You will learn how to improve your return on investment (ROI) on marketing campaigns and utilize analytics insights to optimize performance.

What will you learn about Google Analytics in a 1/2 day?

Marketer/Business Focus – Strategy & Planning

• Understand the user interface & clever stuff you can do with Google Analytics
• Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email, banner campaigns

Webmaster/Technical Focus – Implementation

• Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properly
• Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights

Who Should Attend?

• Business, marketing and technical management and staff
• Webmasters
• Business owners
• CMOs

We will have ample time for Q&A and I’ll be hanging around for an additional hour for hands-on analytics review and advanced analytics questions.

Again, the seminar is in Chicago on Friday October 22, 2010 from 1 to 5pm. Register today and invest in learning!

I look forward to seeing you at SES Chicago.

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics Seminar, google analytics training, Search Engine Strategies, SES Chicago

What can I do with Advanced Segments in Urchin 7?

• Identify & analyze the visitor groups who are truly valuable to your business
• Allows you to filter reporting data similar to using GA Advanced Segmentation. The feature is accessible on the Urchin 7 Reporting UI from the toolbar.
• Each advanced segment is a combination of filters joined by an "AND" condition. Metrics support numeric comparison operators "equals to", "less than", "less than or equal to", "greater than" and "greater than or equal to".

How do I use Advanced Segments in Urchin 7?

Easy   the interface is similar to Google Analytics.  The screen capture below shows the new Advanced Segments dropdown.  Click on this dropdown to enter the wonderful world of Advanced Segmentation awesomeness.

 
In the screen capture below, the user is presented with an option to manage their advanced segments, or view from a list of default segments.

How do I create a new Advanced Segment in Urchin 7?

Let’s build a really simple segment that will let us analyze traffic originating from Google.

NOTE:  in building a segment, I strongly recommend giving the segment a meaningful name.  This will help you and others that may be using the tool clearly know what the segment contains.  Don’t use names like "My Segment" or "Segment 1" or "test".  A meaningful name for the example above would be "Traffic Source=Google" or "Traffic from Google" or something to that effect.
 
1) To create and configure a new segment, click the "Create new custom segment" button on the Manage Urchin Visit Segments page.

 
2)  Below is the segment definition screen:

 
3)  Once done, apply the segment to all profiles

 
4)  Now let’s view the New vs. Returning report for our segment!

What are some practical use cases of Advanced Segments:

1)  Create a true organic segment where branded traffic is filtered out.
2)  Create a segment to analyze visitors by referrer or traffic source (like our example above)
3)  Segment by geographic location (country, city, etc)
4)  Segment by Content viewed (Landing page or Page)
5)  Segment by Goals (allowing you to see the behavior of users who converted vs those who didn’t)
6)  Segment by Technology metrics (browser type, screen resolution, etc)
All the above will help in your data analysis.  These are just a few simple ideas.  Pleases share any cool segments that have assisted you in your analysis!

Try out Urchin 7 today.

Related Posts

• Urchin 7 Now Available
• Google Analytics’ Gift to Humanity:  Multiple Custom Variables

Technorati Tags: advanced segment, google analytics, urchin, web analytics

Features

• New reporting UI
• Report permalinks
• Advanced segments
• Event tracking
• Report tabs to provide more information in context
• Updated segmentation menu and options
• Customizable geolocation settings
• Custom filter ordering
• Native 64-bit support
• Faster data processing speeds
• Multiple schedulers for concurrent profile processing
• Urchin API
• Automatic updates
• Embedded help center
• Improved lookup tables
• New site summary report
• And more!

That’s an impressive list of features and more will come with time!

Works with Google Analytics

Urchin 7 receives some of the best features you have been using in Google Analytics, such as the polished interface, event tracking, and advanced segments.

In addition, you can easily use both Google Analytics and Urchin 7 at the same time to leverage the power of both tools to truly become a data-driven organization!

Pricing

The price for Urchin 7 is $9995.

Any amount paid for Urchin 6 can be deducted from the price of Urchin 7 – Google’s way of making sure your Urchin 6 investment continues to pay off!

For more information about Urchin 7 or any web analytics needs, feel free to contact us and we’ll be glad to help you.

Related Posts

• Urchin 7 64-bit released
• Urchin 7 is finally here!
• 7 Days of Urchin 7

Technorati Tags: urchin, web analytics

Here are the top changes for this release:

• Limit on a total number of log sources in Urchin (65000) was removed.
• Yahoo CPC sources are disabled in Urchin 6.603.
• Switch to AdWords API v.2009.
• Some specific issues related to AdWords account structure download were fixed.

Check out our Urchin page for a download link.

Technorati Tags: urchin, web analytics

That is an average of 36 comments per post and 92 words per comment. Congratulations Avinash!

For Analytics oriented bloggers such as Avinash, I am sure as much as they love and appreciate all their blog readers they will always value the engaged readers who make the effort to drop a line or two seeking clarification, encouraging them to write more or giving them feedback.

This segment of blog readers is by all means the fuel that keeps bloggers alive and encourages them to continue to write and share what they have in mind. Therefore, studying and analyzing the behavior and the user experience of this segment is very important for optimizing the blog to achieve your blog objectives.

In this post I will walk you through few basic steps that will help make this segment of engaged readers available in your Google Analytics report.

Assumptions:

• You have Google Analytics installed in your blog
• You are using WordPress as a platform for your blog (of course you can apply the same method to other blogging platforms)

The How:

Our approach is a three-step process:  add custom code, create a Goal in Google Analytics which tracks the number of comment submissions and then create an advanced segment for those who converted.

Step 1) Add custom code to the comments’ form code:

Since in WordPress there is no unique confirmation page – thank you page – that visitors see once they have submitted their comment, we will need to fire a virtual page every time the “Submit” button is clicked.

We will need to modify the comments form’s code and add some JavaScript code to it. The code will fire a virtual page every time the “submit comment” button is clicked. The code for the comments form is found within the comments.php file, which can be found under your WordPress theme folder [../wp-content/themes/default/comments.php]

• Add the following code to the onclick event of the “submit comment” button:

onClick=”javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/comment-submission.php']);”

Below you will see how the code will look after the JavaScrip insertion, this depends on the version of the Google Analytics tracking code you are using:

Asynchronous snippet

<p><input onClick=”javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/comment-submission.php']);” name=”submit” type=”submit” id=”submit” tabindex=”5″ value=”Submit Comment” />
<?php comment_id_fields(); ?>
</p>

Traditional snippet

<p><input onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/comment-submission.php’);” name=”submit” type=”submit” id=”submit” tabindex=”5″ value=”Submit Comment” />
<?php comment_id_fields(); ?>
</p>

Step 2) Create a Goal:

Every time the virtual page that we created in step 1 is fired, it will trigger a conversion and the hit will be available in the Goals report.

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and then click “Edit” beside your profile. You will need to configure goals for each profile you want the Goal to show up in.
2. Click on: +Add Goal
3. Enter the following Goal Information:

• Goal Name: Blog Comment Submission
• Active Goal: On
• Goal Type: URL Destination
• Match Type: Head Match or Exact Match (in this case both will work)
• Goal URL: /comment-submission.php

Step 3) Wait a Few Days and Analyze your Goal Performance

Your Goals will not work backwards, so you will need to wait for Goal data to appear in your reports. Now you have the number of comment submissions.

Is creating a goal is enough for our deep analysis? Not really! It will be nice if we can analyze traffic only from this specific segment of our blog visitors. Advanced Segments is the answer!

Step 4) Create an advanced segment

Now let us create an advanced segment that only shows the visits of those who submitted comments.

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account
2. Advanced Segments > Create a new advanced segment
3. Select the “Goal Completion” Metric for the Goal that you created in step 2

By applying this segment, now you will have more insight about the  blog commenter’s user experience, their traffic sources, geographical locations, time on site, browsers, screen resolutions, etc.

Apply the same concept to your email subscribers, contact-us requests, social media followers or any other segment of your blog readers you are interested in learning more about.

Happy Analyzing

Related Posts

• How to Setup Goals in Google Analytics
• Google Analytics’ Gift to Humanity: Multiple Custom Variables

Technorati Tags: advanced segment, goals, google analytics, Segmentation, wordpress

Marketer, marketer, what do you see?
I see detailed reports and valuable insights made available for me!

Business owner, business owner, what do you see?
I see more money for me!

Online shopper, online shopper, what do you see?
I see an amazing website customized and optimized for me!

