Brian Eisenberg asked me what my ideal report would be, if I could create just one report. The budget is unlimited, it can have as many dimensions as I like — but just one report.

So, my ideal report tells me why people are leaving the website for every page where there are exits. And then I can fix the site so that those who really needed the site could get what they need before they leave. (Hey, you said be creative. So I was.)

I think this is supposed to be a game of tag, but you know, I don’t like to play tag. I always want to hear what readers think. What would your favorite report be if you could have only one?

You know how you get to the end of a checkout form, and there is the opportunity to sign up for someone’s email marketing list? Unless you don’t notice it, or you really want to be on the list, you generally don’t check it; after all, who needs more email? So stick with me and see what I saw today.

Here I am, working on DataBazaar’s website (they sell printer ink). And as part of that process, I am pretending to buy a product.

So I get to the end of the checkout process, and instead of saying, “Please add me to your mailing list,” it says, “Please send me money saving coupons.” Talk about great writing for the web. Lots of people have email marketing lists that include coupons, but they tend to be worded in your average boring way: “Please notify me of upcoming coupons via your weekly email newsletter.” (I actually got that one off a competitor’s website.)

Do other people have great ways of asking customers to sign up for their email marketing (that work?) I’d love to hear.

Robbin

I stumbled upon (without using Stumble Upon) this really great conversion resource in the UK, Conversion Rate Squirrel. When they have time to write, they do some really cool things. They told me that one of their most popular and appreciated pieces is 101 Things to do with Website Optimizer. (I particularly interested in points #37 and #59 - those were new for me.) So read and enjoy.

Also, welcome Coremark Analytics to the blogosphere. Judah Phillips convinced me that the author is Wendi Malley, who works with the WAA Research Committee. But, who really believes Judah anyway? Well, Mystery Blogger, I hope you do more work on Statistics, we really need a great statistics blog.

Endnotes: Many thanks to Neil Mason, who taught me to stop writing “England” and start writing, “the UK.” Very special thanks to David Meerman Scott, who is publishing a new book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and who changed our blog address in his post. (He pointed out to me that the hard copy has already been printed. Ah, paper.)

My parents were taken aback when I first told them that I was going to quit my webmaster job with a multi-billion dollar company to begin a new venture with LunaMetrics, a small internet consultancy specializing in web analytics, search engine optimization and conversion (among other things). They wondered why I would take such a risk. “After all”, my dad said, “you aren’t in your 20’s anymore, you have a mortgage and a child and you need to consider your retirement.”

But, really, who ever listens to their parents?

So I ditched the webmaster job and began an exciting new phase of learning, exploration and frequent contributions to the LunaMetrics blog (starting with this one). That was 5 days ago.

On Friday I received my first phone call at my new place of employment. Who was on the other end of the phone? It was a career recruiter who found my name (and my new job title) online. She first asked me if I would be interested in interviewing for a job as the vice president of web marketing and analytics for a large public company. And then she asked me how long I’ve been with LunaMetrics. Needless to say, 4 days is not a very impressive length of tenure so the phone call ended pretty quickly.

After I hung up, I turned to Robbin to tell her the story. After laughing a bit, we started talking about this industry and how it is in such demand. There are so many possibilities and so much opportunity to make an impact. And it all comes at such a great time because companies (and the people who run them) are beginning to recognize the power behind the data. They understand why they must make their company more visible on the web. They realize that they can get to know their customers by seeing how they interact online. And, by optimizing their company’s web site, they can enhance their customer’s/member’s experience, thus building their brand loyalty.

On the way home from work, I called my mother to tell her about the call. She responded by saying, “You made the right choice. Congratulations. This is going to be a great experience for you.” And it really is!

So, by way of a long story, I wanted to introduce myself to you, let you know how thrilled I am to be involved in the web analytics industry and how excited I am to begin sharing ideas with you.

Shareen Jordan
Director, Web Analytics
LunaMetrics

Custom advanced filters can be very cool. You can use them to rewrite stuff. And much cooler, you can use them to associate stuff.

For example, you can use an advanced filter to associate a Request URI (a page someone asked for) with a Campaign Medium (the medium they used to get to your site) and then dump it all back into Request URI (so that you can see it in your Content > Top Content report.) Before I go into the technical details, you may be saying, why would I ever want to do that? Well, if you have 10,000 URIs and you want to look at them all in Excel, it would be nice to have a report that you can download into a csv file and then sort any way you like.

So here is a screenshot of what that filter would look like. (Ooh, many thanks to Steve and to our web designer, both of whom gave me the same advice on better screen shots. So now this one is legible:)

Notice the A and B stuff in the middle. Here is what I am telling Google:

My field A is Request URI. Get everything, by using .* and put it in a variable, by using parens, so get-everything-and-put-it-in-a-variable looks like (.*)

My field B is Campaign Medium. Once again, get everything and put it in a variable, hence (.*)

Now comes the magic. Output it all to Request URI. And format it so that I see the A variable (that’s why I used $A1) and then a colon, and then the B variable. That last field, constructor, is not a regular expression. You can write anything you want there — I could have written $A1/$B1, or I could have written, $A1 AND $B1, etc. Also note: in the A field, there is only one variable, (.*), so I used $A1. Same for B. But there might be two variables, and then I would use $A1, or $A2, etc.

