Archive for the ‘WA Tools’ Category
Posted on October 9, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I got tired of waiting for Crazy Egg to have FAQs so I just wrote them myself. I put them together based on the many questions Hiten Shah from Crazy Egg has tirelessly answered for me, as well as my own perceptions. No one from Crazy Egg has seen this or blessed this, and any mistakes are mine (mine, mine, all mine.)
Q: How is Crazy Egg different from other overlays?
A: Other overlays show you where people click on links. Crazy Egg shows you where people click, even if they are clicking on a picture that doesn’t have a link associated with it. This is very helpful because it tells you where visitors expect to be able to click — where you should have links . Also, some overlays give the same amount of “credit” to two links on a page that go to the same place, and Crazy Egg only counts a click where it happened. Finally, Crazy Egg has not one but three different kinds of overlay reports.
Q: What are the differences between the three reports that Crazy Egg provides?
A: The Overlay (#1) displays your test page with buttons next to the places where people click. When the buttons are close to dark blue, you have few clicks, and when they are at the other end of the rainbow — the reddest — you are getting the most clicks. You can click on any Crazy Egg Overlay button to see how many actual clicks came to that spot. Alternatively, you can use the Flower Marker (the tab next to Overlay) to show you all the results associated with all the buttons. The List (#2) is just that — a list of the different kinds of clicks you get and how many of each there are. And the Heatmap (#3) shows you exactly where on a page people clicked (did they click in the middle of the picture? At the end of the link?) so you can see if links need to be longer or easier to reach.
Q: Can you describe the List better and explain what “Type” means?
A: Even though your most common type will probably be “A,” you won’t see B or C or D — when you see A on the list, it stands for an “a tag” like a href. (A link.) Drop down boxes usually have type Select. Free form large boxes usually have type Text Area, and free form one-line text areas have type Input. IMG is an image.
Q: Why does my dashboard say, 1324 views, 649 clicks, 589 shown? Why can’t Crazy Egg show all the clicks?
A: This means that there are clicks on the page that Crazy Egg is not identifying in the overlay. Many times it has to do with Flash elements, ads and even elements that are not on the page anymore. Javascript dropdown menus often have this problem.
Q: If someone clicks into a field and then enters a name with five characters and then hits the tab or enter button, how many clicks does Crazy Egg count — one, five, six or seven?
A: It is supposed to count that as only one click.
Q: What does it mean when Crazy Egg says that they can archive up to a certain number of snapshots?
A: The snapshots are pictures of a test when the test is finished, since Crazy Egg archives the way the test looked right when it ends.
Q: I thought that I knew how long I needed to run my test, but there weren’t enough visits so the data isn’t interesting enough yet. Can I extend the length of my test without starting a completely new test?
A: No, you can’t. Sorry. (Wouldn’t it be great if everyone’s FAQs were written this way, they actually answered a question like this without marketing doublespeak?)
Q: I can put the Crazy Egg code on four pages at no charge, right? And Crazy Egg will archive four tests at no charge, right? So does that mean that after I have ended one of my four free tests, I can start a fifth test, but I lose the archived snapshot of one of my first four tests? Or does that mean that my fifth test will not allow me to archive the final snapshot? Or does that mean that I am done with my free stuff and now I have to pay?
A: Wow, what a great question.
Q: I noticed that the code Crazy Egg gives me is always the same for my site, no matter which page it is on. Why can’t I add the code to an include file and let it run on every page? I would be happy to pay.
A: True, true. Read the editorial part of this post.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
p.s. If you haven’t tried Crazy Egg, you are missing out on a great analytic tool.
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Posted on September 24, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I put CrazyEgg up on my site for a short period of time, mostly so that I could try it out before recommending it to a customer. And I loved it. First the explanation and then the editorial.