Say you have an online store where you sell clothes for men, women, and children. Wouldn’t it be nice to have more visibility into the shopping experience based on site visitors’ age, gender, and products of interest?

Say Hello to a feature known as “Multiple Custom Variables!” To read more about how it works, check this post in the Google Analytics blog.

In this post, I would like to walk through our implementation strategy and technical details.

The Strategy

As visitors enter the store website, they will be tagged with different labels based on some personal unidentifiable information (gender and age), and based on the pages they visit (products and store departments):

Example 1:

Tom is a new visitor.  He registered on the site, viewed a product (women’s pajamas), added the item to the shopping cart and then completed the purchase.

At the end of the session, Tom’s visit will be labeled as the following:

Example 2:

Sara is a returning visitor who in a previous visit registered to the site. She viewed a few products (men’s and women’s apparel), and then left the site.

At the end of the session, Sara’s visit will be labeled as the following:

The How

1. Customizing the tracking code:

Visitor-level Labels

At the visitor level we will use custom variables to segment visits based on their entries in a form. Let’s use the values that visitors voluntarily enter in the “gender” and “age” fields in the following form. These custom variables will remain attached to the visitors for future visits starting from the visit in which they filled the registration form (until they clear their cookies).

Setting the value of “gender” and “age”:

1. Add custom code that takes the gender and age values from the registration form.
   
2. Pass the two variables (gender-variable, age-variable) to the registration confirmation page
3. In the registration confirmation page, add the following code inside the GATC right before* the pageview GIF request _trackPageview()

pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, “gender”, gender-variable, 1);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, “age”, age-variable, 1);

* If it is not possible to add the custom code inside the GATC, then add the following code after the GATC

<script type=”text/javascript”>
pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, “gender”, gender-variable, 1);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, “age”, age-variable, 1);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Session-level Labels

At the session level we will use custom variables to distinguish visitors’ behavior across sessions based on their conversion. In this way, we can segment visits by those who complete e-commerce transactions versus those who just browse products on the site.

A visitor will be tagged as a “buyer” if he or she completes a transaction. If they do not buy anything, the visitor will be tagged as “justlooking”.

Setting the value of “visitor-type” to “buyer”:

In the transaction confirmation page (thank you page) add the following code inside the GATC right before the pageview GIF request _trackPageview()

pageTracker._setCustomVar(3, “visitor-type”, “Buyer”, 2);

Setting the default value of “visitor-type” to “justlooking”:
All visitors will be tagged by default as “justlooking” once they enter the site by setting the value of the custom variable “visitor-type” to “justlooking” at the session-level.

Add the below code* to all landing pages right after the GATC.

* High-level description of the code:

• extracts the “_utmb” string from the cookies set by Google Analytics
• extracts the “pageview count” value from the _utmb cookie
• if the session’s “pageview count” is equal to 1 (landing page), set the value of “visitor-type” to “justlooking”

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var utmb = get_utm_value(document.cookie, ‘__utmb=’, ‘;’);
var utmc = get_utm_value(document.cookie, ‘__utmc=’, ‘;’);
var pageview_count = get_utm_value2(utmb, utmc);
if(pageview_count<=1)
{
pageTracker._setCustomVar(3, “visitor-type”, “justlooking”, 2);
}
//This function extracts the “_utmb” and “_utmc” string from the cookies set by Google Analytics
//This function was originally written by the Google Analytics team (urchin.js)
function get_utm_value(l,n,s)
{
if (!l || l==”" || !n || n==”" || !s || s==”") return “-”;
var i, i2, i3, c=”-”;
i=l.indexOf(n);
i3=n.indexOf(“=”)+1;
if (i > -1)
{
i2=l.indexOf(s,i);
if (i2 < 0)
{
i2=l.length;
}
c=l.substring((i+i3),i2);
}
return c;
}
//This function extracts the “pageview count” value from the _utmb cookie
function get_utm_value2(utmb,utmc)
{
var i, j, k;
var utmc=utmc+’.';
i=utmc.length;
j=utmb.indexOf(“.”, i);
k=utmb.substring(i,j);
return k;
}
</script>

Page-level Labels

At the page level we will use custom variables to determine which product categories and store departments are visited. We will set a custom variable at the page level for each product, where the product category and the department for that product is set as a custom variable.

Setting the value of “store-department” and “product-category”:
In each product page, add the following code inside the GATC right before the pageview GIF request _trackPageview()

pageTracker._setCustomVar(4, “store-department”, “Men”, 3);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(5, “product-category”, “Suits”, 3);

2. Creating Custom Advanced Segmentation

Enough coding!! Now it is time to create some custom segments we can use for deep analysis.

In this section, we will set up a simple custom segment for all ladies (31 to 50 years’ old) who visited the men’s department, looked at suits, and bought an item during their visit.

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account
2. Advanced Segments > Create a new advanced segment
3. Add the following dimensions:

3. Viewing Reports

We are now ready to analyze based on custom segments built upon our custom variables! Let’s look at the amazing data available in our new segments:

Segment 1: Male shoppers (31 to 50 years’ old) who visited the women’s department, looked at Suits and bought an item during their visit

Segment 2: Female shoppers (31 to 50 years’ old) who visited the men’s department, looked at Suits and bought an item during their visit

From the first glimpse at the dashboard numbers above, we can confirm that for the 31 to 50 age group:

• It takes men fewer number of page (around 3 pages on average) to buy suits for women compared to women shoppers who visit 5 pages on average to make a suit purchase for men.
• The number of women who shop for men is more than the number of men who shop for women!  Shame on us men .

If you came up with more interesting segments please share with us, we are very interested hearing from you.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, multiple custom variables, qualitative analysis, web analytics

You have your messaging, promotions, copy, creative, and landing pages all ready, and soon you will go live and you have a week to figure out this “tracking, measurement and analytics” business!

No worries! Google Analytics and this post have come to the rescue!!

In this post I will walk you through a process of how to plan and implement a comprehensive external campaign tracking.

Assumptions:

• You have Google Analytics implemented on your site
• You have a basic familiarity with URL tagging
• Last but not least this post also assumes that you are ready and willing to be proactive and you do care about analytics and campaign ROI

Prerequisite: Structure & Naming Convention

As you know, the sole purpose of tagging is to differentiate between the different ads and campaigns you are running, so it is very important to agree on the structure and the naming convention as a first step. Here is an example:

As you can see from the chart above, we are running different online and offline ads for our Mother’s Day campaign. In the next section, we are going to tag all these ad’s links with the campaign variables using the URL Builder tool provided by Google.

Email

Email campaigns are one of the most effective ways of attracting visitors to your site especially existing clients. If we don’t tag the emails links with the right campaign tags, visits from emails will be attributed as referral or direct traffic.

How do we tag email links?

1. Use the URL Builder to create tagged links
2. Enter the following variables into the URL builder:
   

   Website URL: http://www.store.com/

   Campaign Source: newsletter-april

   Campaign Medium: email

   Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

3. Use the generated link URL in your email (ex. “Visit the Store” button”)
   

Banner

We will follow the same tagging steps that we used for email campaign to tag our banner campaign:

1. Use the URL Builder to create tagged links
2. Enter the following variables into the URL builder:
   

   Website URL: http://www.store.com/

   Campaign Source: oprah.com

   Campaign Medium: banner

   Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

3. Use the generated link URL in your banner (ex. “Shop Now” button”)

Twitter

Social media today is reshaping the online marketing landscape. People are using YouTube, Facebook, Flicker, and Twitter for more than just personal updates and video/picture exchange. There is a huge amount of promotion and branding taking place in these sites and our job in this post is to measure the success of these marketing efforts.

Let’s use Twitter for our Mother’s Day campaign and make sure we tag all links to our site with the proper campaign variables.

How do we tag Twitter links?

1. Use the URL Builder to create tagged links
2. Enter the following variables into the URL builder:
   

   Website URL: http://www.store.com/

   Campaign Source: twitter

   Campaign Medium: social media

   Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

3. Shorten the generated link URL using any URL shortening tools (I usually use bit.ly)
4. Tweet about your promotion using the tiny URL
   

Paid Search – Google

Thanks God that Google AdWords and Google Analytics are cousins and integrate very well together! Google AdWords has a nice feature called auto-tagging which makes it easy for us to see AdWords campaign information in our Google Analytics reports without any manually tagging.

To learn more about auto-tagging visit this help topic.

How do we enable auto-tagging?