Choosing where to output your new mashed up string is important. For example, if you want to see, how many people came through a banner ad medium, touched the home page, and then converted, you wouldn’t want to use the filter I just created — even though it creates the correct information, a mashup of the medium they came in on with the page they touched. That’s became this particular example gets output to content >top content, a report that doesn’t include conversion. A better place to output it to would be campaign name. That way, it will get dumped into your campaign report, which has conversion associated with it.

If you are doing this kind of mashup, it is vital to create a new profile first. After all, you probably need most of the reports “unmashed” for some things, and if you do this in a separate profile, you can mess around all you want, while leaving your production data untouched. Need to learn more about creating new profiles?

Endnotes: Many thanks to Caleb Whitmore from POP, who taught me so much about custom advanced filters when we were at Google training. Caleb actually wrote this particular filter a few months ago. And to Dylan Lewis, for getting our new address right, www.lunametrics.com/blog and for letting his web analyst, Joy Billings, be co-chair of the WAA marketing committee. I have really awesome pictures of both Caleb and Dylan.

If we had a contest, I might win with that photo of Ian and Dylan in the 3D glasses. Steve gets all the credit for that Photoshopped piecture of Avinash and Judah. Shareen, here at LunaMetrics, gets all the credit for bringing order to my PhotoChaos. Anway, click to enjoy - Robbin

Yesterday, I was talking to a potential client. Like most, he wanted to improve his conversion rate, and like even the biggest companies, he had to live within a budget. We discussed the pros and cons of doing user testing with 5-8 users vs. my doing an “expert” conversion analysis. The costs weren’t different enough to be a consideration.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “But I highly doubt that I am going to learn anything with 5-8 users.”

Now, at some level he was absolutely right. Five to eight users would not be statistically significant. Nor, for that matter, would fifty or eighty.

So would one conversion analyst be more statistically significant? No. I can say, “Studies show that making the button red tends to work better,” but it might not work better for your site. Plus, it is incredibly hard for a best practices person to discard the “professional blindness” that knowing websites brings with it. (This is the reason that I don’t allow web designers to sign up for our user tests - same problem.) Web analytics are statistically significant, but we only know that everyone bails out on a page, we don’t know why. Multivariate testing is the best, but you still need to know what to test.

This is why I love user testing. It’s not that expensive, especially if you do it yourself. Sure, you won’t learn everything you always wanted to know, but when you hear four people out of five tell you that the deal isn’t good enough for them to be interested, you sure do know what to test.

Speaking of which, I think too many people think user testing is just usability. Usability does go hand in hand with conversion, but you learn about pricing, about trust, about what people notice on the page. And a great idea (I owe this to a LunaMetrics customer) is to do user testing on your competitors’ sites. That’s when you learn where they have elements that are worth testing on your own site.

Robbin

So it’s finally been announced - Google Analytics has a new interface!

I can now wear my new GA t-shirt. (Although, I think I have to give it to my daughter. See far below.)

Custom dashboards are now here! You can choose which reports to see every day on your dashboard and (yes - at last) you can have them emailed to yourself or your boss. Just once, or on a schedule. And not only can you get them in Excel or Notepad or XML — .pdfs are here, too.

You can now segment by landing page (this was much more important to me than any other enhancement.) I always want to know, they typed in “iron balusters” and where did they land? It helps us see which pages are doing well vis-a-vis SEO. And you can play with landing page both ways: you can look at your keywords and figure out what landing pages they led to, or look at your landing pages and segment by keyword (or other source.)

If you thought the drilldown was good before (and maybe you didn’t, because you didn’t know to use that little red “chevron” arrow), it is now awesome. With the old interface, you could segment referring sources by content and see what page on the referrer’s site was sending you traffic. Now, you able to drill down into that. Since it’s a referrer, you probably aren’t going to segment again by keyword (after all, they didn’t use a keyword), but you could segment by geography, by language, by browser.

The media is less rich and now I can use the most important button on my browser — my “back” button.

There are lots of other new features, like GA’s new geo capabilities (you can really play with the maps like never before). The whole interface is there in front of you, and you don’t have to know to click on the red “chevron” arrows to drill down. Their visualization is now really special– you see little graphs, almost like sparklines, with many of the metrics. Their Timeline version of the calendar is really awesome, but you have to know it’s there to use it.

The back end, for good and for bad, hasn’t changed. I’m pretty happy with that; nice to teach people just the new front end. Also, on every page there are help resources, one of which is “report finder.” So if you knew where it was before, and can’t find it now, use that report finder.

This will be a phased rollout starting today, Tuesday May 8. All existing customers will have access to the new version over the coming weeks as GA rolls the new version out. (I noticed in the press release that if you sign up for GA now, you automatically get the new version.) All historical data will be in the new version, but everyone will still have access to both versions for at least 30 days. Investment Bankers call me all the time and ask me, “When is Google going to start charging?” — but GA is still free, with the new interface.

