Google announced lots of new features last week, and one of the most exciting is Advanced Segments. There are already some great posts out there in the analytics blogosphere explaining what Advanced Segments are all about and how to use them (here’s one from Justin Cutroni, and one from Avinash Kaushik). But we wanted to take a few minutes to compare and contrast using Advanced Segments vs. using profiles and filters to get a different view of the same site.

Up until now, there were some reports in Google Analytics, like the Visitor Loyalty reports and the Funnel Visualization report, that you could only segment by creating a new profile for your site with filters on it to get just the traffic you want. For example, do you want to see the Visitor Loyalty report just for your paid search visitors? Create a profile that only includes your paid search traffic. We’ve done lots of posts about filters in the past detailing how they work to set up exactly these kinds of things.

With Advanced Segments, though, many of these reports can be segmented. Here’s a screenshot of a segmented Visitor Loyalty report. (The Funnel Visualization report, sadly, remains un-segmentable.)

And the real upshot of using Advanced Segmentation is, you can look back historically on the data! With profiles and filters, the changes you make only have an effect from the time you make the change going forward. With Advanced Segmentation, the report instantly shows you the segments for the historical data you have.

Advanced Segmentation has several other advantages as well. You can see multiple advanced segments simultaneously in the same report.

You can also create advanced segments that wouldn’t have been easy or even possible with filters, such as segments for visits with metrics in a certain range (more than 3 pageviews, more than 2:00 on site, and so on).

And finally, the interface for creating advanced segments is much more intuitive than creating filters — you don’t necessarily need to understand regular expression to create most advanced segments you can dream up.

So given all this, who even needs to use profiles and filters any more? Forget them! Well, not exactly. There are still several very good reasons for using profiles and filters. One is for kinds of traffic you almost always want to exclude from your reports, such as internal traffic from your organization to your website (you don’t want your employees counted as visitors in most cases — and IP address isn’t a dimension you can use for creating Advanced Segments anyway). You’ll also still want additional profiles to handle more than four goals. And lastly, you can manage access to profiles with the User Manager, so it’s easy to keep track of who can see which sets of data — you can assign different users to different profiles as either read-only users or administrators. (Advanced Segments, on the other hand, are tied to a particular user’s login, like the Dashboard or email preferences. Each user has their own set of Advanced Segments that are available on whatever accounts or profiles they have access to.)

So here’s a summary of the differences between the two approaches…

Advanced Segments:

1. Segment previously un-segmentable reports (except Funnel Visualization), including historic data.
2. See multiple advanced segments at once in the same report.
3. Types of segmentation that weren’t possible with filters: visits with conversion, visits with more than 3 pageviews, visits that spent more than 2:00 on the site, etc.
4. More intuitive to set up for non-technical users.
5. Tied to a user login.

Filters & Profiles:

1. Still useful for filtering certain kinds of traffic you almost always want to exclude, like your internal traffic.
2. Segment the Funnel Visualization report.
3. Use multiple profiles for more than four goals.
4. Tied to the Google Analytics account, manage access with the User Manager.

- Jonathan

Today, Google Analytics announced so many changes at the eMetrics Summit that my head spun. True, I knew about them all and had played with all but one, but didn’t know we were announcing them *all.*

Here’s the run down, then we’ll slowly start to review them over the next few days. I’ll focus today mostly on the first one, Custom Reports, and just mention the others.

“Custom reports enable customers to create their own reports with the metrics they want to compare—organized in the way they want to see it. ” OK, that’s the Googlespeak. But to me, custom reports enable me to finally create a report once, in GA, and not have to recreate it every time I want it, and I can use the report across all the profiles that I have access to.

I didn’t succeed, after all this time, in creating a custom report that would blow your mind away. They all look very tame once they are created. It’s the capability that is so cool, so I thought I would show you the interface:

Custom Reports Screen Shot

You have to play with it a little until you really see how powerful it is. It enables you to create what looks like a standard report, but instead of bounce rate, exits, etc across the top, you can have Goal 1 started and Goal 1 completed, or Visits with Search and Search Refinements (like in my screen shot here. ) Furthermore, you can segment by anything you want. In my screen shot, I segmented by hour of the day, but I could have chosen anything else in the green “dimension” values that you see on the left side of my screenshot.

OK, enough on this one. Let me go through the others quickly:

Advanced segmentation allows users to segment without creating all those profiles! Before this, if you wanted to see, for example, just your pay per click visitors, or just your visitors who came from Wikipedia (or whatever), you had to create separate profiles for each of those segments and filters to make them work. Now, you can just use the out-of-the-box segments like “Visits with Conversions” or create your own. (I realized this last part when I went into our account and found one called “John’s segment.”)

We’re getting an API!!! It is in private beta. This new application programming interface lets people export their data for lots of cool uses, like building custom dashboards. We won’t have to do all our work in Excel anymore.

The updated interface (OK, here is a screenshot) is cleaner, and more to the point, enables users to compare their profiles and their sites. Notice here how we have some LunaMetrics profiles and some engineering-education.com profiles, both of which are in the LunaMetrics account (from back in the days when you had a hard time getting more than one Google Analytics account.) While I’m not that interested in comparing those two sites, we did training on Monday with 45 companies who run websites for academic journals, and they all asked, “I have multiple journals. How can I compare the metrics from my journals to each other?” This is a nice quick way (apologies to all those companies — I wasn’t allowed to tell you about this feature on Monday.)