1. Sign in to your AdWords account
2. Click on My account tab and select Account preferences
3. Under Tracking section, click Edit
4. Check the Destination URL Auto-tagging checkbox
5. Click “Save changes”
   

Paid Search – Yahoo

Unlike AdWords, to track Yahoo paid traffic we need to manually tag the destination URL with the campaign variables.

1. Tag your yahoo ad link using the following variables:
   

   Website URL: http://www.store.com/

   Campaign Source: yahoo

   Campaign Medium: cpc

   Campaign Term: {OVKey}

   Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

2. Use the tagged URL for the “Destination URL” field
   

Paid Search – Bing

Similar to what we did with Yahoo ads, but with the following variables:

• Website URL: http://www.store.com/
• Campaign Source: bing
• Campaign Medium: cpc
• Campaign Term: {QueryString}
• Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

Tracking Offline Campaigns

When we talk about tracking campaigns, it is not enough to focus only on online campaigns. We have to include the offline campaigns in our reports for complete analysis. In this section, I will share with you one method of tracking your offline campaigns in Google Analytics in 2 simple steps:

1. In your offline ads, refer visitors to a page that is unique to the campaign; [www.store.com/mother]
2. Tag all visitors to the unique page with the campaign variables [source, medium, & campaign name]

How to tag all visitors to www.store.com/mother with the campaign variables?

We will assume that all visitors to the unique landing page [www.store.com/mother] are coming from a specific offline campaign let say the USA Today newspaper. When the USA Today visitors request the promotion URL and before we fire the Google Analytics code, we will refresh the landing page using meta-refresh tag, which update the URL with the campaign UTMs. When The Google Analytics code gets executed after the page refresh, it will see the URL with the campaign UTMs attached to it and will attribute the visit as desired.

How do we tag destination URLs?

1. Go to the URL Builder
2. Enter the following variables into the URL builder:
   

   Website URL: http://www.store.com/mother

   Campaign Source: usa-today

   Campaign Medium: newspaper

   Campaign Name: Mother’s Day 2010

3. Add the following code to the header of landing page before the Google Analytics tracking code

   <head>
   <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.store.com/mother” />
   <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1;URL=http://www.store.com/?utm_source=usa-today&utm_medium=newspaper&utm_campaign=Mother’s%2BDay%202010″>
   </head>

Analyzing the data:

Now as we had all tags in place, it is time for deep dive analysis into the “Mother’s Day 2010″ campaign. I suggest that you isolate the campaigns’ visits by using advanced custom segment and look at this unique segment across reports.

Creating Custom Advanced Segmentation

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account
2. Advanced Segments > Create a new advanced segment
3. Add the following dimensions:
   

Viewing Reports (Show me the money!!)

Now, you are ready to conduct analysis based on the customized segment. You can look at the traffic sources report and see how many people purchased and from which medium:

From the first look at the ecommerce numbers above, we can confirm that:

• The TV campaign has the highest conversion rate
• The newspaper campaign was not as effective as other campaigns
• Social media has the highest ROI (Return on Investment)

Click on the dropdown menu below for more marketing campaign tagging examples.

If you like this exercise and you were able to extract some valuable insights for your business, apply the same concept for the upcoming Father’s Day, which is on June 20th here in the US and do a comparison between the users’ purchasing behavior in these two very special occasions.

Share your findings and happy analyzing and drop us a comment below!

Notes:

• For advanced users and those interested in multi-channel attribution, you can make use of the the Multiple Custom Variables (MCV) feature in Google Analytics
• If you are running social media and online viral marketing activities and you are active in blogging, on Twitter and Facebook, you should include “off-site” measurements in your overall campaign analysis. In addition, be sure to dedicate resources to listen and participate in the social conversations around your brand, products and campaigns

Related Posts

• Deep Dive Analysis with Google Analytics
• Monetize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: campaign analytics, campaign tracking, google analytics, msn adcenter, offline tagging, pay per click, search engine marketing, social media, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

Do you want to customize your user experience based on how many times visitors visited your site or how many pages they viewed?  Maybe you are designing a web page where the layout of which depends on the number of visits to the site or depends on whether the page was a landing page or a category page.

How about if you want to display a message on the landing page to all visitors who visited your site 5 times? Or you want to tag visits with custom variable after certain number of pageviews.

In this post I will walk you through a method that allows you to access the visit counter and the session pageview counter using Google Analytics. What you do with these two variables, I will leave it for you to decide based on your creativity and business requirements.

Google Analytics Visit Counter and Pageview Counter Technique

As you know, websites that have Google Analytics installed in them issue first-party persistent cookies that allow the site to uniquely identify visitors.
In this post we will focus on only two cookies utma and utmb and how can we get the visit count and the pageview count from them:

The utma cookie is also known as the visitor identifier. The last number in the cookie string is the visit counter, which increments by one every time the site visitor starts a new session. In the example below, the visitor visited the site 5 times.

How to extract the visit count?

I’m going to use JavaScript code to pull the “visit count” value off of the _utma cookie.

function get_visit_count(str)
{
var i, vc='-';
if (str != '-') {
   i = str.lastIndexOf(".");
   i++;
   vc = str.substring(i);
   }
return vc;
}

This script defines a function (get_visit_count) that receives the utma string and returns the visit count. If utma comes with no value due to the failure of executing the GATC for example, the function will return the ‘-’ character.

For example:
Function Input: 7113510.1552602301.1265052146.1265052146.1265060431.5
Function Output: 5

The utmb cookie is also known as the session identifier. The number that comes right after the domain hash is the pageview counter which increments by one every time the visitor refreshes the current page or views a new page. In the example below, 8 pages were viewed during that particular session.

How to extract the pageview count?

Similar to what we did in the previous section, this time I’m going to use JavaScript code to pull the “pageview count” value off of the _utmb cookie.

function get_pageview_count(utmb,utmc)
{
var i, j, pc='-';
if(utmb != '-' && utmc != '-'){
   utmc=utmc+'.';
   i=utmc.length;
   j=utmb.indexOf(".", i);
   pc=utmb.substring(i,j);
   }
return pc;
}

This script defines a function (get_pageview_count) that receives the utmb and utmc strings and returns the pageview count. If utmb comes with no value, the function will return the ‘-’ character

For example:
Function Input: 7113510.8.10.1265060431
Function Output: 8

How to implement this method on my site:

1. Create a folder under your web server root and name it “Scripts”
2. Download the “SessionTracker.js” by clicking here
3. Add the “SessionTracker.js” file to the “Scripts” folder
4. Add the following code right after the Google Analytics Tracking Code on every page you wish to track the session information [visit count and pageview count]

<script type="text/javascript" src=".../Scripts/SessionTracker.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
alert("visit count= " + visit_count);
alert("pageview count= " + pageview_count);
</script>

Now that we have the visit count and the pageview count for every page in the site, we can use them for all kind of cool things. Share with us your case studies and nice ideas

Related Posts

• A/B & Multivariate Testing w/ Google Website Optimizer
• Conversion Optimization Session @ SMX West

Technorati Tags: cookies, google analytics, web analytics

In addition to the GA workshop, I’ll be speaking at the Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies session on Thursday March 4, 2:45-3:45pm. Stop by and say hi! I’m certain you’ll pick up a tip or two on improving conversation rates, sales & profits. The session will also cover ideas on what to test and practical information on available tools and technologies.

The session will be moderated by Chris Sherman, the Executive Editor of Search Engine Land and the co-panelists are:

• Tim Ash, CEO, SiteTuners.com
• Patrick Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status
• Nicholas Ward, Product Manager, Range Online Media
• Feras Alhlou, President, e-nor.com

I’ll be focusing on the Google Website Optimizer (GWO) and how website owners should use A/B and Multivariate testing to find site bottlenecks and improve the performance of marketing campaigns by adopting a testing methodology. I am hoping that your takeaways will include:

1. Benefits of Testing and Google Website Optimizer – Free but powerful!
2. Features – what should you test?
3. Advanced Testing Strategies with GWO
4. Testing Best Practices
5. Sample Reports & Results

I look forward to seeing you at SMX West. Meanwhile, if you have a question, a comment or a suggestion, feel free to leave a comment or email me at feras @e-nor.com

Thanks,
Feras

Related Post:

• Google Analytics Training @ SMX West 2010

Technorati Tags: Brian Clifton, google analytics, google website optimizer, SMX west, workshop

Let’s get started!

