Now and again I come across a flaw in Google Analytics and, rather than keeping these little frustrations to myself, I’ve decided to share them with you and Google. Who knows the greater powers that be will hear me!

Now, after reading the title of this post you might think: “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about - you do get the full referring URL in the Referring Sites report.” Fair enough, you’re right to a certain extent: You get the referring domain first, then when you click on a domain you get the full URL. The problem I found, however, is that if a dynamically generated page links to you, you don’t get to see the query string in the referring URL and as a result you cannot find the exact page on another site that links to you.

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I’m a big fan of Bryan Eisenberg and the way he makes visitor behavior and its relation to web analytics understandable. I learnt quite a few things on behavioral analytics from reading his books and Future Now’s blog and one of the most important lessons has to be the importance of making a connection with the your visitor/prospective customer.

In a nutshell, this concept goes as follows: Your site’s visitors all have goals and don’t have endless patience – They will spend less than 10 seconds evaluating (scanning) your site’s landing page. They have a need and hope your site will fulfil that need. It’s your job to help your visitors by turning the table around when you look at your website to try and see things from the visitor’s perspective. The better you manage to understand your visitors and what they want, the better you can connect with them and the better your conversion rates will be and the lower your landing pages’ bounce rate will be.

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The recent news of Yahoo buying Indextools gives me plenty to look forward to - it’s an exciting development in the world of web analytics which will stirr up things and bring about another shift.

As with Google Analytics, there’s a catch - only sunshine is free these days! By offering users a free web analytics tool that currently competes with the likes of Omniture and WebTrends, Yahoo are cunningly luring advertising dollars into their Yahoo Search Marketing program.

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For a lot of marketers out there, web analytics is something they do on the side to help them get more out of what they do. They don’t have web analysts around to tell them what works and what doesn’t,  so they get into the data themselves trying to figure out how they can measure what they do. Measuring keyword performance is an important part of an internet marketer’s toolbox, so here are a few pointers using Google Analytics.

Going deeper for SEO – Google Analytics and keyword targeting

If you’ve invested time and effort into building quality content, you’ll want to make sure that this content is paying off in terms of traffic and conversions (sales, registrations, sign-ups, etc.). There are a few things you can do to help you find the gems in your traffic-driving keywords.

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Google again shows they listen to their Analytics users by adding another feature in Beta which allows you to change graph views to weekly and monthly views.

What can you get out of these new graph views?

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A couple of years ago when I got into web analytics one of the top issues that web analysts and marketers faced was trying to convince Senior Management that web analytics has immense business value. Times are different now it seems, as the need for understanding is turning into an extreme hunger for data and knowledge. This can be a blessing and a curse at the same time.

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