CrazyEgg is a website overlay on steroids, although they may be devastated to read that description (more below). Not only does it give you the standard overlay information that you can get from Clickmaps (or whatever overlay you have), but it also shows wherever people are clicking, even if that is not a link. For example, I saw this in my short test:
Notice how the words, “So now you have a website,” which are just a .gif, are more popular than the real links are.You can tell that at a glance because the overlay button is light blue, not dark blue — it is closer to red, and the redder the button, the more popular.
CrazyEgg makes this even more clear with the use of their heatmap. Notice how my “about us” link is my most popular one:
I always knew that About Us was my second most important page, but I never really “got it” quite as well as I did when I saw this heatmap. Pictures are worth thousands of words even for analysts, it appears.
Now that you see how cool it is, let me explain the issues.
The FAQs and other on-site Help on the CrazyEgg site don’t just suck – they are non-existent. Want to change the time period of your test? No idea how. Want to know what the classifications to all those clicks are? If you work with web stuff all the time, you’ll get it, otherwise you are lost. Want to know why they only show about 90% of the clicks that they report you have? No answers. Want to know what it means to archive four snapshots? Nope, no answers there either.
Furthermore, there is no way to add the code to an include so that you can just use it all the time, like you would an overlay. It would be the perfect solution for all those lost souls who are finally realizing that as great as GA is, the overlay is lousy, so they might as well pay $20/month for a great overlay.
I wrote CrazyEgg and asked why you have to tell them the name of every page you are adding your code to (and then still get the same code for each page). Hiten Shah (who was incredibly good about answering questions) wrote back very promptly three times and explained that they don’t want to be lumped in with all the WA and overlay providers. They are a testing solution, not a WA solution, he wrote. I think that’s just ridiculous (Sorry, Hiten). Scandanavian Airlines positions itself as a business airline, but they don’t make it hard for tourists to travel on them. CrazyEgg could easily position itself for testing and still allow people to use their services for day-in, day-out web analytic overlay work without compromising their marketing strategy.
Hiten tells me that he is a reader, so let’s see if he comments (and what he says.)
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: WA Tools, Web Analytics
Posted on June 18, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Post and software updated: November 24, 2006
Chris Harrington, who lives here in Pittsburgh, wrote a post on the Web Analytics Forum on Friday, directing everyone to his GA-to-PPT tool. He directed everyone to his site where all the details are, but if you just want to use the tool, here’s how you do it. (And, I know all the details because Chris user tested it with me on Friday afternoon.)
Before I start, understand what the tool does. It merely takes the information you already have in Google Analytics and formats it nicely into a PowerPoint slide. You could definitely do the same thing yourself with a cut and paste job, but if you are generating a lot of these, it’s pretty handy. Plus, it formats the information to fit on the slide perfectly.
The URL is http://www.activeinterface.com/pptatk/ga2ppt.hta . But before you click, you should know that it only works in IE. If your computer is set to a different browser default, you need to cut and paste the URL into IE. You always have to choose Run (not save) because your computer will want to open it in your non-IE browser. (Anyone is welcome to tell me what the workaround for this is, as long is it doesn’t involve changing browser preferences…) Also, you should know that it only works if you have MSXML 4.0 SP2 Parser and SDK.
Once you get past the IE and MSXML thing, you can Run the tool and you’ll get a window like this:
I’ve already filled in the first three fields but they’ll be blank, and you won’t yet have the report choices at the bottom of the screen. When I first looked at this, I didn’t really understand what he was looking for, but the date fields are just like the Google Analytics interface — you start by filling in the dates of the report you are interested in.
Next, you have to fill in the Site ID so that the tool knows which company you are tracking. Chris and I figured out that you don’t have to do any of that XML stuff to get the info — it merely wants the RID number that’s nestled inside each and every URL of your reports (and comes right after the question mark, like this: ?rid=123456&scid=something-else). Be sure to pick up just the six digit number and not the rid= or the scid information. Finally, choose a report area, marketing or content (Chris pointed out to me that he broke it down this way so that the user isn’t overwhelmed.) At that point, you’ll be able to select individual reports (which are identical to the ones you get in GA – remember, this is presentation, not analysis) and watch his magic.
Note: Chris and I worked together to update this software on November 24, 2006. As usual, Chris get the big applause and I was mostly nagging and testing. The updated version includes all the new reports that GA has rolled out in the past few months, like AdWords Analysis. In the newer version, the .ppt usually goes to your “My Documents” if you are a PC user (Mac users, please comment and tell us where it goes to.) The Excel version stays right on your desktop until you save it. Also, be patient when you see that black DOS screen come up — sometimes it takes as long as 60 seconds. If you’ve used this recently and not had success, be sure to clear your cache before trying again.
Every time I work with this, it is a great lesson not only in how to auto-generate GA slides but in the power of user testing.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (23 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, WA Tools
Posted on June 14, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I know that lots of readers don’t use SiteCatalyst, so I will write a minimal number of posts on the Advanced Omniture training I did (and I’ll space them out.) One reader did ask for some Golden Nuggets, so here they are:
Golden Nugget #1) 
When you see an icon that looks like a broken egg, that indicates you’ve enabled traffic correlation. When you see an icon that looks like a 
spyglass (the kind that every other WA solution uses to drill down), that indicates you’ve got a commerce correlation. Most traffic correlations have to be created, which may just require a phone call to LiveSupport – that’s how I got a correlation showing me exactly which terms visitors typed into the organic search to land on each page, page by page. (So I suppose they were correlating their standard organic search term report with their standard entry page report.) However, lots of commerce correlations are already there, you can just see them in the data — just look for the spyglass. (You are wondering why this is in the classifications post? Read on.)
Golden Nugget #2) Classifications always have to be children of a standard variable, like product, pages, etc. However, not all classifications inherit the correlation abilities of their parents. So if you take a paths variable like pages and create classifications (sample classifications for pages in a media site: arts and leisure pages, sports page, business page), you won’t be able to do the same kind of correlations that you might with pages. On the other hand, some variables (I believe they are product, customer loyalty and campaign) are “fully subrelated” — that means that they can always pass their relational genetics onto their children (classifications.)
So, for example, I might own a website for women’s sweatshirts, but all my products are just SKU numbers — not very helpful. So I could create classifications and group the sweatshirts by Type (hoodies and non-hoodies. Now I can pull up Products > Type and see all my commerce metrics for hoodies and non-hoodies.) Everything that I could normally correlate with products can be correlated here. For example, with Products, I can look at not just the Big Three Sales metrics — Revenue, Orders and Units — but I can also look at cart additions. Product views. Finding methods. (Some of those get pulled in by clicking on the spyglass icon, since that’s the way that correlation is signified in commerce.) The point is that all the children of products, customer loyalty and campaign can have the same correlations as their parents, but the same is not true of classifications belonging to other parent variables.
Golden Nugget #3) Omniture works hard to call things by names that are meaningless — but then, if you’re still reading, you know that already. WRT Classifications, they have a neat tool called SAINT — probably some kind of backronym. However, they should have called in the SC Excel uploader. It’s pretty easy, even for non-techies — you just create your classifications in Excel and use SAINT to upload them. (It’s useful for other uploads, but we won’t go there today.)
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
PS I am hoping that all the people who work with SC day in and day out will get on an make additions and corrections. For example, I was unable to find a Path or Traffic variable that had any preset correlations, i.e. correlations that I hadn’t created myself. So that addition would be really useful.
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Posted on May 1, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Today, SalesGenius was launched, and when I understood that it it ultimately a form of phishing, I just had to try it out. (Like Mimi says in Rent, “I was born to be bad.”)