1. Content Grouping in Google Analytics: this is our top viewed post in 2009. Marketers loved it and techies loved it too , it showed you the what and the how. This very handy method allows you to categorize pages into groups of related content and collect these pages together and treat them as a single entity (for further analysis as a group). For example, if you have an online store with women and men clothing categories, you can use this technique to group the women pages as one “content group” and the men pages as another “content group” and then, as Avinash mentioned in his comment on this post, “content grouping can really help make a complex site much easier to understand from a macro perspective”. You can also, apply the same content grouping concept to brand pages, or to a groups of landing pages.
2. Monetize your SEO effort by Leveraging Google Analytics: this was one of my posts and it had to be marketing & analysis focused, since I am not the javascript guy . If you are running a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, you’d want to take a few minutes and read this post, if you haven’t already. The post uses a case study and real numbers to help you answer questions on how ranking, or lack thereof, impact the bottom line, and help you get decision makers to act and get the most out of your SEO program.
3. Tracking Press Releases in Google Analytics: again, another method to enhance your measurement system and get a better sense of how your marketing initiatives are performing. Granted Press Releases fall under the “branding/awareness” marketing category, and we don’t just measure branding/awareness by immediate visits/outcomes, it’s still nice to have performance data for each press release. Check out this method, some coding is involved, but the implementation is detailed for you.
4. The Cost of Misinformation: a popular post addressing the mis-information (by some fee-based web analytics vendors) about Google Analytics. In additional to the advanced capabilities and enterprise-level features that Google Analytics has been introducing, this post highlighted Google’s innovative, open and global eco-system for support, training and consulting, available around the globe by some of the brightest in the industry.
5. Problems with Bounce Rates: this post was an answer to a lot of questions we get on how to correctly read and analyze one of the most useful metrics, the bounce rate. Hint: look at your top landing pages report.

And some from 2008!
And since we are talking about top posts, here are three posts that were published in 2008 but continue to be very popular, check them out and put them to use!

• Tracking Mobile Devices in Google Analytics
• Optimize Form Length with Input Analysis
• Detailed Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Keyword data in Google Analytics

And another bonus – E-Nor’s Guest Posts on the official Google Analytics Blog

In addition to the top posts on the E-Nor site, here are few posts that were well received (based on the limited qualitative data we have) on the GA blog:

• Structure Your Google Analytics Implementation – Account Roll-Up & Reporting
• How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics
• Advanced Segmentation & e-Commerce
• Marketing & Campaign Optimization with Google Analytics

A couple of notes on measuring blogs and posts

Note #1- Normalize your data

If you really want to measure the most popular post in a year, the aggregate data might not tell the entire story. A post that was published in January will have a whole lot more time to get traffic/visits/comments/feed subscriptions/retweets than a blog that is published in December. This reminds me of what Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book “Outliers – The Story of Success” and how Canadian hockey players born early in the year all have a huge advantage and how this advantage compounded over time (he showed the stats and the numbers to back up his findings). So if you truly want to compare how each post did, you might want to normalize the data, add a weighing factor to compensate for the sequence of the month in the year, or simply measure stats for each post in X weeks after it has been posted.

Additionally, and for the visually inclined, you can use a Google Analytics’ Motion Chart to “play” the graph over time and watch how each post did and compare the various metrics concurrently over the span of the year.

For example, the chart above represents a number of blog posts (from the GA Top Content report) along with few metrics. The x-axis represents pageviews; y-axis: average time on site; size of the bubble represents $index, and each color represents a specific post.

You see how the blog post represented in dark blue behaved differently than the post represented in lighter blue. For example, you see a “big bubble” on the right hand side of the graph, ~550 unique pageviews with a relatively larger $index value, both are positive outcomes compared to other posts. One can then do a bit more digging and find out what led to this positive result and repeat it!

Note #2: Blog Engagement Metrics

When it comes to blogs, you don’t just want to measure visits & pageviews (that is so 2009! ), you want to have more meaningful metrics. Who cares if you are pumping out posts like there is no tomorrow and no one is engaged. I’d look for things like feed subscriber rates, comments per post, words per comment, posts per blogger, among other things.

Here are a couple of snapshots from two bloggers that are active authors on the E-Nor blog, you’ll notice completely different patterns and user interaction.

A couple of observations

• Blogger A is more active in blogging 1.2 posts per month compared with 0.6 per month for Blogger B
• Blogger A gets fewer comments, 0.8 per post while Blogger B gets 8.4 per post
• One conclusion is that while Blogger A can write, his posts are not as engaging (ouch!) but Blogger B has a knack for getting people’s attention and input. Both bloggers can learn from this quick analysis and improve their posts in 2010 (Blogger A do something to get your audience attention, and Blogger B, charm us with more posts).

I hope you have found our 2009 posts useful! We’d love to hear from you for ideas, issues, questions and areas you like us to address in 2010. Leave us a comment below or email us directly at info @ e-nor.com

Related Posts

• Move Away from Old Metrics to Smart Metrics
• Google Analytics Features: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, Motion Charts and More

Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, motion charts

You don’t want to miss out on SMX or this seminar and the opportunity to meet and learn from Brian. The Search Marketing Expo – SMX West conference features 50+ sessions on the latest search and social media topics. Check out the full agenda, and sign up for the conference and for the Google Analytics Seminar.

For those of you that don’t know Brian, he is an internationally recognized Web Analytics expert who consults on website performance optimization for global clients. He is the author of the best selling book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (if you haven’t read it, you should ).

You can view the seminar details on the SMX West site and register online as well. Brian and I will be covering both strategic as well as tactical aspects of Google Analytics. CMOs, marketers, business owners, IT managers and staff would benefit from this seminar.

All the material will be provided to the seminar attendees. Also Brian and I will have a number of “on-the-fly” site audits during the seminar. Bring your toughest technical implementation and marketing questions and you’ll get expert answers. Here are the registration options:

If you are still undecided, check out the testimonials from previous Google Analytics Workshop attendees.

Brian and I look forward to seeing you at SMX! Feel free to contact us, email, call or leave a comment if you have any questions about the seminar.

Update, 1/7/2010 - we now have a 10% discount when you use the following promo code: GA@SMX.  Note that the code is case sensitive. 10% discount on All Access, Workshop Only and All Access + Workshop Passes. One more reason to attend!

Update, 2/7/2010 - due to unforeseen circumstances, Dr. Brian Clifton will not be attending the Google Analytics workshop @ SMX. Feras will be conducting the workshop according to the already published agenda, for both the morning and the afternoon sessions.

Technorati Tags: Brian Clifton, google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics, workshop

No other changes were made but it is cool that Urchin can be used in so many countries in their native language!

You can download multilingual Urchin 6.602 from our Urchin Analytics page.  If you have any questions on Urchin, feel free to contact us via this blog, the form on the right, or our toll free number 1-866-638-7367.

Related Posts

• Urchin 6.602 released
• Multilingual Urchin 6.602 on the Google Analytics Blog

Technorati Tags: urchin

Today our dear friend Phil Mui, Google Analytics’ Senior Product Manager, announced at SES Chicago, new and advanced features in Google Analytics. We will have specific posts with detailed examples and case studies in the future, but for now here is a quick summary of these cool new features:

Annotations

I would say, a very very long-awaited for feature. You can now quickly add your own notes within the Google Analytics user interface!!! Say you see a spike in traffic in last week’s reports and you know exactly what caused it (e.g. a recent email campaign that worked well). Now, you can add use Annotations to add a comment about this email campaign, so few weeks down the road you’ll have a reference of what happened and you won’t be searching all over your email, notes, and asking your colleagues (and maybe pulling your hair as well ) to help explained the traffic spike. Other scenarios where annotations can be very helpful:

• Very successful marketing programs (or maybe unsuccessful ones )
• External campaign not tagged properly causing data from one source to show in another source
• Introduction of new design/landing pages
• Site related issues causing data collection problems and inaccuracies

As you can see the relevant marketing campaign and site information will be right there next to your Google Analytics reports “bringing more Intelligence to data” as Phil said in his post. Very very useful and time saving feature, give it a try and start using it! Also, you have two options in Annotations, you can have the comment private or shared with others.

Here is an example of using Annotations to comment on a spike in traffic generated by a blog post.

Multiple Custom Variables In Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports

You can now create custom reports and use advanced segmentation to leverage the power of the new Multiple Custom Variables functionality. Slice your data and reports based on the visitor, session, or page level custom variables you have created and get the insights and actionability you that will make you a hero!