Motion Charts are the next item.  They aren’t my favorite yet, but I am sure they will be after you can aggregate the data by time.  They are a visualization of your data — just about any data you want.  You can choose up to five dimensions.

And last comes the only beta that we didn’t test at LunaMetrics — GA integration with Google AdSense. AdSense publishers will now be able to see performance by both page and referring site to make more informed decisions. Who knows? Soon maybe we will get really good integration with Website Optimizer. With Feedburner!

Damn, I won’t be creating all those profiles any more….

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

In the last post, Jim talked about why your domain names should be consistent.

But what does any of that have to do with Google Analytics?

I’m going to attempt an analogy.  I don’t have a lot of historical success with analogies, but I tried this one on some other people and they didn’t tell me that I’m an idiot, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Google Analytics is like a person with a severe case of short term memory loss.

Every time a visitor views a page on your website, GA records all of the details–when they arrived, what the page was, etc.  It does this by writing this information to cookies on the visitor’s computer.  But when the visitor views the next page, Google Analytics no longer knows who they are.

Good thing thing GA wrote it all down !!

GA looks at the cookies for that visitor to remember who they are.

But when i say a *severe* case of short term memory loss, I really mean it. GA doesn’t even know what cookies to look at.

Thankfully, cookies are tagged with the domain of the website.  So GA checks the address bar in the browser to find the domain.  Then it can find the right cookies.

Now we can start to see why www.domain.com and domain.com need to be consolidated from an analytics perspective.

If a visitor comes to www.domain.com, GA writes down it’s information to cookies that are tagged with “www.domain.com” because that was what was in the address bar.

If later they visit a page that is just domain.com, GA will read and record cookies tagged with “domain.com” to identify that visitor.

Imagine our person with short-term memory loss.  He writes everything down in a notebook.  But what if he uses one notebook in the dining room, and a different notebook in the living room?  When he’s in the dining room, he only knows about things that happened in the dining room.  When he’s in the living room, he only knows about things that happened in the living room.

This is what goes on with GA.  When the visitor is on the website “www.domain.com” GA only knows about things that happened on “www.domain.com”.  When the visitor is on “domain.com” GA only knows about things that happened on “domain.com”.

GA is now maintaining two distinct sets of cookies (notebooks) for this visitor.  Your data will show 2 visits instead of one.  One visit will have all of the pageviews to www.domain.com, and the other visit will have all of the pageviews to domain.com.

If you haven’t already, check out the previous post for some ideas on how to get started with consolidating your domain names.

Canonicalization is a fancy word to describe the process of choosing the best URL to display for a given page when there are several choices. The most common scenario is www vs. non-www URLs. For example, most people would consider the following URLs to be the same:

• www.example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/
• example.com/index.html

The problem is that even though each of these example URLs could all point to the exact same page, they are still different URLs, and are treated as such by search engines. The reasoning for this stems from the fact that technically, a web server could return completely different content for all the above URLs.

So why does it matter?
There are many negative effects of serving both the www and non-www versions of your site. It can result in duplicate content (having the exact same content at more than one URL) and can also lead to “dirty” data in your Google Analytics. First, we’ll discuss the problems from an SEO perspective - serving duplicate content and splitting your links to different URLs. Our next post will dissect the problem from a Google Analytics perspective.

Canonicalization from an SEO perspective
Having the same content at “different” URLs presents duplicate content. Now, let me dispell a common myth: there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty by Google or the other major search engines. In other words, if you have duplicate content on more than one page, the search engines will not actively lower your rankings.

The problem with duplicate content is that it splits up the links you have pointing to your pages. We all know (hopefully) that links to your website from other websites (inbound links) play a vital role in increasing your rankings in the search engines. When you have one page with two or more URLs, there is a chance that not everyone will link to the same URL.

For example, if you have 1,000 inbound links to www.yoursite.com/ and 1,000 inbound links to yoursite.com/ (without the www), then the search engines will only count half of the total links to your homepage. If the search engines saw that all 2,000 links were in fact pointing to the same page, however, then your homepage would certainly rank higher than if the search engines only counted 1,000. So that begs the question: “How do I consolidate those links to one canonical URL?”

URL Rewriting Tools
The easiest way to fix this very common problem is by using mod_rewrite and adding URL rewriting rules to your .htaccess file. This requires being on an Apache server, however, which some of us are not fortunate enough to be on. If your website is on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), then you can accomplish the same task by installing ISAPI_Rewrite. The basic idea is that when someone requests http://yourpage.com/, your server would do a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.yourpage.com/.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will discuss domain canonicalization and how it affects your Google Analytics.

Wouldn’t it be great if we all meant the same thing when we used a web analytics term?

At the Web Analytics Association, we have a committee called Standards (and I am honored to work with them.) The job of the Standards committee is to do just that - figure out what the words all mean, you might say.

A couple of weeks ago, the Standards Committee released a draft document of twenty-nine terms. It is a revision of a document done about a year ago. One of the current highlights is an Ask Your Vendor focus — we’re really looking for individuals to ask their vendors how well each vendor’s terms match the WAA’s standard terms.

The document, as pointed out above, is in draft format, and will be for a little while, as we collect comments. So I hope you will read it and make comments (the best place to comment is on this blog post at the WAA blog.) Those of you who are going to the eMetrics Summit in DC will get a hard copy in your conference bags. And bloggers — you would do the industry a service by reblogging or publicizing in any way you can. Thanks much.

Robbin