April Fool’s Day is over and life on the interwebz has gone back to normal. We can go back to reading blog posts without questioning their validity. We can click on links without fear of being Rickrolled (go ahead – click on it, I dare you).

Our post from yesterday was fun, short, and completely 100% false. But it did give us a chance to do some testing (what kind of web analysts would we be if we didn’t throw in a bit of research?). In our Fool’s Day post, we linked to the Rick Astley music video – “Never Gonna Give You Up” – masking it as a link to an announcement from Google about things that would get your site banned. We linked to it in three places – the first paragraph, second paragraph and in the last sentence.

Side note: I thought it was bad when “The Wheels on the Bus” song got stuck in my head for a week. That was nothing compared to 2 days of Astley.

We tagged each link with an onclick event to see how many of you took the bait, and which bait you took. Here are the numbers:

Pageviews – 255

Unique pageviews – 171

Link 1 – 54 clicks
(anchor text: “Read the full announcement here”)

Link 2 – 23 clicks
(anchor text: “specific features listed”)

Link 3 – 19 clicks
(anchor text: “the announcement”)

Not surprisingly, the first link got the lion’s share of clicks. This is a good reminder for your next newsletter, press release, e-mail or blog post: put the important information (and links) at the top.

What Links Did You Click On? is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

  If you’re having trouble getting the new Google Analytics, ga.js code to work on
  your Blogger Blog, we have a quick and easy fix for you.

  Actually, this fix isn’t specific to Blogger or even Google Analytics for that matter. 
  To make your web pages XHTML-compliant, you should either do this on all of your
  scripts, or you should move your scripts to a separate file.

  Here’s an example: (Beware of smart quotes.  WordPress keeps changing my formatting automagically.)

<script type=’text/javascript’>
//<![CDATA[
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol)
? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write("\<script src='" + gaJsHost
+ "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'>\<\/script>" );
//]]>
</script>

<script type=’text/javascript’>
//<![CDATA[
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-1");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
//]]>
</script>

See how the first line after each script tag, we have: //<![CDATA[

And right before closing each script tag, we have: //]]>

The forward slashes are JavaScript comment indicators for older browsers that don’t understand CDATA.  This post on About.com provides some additional information.  Note the author uses multiline comment characters rather than the // we use here.  Both methods will work just fine.

So what have we done?

  We told the browser’s validator to ignore our script by wrapping it in the CDATA
  tag.  So now Blogger and the W3C will happily accept your Google Analytics
  Tracking Code.

  – Jason Green
 

Blogger Blogs, ga.js, and XHTML is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

To my true love, Blogbeat:

I have always been in love with you. From the moment I set eyes on you, I knew that you were the one for me. I suppose it is poetically ironic that you should choose to leave me the week of Valentine’s Day.

I’ve seen this coming for a long, long time. Ever since that day last July when Tracy Hailpern from Feedburner called me to be part of the press release, the one where Feedburner announced that it was buying you and your love — I knew this day would come.

Oh sure, “We’ll still be friends,” you say. That’s what all my other lovers have said, and where did that get me? Do you think they call me and talk to me, or measure my blog?

What am I supposed to do tomorrow morning when I wake up and you aren’t there to tell me who visited my blog using the term “Price of Sitecatalyst” from King of Prussia, searching on Google even though this is his third visit? (I always thought King of Prussia was a shopping mall. You’d be awed at how many “price of SC” searches I get.) Do you expect me to use MeasureMap? No, I know that you expect that we really will be friends and that we’ll be a threesome with Feedburner. But you know, I have my own special relationship with Feedburner and you don’t really measure up, no pun intended. The one thing you did so well, matching up the geo-location with the browser string identifier with the referrer and the search term and permalinks visited — that’s gone. You were a real man with me, Blogbeat. Now that you’ve married Feedburner, I need a calculator to figure out how old those visits from 23,532 seconds ago really were. And just to make this hurt even more, you aren’t offering cookies to exclude myself from the data.

Yes, I know, I could use Google Analytics. I’ve been readying myself for this breakup for a while; I installed GA on my blog last summer; I even coded onclick events for my feeds so that I could tell which buttons people preferred. (I found out that they like the big orange feed button the best.) Looking at aggregated analytics is wonderful for my customers who have large sites, but Blogbeat, you just don’t understand. I only have about 235 subscribers and 100 visitors to the blogsite itself each day. I love to scroll through and look at who came and where they landed in an effort to figure out, did the reader find what s/he was looking for? Now that you’ve disaggregated the searches from the landing pages, those data are gone.

When you asked me to be part of your beta test, I knew this was the beginning of the end. I hung on to every word you said, ever chance I had to be with you. But did you care about me? Did you incorporate any of my suggestions into the gamma product (whatever comes after beta)? In addition to being your lover, I am a web analyst, but you never cared.