New Google Analytics Setup Wizard

For those of us that are less technical savvy, this Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) Wizard will be our best friend . You don’t have to manually construct the GATC code for sub-domains, multiple domains, cross-domains, mobile, etc; the wizard will help you get the code in a packaged and ready to use form.

For the GA ninjas, you also have a reference on How to Structure your Google Analytics Account.

New Version of the Google Analytics API

More details to come out later this week, but get ready for more capabilities in the GA API, namely support for Advanced Segmentation.

Whoa, it sometimes feel like it’s a challenge to keep us with all these new features, but it’s worth every bit of effort. Roll up your sleeves and give these features a try, and start improving your site and your marketing campaign performance.

Comments or thoughts about these new features?

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

• An experiment management API which allows you to create and manage experiments outside of the interface.  For those that work with a lot of experiments or deal with third party integration, this will save you a lot of work!
• Conversions over time charts can be found on the reports page of GWO.  Conversion rates are rarely a static number and websites might undergo changes during an experiment, so visually seeing how your combinations performanced over time might give you that extra bit of insight you were looking for.

Technorati Tags: google website optimizer

The problems with Omniture’s argument are that they are irrelevant and out-of-sync with the challenges that exist in the web analytics industry. When was the last time technology/features were the main issue in analytics? Also, the argument of cost is extremely misleading. So what if a Google Analytics solution isn’t free? That plain and simple ignores the fact that Omniture’s solution is priced well above what a Google Analytics “total package” would cost. When you criticize your competitor for a point that you’re not particularly strong at yourself, the argument loses all credibility and respect.

The biggest challenge facing all of us in the web analytics industry has little to do with the tool; the real challenge is creating an analytics culture. Getting the right people with the right processes to think “measure, analyze, take action” is way more meaningful. Google Analytics is more capable of facilitating this because:

• Google Analytics allows you to stretch your marketing dollars. According to Forrester: “Enterprise companies must ask themselves if they are paying too much for capabilities that they simply do not need. In some cases, gaining fewer seldom-used capabilities is a worthwhile trade-off if funds can be reallocated to hire more resources necessary for analysis”
• Google Analytics ease of use (GA has set the User Interface standard really high)
• Google Analytics support eco-system (see details below)

There have been many articles, posts, comparisons, etc. between GA and other solutions, so I won’t bore you here with repeating the details. I’ll just shed some light on two areas of misinformation:

• Over-emphasis on Technology
• Customer Support & Consulting

Over-emphasis on technology

You don’t have to be a CMO or a CFO at a Fortune 100 to realize that tools and software alone don’t get you the intended results. This applies to project management, accounting, Sales Force Automation and other aspects of running a business, and not just web analytics. For example, if you are looking for a sales force automation or a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can invest all the dollars you want in a solution like SalesForce.com but until you train your sales personnel and build the in-house processes for lead management and client communication, you can’t claim that you have a CRM system in place. So whether you use SalesForce.com or use an open source CRM, the investment you should be prepared to make is NOT just in the software, it is in people and process. It’d be gullible to think otherwise.

• The often repeated messages we keep hearing from fee-based analytics vendors is the over-emphasis on technology and feature-set.
  • Features are indeed important and Google Analytics is definitely feature-rich. Yet what matters is not the long list of features, but what’s important to the customer. Who cares if your solution offers a gazillion features but your customer’s business only needs 7 metrics/features and your solution doesn’t give them what they need!
  • Analytics industry experts across the spectrum have said it over and over, it’s not just about technology. Consider: people (in-house staff, consultants, professional services organizations), process, the organizational analytics maturity, among other factors. We are aware of Avinash’s 10/90 rule, and Eric Peterson reminds us of the staffing and process chasms.

Customer Support & Consulting – Investment in People & Resources

• If one listens to some of the fee-based vendor claims, they’d think that Google Analytics has no support or at max very limited support. This is far from the truth. Google is a unique company and does things in a unique way. Instead of establishing a professional services organization, Google Analytics opted to create an open, global and collaborative eco-system, which as a model, is more superior than a traditional, centralized, and closed professional services organization.

• As an enterprise manager/business owner, you have many options to establish and nurture your in-house team’s expertise and/or leverage the Google Analytics eco-system resources. Education, Training, Customer support & professional services are available through the following channels:
  • Ask a question, report a problem, or suggest an enhancement: Google Analytics Support
  • Answers for common issues: Google Analytics Help Center and Google Analytics Help Forum
  • Professional Services & Paid SLAs: Google’s worldwide network of authorized consultants, known as GAACs offering:
    • Technical Implementation
    • Validation & Configuration
    • Consulting & Best Practices
    • Ongoing Optimization
    • Testing
  • Training
    • In-person through the Google Analytics seminars
    • Regional Summits, Conferences & Webinars
    • Industry Conferences (workshops at eMetrics, SES, etc.)
    • Certified Training Programs (GAIQ)
  • The GAAC partners go through a rigorous vetting process, have direct access to Google Analytics technical team members and are required to maintain up to date product know-how, including training at the Googleplex. The GAAC global network is 100+ strong and provides professional, local (and personable ) services in these regions:
    • North America: USA, Canada, Mexico
    • South America: Argentina, Brazil
    • Europe: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands,
    • Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK
    • Middle East & Africa: Israel, South Africa
    • Asia Pacific: Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka

• In addition, fee-based solutions providers do have “professional services” organizations and they do sell these services (last I checked, these services weren’t free either!). Here’s a quote from Omniture’s services: “Omniture Engineering Services provides both standard packages as well as custom solutions. Specialized solutions are priced hourly on a per-project basis. Please coordinate with your assigned Omniture Account Manager to discuss your needs. The Engineering Services team will then engage with you and your Omniture Account Manager to scope the project, provide timelines, and deliver your specialized solutions.”

One final thought on technology/features. While there is always room for improvement and the product can benefit from additional capabilities, Google Analytics’ commitment to innovation is evident by the on-going enhancements including:

• Last year’s features: advancement segmentation, custom reporting, on-the-fly analysis capabilities, etc.
• Data Export API (and it’s network of developers and innovations), and
• The recent announcement at the D.C. eMetrics , including: “intelligence”, custom alerts, mobile tracking, and multiple custom variables.

So here you have it. Don’t get distracted by the misleading information, and stay focused on building your expertise in analytics and nurture a team (in-house and/or outsourced) that will utilize all the “free” resources to save you money and improve your returns!!!

Related posts:

• Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics
• Top Ten Myths about Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent
• Google Analytics No Longer Free

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

Here is a quick overview of the features included in this release:

• Switch between supported languages (total of 10)
• Added SSL/TLS protocol support to External Authentication (LDAP)
• The Urchin “Home” page (sometimes called the Roll-up Report) now displays metrics for all profiles visible to the logged in user. Data can be shown in 3 views: Basic, Business, and Admin.
• Easier one-click installation: New one-click installation which also sets up the included postgresql database server at the same time! This reduces much of the setup time, since the database server no longer has to be setup and configured. The user can still opt to use existing database servers if desired.
• Optimized GeoDB. You can now select between a full GeoDB or a lighweight GeoDB providing metro information up to the country level only. This significantly reduces the memory footprint.
• The zip utility has been updated to work with data files > 2 Gb.
• New UI tweaks have been made on the Marketing Summary report so that the user can sort metrics sources, keywords, and campaigns by their appropriate metrics.
• Remote log file downloading. A new configurable parameter for remote log download timeout has been added to urchin.conf.

In addition, many bug fixes in the areas of log processing, licensing, migration, and embedded help were included in this release.

Important notes:

• Urchin 6.6xx no longer supports the MySQL 4.x.x. database. If you are using this version of MySQL, you’ll need to upgrade to 5.03+.
• FreeBSD 5.x platform has been deprecated.

That’s a lot of new stuff for a point release upgrade   This new version has currently only been released to Urchin Resellers.  If you would like a trial copy, please contact us, or you can download version 6.6.0.1 (the current version) here.

Technorati Tags: urchin

As announced today on the Google Analytics blog and at eMetrics, the Google Analytics team is rolling out a new version of GA (version 4) with exciting new capabilities, many more customization options, and the totally awesome and super powerful Intelligence feature.

Over the next several days I’ll be posting specific posts about each of the new GA features, but for now here is a quick summary of what you’ll start seeing in your reports.

