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Archive for the ‘web analytics’ Category

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.

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!