In fact, the only person I can say anything nice about here is Zach at Juice Analytics, who finally showed me how to express my misery. Of course, it’s always easier when you are doing the breaking up, like Zach is.

Maybe I’ll be better off without you. I won’t check my analytics all the time. Sure, they’ll be interesting, but they won’t be fun anymore. Not without you.

Love Forever – I’ll never forget you

xoxo

Robbin

Response to a breakup: Blogbeat is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Blog analytics are interesting because blogs tend to be simple and so the analytics don’t require you to write code and understand GetQueryParam. You can learn quickly.

I run four kinds of web analytics on my blog, when you include FeedBurner (although I am still waiting for Google Analytics) and these are some of the things I have learned:

1) No one subscribed to the FeedBlitz email subscription, which was how I enabled individuals to read my blog in their email instead of RSS or going to the blogsite itself. Since no one cared, and since I was always incorrectly using that email field to search my blog instead of using the Technorati field, I ditched that service.

2) My most important referrer this month was the StatCounter forum. I wrote a post about them a week or two ago, and then cross-posted to it on their forum. I got immediate traffic, and then when the conversation became slightly controversial, I continued to get traffic. Now, if I were writing about another company with a forum, I would always know to cross post or trackback so that I could get that traffic.

3) My website continues to be my most important referrer, over time, to my blog, and vice versa. There is no “to do” here, it is just a nice verification to have.

4) My two top posts this month for my blogsite (i.e. among newsstand readers) are the post about Matt Belkin (where I take all the credit for his post) and the original Statcounter post. However, among those who subscribe to feeds, the most-read post is, not surprisingly, How do you convert feed readers? There is a great lesson here about writing for one’s audience.

5) I can see that when people comment, they rarely come back to the conversation because I don’t have comment trackback. So I am thinking about pulling the code from a site like co.mments, into my blog template and thereby make it easier for commentators to watch the conversation.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

What I learned from my analytics is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

(Apologies to most of the people who read, who aren’t from Pgh. I will write about using action buttons to increase conversion rates — a non-geographic topic — tomorrow.)

I will be speaking on how to increase your conversion rate on Wednesday, March 29 at Duquesne University, 9-noon. You can get more information here and you can register for the presentation here.

I’m also speaking with Dave Radin the next day, Thursday the 30th, on blogging and web analytics and tagging and SEO/PR. Dave will handle RSS and Podcasting and online loyalty and new online advertising. It’s called The Next Generation of Online Marketing – The Rules Just Changed Again.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

For Pittsburghers is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Here is the visitor cloud from my blog:

So I will ask the readers in Edinburgh and Zurich and Haifa and everywhere else but W. PA to forgive me for making a local post: Since a number of people are from the Burgh, including yours truly, I am taking this opportunity to tell everyone that we’ll be doing our first Pittsburgh Web Analytics Wednesday on Wednesday, April 4, 6-8 pm. Location TBD soon. I am leaning toward the S. Side or Oakland, suggestions are welcome. Post here or send me email, steif at lunametrics dot com.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

ps I know you are dying to know, did I exclude myself from the data? Eventually I did set a cookie to do just that, but I definitely skew the results. So maybe I will be talking to myself…

Visitor clouds and web analytics (and Wednesdays) is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog

Recently, I subscribed to BlogPulse Analytics. (Well, ok. I haven’t handed them the $24/year it will cost me to be a real subscriber. But I will.)

Anyway, BlogPulse has a number of free analytic tools that anyone can use to find out what kind of buzz is going on among bloggers. Need to know about the buzz on Mark Warner vs. Hillary Clinton? (After all, Warner was on the front cover of today’s NYTimes Magazine.) Put each of their names into the BlogPulse Trend Search and Get Trend. Here’s what you see:

So, I want to know how the blogosphere handles web analytics. The first time I did the trend report, I found there were two big peaks: when Google brought out its free Google Analytics in November ’05, and when Google purchased MeasureMap in February ’06. I tried to correlate Google Analytics with web analysis the way that I did the same correlation on Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton but found that the buzz for Google Analytics was so many hundreds of percent higher than the buzz on just web analytics that the web analytics line was reduced to an almost straight line on the bottom of the graph. Instead, then, I did a correlation of web analytics and MeasureMap:

Notice that web analytics has its peak in November, with the Google Analytics announcement. It hits the smaller February peak with the Measure Map announcement (probably for posts that include both the terms “Measure Map” and “Web Analytics”) but the yellow Measure Map line is off the charts (no pun intended) in February, for all those posts that include just the Measure Map name (and no reference to web analytics.)

Anyway, use the tool for your own purposes and enjoy.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Measuring buzz for your topic is a post from: Google Analytics, SEO, Social Media and PPC blog