• Expanded goals
• Mobile reporting
• Advanced table filtering
• Unique visitor segmentation
• Multiple custom variables
• Sharing of custom segments and custom report templates
• Intelligence
• Automated and custom alerts

Please note that some of these features are rolled out as we speak (ok, it is past noon Pacific, 10/20/09 ), and others will be rolled out in the next few days or weeks.

More Power!

• Goals and more goals! We have conveyed your requests to Google. You weren’t satisfied with 4 goals and now you can have up to 20; yes, 20 goals! Measure those important actions! In addition, you can now measure two engagement metrics, Time on Site and Pages per Visit.
  
• Expanded mobile reporting. Not only you can track traffic from your iPhones, but now GA allows you to track mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices (great way for application developers to measure engagement). In addition, traffic to mobile sites can be tracked (for sites built in PHP, Perl, JSP, ASPX), for devices with or without JavaScript.
• Secondary dimensions and pivoting. Great table and filtering features. Check out our post on these here.
• Unique Visitors Segmentation: now available across many dimensions in your Custom Reports. Answering the question of “how many actual visitors” got a little bit easier.

More Flexibility and Customization Options

• Multiple custom variables. The requests of the analytics ninjas have been answered! Define an important interaction for your site and set a custom variable to track it. Tracking can be done at the page, session, and visitor level.
• Sharing custom segments and custom report templates. If you can create them, you can now share them . It’s as easy as copying and pasting a URL.

Intelligence

• Analytics Intelligence. This new feature is just great! Any time a tool can help automate the mundane and allows you to focus on the business, you gotta love it! This new report will provide automatic alerts when significant changes in your data occur, in daily, weekly and monthly intervals.
  
• Custom alerts. You can create your own custom alerts and be notified by email or through the UI.

That is it for now. Log in to your GA account and check out some of these features and let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, mobile marketing, web analytics

Jim Sterne and the eMetrics team have an incredible line up of speakers and tracks, including multi-channel metrics, search analytics, emergent media and many others.

In addition, there is a number of workshops offered. Topics include: reports, predictive analytics as well as a workshop on Google Analytics by our dear friend and GA Ninja Caleb Whitemore of AnalyticsPros.

So don’t miss out if you can make it, you can still register here.

Technorati Tags: emetrics, google analytics, web analytics

With his usual charisma and humor, Avinash covered a number of areas including the process of making decisions and smart analytics. I’ll summarize a few points in this post. This is not meant to be comprehensive so to get more, buy Avinash’s new book! ) .

• Websites are not the center of the universe anymore and neither is centralized analytics tagging. The model used to be Content Creation  —>  Content Distribution  —>  Content Consumption. This model is changing. The way we create content, the way we consume it is changing (blogs, tweets, etc.); marketers and analysts don’t think about this issue enough. Just looking at your site analytics is not going to be sufficient. The data that we need to make marketing decision effectively is more distributed and not in one centralized place.
• The challenge is going to be to figure out how to integrate all this data from all different systems automagically as Avinash put it; pull the data in, scrape, integrate, and then correlate and compute.
• Vendors, practitioners, and consultants should start thinking beyond existing (read this as old) metrics: (visits, pageviews, time on site, etc.), and look into things like engagement, reach, velocity, demand, network strength, and activity. As we have moved away for hits (hits = How Idiots Track Success ), we need to move to smart metrics.
• An example of smart analytics for measuring twitter. Move beyond just number of followers, look how my message that I am communicating is amplified. Look for number of retweets per thousand followers. Twitter is not an ad – it’s about conversation and not shouting. Conversion rate is another cool metric. Numbers of replies sent/day and replies received/day indicate you are communicating with people.
• Another example for measuring a success of a blog. Go beyond pageviews! RSS/feed subscribers is much more important than visits or visitors. Metrics such as conversion rate per post, words in posts, words in comments all are very insightful.

And finally think of outcomes and behavior that adds value to business.

Technorati Tags: web analytics

Yes the election is over and this might sound like an out of the date post, but actually the message here is that Dan went on to found a start-up with the knowledge and expertise he gained from the Obama campaign. What he accomplished and learned in the political campaign is very applicable to the private sector and hopefully we can all learn a thing or two.

Some interesting facts about Obama is he out-performed McCain in the “new media” category significantly, in terms of Facebook friends, YouTube views, and website unique visitors, as well as the very important aspect of fund raising. The money raised for Obama was $656 million versus $201 millionfor McCain (not counting the Federal funds). Out of the $656 million, a staggering $500 million was raised online.

Analytics Lessons Learned

1. Define success and also define quantifiable success measures.Metrics, like cost per click, email sign up rate, and revenue per email recipient. In Dan’s startup, he is now measuring: cost per click, cost per playing user (free account), revenue per paying user (paid account). So when the revenue per paying user exceeds the cost per playing user, they make money!
2. Question assumptions.Testing is king, A/B and multivariate testing both play a key role in deciding what call to action, what creative, and other aspects work best!
3. Divide and conquer.Segment users, for example, those that never signed up, those signed up but never donated, and those that previously donated.
4. Don’t reinvent the wheel.Use available and free tools like Google Apps, Google Websize Optimizer, and Google Analytics.
5. Take advanatage of circumstances.Whether it is internal to your business or something external (economy, competitiion, etc), give your visitors current and relevant content.

Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics

As the glow in the room reaches epic proportions, a faint sound begins resonating in the distance. What is that wailing sound? Someone please make it stop! Is that a human voice? As a hush falls over the crowd, the voice now clearly identifying itself as human comes through loud and clear. “Are you sure your data is accurate?” It’s the voice of that most dreaded of all phenomenon’s….the web analyst!

As our trusty friend, the web analyst points out, it’s equally important to ensure your data is accurate as it is to have the data in the first place. What’s the point of having all that cool data if it’s not accurate? Would you want to make a business decision or drive some marketing effort based off of misleading or inaccurate data?

It’s crucial to invest time and resources in checking and re-checking your data to ensure it’s as accurate as possible. Let me share a recent example to illustrate the importance of data accuracy to the wonderful world of web analytics.

I got a call from “Customer X” recently questioning why traffic to their site was so low in their Google Analytics account. After a couple of minutes of discussing the issue, we came to understand that there was roughly a 30% decline in visits over the last week. The date that the visits dropped coincided with a site outage that required a backup version of the site to be restored. We did our due diligence and made sure the GA code was present, and that the site was functioning properly, but didn’t find any other code related issues.

We asked the standard questions to determine if any offline marketing (or termination of some campaign) would have resulted in a decrease in traffic, but the answer was no.

After poking around on the site, we found that any users going to the non-www version of the domain were seeing a slightly different version of the site. This version of the site had no GA code on it. Apparently there was a DNS problem which was sending visitors to a staging environment instead of the live site. This was resolved quickly but no tangible increase in traffic was found. We still saw roughly 30% decline from previous weeks/months.

So, faced with no obvious conclusions we started diving into GA and found something interesting. It appeared that visitors using IE had reduced by 2/3 from the last week. We thought we had it nailed! Our assumption was that something in IE was preventing the GA code from loading under certain circumstances. We tested IE inside and outside, right side up and upside down, but found no anomalies whatsoever. This led us to believe this issue was just a symptom of a deeper problem.

Finally, after exhausting all normal troubleshooting procedures, a colleague of mine suggested we look at the problem from the reverse angle. Instead of assuming the data was accurate before the restore, let’s assume the data is accurate after the restore, and perhaps it was messed up before. We dove backwards in time through the data, and found a date 4 months prior, where the data had shot up 30%. Hmmmmm!!! After consulting with the customer again, we were informed that another site outage had occurred on the exact date that traffic had shot up 30%, and this outage also required a site restore from backup. The data from before the first site restore and after the second restore was exactly the same. The anomaly was the 4 months between the two site restores. Now the problem data was isolated, but what the heck was causing the data to be so off?

We asked the customer to restore a backup of the site (from the time period in question) to a separate environment for further analysis. Upon doing so, we continued our investigation. On a whim, we started checking some common code files, and to no one’s surprise, we found two versions of the same GA code being loaded. Sure enough, the second version of the GA code was in a design template file that was only being used 30% on the site.

So after hours and hours of troubleshooting, we were able to nail down the problem for this customer. Many high-5′s and manly grunts ensued and we all lived happily ever after…well at least until next time!

Data accuracy is the core of Web Analytics. Don’t take it lightly.

