Much hoopla has been made in the not-too-distant past about having a free little questionnaire on your site. It hits you when you enter with a question like this one: “After your visit, would you be willing to answer a few questions?” 4Q from iPerceptions does one, as does Kampyle.

When I spend $150 at usertesting.com to find out how much visitors hated my company’s incredibly old site, I also found out that they hate getting a popup box before they get into the site. (For the record, we use Kampyle.)  We had programmed the site so that only 30% of visitors were served the box, and only on the home page, but that meant two out of five testers got it. They both reacted vehemently. So we pulled the questionnaire and just left the ability for someone to comment if they were actually looking for a way to give feedback.

We won’t get as much feedback, but the truth is — we weren’t getting a lot of feedback anyway.  And we were turning off a lot of people.

So when I have data on reduced bounce rate (more than a day or two’s worth), I’ll tell you.

Robbin

Jesse, who just attended our GA training in NYC sent me an email, asking me this question about the navigation summary (caution: the answer is easy, but the question is hard to understand).   “When you look at the ‘next page,’ are the % Clicks based on all next pages or all next “moves?”  In other words, do the percentages take exits into account?

Usually, I have to test that kind of thing, but I had a ready made test — a profile for a new, tiny site that I had set up not hours ago. Here is what I saw when I looked at the navigation summary:

Notice that there were only ten pageviews of the homepage, which we see in the middle of the picture. So there had to be exactly ten “next moves” — everyone who looked at the homepage had to do something else after that. One clearly left, and there were clearly nine next pages, and the % clicks (the column all the way to the right, which is the column in question) is obviously based on the total number of next moves — not just on next pages.

And remember, no one gets to ask why the previous pages mirror the next pages so perfectly unless they first read this post about pages that refer to themselves and  Google Analytics Gang Signals.

Robbin

Google Analytics has two kinds of data: Dimensions and Metrics. So what’s the difference, and when do we see them?

Dimensions are the kinds of things you would see in the rows of a Google Analytics report.  For example, language is a dimension — you can even see a whole report with rows and rows of language preferences.  Browser preference is a dimension. Campaign is a dimension. “Page” (aka request URI) is a dimension. You can find all those things as the titles of rows in Google Analytics reports.

Metrics, on the other hand, are the numbers that usually populate those rows. So you might have a City report, and it gives you rows with the names of cities that visitors came from, but it also gives you metrics: how many visits per city, what the average time on site per city was, what the bounce rate per city was, and so forth.

OK, now for some examples. In the accompanying screenshot — taken from the custom report capability in GA –   I’ve opened up the metrics for site usage, up top in blue. So we see bounces, entrances, exits, new visits, etc. All things that you would expect to see in the reports (in the boxes, or in the bars as measurements of goodness/badness.)

Below that, in green, you can see how  I’ve opened up the Content dimension so that you can see the specific dimensions available to you there.  Notice how nicely they fall into that definition: Page Title, Hostname, Page — all things that you would expect to be the headers of rows in a report.  So you might see a report of page titles, and each row would have a different page title, and the report might tell us bounce rate, entrances or entrance rate, exits, etc.

But wait! You are saying, what about that new visits up there in metrics? After all, we have a report in Googel Analtyics, in the Visitors section, called Visitor type, and it shows us New vs Returning  visitors. Aren’t they the names of rows? So doesn’t the definition fall apart?

Well, no. If you look carefully, there is a metric called new visits, a metric called % new visits,  and a dimension called visitor type.

Many thanks to Jonathan Weber for his help with this one.

Robbin

This post is a look back at the basics for those who may just be joining us (sorry analytics ninjas - you’ll have to wait for the next advanced, brain-swelling post on GA from John or Jonathan).

I am always surprised when I see a website that has the same title tag for every single page. Unfortunately, it’s more common than you may think. It seems to affect small businesses more frequently, but no website is immune.

What do I mean by the title tag, you ask? Simply put, it’s a title for the page that describes that page’s content. The title tag goes in the head section of the page’s HTML, and looks something like this:

<head>
<title>Increase Your Site’s Conversion Rate with Web Conversion Consulting</title>
</head>

OK, I see your eyes glazing over - that means you want real world examples, right? People see your title tag everyday in two main places - their web browser and in the search engine results:

So what’s the big deal with the title tag? Of all of the things you can change on your website, changing the title tag will have the most impact on how high you rank for the keywords you’re targeting. It’s also what searchers look at when deciding which result to click on.

