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Posts Tagged ‘google analytics’
Mar 06
2010
I want to thank all of you who attended the Conversion Ninja Toolbox Session @ SMX West on Thursday and the Google Analytics Seminar on Friday. It was pleasure meeting you all!
Also, thanks to Tim Ash, Nicolas Ward and Patrick Bennett for their great presentations at the conversion toolbox session. Check out this post that Nicholas wrote after the session, you gotta love the picture (Nicholas, can I be the one with the two swords?  ).
For those of you who attended the Friday Google Analytics Seminar, thank you again and I hope you found the material helpful and I hope you put it to use right away (on Monday as you promised!! ).
Here are some additional references:
That’s it for now! Thank you all again and hope to see you at an advanced Google Analytics training in the future!
Technorati Tags: google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics
Tags: google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics
Posted in general | 2 Comments »
Mar 01
2010
It’s March 1st already, my goodness, I am already so behind on things I want to do in the first quarter! And this week it’s going to be busier since I’ll be attending & presenting at SMX West. But it’s worth every bit of it. The folks at SMX have assembled a great line up of speakers on all-things search (and yes, some analytics too).
For those of you attending SMX West, I’d love to meet and catch up. In addition to attending and taking notes at the various sessions, here is where I’ll definitely be networking or speaking:
- Monday 3/1, 6pm-7:30pm: Meet & Greet reception
- Tuesday 3/2, 5:45pm-7:00pm: Expo Hall Reception
- Thursday 3/4, 11:30am-12:30pm: Measuring How Search Ads Drive Offline Conversions – Q&A Moderator
- Thursday 3/4, 12:30pm-1:30pm: Birds-of-a-Feather Analytics Table (lunch)
- Thursday 3/4, 1:30pm-2:30pm: Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO – Q&A Moderator
- Thursday 3/4, 2:45pm-3:45pm: Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies – Speaker
- Friday 3/5, 9am-5pm: Google Analytics Workshop – Presenter
To our clients: many of us at E-Nor will also participate in parts of the conference and we plan to absorb as much as we can, pick some golden nuggets here and there and take it all back and continue to enhance our processes and add more value for our clients.
Thanks,
Feras
Technorati Tags: google analytics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SMX west, web analytics, workshop
Tags: google analytics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SMX west, web analytics, workshop
Posted in general | No Comments »
Feb 08
2010
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:
- Create a folder under your web server root and name it “Scripts”
- Download the “SessionTracker.js” by clicking here
- Add the “SessionTracker.js” file to the “Scripts” folder
- 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
Technorati Tags: cookies, google analytics, web analytics
Tags: cookies, google analytics, web analytics
Posted in web analytics | 16 Comments »
Jan 25
2010
You probably have seen the earlier post on the Google Analytics Workshop that Dr. Brian Clifton and I are holding at SMX West on March 5, here in Santa Clara. The early registration ends this Saturday, so if you are planning on attending the workshop, take advantage of the 10% discount and sign up by this Saturday 1/30/2010, the discount code is GA@SMX.
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:
- Benefits of Testing and Google Website Optimizer – Free but powerful!
- Features – what should you test?
- Advanced Testing Strategies with GWO
- Testing Best Practices
- 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:
Technorati Tags: Brian Clifton, google analytics, google website optimizer, SMX west, workshop
Tags: Brian Clifton, google analytics, google website optimizer, SMX west, workshop
Posted in web analytics | No Comments »
Jan 11
2010
 It’s that time of the year to review 2009: “Top 5 Google Analytics Posts in 2009″! We want to thank our blog readers for their time, input and comments and we look forward to offering you more useful tips in 2010 and additional methods and strategies to leverage Google Analytics and take your marketing optimization efforts to the max. This post lists the top viewed Google Analytics blog posts, as well as a couple of bonus points related to measuring blogs.
Let’s get started!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
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:
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
Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, motion charts
Tags: content grouping, google analytics, motion charts
Posted in web analytics | No Comments »
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