Finally, I didn’t post a picture of myself in my new GA t-shirt. I was at Google getting them, and I was down on the floor, ripping open boxes, handing them out to other GAACs as I found different sizes (”I’ll take that extra large! Hand me that men’s medium!”) and I just didn’t get the right size for myself. Well, my daughter will love it, and it’s really that black long-sleeved Website Optimizer shirt that I covet, anyway.

Robbin

This is a two-topic post.

First, Batman rules. When I originally post this link to LunaMetrician Taylor Pratt’s article about Web Analytics and SEO, he got 30 unique views (that’s how they judge this contest, by unique views.) But over 500 people read this blog, and while 30/500= a 6% conversion rate, still, I just need a little bit more help. If you already went to his story, you don’t need to go again (unless you are on a different computer — how is that for gaming the system?) But if not, please check it out, even if only for a moment or two.

Also, I got into SF way too late last night, and refused to go out with everyone for sushi (because they felt like it was 9 m and I felt like it was midnight.) I did manage to capture a few pics with my new digital camera. I haven’t figured out all the flash settings yet.

So here is Eric, with his new haircut. I offered to give him $15 and take him to Supercuts to get a really awesome cut, and he was offended, he said all the other women love his cut.

(To be fair, this is a really lousy shot. Like I said, I am still learning how to use this little camera.)

I have a great shot of Rene that I can’t get up here, for some reason, and I lost my picture of Scott Baldwin.

Finally, here is June. It’s a nice picture of her, but by this time, I had figured some stuff out on my camera, plus, I wasn’t sitting in the dark outside with 50 other people, balancing luggage at the same time.

When I am not desperately trying to get down to the workout room, I will get Rene’s picture back. And another picture of Scott.

And here’s that link again to Taylor’s article.

Custom Advanced filters are so cool, and there is so little information available about them. It’s too bad that they have such an intimidating name.

I find myself using them in three ways:

1. To rewrite stuff in GA. Usually, this it to rewrite a URI. For example, we work with a site where the CMS insists on calling the same page three different URIs, and we are using custom advanced filters (among other things) to rewrite them, so that we always know what page we are looking at.
2. To associate data that aren’t already associated. For example, Benjamin in SF wrote me and asked how to associate a referring source with a transaction ID. This is a job for Superman Custom Advanced Filters.
3. To change all sorts of other things (but which are mostly about #1 and #2.)

So let’s look at a really easy Custom Advanced filter — rewriting all your URIs to be Title Tags. (True, you can already see them in the Content Performance > Content by Title report, but this will rewrite them for every report.)

I want to teach two things before I start.

Thing #1: When I wrote about Regular Expressions, I explained how a dot means, match any one character. And I wrote about how a star means, match zero or more of the previous items. So when you put them together, they mean, match everything.

Thing #2: When you use parenthesis, it create a variable in Regular Expressions. Most of the time, I don’t care. But it really matters in Custom Advanced filters.

Putting Thing #1 with Thing #2: When you write this: (.*) it means, get everything and put it in a variable.

OK, now we are ready to start. Check out the screen shot below

First, I gave it a friendly name (”Rewrite URI, etc.”) Then I chose Custom filters, then within custom, I chose Advanced. As soon as I chose Advanced, I got all the other options below it.

Today, we are ignoring the middle set of boxes, the ones that say “Field B” and are just dealing with Field A and output. So everytime I talk about the A stuff, I am referring to the boxes that say, Field A –> Extract A.

Now, let’s sit back for a moment and think about what we’re doing before we do it. Our goal is to get the page title and to rewrite it — to reconstruct it — so that it shows up everywhere that Request URI might. So instead of seeing URI’s (urls - you can all fight about the correct way to say that), we’ll see page titles.

To do this, we first choose Page Title as Field A (just like we chose filter fields in this post that I wrote last weekend. You have to decide, what are you working on?) Then we extract it — we create a Regular Expression(RegEx) that describes it. In this case, our RegEx is (.*), i.e. get everything and put it in a variable (like I described early in this post.)

Next, we decide where we are going to put it. We want to output it to the URI.

Now, here is the magic (or at least, that’s the way it felt to me as I went through life, trying to understand what $A1 or $B3 was.) The first variable (the first set of parenthesis) in the –> Extract A field is called $A1. We only have one variable in this screenshot, but if we had a second one, it would be $A2. $A3 for the third one (if we had one), and so on. So when we use $A1 as our constructor, it means, use the first variable (.*) in the extract A field to reconstruct our URI.

I know that was confusing, so let me say it another way. Here’s what we did. We took the title tag, and rewrote it as a Regular Expression in the A field. The expression we used was (.*), i.e. get everything and put it in a variable. (So that means, we put the whole title tag in a variable.) Then we told the constructor fields to take the Request URI and rewrite it to be the first A variable — which is now defined as the whole title tag. Consequently, all URIs get rewritten as their page’s title tag.

Please comment if you didn’t understand anything. (I’m serious. I got on someone else’s blog today and said, I just don’t understand.) Or send me email to my last name at my company name dot com.

Robbin