Archive for March, 2010
Posted on March 25, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
Boring name, amazing report!
I have a new favorite report in Google Analytics (sorry Keyword Report – can we still be friends?). This report can reveal some very interesting business opportunities, help you direct your sales force, and make your boss sing your praises. Are you ready for it?
Service Providers.
That’s the report. I know, it doesn’t sound sexy or powerful or elegant. But just take a look at what you can do.
Visits from universities
Imagine you run a company that makes removable insulation covers. Perhaps universities and colleges, with their vast boiler rooms and uninsulated valves and steam traps, are your gold mine. How do you know if they’re visiting your site? How can you tell if your direct mail or e-mail campaigns are working? Did that booth at the trade show really help?
Take a look at your Service Providers report for the answer. You’ll find it under Visitors > Network Properties > Service Providers.
At first glance, you may think I’m crazy. All you see are visits from service providers like Comcast, Verizon, Road Runner et al. But with a little filtering magic (Filter Service Provider: containing > universit|college) you immediately see the glimmer of gold.
Knowing that people from these universities are visiting your site (and digging into the data to see what pages they looked at, if they downloaded any white papers, etc.) can help your sales force focus their efforts and discover new opportunities.
*Disclaimer: Just because they’re visits from universities doesn’t mean they’re potential clients. It could just be a student doing research for a paper.
Visits from other businesses and organizations
This is all great if your interested in traffic from universities, but that won’t apply to everyone. If you want to see visits from businesses and organizations that are big enough to be their own service providers, there’s an easy way to do that too. Just like we filtered for service providers that contain the terms “universit” (to capture singular and plural versions) or “college” we can also filter for service providers that exclude the common ISPs – like the Comcasts and Verizons. My list of common ISPs is long (and growing) so I’ll share it with you here for you to copy and paste, and add to it as needed:
verizon|communication|isp|comcast|tele|internet|dsl|road runner|pool|service provider|embarq|address|vodafone|sprint|network|cable|alltel|wifi|telkom|bellsouth|
uninet|online|jazztel|easynet|clearwire|iinet|t-mobile|iunet|broadband|provider|
comunitel|earthlink|proxad|fastwebs|armstrong|at&t|abts|cybernet|rcs & rds|singnet|axtel|unknown
Once you filter to exclude these service providers, you get a list of the businesses/organizations that visited your site that your company may be interested in dealing with. (Bonus hint – use your secondary dimension to show the region or city of the visit, source, keyword or landing page)
Advanced Segments
The easy way to set up these segments of visits to your site is with Advanced Segments. Just add the dimension “Service Provider” with the condition “Matches regular expression” and the value of “universit|college” (minus the quotes).
For even more insight, add an “and” statement to include just new visits by selecting “Visitor Type” as the dimension, “Matches exactly” as the condition and “New Visitor” as the value. Now you have easy access to a segment of traffic that is coming from a university for the first time. Be aware, that if a visitor visits your site from multiple computers at the university (office, library etc.) they will all show up as “new visitors” in your GA.
Once you have your advanced segments set up, it’s easy to set up a scheduled report to be emailed to you. This gives you a quick look on a daily or weekly basis of the new visits from these important segments.
One final note – if you are using an advanced segment to look at a report, you won’t have the ability to use secondary dimensions. For example, if I’m looking at the Service Providers report with an advanced segment to filter out common ISPs, I can’t use the secondary dimension to also show the region. Here’s Google’s explanation of why advanced segmentation is disabled for certain reports.
Fortunately, you can work around this by using advanced filters (as shown in the above image).
Your Turn
Do you think this is useful? How can you envision using a report like this for your company or client’s company? Please share in the comments!
verizon|communication|isp|comcast|tele|internet|dsl|road runner|pool|service provider|embarq|address|vodafone|sprint|network|cable|alltel|wifi|telkom|bellsouth|uninet|online|jazztel|easynet|clearwire|iinet|t-mobile|iunet|broadband|provider|comunitel|earthlink|proxad|fastwebs|armstrong|at&t|abts|cybernet|rcs & rds|unknown
View Comments (11 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Web Analytics
Posted on March 9, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Just a quick note about our upcoming Google Analytics Training in New York City — we are going to have three days of training so that we can reach all the right levels. We’ll be having:
- Google Analytics 101, on June 8. This is for the true beginner (I get so many emails that read, “Robbin, no one knows less than me. Just teach me what I don’t even know how to ask.”) We’ll teach you how to log in, how to find your own profile, how to look at the various reports, find the data you need, and other basics for those of you who are either new to analytics or new to Goolge Analytics.
Google Analytics 201, on June 9. This is an all-day seminar for those who are pretty good with the reporting in GA, and really want to take their analytics capabilities and GA capabilities to the next level. This is another request we get a lot (“So much data, so little insight”) and so the focus will be on advanced usage and analysis. This day also includes a strong introduction to Google Website Optimizer.
Google Analytics 301, on June 10. This is a techie day. From filters and profiles to events and ecommerce, learn all the techie tricks and a few that you hadn’t even considered.
This will be our fourth training in NYC – we’ll be at the New York City Seminar and Conference Center again (map it) There will be free wi-fi for all (so if you can bring your laptop, do so, and if not, you’ll be ok.) We include breakfast and lunch and slides for all, plus Google goodies. You can read the agenda or register here.
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Industry News
Posted on March 5, 2010 by Robbin Steif
“If you aren’t going to do anything about those numbers, don’t bother measuring.” How many times have I heard that? Forget that, how many times have I said that?
Now, there is a great (great great) deal of truth to that saying. I always compare analytics to a bathroom scale. “Why would you weigh yourself every day if you have no plans to change your eating patterns based on the weight?” In other words, If you aren’t going to do anything about those numbers ….
But I think we are foolish when we say that so loudly, so often and so authoritatively. Most of the world’s website owners have analytics because they want to know, “How are we doing?” When the numbers are up, they feel great, and when the numbers are down, they feel not-so-great. And, they don’t do much about it.
Is that really so bad? Certainly, those companies would be smarter to make decisions based on their analytics, but isn’t the first step just to know how you are doing? Maybe they need to look at their numbers for a year, and then see competitive numbers, before they are ready to even think about making a decision based on their analytics. In the meantime, they are absorbing their data and learning to think about the numbers. So for now, they have taken the first step.
Robbin
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Web Analytics
Posted on March 3, 2010 by Robbin Steif
It is amazing what our visitors know and don’t tell us. That’s why we have to keep asking them, and surveying, and looking at our analytics
A couple days ago, I was working with a customer on his website, and saw that as soon as the visitor chose to put something into the shopping cart, she would be confronted with a sign-in requirement. There wasn’t even an option to proceed as a guest.
“Well, that must be a real turn-off,” I said — too quickly, it turns out. Because, the very next thing we did was go look at his Google Analytics. We saw that less than 10% of the visits that got to that page exited.
“Well,” I continued, sure that I knew his customers and visitors better than they knew themselves, “Let’s see what it says for new visitors only. I’ll bet that new visitors, who don’t already have sign-ins, exit in droves.” And you guessed it, we saw that less than 10% of the visits that got to that page exited.
So we get back to the need for analytics, user testing and multivariate testing, because we never know what our visitors really want.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: A/B and MVT, Conversion Science, Surveys, Usability, Web Analytics
Subscribe to this blog's feed