Here are some practical suggestions for assessing the accuracy of your web analytics data:

• Conduct a periodic audit on your web analytics code.
• Review your Google Analytics account configuration. Check your profiles, filters, segments and goals to make sure they are setup right.
• Review external tagging.
• Question the data (especially for sudden ups and downs).
• Speak with other departments in your organization to confirm/deny what the data is indicating. This will help give your data some context.

Related Posts:

• Cleanup your URLs with Search and Replace Filters
• How Accurate is your Analysis Data?

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

1. Learn practical steps on how to improve your online business. Whether you have an eCommerce site, a lead generation site, a corporate site or a content site, this workshop will teach you how to use data to optimize your site as well as how to measure and improve the return of your marketing campaigns.
   

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2. Learn from the experts. Brian has written a book on Google Analytics and both Brian and Feras founded companies that are certified by Google as Authorized Google Analytics consultants (you know, they must know the stuff to be accredited ). Jokes aside, Brian and Feras have worked extensively with clients across the globe helping them capture, track, analyze, test and continuously improve online businesses using Google Analytics.
   

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3. The training caters to both the technical/webmaster as well as the marketing /business folks. As a matter of fact, you can have the marketing person attend the first day and the webmaster attend the second day (split the cost across two departments, might be easier to get approval this way )

   

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4. All workshop material will be made available for you in a digital format. This includes PowerPoint presentations, documents and sample excel spreadsheets.
   

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5. FREE book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton! And it is signed by the author too!
   

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6. Breakfast and lunch are provided and included in the registration fee.
   

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7. Meet Brian Clifton in person! Ok, Feras is local, you can meet him any time

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop on October 19 & 20!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing & Business!

A two-day workshop on web measurement strategy and planning, and Google Analytics implementation. Marketers will greatly benefit from Day 1 and webmasters will find Day 2 full of implementation techniques and best practices. You can sign up for one day only or for both days.

Register before September 30 and receive a signed copy of Brian Clifton’s book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

Mark your calendar and stay tuned for more details!!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

Roll-up Reporting

• In Urchin 6.600, attempting to log in to an account with a large amount of data often resulted in the following error: Session Error – unable to call default routine. (2002) Please login again.This error occurred due to slow performance in calculating roll-up reports. In Urchin 6.601, the performance of the Urchin roll-up report data extraction has been significantly improved.
• The default view has been changed from ‘Month’ to ‘Day’. This was done to improve the performance on installations with a large number of data-heavy profiles.
• The “Completed Goals” calculation logic has been corrected to report the total number of goal conversions. (Previously only one conversion per defined goal was reported, so Completed Goals would only show values from 0 through 4.)

User access to AdWords Tools

• A new ‘Access to CPC Sources’ setting has been introduced on a per-user basis. By default, only Super Admin has AdWords tools enabled. For all other users, this access must be explicitly granted via this new setting.

Copy Campaign Tool

• The Copy Campaign Tool has been disabled due to legal issues. It may be reintroduced at a later date.

Support for Bing.com

• Support for the new bing.com search engine has been added.

Master tracking codes with CPC sources

• Profile filters are now applied to CPC sources.

Special characters in CPC source passwords

• Certain special characters were not allowed in CPC source passwords. This has been fixed and certain special characters are now allowed.

Licensing

• Regular license re-set and reactivation were required after upgrade to 6.600 on Linux and FreeBSD. This has been fixed and reactivation is no longer required.

Migration

• In certain cases, when migration of the reporting databases from Urchin 5 to Urchin 6 crashed or was interrupted, subsequent attempts to resume failed with “WARNING: (8010-577-1192) Database file is the wrong size – run sanitizer”. This issue has been fixed.

Enable all Regions

• All regions have been enabled.
• IMPORTANT: If urchin 6.601 is used to upgrade from the international version (Urchin 6.501 or 6.402), the language settings for all users will be switched to English, while preserving other regional settings.

The geo database has been updated.

Here is a link to download Urchin. If you have any questions on Urchin and you need any technical support for Urchin, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Technorati Tags: urchin, web analytics

It’s always a pleasure to speak with Avinash. You’ll hear about analytics, online marketing, and also about what is going on in some of the world’s top brands.

I was able to take some notes that I wanted to share. OK, the notes are brief as I was typing on my iPhone and I think Avinash thought I was playing Sudoku too . Here you go:

Why aren’t more people testing and why is testing a rarity. Avinash mentioned a couple of things that made a lot of sense:

• Vendors and consultants are sometimes at fault. In their effort to highlight the capabilities of their products and services, they inadvertently set a high barrier to entry. All they talk about is multivariate testing and the gazillion variations you can have.  While impressive, it might be overwhelming or intimidating to marketing managers and site owners. Simplifying what to test, starting with a couple of ideas, and setting realistic expectations might get the decision makers to grant you the go-ahead and get your testing effort off the ground.
• The second point is that while it is easy to simplify things, it’s hard to come up with two good ideas to test (not just “let’s change the button color”). It does take creativity, knowledge of your audience, among other factors to come up with two very good ideas to test.

These were the two points that Avinash emphasized and I find very helpful. Then there was an interesting discussion about some experiments with 19 PhD’s (I’ll pass on this for now), and another discussion about embarrassing the highest level manager you can (this way they listen to you), but this one needs another post altogether, and Avinash talks about it on his blog, so you can read his comments on the topic and apply it at your own risk!

I would also add that looking for some easy wins, taking some risks, and finding a sponsor that will support your effort, will pay off big time in getting more out of your site, and also in setting/starting a testing program within your organization.

So to summarize:

• If you/your organization is new to testing, start with A/B Testing
• Be creative, take some risk, look for low hanging fruits and get some early results to get your testing program supported within your organization

For more information on testing, check out Google Website Optimizer, make sure you get a copy of Always Be Testing, and feel free to contact one of E-Nor’s consultants.

Technorati Tags: google website optimizer

Who’s on the panel?

• Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing
• Ron Belanger, SES Advisory Board & Vice President of Worldwide Agency Sales, Omniture
• John Marshall, SES Advisory Board & CTO, Market Motive
• Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite
• Feras Alhlou, President, E-Nor, Inc.

You have vendors and consultants sharing their experiences and how to enable data-driven decision making in your organization.

For my presentation, I intend on sharing real life examples and case studies and to “show” more than to “tell”. And definitely no sales pitches (learned not to do that long time ago ).

I hope to see you all at SES. Drop me a comment or email me directly for any specific questions on the session.

Technorati Tags: web analytics

• Deep, deep, deep integration with Google AdWords
• Data Export API
• External Authentication (LDAP)
• Auto CPC cost data import from Yahoo
• A number of Admin, Log Processing, Security and Utilities bug fixes and enhancements

If the above has piqued your interest, then read more below.

Urchin Integration with AdWords

• Budget Alerts: Notification when AdWords campaign budget is about to expire.
• Keyword Generation Tool: Addition of the Keyword Generation tool in Urchin, add & delete keywords in your AdWords campaigns.
• Direct Access to AdWords: Skip the AdWords login process, directly link from Urchin to AdWords after proper set up, save time.
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion: Import cost data simply from AdWords with this new feature which inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs.
• AdWords Optimizer: Optimize AdWords campaigns in Urchin & those changes are automatically applied in AdWords.
• Copy Campaign Tool: Copy campaigns from other ad networks into AdWords.

New Urchin Metrics & Reports

• Performance Comparison: Compare & Analyze campaign performance from all sources & mediums.
• Time on Site: Dig into customer engagement with visitor time on site information.
• Campaign & Keyword Views: Reports display paid campaign & keyword data.

Urchin API

• Export your data from Urchin and run your own application. Protocols supported: SOAP 1.x & REST

Other Enhancements & Bug Fixes

• Demo license change. Profiles & log sources now have a limit of 5 each. No other limits have been implemented.

Go to our Urchin sofware page to download the new Urchin files. For additional information about Urchin, contact one of our Urchin experts.

Related Posts

• Urchin 6 released
• Adwords and Urchin integration
• Detailed Urchin 6.6 changelist

Technorati Tags: google adwords, urchin, web analytics

• Secondary dimensions
• Pivoting

To find out more, keep reading or watch our video:

Secondary Dimensions

Personally I’ve found this new feature to be extremely helpful. It has helped me focus more on analysis and less on digging through reports (yay!) and it definitely decreased the steps taken to get to a particular report. Secondary Dimensions allow users to view two different dimensions within the same GA report. This makes analyzing your data more efficient and saves you time. Instead of having to run different reports and compare the data, you’re able to run the report and see the data side by side. Let me show you an example:

One of our clients observed a sudden spike in their direct traffic. We needed to ascertain where the traffic was coming from. Since the client had attended a couple of recent trade-shows, our initial assumption was that this spike in direct traffic resulted from the buzz around the shows. Stop – do not settle on this conclusion so easily! We’ve been trained to use data to validate assumptions and conclusions.