For sites that suffer from this affliction of title tag duplication, this is the easiest, quickest way to increase traffic to your site. We have a client (I won’t shame them in public) that had this problem, and after changing their titles on each page they saw a 60% increase in traffic from people searching for products and services related to their industry. Previously, the only traffic from search engines came when someone searched for their company name. That would be like Nike only showing up if someone searches for “Nike” and then after changing their title tags they suddenly start showing up for the search term “shoes.”

Believe it or not, there’s even a Google Analytics tie-in here. The title tag shows up in your GA in the “Content by Title” report.

If all of your titles are the same, you’ll not have much use for this report, because it will just show you all of the pageviews for your site lumped together under the same page title. But when your pages each have different titles, you can see the pageviews segmented by each page (by title, of course). You can basically get the same data by looking at the “Top Content” report, but that shows you the pages’ URLs instead of page titles, which isn’t nearly as pretty.

Do you know that you need a new site (or changes to your site) but have been putting it off?

I sure have. Every Monday, at our weekly meeting, I have a good excuse for why I haven’t written or thought too much about our new site. And they really are good excuses….

Then I tried UserTesting.com, and will have a hard time procrastinating any more (in a few minutes, I’ll explain what one has to do with the other).  You might have tried the service or heard about it already. They only charge $29 per user test, you get to specify who the tester needs to be, and what questions you want answered (or activities accomplished.) UserTesting.com got back to me with five user tests within a few hours, each of which I was able to listen to in its entirety and watch the screen (and mouse) of the user. The users were clearly in the demographic that I asked for, and they definitely knew how to be testers.  (For example, one guy kept saying, “I’m sorry to be so quiet, I have to think about this issue.”  He knew that the person watching the test can’t read his mind, and that unless he talked the whole time, I would learn very little.) A couple of the tests were only ten minutes or so, but others went over half an hour. All the testers went out of their way to be sure that every question was answered.

I want to add a note about the company’s great customer service. I was asked to give stars to each tester, on a scale of 1-5. A couple of people got 5’s and a couple got 3’s, but I gave one tester a single star. (This was the only time where I had to explain why I had given the tester a certain score. )  Then the next day, Aimee Williamson, the director of customer support at UserTesting.com, wrote me and offered to refund my money for that tester! (I was already impressed with the company before she wrote, her knock-your-socks off service truly made me consider sandals.)

So I can’t procrastinate any more (much) because of the things that I heard the testers say. I knew that we needed a facelift, but I didn’t have time, and it always felt like my little dark secret — after all, we get a ton of business from our site (or as one tester wrote after looking at our Alexa profile, “It feels like this site succeeds despite itself.”) But hearing the feedback from real people (who are brutally honest when they are only talking to a recorder and a video cam) was quite the wake-up call.

Check ‘em out.

Robbin

This coming Tuesday, June 2 2009, LunaMetrics is doing a two-track, one day training in NYC on Google Analytics. Two tracks so that marketers/analysts can enjoy one track and techies can do the other track.  (Some attendees prefer to do a little of each track, and that’s ok, too.)  $285/person, includes continental breakfast, lunch, Google goodies and all the slides. Click here for more information and/or to register, or just check out the agenda here.

Robbin

We often hear variations on the question “Do we need the leading dot when using _setDomainName”.

With the dot:
pageTracker._trackPageview(’.lunametrics.com’);

Without the dot:
pageTracker._trackPageview(’lunametrics.com’);

The _setDomainName method is used to tell GA what to set the “domain” to, for the cookies that it uses to keep track of visitor information.  This “domain” field for the cookies are used as part of the security in browsers to determine what websites can access what cookies. (You don’t want porn.com getting access to your amazon.com cookies, for example.)

The Google Analytics documentation recommends using a preceding dot.  For example: pageTracker._setDomainName(’.lunametrics.com’)

The example above allows any lunametrics.com subdomain to access the same cookies.  (blog.lunametrics.com and help.lunametrics.com are both still “lunametrics.com” so the browser says this is okay)

In most cases, it doesn’t really matter whether you use ‘.lunametrics.com’ or ‘lunametrics.com’.  As long as you’re consistent across the entire website that you’re tracking. That’s part of the confusion.  Both ways work fine.

