Also, thanks to Tim Ash, Nicolas Ward and Patrick Bennett for their great presentations at the conversion toolbox session. Check out this post that Nicholas wrote after the session, you gotta love the picture (Nicholas, can I be the one with the two swords? ).

For those of you who attended the Friday Google Analytics Seminar, thank you again and I hope you found the material helpful and I hope you put it to use right away (on Monday as you promised!! ).

Here are some additional references:

Technorati Tags: google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics

For those of you attending SMX West, I’d love to meet and catch up. In addition to attending and taking notes at the various sessions, here is where I’ll definitely be networking or speaking:

• Monday 3/1, 6pm-7:30pm: Meet & Greet reception
• Tuesday 3/2, 5:45pm-7:00pm: Expo Hall Reception
• Thursday 3/4, 11:30am-12:30pm: Measuring How Search Ads Drive Offline Conversions – Q&A Moderator
• Thursday 3/4, 12:30pm-1:30pm: Birds-of-a-Feather Analytics Table (lunch)
• Thursday 3/4, 1:30pm-2:30pm: Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO – Q&A Moderator
• Thursday 3/4, 2:45pm-3:45pm: Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies – Speaker
• Friday 3/5, 9am-5pm: Google Analytics Workshop – Presenter

To our clients: many of us at E-Nor will also participate in parts of the conference and we plan to absorb as much as we can, pick some golden nuggets here and there and take it all back and continue to enhance our processes and add more value for our clients.

Thanks,
Feras

Technorati Tags: google analytics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SMX west, web analytics, workshop

Do you want to customize your user experience based on how many times visitors visited your site or how many pages they viewed?  Maybe you are designing a web page where the layout of which depends on the number of visits to the site or depends on whether the page was a landing page or a category page.

How about if you want to display a message on the landing page to all visitors who visited your site 5 times? Or you want to tag visits with custom variable after certain number of pageviews.

In this post I will walk you through a method that allows you to access the visit counter and the session pageview counter using Google Analytics. What you do with these two variables, I will leave it for you to decide based on your creativity and business requirements.

Google Analytics Visit Counter and Pageview Counter Technique

As you know, websites that have Google Analytics installed in them issue first-party persistent cookies that allow the site to uniquely identify visitors.
In this post we will focus on only two cookies utma and utmb and how can we get the visit count and the pageview count from them:

The utma cookie is also known as the visitor identifier. The last number in the cookie string is the visit counter, which increments by one every time the site visitor starts a new session. In the example below, the visitor visited the site 5 times.

How to extract the visit count?

I’m going to use JavaScript code to pull the “visit count” value off of the _utma cookie.

function get_visit_count(str)
{
var i, vc='-';
if (str != '-') {
   i = str.lastIndexOf(".");
   i++;
   vc = str.substring(i);
   }
return vc;
}

This script defines a function (get_visit_count) that receives the utma string and returns the visit count. If utma comes with no value due to the failure of executing the GATC for example, the function will return the ‘-’ character.

For example:
Function Input: 7113510.1552602301.1265052146.1265052146.1265060431.5
Function Output: 5

The utmb cookie is also known as the session identifier. The number that comes right after the domain hash is the pageview counter which increments by one every time the visitor refreshes the current page or views a new page. In the example below, 8 pages were viewed during that particular session.

How to extract the pageview count?

Similar to what we did in the previous section, this time I’m going to use JavaScript code to pull the “pageview count” value off of the _utmb cookie.

function get_pageview_count(utmb,utmc)
{
var i, j, pc='-';
if(utmb != '-' && utmc != '-'){
   utmc=utmc+'.';
   i=utmc.length;
   j=utmb.indexOf(".", i);
   pc=utmb.substring(i,j);
   }
return pc;
}

This script defines a function (get_pageview_count) that receives the utmb and utmc strings and returns the pageview count. If utmb comes with no value, the function will return the ‘-’ character

For example:
Function Input: 7113510.8.10.1265060431
Function Output: 8

How to implement this method on my site:

1. Create a folder under your web server root and name it “Scripts”
2. Download the “SessionTracker.js” by clicking here
3. Add the “SessionTracker.js” file to the “Scripts” folder
4. Add the following code right after the Google Analytics Tracking Code on every page you wish to track the session information [visit count and pageview count]

<script type="text/javascript" src=".../Scripts/SessionTracker.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
alert("visit count= " + visit_count);
alert("pageview count= " + pageview_count);
</script>

Now that we have the visit count and the pageview count for every page in the site, we can use them for all kind of cool things. Share with us your case studies and nice ideas

Related Posts

• A/B & Multivariate Testing w/ Google Website Optimizer
• Conversion Optimization Session @ SMX West

Technorati Tags: cookies, google analytics, web analytics

In addition to the GA workshop, I’ll be speaking at the Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies session on Thursday March 4, 2:45-3:45pm. Stop by and say hi! I’m certain you’ll pick up a tip or two on improving conversation rates, sales & profits. The session will also cover ideas on what to test and practical information on available tools and technologies.

The session will be moderated by Chris Sherman, the Executive Editor of Search Engine Land and the co-panelists are:

• Tim Ash, CEO, SiteTuners.com
• Patrick Bennett, Co-Founder, BLVD Status
• Nicholas Ward, Product Manager, Range Online Media
• Feras Alhlou, President, e-nor.com

I’ll be focusing on the Google Website Optimizer (GWO) and how website owners should use A/B and Multivariate testing to find site bottlenecks and improve the performance of marketing campaigns by adopting a testing methodology. I am hoping that your takeaways will include:

1. Benefits of Testing and Google Website Optimizer – Free but powerful!
2. Features – what should you test?
3. Advanced Testing Strategies with GWO
4. Testing Best Practices
5. Sample Reports & Results

I look forward to seeing you at SMX West. Meanwhile, if you have a question, a comment or a suggestion, feel free to leave a comment or email me at feras @e-nor.com

Thanks,
Feras

Related Post:

• Google Analytics Training @ SMX West 2010

Technorati Tags: Brian Clifton, google analytics, google website optimizer, SMX west, workshop

When I look at popular blog posts, videos, and tweets, I often wonder, “How in the world did this spread virally?” when it isn’t particularly good or even entertaining. Dan described it perfectly in saying that news spreads simply because of “contagiousness.” It has nothing to do with whether a video is good or not. People seem to be more attracted to posts that have many views; it seems to add credibility that many people have seen this post. The problem here is how do we get our social media content to reach a viral popularity?

Pressures of Micro-Blogging

The pressures of micro-blogging are much different today than they were even a few years ago. The problem with micro-blogging before was there was a limited amount of people that you could reach. Seeing as nowadays the amount of people you can reach is not an issue because of sites such as Twitter, and MySpace, where you can add people who are in your field, and in most cases they’ll add you because of your connection through the field. A new problem has occurred though, there is so much information that is being thrown at us daily, how do we make our content grab the user’s attention. That is the new issue arising with micro-blogging.

The way to grab a user’s attention is through finding a person in your field who has the power over influencing a large amount of his followers. Once you find this influencer, as Dan calls it, your next step is to make people aware. When you post your information, make sure your influencer reposts it. In terms of Twitter, post your information as a retweet so that it is simply passed on exactly as you posted it. A good tip is that you shouldn’t post very often; many people think to get a lot of people interested post as much information as possible. The problem with doing that is people will start to get frustrated with seeing multiple tweets and posts that it will get ignored or they will stop following you. So when you post information, make sure it’s relevant and don’t bombard your followers with updates.

Benefits of Social Media

Many traditional companies seem to shy away from social media; they fail to see the benefit. But what they don’t realize is that their competitors are one step ahead of them. Just being involved in the conversation about your company that is happening in the social universe is beneficial for you in itself. Having a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter, and the conversation in those spaces or directly on your page (through posts and updates) can help you identify problems that you may not have known were there otherwise. Through your pages you can instantly address problems. For example, If you are getting negative publicity, the more time you allow without addressing such issues can make your company seem stale or irrelevant. Your social media outlet will be the perfect place to catch these problems quick.