In the “All Traffic Sources” report, I selected traffic sources by medium, and then I added a secondary dimension for “Country/Territory”, and voilà, the report was created and it showed us that out of 1972 direct visits, 1037 were from Pakistan.

Wait a second, we knew that the trade-shows where in the US and not in Pakistan, and the client’s target audience is US-based as well. It turns out that this particular client has an offshore software development office in Pakistan. which explained the recent spike in traffic as the developers were making updates to the site.

Even without the Secondary Dimension feature this same information is available, but you would have to leave the current report and go to a “direct segment” and then look at a geography report to find the information that is now available using the secondary dimensions feature (with one click). As stated earlier, deep dive analysis at your fingertips!

Pivoting

If you are an Excel geek, and I might qualify for one , you know what pivoting is all about. But for the purpose of this post, pivoting in Google Analytics will allow you to see additional metrics in the same view.

For example, say you are looking at your top landing page report. With secondary dimensions, you can now view the visitor type (new versus returning) as well.

This above report is for a news website, “/” is the homepage, and “/Politics” is the politics page. We see that the bounce rate for the “/Politics” page is much higher for new visitors than for the Returning Visitors. Time for action! Equipped with the new findings, you can review the “/Politics” page content and/or layout and assess how to further engage the new visitors. Keep in mind that when you are doing this type of analysis, keep statistical significance in mind; don’t waste time on something that is not statistically significant such as a seldom visited page.

With pivoting, the deep dive analysis is about to go into over drive. So while I am in the same GA report, it occurred to me that the client makes frequent updates to their homepage and maybe some browser incompatibilities have been introduced along the way. With a couple of clicks, I can get the insight I am looking for.

In the Secondary Dimensions drop-down, I selected “Browser”, then I selected the “Pivot” view and I choose “Operating System”. Here you go, all the cool analytics data you want right here in one table. We are now seeing:

• Home page (our landing page in this example)
• Viewed by browser type (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and more)
• Viewed by Operating System (Windows, Mac, and more)
• By Entrances and the respective Bounce Rate
• Wow, a lot of numbers to view, but the report is much more insightful and there is so much context!

What do I do next? Easy! Meet with the web design team, share the data, and hopefully help the team prioritize fixing browser incompatibility issues starting with Firefox on Mac, and then Safari on Windows. Obviously, if you are not happy with the 34.27% Bounce Rate of traffic on Internet Explorer, then you’d want to allocate time to improve it on this segment of traffic since Internet Explorer represents a significant percentage of the total.

So to summarize, the secondary dimensions and pivoting features in Google Analytics allow us to dig much deeper into the data, and all done on-the-fly. Give these features a try and let us know what you think.

Related Posts:

• Share Customizations and Dive Much Deeper
• Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: google analytics, pivoting, secondary dimensions, web analytics

A lot of time, the issue is not reporting nor analysis but it is making sure:

• Data is accurate (or as accurate as it can get )
• What we think we are analyzing is truly what we are analyzing

If you think one of your most important pages has a 100% bounce rate, you might panic (and rightfully so) and gather all your resident experts to figure out what is going on. Imagine, after hours or days of analysis and review you find out that all of your bounces come from a statistically insignificant number (in our example, 3) of pageviews! Most of us would not bother to investigate further and try not make the same false misperception again.

Let’s explore this issue in more detail.

Question: How does my e-commerce thank you page, which is not a landing page, have 100% bounce rate in the Top Content report in Google Analytics?

Answer: You are in the wrong report, my friend! Let us start with the definition of Bounce rate: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page,” by Google Analytics. “Single page view visits divided by entry pages,” by the Web Analytics Association.

So bounce rate is a metric for only landing pages and not for all pages. Reading the bounce rate for pages that are not entrance pages will lead to misperceptions, incorrect conclusions, and wrong actions.

What is the issue?

The issue starts when we try to make sense out of the bounce rate column in the content performance report. This report contains all pages visited in your site, including entry pages and non entry pages.

So let’s say we want to study and analyze the performance of the ‘confirmation.htm’ page and we started with the top content report.

When we look at the bounce rate on the content performance report, it is quite misleading since the 100% bounce rate is only applied to visits when this page was a landing page. One might ask, if this page is not a landing page and you have to go through a few steps before you reach it, where did these three visits in our above example come from?

There are a few scenarios where a non-landing page could be tracked in Google Analytics as an entry page (landing page). These scenarios include but are not limited to:

• The thank you page was bookmarked by the visitor for future reference.
• The visitor hit the refresh button on the non-landing page window after 30 minutes of no activity.
• A direct visit to the non-landing page by developers/site owner. Excluding the internal traffic will solve this one.

If we look at the “Landing Pages” report, we can see these leaked pages and their bounce rate; 3 single pageview visits out of 3 entry pages leads to a 100% bounce rate.

Suggestions for web analysts:

I advice my dear analyst friends to not look at the bounce rate column in the “Top Content” report for non-landing pages. If you insist then I suggest excluding bounce visits with an Advanced Segment.

Now you have clean and accurate data

Suggestions for Google:

I suggest to the Google Analytics developers to remove the bounce rate column from the top content report all together. Or at least make it possible to remove the column from the display.

From now until the next blog post, I wish you a happy April and an enjoyable month of analysis.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

A few days after my colleague and I wrote about content grouping in Google Analytics, E-Nor president Feras Alhlou asked if it is possible to apply the same concept to referring sites.

Our objective is to group all domains and subdomains of related referring sites as one referring entity. For example, nextag.com, nextag.co.uk, and affiliates.nextag.com should appear as a single Nextag entity.

1) Create an advanced filter that renames all domains and subdomains of a particular referring site to one entity.

2) Repeat step 1 for every group of referring sites that send you significant traffic.

Another example of related sites: cnet.com, zdnet.com, download.com, and shopper.com. Affiliates and dealers could also be grouped this way.

3) Apply the filters you just created to a new profile.

New profile – my colleague Rehan Asif cannot stress this enough!

Congratulation, we have grouped related referring sites as entities!
Now we can look at the traffic from those referring sites at an aggregate level.
Happy, Feras?

Stay tuned for the next post on how to group pages based on their functionality. It is actually Avinash’s idea from the previous content grouping post and I promised him that I will write about it.

Finally, do not forget to adjust your clocks this coming Sunday and analyze your performance before and after the change

From now until the next blog post, I wish you a happy March and an enjoyable month of analysis

Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, web analytics

Google is also offering a Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test as a proof of proficiency in the fundamentals of Google Analytics (GA). For this test there is a $50.00 fee.

What will you learn? A lot!

• Installation of Google Analytics tracking code (GATC).
• Familiarity with the GA user interface.
• Canned reports and how to interpret them.
• How to set up profiles, filters, goals, funnels, and more.
• Campaign tracking, eCommerce tracking, and events tracking
• An entire section on recent features, including custom reports, advanced segments, and motion charts.
• Cookies, regular expressions (regex), and all the fun stuff to do with tracking mutiple domains and sub-domains.
• There are also few sections focused purely on analysis of reports.
• And more!

Our consultants here, including myself, have gone through the curriculum; we liked the structure and the thoroughness of the course. If you are serious about analytics, specifically Google Analytics, I highly recommend you invest some time to take the course.

Depending on where you are in your organization, I see a couple of challenges that you’ll need to overcome:

• If you are not technical, say your focus is on reporting and analysis, you are going to need some strong coffee as you go through the technical sections (regex, cookies, etc), but you will have a better understanding of the scope of work involved in implementation.
• If you are technical and focused on implementation challenges, then you’ll probably enjoy getting away from coding for a little bit and seeing how all your hard implementation work is put to use during analysis.

What if you can’t stand staring at a computer screen for hours going through an online course? Othere sources for Google Analytics education and training are available:

• Books: Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics, Justin Cutroni’s eBook, and a few other books you can find on Amazon.
• Google Analytics help forum
• Your friendly neighborhood Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (no sales pitch here, the link is going to all the GAACs).
• A good number of blogs focused on Google Analytics.
• Webinars offered by many GAACs.
• In-person Google Analytics workshops (San Francisco Bay Area) and seminars (national)

Happy learning!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics