Just a quick note to tell everyone that our next one-day Google Analytics training will be October 3 in Washington DC, and then after that, on December 9 in NYC. Both training days cost the same — $285/person.  We’ve done a few new things (based on the really great feedback we had in DC last time) — everyone will have the ability to plug in and log on and follow along in a classroom-type setting. (None of this balancing your coffee and your laptop at the same time).  Also, we’re planning to have a “lab” at the end of the day where you can get on your own analytics and we’ll visit each participant, giving you personalized help with your analytics.

You can get more information, see the schedule and register at http://www.lunametrics.com/getting-ahead/

Robbin

Google Analytics does a great job of helping you measure online advertising. Not only does it integrate with AdWords, but you can use it to measure any kind of internet marketing, such as banner ads, email marketing, etc. The Campaign reports then give you all kind of data about your marketing, like bounce rates and conversion rates by campaign, by medium, or by source.

Google Analytics Campaign Report

This helps you decide where you’re being effective in spending your advertising budget and where you’re pouring money down the drain on people who never visit the site, who bounce once they do, or who never convert.

The Challenge of Offline Advertising for Your Website

But what if you have offline advertising that’s intended to drive people to your website — a brochure, a traditional newsletter, or for that matter some guy in a sandwich board you hired to parade up and down the street? You might just include the URL of your home page, because it’s easy to remember and type in. But then you don’t know anything about the connection between your advertising and how it drove someone to your site.

You could, of course, use campaign codes in your offline advertising, just like you do with online advertising. But here’s an example of a campaign-coded URL (broken across lines for clarity):

     http://example.com/destination?utm_source=brochure
          &utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=fall08

Remember, this is in print. So a user has to type all that in? I don’t think so.

The Solution: Vanity URLs

You need nice, short, easy-to-remember URLs in print, because someone’s going to have to type them in. So you want something like:

     http://example.com/ad

or

     http://ad.example.com

or even simply

     http://mypromotion.com

These kind of short, catchy URLs are known as “vanity URLs.” They’re pretty names for pages that actually live somewhere on your site — maybe just your homepage, or even better, a dedicated landing page for the promotion.

So suppose your vanity URL is http://example.com/ad, and you would really like it to point to http://example.com/promotion/landingpage. (We’ll do this with a technique called “redirects” that we’ll talk about in a minute.) But if you’re already pointing your short URL at a longer URL, why not go all the way and include campaign codes? Start with

     http://example.com/ad

which is nice and short and easy to type. Send it to (broken across lines for clarity)

     http://example.com/promotion/landingpage?utm_source=brochure
          &utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=fall08

This does two things: (1) it goes to the landing page you want, and (2) it uses campaign codes to track that this is part of your “Fall 08” campaign, the medium was “print”, and the source was “brochure.” All that will show up in your Campaign reports, right alongside your online advertising. Awesome!

How to Do It: 301 Redirects

There are a number of ways to point URL A to URL B; this is called “redirection.” I’m not going to go into gory details about different methods, but what I will say is this: the kind of redirect you want to use is called a “301 redirect.” There are lots of reasons this is better than various other ways to redirect URLs, including being good for your search engine optimization.

A 301 redirect is called “301” after the HTTP status code that is returned when a browser requests the URL. (You’re familiar with other status codes like “404” for a page that can’t be found.) All the redirect does is say “The page you were looking for at this URL? It’s at this other URL instead. Go there.#8221; And your browser automatically does.

A 301 redirect occurs on your web server. Depending on what web server you’re using and how your site is architected, there are a number of ways to accomplish this. I’m not going to cover every one in detail, but here are some links to popular ways you might accomplish this.

• If you’re using the Apache web server, you can use the mod_rewrite engine
• If you’re using the IIS web server, you can use the ISAPI_rewrite engine
• Depending on your site, you may also use a custom scripting solution for rewriting URLs, such as one based on PHP or ASP.NET

There are lots of options here, and you should think about how they fit with the way your site currently works behind the scenes, as well as how you’ll maintain the list of vanity URLs and campaign-coded destination links as you add to them in the future.

So, go ahead and start tracking your offline advertising!

-Jonathan

OK, everyone deserves a little web analytics fun.

After our last Google Analytics training in Washington, DC , I emailed most of the attendees and said, do you have any hanging questions or issues? A few people thanked me for writing, a few people had questions, most ignored me. But one man needed some help with his goal. So I replied, send it to me. I’ll write it for you. (I can’t begin to tell you how hard we work to be sure that people get their questions answered.)

So this afternoon, an email caught my eye; it had the title, “Goals Working.” I will cut out small parts of it to protect his privacy:

It has taken me all day to write you!! The goal you wrote for me IS OPERATIONAL!! I didn’t have a chance to look at it until this morning. I had perma-grin. THANK YOU. Tomorrow I will take a stab at the remaining goals. Who needs IT now? I am empowered!

When I wrote him back and told him that he had made my day, he replied, “So much fun, it should be illegal. No joke.”

OK, there you go. I hope you are enjoying your analytics as much as this guy is.

Robbin

Our recent Google Analytics training in Washington, DC sold out a week before the event (sorry - we were limited by the size of one of the rooms.) A lot of people have since asked about our next training and signed up for early notification. So we are going to do another Google Analytics training day in Washington, DC — same price ($285/person), same place (American Institute of Architects in the heart of downtown DC.) The venue was just fabulous - we had great wi-fi for everyone, electrical outlets at every seat so that laptops ran all day, not to mention stadium seating with tables in front of everyone.

We haven’t even finished compiling the evaluations forms (but read them all on the way home). A few things were clear: people really loved Jonathan’s new presentation on Google Analytics workarounds for analysts and techies; lots of attendees wanted a little more time learning about goals (OK, I’ll do that); many eval forms mentioned how nice it would be if attendees had a chance to work with each other. We are making one important change: the last hour of the day will be devoted to a Google Analytics lab, where you can bring your laptop and work with your own data. We’ll be there to answer questions and help you do your analyses, help you find the right data, help you configure your analytics (you’ll need admin privileges to your GA in order to do configuration.) Even if you don’t have a laptop to bring (or hate dragging it), we can still spend that time working on our laptops and helping you with your GA.

Well,– here’s the link to our October 3, 2008 GA Training in Washington, DC.

Robbin

At our Google Analytics training in Washington DC last week, one of the most burning questions we got asked was, “Why can’t I see my AdWords data in my Google Analytics?” And even though we’ve blogged about this problem before (here), we wanted to provide a step-by-step troubleshooting guide, complete with how-to’s and screenshots.

So - let’s start from the beginning! Log into your Analyltics account directly from www.google.com/analytics/home/ (rather than just tabbing over to Analytics from your AdWords account). Go to Traffic Sources / AdWords / Adwords Campaigns. If you see data there, but simply cannot access it from your AdWords screen, that is a separate problem (see steps #4 and #5 on this Google help page). However, if you see zeroes there (as in the thumbnail to the left which you can click to enlarge), follow the steps below:

Step #1: Checking Your Auto-Tagging

When your AdWords aren’t talking to your analytics, the first thing we suspect is that your Auto-Tagging may not be turned on.

To check this, log into your AdWords account from adwords.google.com/select/Login, click on the “My Account” tab, and click on “Account Preferences”. Under “Tracking”, you will see either “Auto-Tagging: Yes” or “Auto-Tagging: No”.

If you see “Auto-Tagging: No”, you’ve likely found your problem. Click on “Edit” and change it to yes. (Remember that once you do this, you’ll be collecting AdWords data going forward — you can’t recover data retroactively — so wait six to eight hours before you log into your Analytics account and look for your AdWords data.)

If your auto-tagging was already turned on, keep going on to Step #2 to find your problem!

Step #2: Make Sure Your Landing Pages Are Tagged

Now, you’re going to check whether you have Google Analytics code on the landing pages you’re sending traffic to. So go to one of your landing pages, and click on “View” / “Page Source”. (If you’re not entirely sure what landing pages your ads are going to, you can go to an ad group in your AdWords account, and just click on the blue underlined title in the Ad Variations tab all the way to the right — that will take you straight to your landing pages without incurring any click charges.)

After you select “View” / “Page Source”, you should see a bunch of HTML with a chunk of javascript like in the screenshot to the left. However, if you find that your landing pages aren’t tagged (since it’s easy to forget to add GA code if you have dedicated landing pages!), you’ve found your problem. On the other hand, if your landing pages are all properly tagged, continue on to Step #3.

(**Side note: If going to “View Source” and then hunting in the code for your GA code is not your cup of tea, never fear. Stephane Hamel has created a wonderful plug-in for just this purpose and it’s well worth the download!)

If you still haven’t solved your problem, you’ve most likely got a gclid problem. (And what the heck is a gclid, you ask? Actually, it’s just the tracking code that passes information from your AdWords to your analytics. [The term gclid actually stands for Google Click ID -- thanks to Jesse for clueing me in to the origin of the word!])

To diagnose this problem, go ahead and click on one of your ads in the paid search results, and then look up in the URL. Do you see the letters “gclid” followed by a series of letters and numbers? If not, you’ve identified the problem at last!

Usually, this happens when the destination URL of your AdWords traffic is being automatically redirected to another page. To correct this problem, fix the destination URLs in your AdWords account so that each ad is going directly to the right landing page. Or, just have the server redirection retain the gclid parameter in the URL of the page the traffic gets redirected to. (You may need to find yourself a good Google Analytics geek to help with this last part!)

Best of luck, and happy linking!

-Traci Scharf

Apologies to anyone who wanted to go to our Google Analytics training next week in Washington DC, but we are now sold out. We are planning to do another training day in NYC and back in DC. I will have more information on dates and places soon. In the meantime, if you want to be notified of either training as soon as I have the dates, fill out this form and we’ll get back to you:

Sorry that we sold out! Be notified of upcoming NYC and/or DC Google Analytics Training Days. Email:

Robbin

Content - Navigation

About a week ago, I read a post by Avinash that answered GA questions; but when I got to the part about the navigation report (see screen shot, left), I just didn’t agree. The question was, “Navigation summary question - why is previous and next page often the same as the page you are viewing? ” Like this report on the left: Notice that 6.23% of pages that lead to the index page come from the index page, and 6.23% of pages that come from the index page go to itself. A little strange, no?

Why I was suspicious of the original answer.

In his post, Avinash wrote that someone at GA explained what caused this peculiar beharior. Here is how he described it — basically, it is about viewers that look at a regular tagged page and then look at a picture on the page in larger format (which isn’t tagged). Here is the example he gives:

Visitor Action One (view): /avinash/2007/09/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html
Result: javascript hit generated (data collected)

Visitor Action Two (click): http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/web_analytics_1.0.png
Result: NO javascript hit generated (no data collected)

Visitor Action Three (back): /avinash/2007/09/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html
Result: javascript hit generated

Visitor Action Four (click): http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/web_analytics_2.0.png
Result: NO javascript hit generated

Visitor Action Five (back): /avinash/2007/09/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html
Result: javascript hit generated

To Google Analytics (or any other Analytics tool), it will look like this:

1) /avinash/2007/09/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html - javascript hit generated

2) /avinash/2007/09/rethink- web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html- javascript hit generated

3) /avinash/2007/09/rethink-web-analytics-introducing-web-analytics-20.html - javascript hit generated

</Avinash>

This sounded plausible, but too neat. Much too neat for me. What if someone got to one of those pictures - one of those untagged .png pages - and decided to leave the site altogether? If just a single person bailed out, that would make the percentages different. In order for this explanation to work, every single person would have to exhibit the identical behavior - they would all have to look at two pictures and come back to the same page. It has to be perfectly symmetrical, and it is in the hands of thousands of humans to do it the same way.

Do you believe that? I didn’t. But I didn’t know the answer.

The Truth According to John (aka Google Analytics Gang Signing)

So yesterday, I was working with John and Jonathan here at LunaMetrics. “Did you see Avinash’s post a week ago?” I asked them, “Those numbers are WAY too clean. How could a page refer to itself and then refer to itself again every single time?”

John thought to himself for a couple of minutes and then said, “Oh, I get it. Here is what happens. Whenever the page is viewed twice in a row - like a page reload — the whole thing automatically works.” He put his hands together in the configuration on the left. Jonathan nodded wisely. I looked at them like they were nuts.

But ultimately, I understood what he meant:

If a page precedes itself, it also follows itself. That’s what John meant with his fingers — on one side of the report, we see a page preceding itself, on the other side of the report, we see the page following itself. It is just the same story, told twice.

The key is, you can’t think of that report like a clickstream when it involves the same page more than once. Once you stop thinking about it that way, it becomes intelligible. The page is the same no matter which of the columns of the report it appears in, and the numbers have to match exactly because of that.

Still lost? I know that some of you are sitting there nodding your heads, while others are saying, “What is she talking about?” So for the latter crowd, let me describe it in a different way. I hope you won’t mind if I use numbers instead of percentages, just to make this clearer.

Let’s say that Page A refers to itself via a page reload 100 times. And let’s say that the website has only one page — Page A. The report would look like this — in a conceptual way:

Notice how we get 200 pageviews in the middle of the page (and we know that that’s how many there are.) Notice how the number of pageviews on the left and on the right are symmetrical. And notice how these are two identical pictures, which meet in the middle — just like the picture of John’s hands above.

So I think I have run out of ways to explain this problem. It is sometimes caused by a reload, and sometimes caused by part of the explanation that Avinash gave. But it never requires thousands of people to exhibit the identical behavior.

And in closing, John wanted me to show off that he is really known for his good looks and not for his gang signs, so here is he is.

Robbin

My daughter really wants to go see the opening of Mama Mia! this weekend. But, while a good play, it is not exactly what I am looking for in a movie. On the other hand, I am dying (heh) to see Heath Ledger’s posthumous appearance as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

“It got a ‘Must Go” rating on Fandango last night,” I pointed out to her. Ever the analysts daughter, she retorted, “And that was out of three people?”

Well, no, that were actually hundredds of people who succeeded in seeing it before it opened (Hmm, maybe it opened in other countries in other time zones, the way that you could get an iPhone in New Zealand almost a full day earlier than here.) But it got me to thinking. If there are only five rankings: Must Go, Go, So-So, No and Oh No! — then how does anyone ever achieve a ranking at the ends of the scales? It’s like asking someone to take a survey and they can choose a number between 1 (lousy) and 5 (awesome) — unless everyone chooses a 5, how does anyone end up with an average of 5?

“Aren’t you assuming a lot about Fandango’s algorithm?” asked John Henson, famous creator of the GA Goal Copy tool. “Maybe it’s like the Google ratings,” pointed out SEO Jim Gianoglio, “They count more if you not only rate but also write a review.”

Well, analytics to the rescue. If you click through, you can actually see the rankings in buckets (sort of like the Google Analytics loyalty charts, but without all the misleading titles):

Obviously, you don’t have to get all “fives” to get a five. So let’s expand the system and pretend that Fandango weights all answers on a scale of 1-10, and you have to get between a 9 and a 10 to score a “Must Go.” And maybe each vote gets the top of its category (so if you vote “must go,” it is worth ten points, and if you vote, “go” it is worth eight points. We would have (in my made-up algorithm):

45*2, 26*4, 63*6, 96*8 and 991*10

all of which gets divided by the number of votes, 1221. For a weighted average, i.e. raking of 9.21376 (OK, that is a little overly precise given that I don’t know the algorithm.)

Late note: After publishing, I realized that this (made up) algorithm only works at the high end. What if you had a lot of Oh No! and a scattering of other rankings — if you gave a “two” to an “oh no!” ranking, you could never get a movie to rank, overall, as an “oh no!” So probably it is more of a sliding scale — but the concept is the same.

Well anyway, that is your web analytics movie lesson. Enjoy the weekend. Comment when you see the movie and tell me if I should go.

On a post way back in April on Custom Advanced Filters, Idris left a comment asking about the required/not required selection (seconded by Paul):

Hey, great articles. I am trying to do some advanced filtering, but I’m confused by the “Field X Required” option. If I say “Yes” to the requirement, which of the following two things does that mean?

a. If the regex in this field does not match, do not include this hit in the profile at all.

b. If the regex in this field does not match, skip this filter, and move on to the next, but still include these hits in the profile.

These two are obviously very different. Which does Google Analytics do?

The confusion is about what exactly is “required”. We were pretty sure we knew, but we did an experiment to confirm. It’s basically b from what Idris suggested.

Here are the details:

1. If the field is required and the regex matches, the output is written to the field you select.
2. If the field is required and the regex does not match, the output is not written to the field you select.
3. If the field is not required, the output is written to the field you select regardless of whether the regex matches.

In no case are the pageviews excluded from the profile entirely (you need an exclude filter for that). The filter just doesn’t apply if the field is required and it doesn’t match.

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