Here’s how it works: the salesperson, presumably, sends email to her prospective customer using the SalesGenius website (the Outlook plug-in is still in beta.) As part of the email, the sales rep includes a link to her own company’s website. And here’s where the phishing (and the intended value) come in. The link automatically redirects through the SalesGenius server, rsvp1, so the url comes up looking like this: http://www.mysite.rsvp1.com. However, the unsuspecting potential customer doesn’t realize that he was redirected unless he happens to look at the address bar, because the page is the same as the one he is expecting to see. The salesperson can now get on her account at SalesGenius and see which recipient of her email clicked to the site, which pages the potential customer looked at, in what order he looked at them, and how long he stayed on each page.
To test it out, I created a free 30-day account. Then I sent email from my new SalesGenius account to three web analytic/conversion rate bloggers – I just told them that I was testing invasive software and asked them to click around my site, on more than one page. When I created the email, I was going to create a naked link, www.lunametrics.com, but the SalesGenius software encouraged me to bury my site link in a phrase, like this.
Here you can see the first screen shot, where Pat McCarthy from Conversion Rater was on the site while I was looking, Clint Ivy from Instant Cognition had opened the email but not visited the site, and Eric Butler from Inside Analytics has already been to my site.
Next, I could select any of the people who had clicked through to the site and see what pages they had visited and for how long:
Finally, I was able to “replay” their visit:
This last step seemed a little redundant, I had already seen it (albeit by page name) in the step before, but if the URL names are not very descriptive, or the clickstream was a long one (or the salesperson doesn’t know the website well) it might be helpful.
You can imagine how much I disliked the deception here. Here is an excellent review on CNET, The Case of the Spying Salesman. It’s also worth looking at the very interesting comments on the TechCrunch review earlier today.
Many thanks to Eric, Pat and Clint for their help.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: WA Tools, Web Analytics
Posted on April 30, 2006 by Robbin Steif
It’s possible that I’m the only web analyst around who didn’t understand the interplay between Google Analytics and Urchin (but I doubt it.)
I have a customer with Urchin logfile software whom I wanted to upgrade to Google Analytics (and I even got them an invitation from GA while I was at the eMetrics Summit.) While I was at the Summit, their Urchin reseller set up their current Urchin 5.0 software for their new website, and told them that there would be an upgrade. I was sure that Urchin is going to die and will be replaced by Google Analytics completely; after all, Google bought Urchin for just that purpose. However, Tim Seward from The Unofficial Google Analytics Blog assured me that I was wrong — he even called me from his son’s ball game on Saturday morning to tell me how wrong I was. Server side Urchin is not only alive and well, but will be upgraded to Urchin 6 sometime in 2006.
The Google Analytics site says,
Urchin 6 software will not be free when it is released in 2006. However, if you paid for an Advanced Support contract that expired after March 2006, you will be offered a free upgrade to Urchin 6 software when it is available. If you are looking for a free analytics service, please sign up for Google Analytics.
And of course, if you want client side analytics, you have to use GA.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: WA Tools
Posted on March 28, 2006 by Robbin Steif
RevealSite is unlike any other WA software I’ve worked with, because it is not about trends – it is real time monitoring of who visits your website or blog. They don’t use tracking cookies – they match IP address strings, “but most people in the US don’t have dynamic IP addresses,” Addison Schonland from RevealSite told me on the phone. (I haven’t had a static IP address since I started with cable in 2002 — and now I have fiber optic service — but I haven’t taken a poll on this topic.)
The software enables you to watch as individuals (or more correctly, their IP addresses) wander around your site. If you know who they are, you can rename them. You can send a text message (“It looks like you’re having trouble with that software download, how can I help you?”) and you can block someone, like a competitor whose address you recognize, from your site. You can change the color of a specific IP address to quickly alert you when someone special or problematic is on your site. You can even create a Welcome, You’re Special page and send it to replace the page that the IP address is looking at (or for that matter, a page that says, “We don’t need your type of IP address hanging around here.”)
On the one hand, I’m fascinated, on the other, I’m scared silly. “What’s so scary?” Addison asked (and I paraphrase, since I wasn’t taking notes.) He said, “It’s my site, I can let in the people I want. If it were my store, I’d kick someone out if they were inappropriately dressed. It’s the same thing.” Well, is it? People like the perception that they are anonymous on the Internet. It’s true that an unexpected chat message might help someone who is pogo-sticking between the menu and the content, but will that person feel like Big Brother is watching? Some companies don’t even like to send email that says, “You left Widget X” in your shopping cart, because it breaks the illusion that the customer is anonymous. They find it more effective to write, “We’re having a 5% discount sale this week on Widgets X,Y and Z” and the customer feels that they just got a lucky break.” But you know, I have a special bias, I worry about conversion all the time. Other kinds of sites may have different concerns and so RevealSite may be just the ticket for them.
On the technical front, the monitoring dashboard runs on IE, and it seems to do a better job of picking up visitors who use IE than those who use FireFox (when Addison demoed it back to me from his site, he couldn’t pick up my visit until I opened his site in an IE browser.) After a three hour trial, I had to take it off my blog because it forced the entire page to scroll down to the bottom.
Addison and everyone else – you are welcome to comment and tell me how wrong I am.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
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Posted on March 20, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Last Friday, I wrote what I thought was a pretty nice review of StatCounter, a little free web analytics package. I included this line, “And one should never forget that, like many client-side analytic packages (i.e. the kind where you don’t need server logs), they don’t collect data about bots (like the GoogleBot), because most bots don’t read javascript.”
Being a good cross referencing blogger, I then went to the StatCounter forum, where I have never written, and referenced my post in their “Do you like us?” section. I was really surprised to see the Master Member, Christine, write back this post:
“Compliment or Competitor: Forgive me if I’m wrong or paranoid. Bur aren’t you in fact a competitor of Statcounter’s? Your flagship website from your sig doesn’t use Statcounter…”
Wow. I was expecting, “Welcome new member” or maybe, “Thanks for the great review.” I never figured out how using their code on only my blog made me a competitor.
But she went on,
“BTW, you do have some factual errors when discussing Statcounter’s capabilities. The most strinking (sic) of them is that bots don’t get tracked by Statcounter. Statcounter tracks image enabled bots. The bots that don’t get tracked are not tracked because they are not image enabled, not because they are not javascript enabled.”
I wasn’t sure what she really meant, so I went back to Hack 23 in Web Site Measurement Hacks and read, “…a solely client-side data collection model (page tags) may not be able to collect all robot/spider traffic information, because some robot/spider agents do not execute JavaScript and generally do not accept cookies.”
Well, the author (Eric Peterson), wrote “may not” instead of “will not.” So I wrote Fred Kuu from HBX Uncovered. Fred is “the Web Metrics Technical Lead at Adobe Systems” according to the HBX website. Here’s his answer:
Hi Robbin,
Most bots (aka spiders or crawlers) cannot parse and execute Javascript. This is why all vendors (based on JS tagging approach) tout that they track and report only human activity. Granted, it is possible for a hacker to program a bot to parse the Javascript but it’s not easy and there’s not much of a gain by enabling it.
Now, regarding images, almost all bots (especially search engine ones) will be able to track if a page contains images but majority will not actually request the image. So in the logs, virtually all bot activity are to web pages and not to images or other binary files.
-Fred
Then I went to my SiteCatalyst user manual (as another reference point – it is also a client-side package) and it said, “SiteCatalyst does not track spiders since they do not load images.”
So finally I wrote Jon B. in London. The great thing about writing the other side of the ocean is, you write them at night and the answer is in your in-box before you wake up the next morning. Here’s what he said:
Hey Robbin, how goes it?
Strictly speaking, bots don’t execute Javascript. The javascript is responsible for loading the image hence there is some indirect truth in the sense that the bots don’t load images. Also bear in mind that bots can load images – that’s exactly how Google images sources its images database-index…
So, I put all this data into my blender, turned it on high and came up with this: If a bot reads a picture (like the Google Imagebot), a client-side solution like StatCounter can pick them up if the company decides to enable that ability. However, most bots are not about pictures, they are about finding your text, and those bots don’t get picked up by client-side solutions because they don’t talk to the javascript.
