New graph views in Beta
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?
Web analytics and Senior Management
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.
The Power of Site Search in Google Analytics
Most websites these days have internal search functionality, which serves visitors with the option to search for specific information within websites. The popularity and effectiveness of Google and other search engines over the past decade have driven a demand for search functionality, which has become an important tool in the webmaster’s toolbox. Web analysts have become aware of the need to analyze how visitors use search, whether it is helpful to them and find out what goals they try to achieve but which you do not yet cater for. Google Analytics provides web analysts with the means to gather this knowledge through Site Search reporting.
Website owners often look at their websites from their own perspective, setting out goals as they see them and to a certain extent determining what visitors are served with. Many website owners aren’t aware of the fact that in order to get the most out of their online businesses they need to put themselves in their visitors’ shoes to find out what their needs are, and customize their websites to meet these needs. Failing to use a user-centric approach is likely to result in loss of business, and many online businesses aren’t even aware of this. Site Search analysis can be a great measure of how well your site performs in serving users with what they need.
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Segmentation of web analytics data in Google Analytics
Segmentation is a technique that is used to help get to more detailed information on your site’s performance, which is done by slicing and dicing your existing data until you get only the information that’s relevant to your cause. A simple example is the conversion rate. You’ve established that your site’s conversion rate is 3%. Great, but that gives you very little information. By using segmentation you can determine the individual conversion rates for separate streams of traffic, which gives you a clearer direction as to which parts of your online marketing efforts need to be stepped up.
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Using AdWords Geo targeting effectively with Google Analytics
Most of us know how well Google AdWords PPC ads can work for online businesses. With not all too much tweaking you can get targeted traffic to your site at a fairly low cost (depending on the niche you operate in). A lot of businesses know that visitors from certain geographical regions are much more valuable in that they convert more easily and thus result in higher ROI (Bigger Bang for Buck). By being able to invest only in these more valuable visitors you can get much better results from your PPC campaigns.
AdWords offers a feature called Geo targeting, which enables you to have your AdWords ads show up only for people from specific geographical regions, and with the help of Google Analytics you can find out where your best converting visitors live. This post will give you a guide on how you can get the info you need and make the changes in AdWords.
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Tracking clicks to outbound links with latest GA script
The latest script version for Google Analytics enables you to track clicks on outbound links. By manually tagging each link to other sites using a javascript function, data on these clicks will be gathered in the content reports.
Before trying out this technique, please be sure you’re using the latest ga.js script and not the legacy urchin.js version of the script. The updated Google Analytics code can be found by editing the targeted website’s profile in the welcome screen and by clicking ‘Check Status’ at the top right corner of your website profile. Both urchin.js as well as ga.js based code is provided here.
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Implementing and developing a leading web analytics tool
Disclaimer: This post is NOT intended to put large web analytics vendors in bad light and to endorse the use of Google Analytics instead.
In my daily work I rely on one of the larger web analytics solution vendors, which over the past two years has provided me with rich data, custom and on the fly reporting and one the whole things were alright. Until we needed better reporting, which we thought would be relatively easy to get since we chose one of the leaders in the market. Little did we know.
I’ve noticed that over the past couple of years it’s become increasingly difficult to work with these guys. It was already quite a feat to get through implementation, which was almost completely unguided and parts of which had to be corrected later on. Bit by bit we learned more about how the solution works and once we deciphered most of the ingeniously chosen terms used solely by this vendor we started to uncover what went wrong during implementation and we obviously needed to correct these issues to get everything sorted.
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New graphing tools available in Google Analytics
Google Analytics added a few nifty new features in beta recently, which includes the ability to map out multiple metrics in one graph at once. All Google Analytics users should have this functionality enabled already (the new features were introduced on December 13, 2007) so here’s a little appetizer to get you going.
New Google Analytics graphing tools
The new graphing tools enable you to view multiple metrics in one graph and see how they correlate. This enables you to see, for example, how your pay-per-click traffic compares to organic search engine traffic, but also how one conversion goal compares to another in a set date range.
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The value of page views and why advertising publishers stick to page impressions
Whereas many web analytics practitioners let go of page views quite a while ago, some people on the receiving end of online advertising still hold on to it and assign great value to what has become a hollow metric.
There are few standard metrics that have value when considered on their own, but page view is what “hit” still was two years ago – practically redundant but over-used. A page view itself is not a proper measure for traffic volume and is merely a secondary metric that adds dimension to unique visitors. Examples are the use of newer standardized metrics, which set out page views vs visits to create “bounce (or exit) rate” and “pages per visit” – two metrics both used by Google Analytics (amongst other providers of web analytics solutions) that provide much more meaning to analytics efforts.
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Working with and setting up Goals in Google Analytics
The use of Goals comes forward from the main motivator behind web analytics for most of us: Analyzing and optimizing how many people are doing what we want them to do and (perhaps more importantly) why others don’t.
In its simplest form, a Goal is a page marker that can be set in Google Analytics, which tells you the amount of times a certain page is reached and its most common use is recording product purchases or registration completions. Without tracking Goals, trying to get more business in and out of your website would be like driving blind. There’d be no way of telling what performance is today, nor what it will be tomorrow so it’s impossible to know which of your online marketing efforts are paying off and which aren’t.
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