For our upcoming training dates and locations please check: http://www.lunametrics.com/getting-ahead/

We did GA training in NYC earlier this month, and I got forms and emails and notes from people asking me when our next one was. They couldn’t make it that day (which was, bizarrely enough, good. We sold out. We printed 70 binders with all the slides to give away, and didn’t have a single one left for ourselves.)

So our next training, for all you folks who asked, and for a whole bunch of people who didn’t, is in Washington DC, August 12, at the American Institute of Architects.

We know that different audiences attend: Those who just want to use the analytics for analysis. And (and/or) those who need to configure them and/or implement. And not only are attendees driven by different tasks, they are at different levels, too. So we’ve tried hard to have the right mix of sessions, and you can see the agenda (and how the sessions are rated) here. And you can also read a more in-depth write-up of each session. You’ll see that the event includes tips and tricks, in-depth analysis, case studies, and even a session on GA 101 for beginners. For those who do configuration, we’ve got goals and filters and profiles, cross- and subdomains, e-commerce and user defined variables. Notice that there are also sessions on Google Website Optimizer and Google AdWords.

Don’t you hate it when people hide their prices? So we won’t: it costs $285. You can register now, and even if you have to cancel, we can refund your money in full until close of business on the Friday before the event. After that, you can transfer your registration to someone else, if you need to.

If you have questions about the event, or want to be sure that your GA problem gets solved there, send me email. Here’s the link where you can learn all about the event.

Robbin

Google is doing a triple event. I don’t really think that they need me to blog about it to our 1900 readers (which is why I never blog about new features, everyone has already heard about them by the time I get to my Wordpress dashboard.) But you do favors for your friends, and this is one of them.

In the PR, which you can also read on the GWO blog, they say that they will:

• Briefly introduce the products
• Highlight recent product releases and developments
• Discuss the benefits of using the products together
• Answer selected questions that attendees have submitted

So I believe it is a beginner seminar. Just ideal for the person who is beginning to work with one of those tools, or who works with one or two but doesn’t know the value of the others.

Here’s the What/Where/When:

TITLE: The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website
Optimizer
DATE: Tuesday, July 8, 2008
TIME: 9:00 - 10:00 am PT (Pacific Time)
JOIN US: Register to attend

Goals are one of the most useful things you can set up in your Google Analytics. Funnels go along with goals in helping you understand how visitors progress to your goal.

A Primer on Funnels

A funnel is just an ordered list of pages (up to ten) leading up to your goal page. For example, for a shopping cart, a funnel might be something like this:

1. Check out
2. Fill out shipping information
3. Fill out billing information
4. Confirm purchase

The funnel that make sense for your goal depends on your site and how you intend your visitors to progress to your goal. Not all goals have a natural funnel, and you aren’t required to define a funnel for a goal. However, for a goal like the shopping cart example above, defining a funnel can give you a lot of useful information about where people get hung up and decide to abandon the funnel, never reaching your goal.

You set up a funnel along with your goal, and the setup is the same — just put in the URLs for the funnel pages (using Head Match, Exact Match, and Regular Expression match just like the patterns for the goal URL). See How Do I Set Up Goals? in the Google Analytics Help for more information on setting up goals. One tip: Give the funnel steps descriptive names, since they’ll show up in the reports and you want them to be self-explanatory. “Step 1” and “Step 2” don’t help anyone much. Better to go with “Check out” and “Fill out shipping information.”

There’s a lot of confusion around how setting up a funnel affects your goal reporting, and what gets recorded in the funnel by Google Analytics. First of all, the funnel you define affects only the Funnel Visualization report. Your goal conversion counts and rates are still exactly the same as they would be without the funnel in the rest of the reports in GA. With that in mind, here are some answers and some troubleshooting for common problems with funnels.

Required Step

The “Required First Step” check box on the goal setup causes a lot of confusion. First of all, remember that this affects only the Funnel Visualization report. If you check off this box, here’s what happens: The Funnel Visualization report includes only conversions that passed through the required step. That’s it. Your other reports still include any visit that views the goal page, but the Funnel Visualization report only calls it a conversion if it visits the required funnel page.

The required step can be a way to separately measure multiple goals that have the same ultimate goal page, but start at different places. Simply set up more than one goal with a different required step for each one. (Again, remember that the differences will only be apparent in the Funnel Visualization report.)

Order of Steps and “Backfill”

Your funnel steps have an order, and they show up in that order in the Funnel Visualization Report. But the truth is, GA doesn’t care what order the steps occur in. It simply looks through the visit to see whether the funnel pages and the goal pages were viewed, and if they were, that’s represented in the Funnel Visualization report, regardless of the order they were viewed in. A visitor could view step 2, then step 1, then step 3, then the goal, but they’ll still show up in the funnel for each of the steps.

