Archive for December, 2008
Posted on December 31, 2008 by Jonathan Weber
The new account interface to Google Analytics (announced in October and rolled out to everyone over the last few months) is a really nice improvement, because it allows you to see, at a glance, how different accounts or profiles are doing and compare them to each other without having to click through to the reports for each profile.
Given that you might have lots of different profiles in an account — even for multiple sites — what exactly does it mean that an account has X visits?
The answer is fairly straightforward, but first you have to understand something about how profiles work. If you’ve ever created a profile, you’ll have seen the following question:
You can create profiles for different sites or multiple profiles for the same site. (Different sites have different tracking code numbers. Multiple profiles for the same site have the same number and receive the same data, but you can filter the data in different ways to see it differently.)
This is how you’ll see profiles listed within an account in the new interface:
Notice that they’re sorted by site, then each profile for that site is listed.
When Google Analytics totals up the visits and other metrics for the account, the profile with the highest number of visits wins for each site. Then all sites in the account are totaled.
So, from the screenshot above, the total should be 7835 (the profile with the highest visits for the first site) + 1419 (the only profile for the second site) = 9254. And, voilà:
So this can be a really nice way to compare accounts, but you should be aware of exactly how those numbers are totaled up so you know what to expect.
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on December 19, 2008 by Jonathan Weber
“I have this banner I’m putting on my homepage to promote a particular product. How do I tell how many people clicked on that banner to get to the product page?”
People ask me this kind of question, or variations thereof, all the time. It’s all about understanding how often some particular link on your site is getting clicked, or differentiating between two or more different links to the same page.
Sometimes people ask if they should use campaign codes to track these kinds of links. That’s the right instinct, but I recommend against using campaign codes. The reason is simple: if a visitor clicks a link with campaign codes, they’ll overwrite the visitor’s previous referral information — that is, how they actually got to your site in the first place.
How to differentiate links
OK, so campaign codes are out. What to do?
The answer is simple, and related to the way campaign codes work. You’ll recall that “query parameters” are those things after a question mark (?) in a URL. The great part about them is, if your web server doesn’t recognize them, it just ignores them. So for example, this URL:
http://www.example.com/mypage.html
is identical to this one, as far as my web server is concerned:
http://www.example.com/mypage.html?from=banner
They’ll both take me to the same page. Here’s a real-life example you might be familiar with, the top menu from Facebook:
Both the logo and the “Home” link take you to your home page, but the URLs are slightly different:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home
They’re using the “ref” query parameter to see which place you clicked. It’s the same with the “Profile” link and your name.
So the URLs go to the same pages, as far as the visitor is concerned. But if I’m using Google Analytics and take a look at the Top Content report, I’ll see separate listings. And whatever the query parameter is that I’m using (“from” in this case), I can easily use the “contains/excludes” filter at the bottom to find those pageviews.
Best practices
If you use this method, you’ll notice that the pageviews for the page in question are disaggregated according to the query parameter you used. This is great — it’s exactly what we’re after. But if you want the total pageviews for that page, you have to do some addition.
The best thing to do would be to have two profiles, one where you take the query parameter into account to disaggregate those links, and another where you strip the query parameter away to easily see total pageviews to each page, irrespective of which link someone clicked to get there.
Google Analytics lets you easily strip away query parameters you don’t want. In the profile settings, just enter in whatever query parameters you’d like to take out.
This will give you a profile with the aggregated pageviews, without your query parameter.
View Comments (8 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
Posted on December 15, 2008 by John Henson
Who is visiting your site?
When a visit is reported to GA, it includes the IP address. GA doesn’t report the IP address (Google considers this Personally Identifiable Information so their privacy policy prohibits it), but it does look up who the IP Address belongs to. Often you’ll find that the IP address of a visitor belongs to Comcast or Verizon or AT&T. These are individuals like you and I who have their internet service with, you guessed it, Comcast or Verizon or AT&T.
These are probably the types of things in your Network Locations report.
.
But organizations’ IP addresses sometimes resolve back to that organization instead of a generic ISP. Dig a little deeper and you may find segments of traffic that are important to your site.
These are important segments for this particular organization.
.
Where to find it:
In the GA reporting interface we can find it in the Visitor Reports under “Network Location.”
However, GA is inconsistent with the terminology for this in different locations. When creating a filter, it is called “Visitor ISP Organization.”
In Advanced Segments it is still called “Network Location,” but it’s under Systems instead of Visitors.
So there you have it, a quick look at Network Location and where to find it.
Now, go find out who is visiting your site.
John
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics
Posted on December 8, 2008 by Robbin Steif
This was the question that greeted me in my email this morning. What should a good-looking recency chart look like? asked the writer. He was referring to a post I wrote about a year ago on how Google Analytics calculates recency.
Recency charts are like conversion rates — different for everyone. A recency chart for an ecommerce site won’t look like one for a content site. But best practices would always dictate that the chart is filtered by new and returning visitors; otherwise, new visitors and visitors who are addicted to your site will both end up in the zero days chart.
For example, here is the unfiltered recency chart from LunaMetrics, and next to it, the same chart filtered to include only returning visitors
Unfiltered Recency chart
As you can see, by using Advanced Segments (that’s how I did this) to filter out the new visits (and only get returning visits), the charts look very different. On the left is the unfiltered recency chart. But on the right — the chart with only returning visits – shows what you might consider a “good looking” recency chart — one that has a larger 8-14 day bar than the 7 day bar, since 8-14 days is seven days of data. That last point is an opinion only — remember, every site is different, and not all will see a bulge in the 8-14 day bucket — but most that I have seen do.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics
Posted on December 3, 2008 by Robbin Steif
Avinash Kaushik is going to put in a guest appearance at our NYC Google Analytics Training on Tuesday, December 9. Register or get more information about the training here.
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News
Posted on December 2, 2008 by Robbin Steif
Just a quick post to tell you that the Google Analytics training we are doing in NYC will be next Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008. It’s $285/person. We’ve perfected it to the point where the evaluation forms come back with rave reviews. So whether you are a marketing person and want to learn how to read the reports, or a techie who needs to set them up, come to our training day — we have two tracks going, and you can pick and choose between them.
Learn more about our Google Analytics Training or See the Schedule
Hope to see you in NYC – Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Industry News
Posted on December 1, 2008 by Jonathan Weber
There are lots of dimensions and metrics available for creating Advanced Segments. Most of these naturally apply to an entire visit: things like a visitor’s country or city, the keyword they typed on a search engine to reach the site, or their landing page.
You’ll find some items in the list that are different, however. “Page” or “Product SKU” are a couple of examples. Although visitors might have seen a particular page or purchased a particular product during their visit, they also potentially viewed other pages or purchased other products.
It’s important to recognize, however, that Advanced Segments segment entire visits. So if you create an Advanced Segment (like the one in this screenshot) that says “Page matches exactly /blog/index.php” you might not get the results you’d expect at first glance.
You’ll notice that it says “Matches 1,134 visits” and the data for all of those visits will be in the segment.
To illustrate, here’s a screenshot of the Top Content report viewing that segment. You’ll notice that pages other than just “/blog/index.php” appear. Why is that? Because Advanced Segments work on entire visits. This segment include any visit where someone viewed “/blog/index.php” — and of course, those visits also included other pageviews. You’ll find similar behavior with Advanced Segments if you segment by any dimension that occurs other than at the visit level.
This behavior is simply something to keep in mind when you’re creating Advanced Segments — you’ll always get entire visits. So what do you do if you really just want the views of a particular page (or maybe a particular section of your website)? In that case, you’ve got to go back to our old friends profiles and filters, where you can filter on the URI field.
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
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