Robbin Steif, CEO
LunaMetrics
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Posted on March 16, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Let’s talk about free web analytics.
While Google Analytics are really awesome (I’ve worked with customers who already have them), I’ve been on their waiting list since November. So I don’t even bother to recommend them to customers anymore. If the website is mission critical but not a profit center, I recommend NetTracker or ClickTracks. (Note: I hear that NetTracker 8.0 is going to “do money.”) For e-commerce, SiteCatalyst is my weapon of choice, although I’m sure I’ll love HBX eventually. And there are lots of other great packages that I haven’t touched upon. But for customers who have ten-page sites, I really encourage the use of StatCounter. Here are the top reasons I like it:
#1. Most other free analytics are server side, i.e. you have to have access to the actual web server to be able to install the software and then run it against your logs. Ten-page sites are almost always hosted at some ISP, and installation of StatCounter is much easier.
#2. StatCounter makes it really easy to exclude your own computer from the analytics, even if you have a dynamic IP address.
#3. StatCounter provides rudimentary clickpaths, so I can watch how people come to the site and then where they go (and if they reach a “Thank you very much” page, how they convert. It’s not Omniture, but one has to keep the price/performance ratio in mind.)
#4. StatCounter has drilldown. So, for example, I can choose the referrer tab (what they call “recently came from”) and next to each referrer, I can click on the spy glass to see the IP address, which is often resolved into a company name that I recognize. It’s not NetTracker, but again, there’s that price/performance ratio…
#5. In addition to drilldown to IP/domain, StatCounter shows you where the visitor is physically, on a map. Or at least, where her computer is.
#6. On their summary page, StatCounter lets you choose the time period you want to measure.
It also does all the things you would expect of a free package. Entry pages, exit pages, search terms, etc. Of course, there are lots of things StatCounter doesn’t do. Other than letting you choose a time period, you can’t customize anything – no customized dashboards, no campaign management. And one should never forget that, like many client-side analytic packages (i.e. the kind where you don’t need server logs), they don’t collect data about bots (like the GoogleBot), because most bots don’t read javascript. So for the first time today, after I had a new client put up a “coming soon” site, I wrote the developer and said, “Please load AWStats. [A log-based, not-as-interesting-but-still-free-package.] My only goal right now is to see if the bots/spiders are coming to visit.”
Robbin
LunaMetrics
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Posted on December 20, 2005 by Robbin Steif
WebTrends recently published a 34 page report on analytics (which you can get here.) This finding really amazed me:
In our own 2005 Web Marketing Confidence Report, we surveyed over 250 marketing professionals and learned that only 5% are currently “very confident†in the measurement of their results. In fact, 26% admitted to “flying blindâ€. Why? Because less than one out of four had a complete view of their performance metrics—including conversion, revenue, ROI—to gauge the success or failure of their marketing initiatives. The majority, a combined 52%, are still relying on clickthrough rates or have no campaign metrics at all.
For those of you who aren’t looking at your metrics every single day — don’t you wonder if you are shouting into the wind? (No one can hear you?) And if you respond, “Well, we have e-commerce so we can see that people are purchasing,” you are leaving lots of money on the table by not having analytics.
When I first got this blog, I was sure there were web analytics attached, and I just couldn’t find the right button. It drove me slightly crazy to blog and blog but not know — was anybody listening?
Eventually I realized that there was no button, I just had to install my own analytics. I chose a small, free, client-side package because a) I only want to measure traffic and marketing referrals and b) I need a client-side package in order to be able to measure this particular site.
Analytics are magical. They are instant feedback. When I installed analytics here, I learned that I wasn’t shouting into the wind. More interestingly, I learned that more of my audience wanted to hear about analytics, as opposed to just great ways to increase conversion rate, and so, I’ve started to concentrate on that topic a little more (as you see!)
Robbin
LunaMetrics
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