In fact, GA goes even further and “backfills” missed steps in the funnel. So if someone views step 1, skips to step 3, and then views the goal page, GA will actually show that they proceeded through step 2! It will fill in any pages between a visited step and the goal.

Converting More than Once

A conversion is when someone reaches your goal page. But what if someone
visits your goal page more than once? Whether they visit your goal page one
time or one hundred, GA will only report a single conversion for that visit.

Much like the scenario in “Order of Steps” above, GA simply looks through
the visit to see if the goal page was viewed, and if it was, the visit
counts as a conversion. So if a visitor repeats the funnel within the same
visit, you’ll only see one conversion.

Funnel Problems: 100% leave after a step, or 100% convert for several steps

Occasionally we see a funnel that looks like the one below. Something’s clearly wrong. 100% of the visitors leave after the first step, but the other reports clearly show goal conversions are happening.

This happens when you have a funnel step that matches the subsequent steps in the funnel. Remember you need to be careful if you are using Head Match or Regular Expression match in your URLs. If your funnel setup looks like the one below, you’ll end up with a Funnel Visualization report that looks like the one above, where everyone leaves after the first step, because all of the steps match the first one.

A related problem happens when only some of the later pages match a previous page in the funnel. Take a look here:

This problem is harder to detect, but 100% conversion across several steps looks fishy. You should expect to lose at least a few people, given enough data. So what’s happening here?

It’s similar to the first problem funnel setup. Here step 1 also matches
steps 2 and 3, but this time it does not match the goal page. Like the
first example, because steps 1 and 2 are the same, no visitors make it to
step 2, as far as GA is concerned. However, the goal page is different.
For every visitor that reaches the goal page, GA backfills into the previous
steps.

You can avoid problems with a step matching subsequent steps by using regular expression that have negative lookaheads to exclude the later steps.

Jonathan

Update to the Update:

Anders at IIH Copenhagen has modified the the Goal Copy extension to work with the alternate HTML that is being seen by some International Users (see comments).

You can get the alternate, international version from http://blog.iih.dk/goal-copy-extension-international/

Thanks Anders

——-

I have updated the Goal Copy extension for FF3 (I hope).

Let me know if there are any issues.

Update: Robbin pointed out the brief nature of this post and that many people would have no idea what I’m talking about. So for those who are going “what the heck is he talking about?”, the Goal Copy Firefox extension can be used to copy goals between profiles in Google Analytics. Take a look at my previous posts if you think this is something you might be interested in:

Goal Copy Extension Update

Copying Goals in Google Analytics (A Firefox Extension)

John

Update: I’ve added an additional URL to when this script runs.  It now runs on https://www.google.com/analytics/settings* as well.  If the script stopped working for you, this was probably why and should take care of it.

You can also make this change to the existing script by going to Tools->Greasemonkey->Manage User Scripts.  In the Included Pages area, click the Add button, paste in the above URL, and click OK.

————–

I was recently asked by Espen at zedge.net if there was anyway to automatically show all your profiles for the website profile list in GA.

The default is to display 10 profiles and you can either 1. page through them (painfully) in sets of 10 per page or 2. Select from a pulldown how many you want to show at once.

But when you have a lot of profiles it becomes annoying to select “Show 100″ every time you see this screen.

So, I wrote this very simple greasemonkey script that watches for certain location.hrefs (URLs) and adds the parameter ns=100 to the end of the URL. The ns=100 parameter directs GA to show 100 profiles at once (which is the highest option in the pulldown).

If you don’t already have Greasemonkey installed you can get it here.

Then download and install the Show 100 script. (If you have greasemonkey installed, you should be prompted to install the script when you click on it. Otherwise download it and use the greasemonkey interface to add the script).

It is not a perfect solution but it has worked well for me so far, and it may help you put off that carpal tunnel surgery for a while longer. If you have a better or smarter way to accomplish the same thing, let’s discuss it.

UPDATE: André made a code suggestion (see comments) which I have incorporated into the script.  Now it will not add the &ns=100 parameter if there are 10 or fewer profiles.  Thanks André

-John

Earlier this week (Monday, June 2), the Web Analytics Association started the WAA Championship. The idea behind the championship is for analysts to show their stuff (and have fun.) Everyone gets to evaluate the same site (www.webanalyticsassociation.org) for insight into how we are achieving our goals, how we are enabling visitors and members to achieve their goals, and at the end (later this month), the best analyses will win. The WAA Marketing Committee is giving away real prizes, too — I know that the first prize is a trip to an eMetrics Summit, including hotel, and second/third prizes are big big Amazon gift certificates.

Only WAA members can play. So go play and win and get another notch in your web analyst belt. Full disclosure: I worked on the Championship a lot when I was the board member in charge of Marketing. I’m working with different committees now, but Marketing always has the fondest place in my heart — especially Daniel Waisberg, the Championship’s architect.