Archive for July, 2009
Posted on July 29, 2009 by Jim Gianoglio
Do you have a sitemap on your website? More importantly, do you need one?
Before I answer that question, let me point out that there are two types of sitemaps – HTML and XML. The first is an actual page on your website that lists all the other pages of your website – often broken into sections. For an example, check out this sitemap. This type of sitemap is intended primarily for human visitors (not robots) to your site. The second type – XML – is only seen by the search engines robots. It too is a listing of all the pages of your site, with some additional information.
HTML Sitemaps
So, what’s the point of a sitemap page? Do visitors to your site even look at it? To answer these questions, I took a quick look at the analytics for about a dozen sites (that range from 5,000 visits a month to over 100 million). What I found from this (less than scientific) analysis is that the number of pageviews of the sitemaps pages ranged from less than .01% of total pageviews to 1.24% (with the average being .26%). See the screenshots below for a better idea of the actual numbers:
Even if only a quarter of one percent of your pageviews are to the sitemap page, depending on the amount of traffic to your site, that could be a substantial number.
(As a side note, if you’re getting a significant amount of pageviews on your sitemap page, that’s a good indicator that people can’t find what they’re looking for. Perhaps you should rethink your navigation or how you present your content.)
Aside from helping that small percentage of people who actually use it, a sitemap page has other benefits. If you have pages that are buried deep within your site, a sitemap can keep them a minimum number of clicks away from the homepage. Why is that important? It helps those pages receive link juice from the home page, as well as helping the search engines find pages that they otherwise might not see.
XML Sitemaps
So what about XML sitemaps? Basically, they can be used to let the search engines know about all of your pages. Google has some helpful information about when XML sitemaps are useful, including:
- if your site has dynamic content
- if your site is new and/or has very few links pointing to it
- if you have a lot of content pages that are not well linked from other pages on your site
Additionally, XML sitemaps let you specify information about your pages that help guide the search engines, including how frequently the pages are updated, the date each page was last modified, and the relative importance of each page. This information will help the search engines decide how frequently to crawl your pages.
Additional Resources
XML-Sitemaps.com – this online tool lets you create XML and HTML sitemaps for free (up to 500 pages)
XML Sitemap format – explains the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol
Google Study Shows Use of XML Sitemaps Helps Index Fresh Content Quicker – Bill Slawski dissects a whitepaper from Google about the effectiveness of XML sitemaps
Increasing Search Indexing Coverage With an XML Sitemap – an XML sitemap Q&A from former Googler Vanessa Fox
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability
Posted on July 23, 2009 by Jonathan Weber
The filter at the bottom of reports can be quite handy. But you may have noticed that (like lots of AJAX-y things on the web these days) the URL doesn’t change when you apply this filter.
This can be a pain when you want to bookmark it or share the filtered report with someone else. (Sure, you can email them the report, but the static output isn’t the same as letting them play with it live.)
So you may be interested to know that you can actually apply the filter with a query parameter in the URL. (This may be of interest to anyone who’s writing Greasemonkey scripts or something like that, as well.)
The query parameter is q and you can use whatever expression you would use in the regular filter box. (Just make sure you URL-escape any characters that aren’t safe in URLs.) There’s also a query parameter qtype that specifies the value of the “containing” or “excluding” dropdown. Set qtype=0 for a “containing” filter and qtype=1 for an “excluding” filter. Just add these parameters to the URL for the report that you already have, and voila! you have a filtered report.
View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Regular Expressions
Posted on July 16, 2009 by Jonathan Weber
If you’re an ecommerce site, chances are that product comparison sites are an important source of traffic for you.
Recently I had a customer ask about Google Product Search, and how to distinguish traffic from there from regular old Google organic searches.
Campaign tagging
One option is using campaign-tagged URLs. If your product data shows up in Google Product Search, it’s probably because you’re providing the data through Google Base. You could add campaign tags to the URLs back to your site that you provide. You could make the Source be “google base” instead of just “google”, for example.
But unless you have an easy, automated way to do that, it might require changing lots of URLs.
Easier: Use a filter
(***Using filters as a form of tracking is no longer a feasible way of measuring search traffic. Google changed the beginning of the URLs so they are the same on both regular search results and within Google Product Search, so a filter no longer works to bring you actionable data. However, campaign tagging is still an effective means of gathering data.)
It turns out, it’s pretty easy to use a filter to distinguish regular Google searches from Google Product Searches. If you do a search on Google, you’ll see that your results page has a URL that looks like this:
http://www.google.com/search?a-bunch-of-other-stuff
It starts with “/search” after the “google.com” part. But on Google Product Search, it looks like this:
http://www.google.com/products?a-bunch-of-other-stuff
It starts with “/products” instead. So we can use a filter that using the “Referrer” field (that’s web-geek speak for “where the visitor came from last”) to distinguish between these and change the Source field in your analytics data.
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:
The first part looks for a Referrer like the Google Product Search URL above. The second part limits it to only organic searches (since AdWords ads appear on the Google Product Search pages too, and we don’t want to screw up the attribution for those). The third part changes the Source to “google base” instead of just “google”.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll see in the All Traffic Sources report:
Now traffic is listed separately as “google / organic” and “google base / organic” so you can distinguish plain old search from product search. And if you drill down, you can still see the keywords for each of those individually.
Remember that filters only apply from the time you create them going forward; this doesn’t reprocess any of your existing data.
View Comments (39 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science
Posted on July 8, 2009 by Jonathan Weber
There’s a lot to know about Google Analytics, but fortunately there are lots of places to learn about it. Here’s a roundup of links to some of the most helpful information on Google Analytics. See a resource that you love that’s missing? Leave a comment.
Documentation
First off, the Help Center has pretty good documentation about all kinds of basic questions about Google Analytics.
For more indepth technical documentation, there’s also the Google Code site. This is a great reference if you’re a web developer and JavaScript-savvy. It tells you all about how the tracking code works and how you can customize it.
Videos
If you’re a visual learner who’d rather see it than read about it, there are two great sources of videos for learning about Google Analytics.
First, there are the GAIQ lessons, which walk through a lot of the basics of how to use Google Analytics.
There’s also a Google Analytics YouTube channel which has videos with lots of tips and tricks for using GA.
Books
People always ask me for good books about Google Analytics. The only book that’s really out there is Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, which covers both analysis (how to use Google Analytics) and configuration (how to set it up). But even though it was only published last year, it’s already pretty out of date with the new features that have been released since then. (That’s the downside of quick innovation cycles clashing with the slow publishing schedules of books.)
For a guide to configuration and implementation, there’s a great e-Book, Justin Cutroni’s Google Analytics Shortcut. The current edition of this is a little out-of-date too, but it’s being updated right now.
Although it’s not specifically about Google Analytics, I can’t mention books about analytics without mentioning Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, which is just an excellent resource for you to think about what you really want to accomplish with web analytics and how to get there.
Blogs
There are just a ton of great blogs from Google Analytics Authorized Consultants and others on Google Analytics. Here are just a couple of my favorites, but there are lots to choose from. These are pretty focused on GA and related topics, but there’s also a whole blogosphere out there for information about web analytics in general.
Personalized Help
If you have a quick question about Google Analytics, try the Help Forum. (And don’t forget to search the forum’s archives — your question may have already been answered.)
If you’re still struggling with an issue, think about contacting a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant like us. We can help you in a variety of ways, from personalized webinars and training to projects to audit your analytics setup, get it configured for you, or help you analyze how visitors use your site.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics
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