However, Google explains, in cases with multiple levels of subdomains, you can sometimes run into problems if you don’t use the preceding dot with _setDomainName.  If we had robbin.posts.blog.lunametrics.com the browser may not let the GA code on that page have access to cookies written with _setDomainName(’lunametrics.com’), but it would allow access to cookies written with _setDomainName(’.lunametrics.com’).

I am always amazed when site owners say, “Our customers love {whatever} about our site.”

Last week, they had an SEO day here in Pittsburgh, and I spoke on the analytics panel. So I was there at lunch when the speaker from MSN/Live got up to talk about Farecast (which was purchased by MSN a while ago) and heard her seem to know what her Farecast customers love.

I have been a Farecast user for a long, long time. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it is yet another travel site, with a unique twist: for most markets, it predicts whether fares are rising, falling, etc. For example,  in this screenshot, you can see the forecast (farecast) for travel from my town to NYC (Laguardia).  It’s clearly advantageous to purchase now, given that I have to travel within the next couple of weeks.

But that’s not what I love about Farecast, and I was surprised she assumed that it was. In fact, the thing I love about it is something you can get from other sites, like Kayak — Farecast just does a better job of it. Farecast gives you the capability to do excellent filtering on your travel selection.  It’s not just that they ask when during the day you want to travel — the site actually cares what you tell it, and shows you all the prices at the various times.   I know that I have to leave in the morning to be in NYC and work there that afternoon, and I know that I can’t leave the following day until the entire day of Google Analytics training is done.

It really looks like that $140 block is the one that is going to meet my needs. First of all, it is not too early in the morning for departure (after all, I don’t need to be in the city until after lunch.) After having done the GA training (which will be the following day) in NYC numerous times, I know the only good flight home is the 9:25 — a little late for my taste, but better than walking out on attendees just to get to the airport on time. And while not as inexpensive as the other fares, it’s only $140.

So — to return to my original thesis — why didn’t the MSN lady even mention that Farecast has an incredible user interface and travel usability tools to die for? Maybe she has done a lot of testing and knows what all her visitors love.  After all, as my friend from the WAA, April Wilson, always says, “Don’t make your decision on this focus group of one person.” But I have a sneaking suspicion that like most sites and most products, the owners overlook the simplest of features and always care about the sexy ones.

Robbin

“But our paid search vendor won’t give me access to our keywords and ads,” complained an attendee at our GA training in DC.  (I promised her that I wouldn’t use her name.)

“Hmm,” said I, “That seems a little awful.  You would think they would keep you locked up as a customer based on how wonderful they are, not based on your inability to get at your own data.”  In fact, I mused out loud to her, I wonder if that is a violation of the paid search terms and conditions….

…. so I did a search for Google AdWords Terms of Service, and I found this:

6     Agency. Customer represents and warrants that (a) it is authorized to act on behalf of and has bound to this Agreement any third party for which Customer advertises (a “Principal“), (b) as between Principal and Customer, the Principal owns any rights to Program information in connection with those ads, and (c) Customer shall not disclose Principal’s Program information to any other party without Principal’s consent.

So, I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that if the customer is an agency and advertises on behalf of a Principal (a real company), then the Principal owns the data. I don’t see that it says, the Principal must have access to the data, but hey, if you own it, you should be able to look at it, no?

And before I close — if you are in the NY Metro area and are interested in learning some actionable insights for your Google Analytics (techie or marketing), come to our GA Training Day, June 2 in Manhattan ($285 per person.) Learn more here.

Robbin

An old friend, Jeff Turner (of Blogbeat fame, the package that was purchased by Feedburner, which itself was purchased by Google), called me the other day. He and his business partner asked me to do some user testing on a new product they are developing called Pointomatic.

I’m not supposed to give too many details away, so I will just say that it is not a full-service analytics package, but rather, a product that focuses on visitor loyalty/engagement. Some of the things it can do with ease are very cool. If you are interested — especially if engagement is a very high priority for you — you can contact Jeff and get into his free alpha/beta. You can send him email or follow Jeff on Twitter.

Robbin