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Archive for the ‘google analytics’ Category

Google Analytics reports the bid term in its search engine report (paid), rather than the term as it appeared in the actual search.

So let’s say I run a PPC campaign and bid on the term ‘web analytics training’, using broad match.  Someone comes along, does a search on ‘the best web analytics training’ and clicks my ad.

GA will report that search term as ‘web analytics training’ in its search engine report.  To get at the actual search term used, then there is an excellent blog post at http://www.ga-experts.com/blog/2006/11/how-to-get-detailed-ppc-keyword-data-from-google-analytics/

which explains how to do it very clearly – which is good since it is not exactly intuitive!

There have been rumblings about web analytics and privacy ever since there was web analytics and this has largely been aimed at Google Analytics.  Why?  Probably because of the huge quantity of data that Google has accumulated from its free analytics offering and partly no doubt because of it it head and shoulders above any other internet property.

It seems that Google is now planning the release of a plug in which will allow visitors to prevent the  website they are visiting from collecting data via Google Analytics.  It is quite a low key little announcement at this stage and one wonders why Google has decided that that now is the time to do itA very interesting blog post by Eric Peterson suggests it is a way of Google maintaining and increasing its ability to accumulate data – all the world’s data according to Mr Peterson – and I can’t argue with his reasoning.  No doubt it does make financial sense to offer GA free as a way of increasing revenue on Adwords, but call me cynical but I can’t helping there must be other benefits beyond Adwords revenue.

Google itself says the plug in will ‘give more choice for users’ – an interesting variation on ‘to improve the search experience’.

Whatever the reasoning, when the opt out plug in is released it will be very interesting to see just how many ordinary web surfers are really worried about privacy issues and use the opt out.  My guess is that very few have ever even given the matter any thought, are not interested in what GA is and isn’t doing, but are much more interested in how quickly they can find the price/information/music they are looking for or even, if they are UK surfers,  how the meerkats managed to travel across those wastelands to find more grubs.

Just came across what looks like a really useful tool called Excellent Analytics – it imports Google Analytics data into Excel.  I am forever downloading individual reports into Excel so this certainly looks worth checking out.   If anyone gets a chance to check this out before I do, please post a comment and let me know how you get on.

There is a review of Excellent Analytics on SEOmoz.

The real power of web analytics is felt when you separate different visitors groups into segments.  As with everything, the average is a mathematical concept and doesn’t actually apply to anyone.  Much more meaningful is to look at groups of visitors with something in common.  You may want to look at visitors who visit on at the weekend, or who have made a purchase.  You may want to exclude all those visitors from overseas as they are not your market!  The list is endless.

Google Analytics does provide powerful segmentation options though these are not quite so intuitive as say ClickTracks which puts segmentation right at its heart.  On the other hand, the flexibility of the segmentation offered by GA is excellent – awesome even!

So lets look at what Google Analytics offers by way of segmentation.  Firstly it is important to differentiate between filters and segments.  Filters are defined at the settings level whereas segments are defined within the reports section.

Google Analytics Filters

Filters are applied to the data before it is anlalysed.  You may want to exclude internal traffic from the data, or look at traffic on a specified sub folder for example.  You can set up different profiles for your site and apply different filters to each profile.   So you may have one profile that looks at the site as a whole, one that looks at internal traffic only, one that looks at a particular sub domain.

Bear in mind that the purpose of filters is to look at different chunks of the data from a particular website.  Don’t use profiles to look at data from different websites.  Each website should have its own account otherwise all sorts of problems can arise not least that you can only have one Adwords account associated with any one Analytics account.

Because filters are applied to the data before it is analysed, you cannot look at filtered data from before the filter was defined.

Google Analytics Segments

Segments seem at first to be very similar to filters but they are really fundamentally different.  Segments are applied retrospectively to the data which means that they can be applied to all data from the time GA was first set up for a website.

Segments are set up from the reports dashboard.  There are a number of preset segments but the real power lies in the custom segments.  These can be defined from any combination of what GA calls ‘dimensions’ and ‘metrics’, in effect any group that relates to something that Google Analytics provides information on.

Metrics are quantitative, that is they have a number. For example bounce rate is a metric. Dimensions relate to visitor characteristics, so being a new visitor is a dimension, as is the geographical location from which the visitor accessed a website. When using segments, the difference doesn’t really matter but it is interesting to understand how GA is thinking.

To define a custom segment, click on Advanced segments and then on Create a new advanced segment.

As I say, the permutations that are available are immense but let’s consider how to look at traffic from the UK only.  This is achieved by choosing the dimension ‘country’ (simply hover the mouse over ‘country’ in the left hand column and drag it across to the dimension box).  Then select ‘match exactly’ and give this a value of ‘United Kingdom’.

Give your segment a name and then use the ‘test segment’ button at the top of the screen – as shown.  The GA screen can be confusing at this stage – if you try and test the segment before it has been named, it will say the segment is empty.  Also, there is a test segment button below the dialogue box but this relates to further sub-segments that have yet to be defined and should be ignored at this stage.

You may well want to segment your segment.  For example, you may be interested in only those UK visitors who completed a goal.  Sub-segments can be created using either ‘and’ or ‘or’ combinations of dimensions and metrics giving options such as defining sticky visitors as those who either view more than 4 pages or who stay on the site for more than 45s.

Segments have the potential to provide real insight into web visitors but as with all web analytics, the skill lies in carefully defining what you want to measure – in other words in the correct identification of the KPIs (key performance indicators) that drive the success of the site.

Are you excluding internal traffic from your web stats? What I mean is are you tracking visits that you and your staff make to the company website?

Internal traffic can be a major traffic source, especially for low traffic sites, sites where there is a lot of testing going on, sites where the staff use the company home page as there default new page and where staff are major uses of the site perhaps to find information or as a sales tool.

I was at a networking event a couple of days ago and one business owner was saying how funny it was that there were always traffic spikes just before she sent out a newsletter – she thought her visitors were psychic! Actually she was monitoring herself checking all the links for the new content she was putting up relating to the newsletter. It sounds silly but it is very easy to do.

You can exclude all traffic from a specific IP addresses from the web data, simply look at Google Analytics set up for details on how to do so. You may want to monitor how your staff are using the site themselves, in which case you can set up a separate filter that includes internal traffic and one that does not.

Don’t forget to exclude other people who may not be staff but are still internal traffic, your web developer for example.

If you are interested in intranet traffic, then this will usually be within a sub directory and you can set up a filter that monitors only traffic to that specific sub directory.

One of the challenges of web analytics is to be sure that you know what data you are looking at and inadvertently watching yourself or your staff visiting the website is all too easy to do. This can be quite a tricky problem where you have sales staff visiting prospects and using the company website as a sales tool using laptops. In this situation, it is possible to exclude this traffic from the stats by setting a cookie on your website and then visiting it from all the company laptops. Google explains how to do this at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=55481

Alternatively, a less than ideal workaround is to just look at the new visitor segment. This is useful if your main interest is in increasing online visibility, eg SEO but of course you lose all information relating to repeat visitors, vital for every site that does not sell on the first visit!