Having a presence in these spaces can also enhance your marketing efforts in ways you may not have thought of – announce sales, promotions, and posting live information as soon as they occur.

So, go out there find your influencers; stay connected, and don’t forget your calls to action!

Quick Tips:

• Stay active on your social media funnels, check your profile, and keep up with your followers inquiries
• Keep it personal; after all social media is about a human interaction with a company, not just a logo! For example, share pictures from your office, store or warehouse.
• Use URL shortening tools for Twitter, since you are only limited to 140 characters.
• Try to participate in conversations about your company where it makes sense.
• Don’t forget to comment, retweet, and respond to tweets because this will build a community around your brand!

Related Links:

1. Dan Zarrella’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/danzarrella – Very useful tweets!
2. http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/marketing/article/5-ways-to-grow-your-local-business-with-social-media-john-jantsch – Article about how to use social media for a small/local businesses
3. Follow E-Nor on Twitter! — http://twitter.com/enorinc

Technorati Tags: microblogging, social media

Let’s get started!

1. Content Grouping in Google Analytics: this is our top viewed post in 2009. Marketers loved it and techies loved it too , it showed you the what and the how. This very handy method allows you to categorize pages into groups of related content and collect these pages together and treat them as a single entity (for further analysis as a group). For example, if you have an online store with women and men clothing categories, you can use this technique to group the women pages as one “content group” and the men pages as another “content group” and then, as Avinash mentioned in his comment on this post, “content grouping can really help make a complex site much easier to understand from a macro perspective”. You can also, apply the same content grouping concept to brand pages, or to a groups of landing pages.
2. Monetize your SEO effort by Leveraging Google Analytics: this was one of my posts and it had to be marketing & analysis focused, since I am not the javascript guy . If you are running a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, you’d want to take a few minutes and read this post, if you haven’t already. The post uses a case study and real numbers to help you answer questions on how ranking, or lack thereof, impact the bottom line, and help you get decision makers to act and get the most out of your SEO program.
3. Tracking Press Releases in Google Analytics: again, another method to enhance your measurement system and get a better sense of how your marketing initiatives are performing. Granted Press Releases fall under the “branding/awareness” marketing category, and we don’t just measure branding/awareness by immediate visits/outcomes, it’s still nice to have performance data for each press release. Check out this method, some coding is involved, but the implementation is detailed for you.
4. The Cost of Misinformation: a popular post addressing the mis-information (by some fee-based web analytics vendors) about Google Analytics. In additional to the advanced capabilities and enterprise-level features that Google Analytics has been introducing, this post highlighted Google’s innovative, open and global eco-system for support, training and consulting, available around the globe by some of the brightest in the industry.
5. Problems with Bounce Rates: this post was an answer to a lot of questions we get on how to correctly read and analyze one of the most useful metrics, the bounce rate. Hint: look at your top landing pages report.

And some from 2008!
And since we are talking about top posts, here are three posts that were published in 2008 but continue to be very popular, check them out and put them to use!

• Tracking Mobile Devices in Google Analytics
• Optimize Form Length with Input Analysis
• Detailed Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Keyword data in Google Analytics

And another bonus – E-Nor’s Guest Posts on the official Google Analytics Blog

In addition to the top posts on the E-Nor site, here are few posts that were well received (based on the limited qualitative data we have) on the GA blog:

• Structure Your Google Analytics Implementation – Account Roll-Up & Reporting
• How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics
• Advanced Segmentation & e-Commerce
• Marketing & Campaign Optimization with Google Analytics

A couple of notes on measuring blogs and posts

Note #1- Normalize your data

If you really want to measure the most popular post in a year, the aggregate data might not tell the entire story. A post that was published in January will have a whole lot more time to get traffic/visits/comments/feed subscriptions/retweets than a blog that is published in December. This reminds me of what Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book “Outliers – The Story of Success” and how Canadian hockey players born early in the year all have a huge advantage and how this advantage compounded over time (he showed the stats and the numbers to back up his findings). So if you truly want to compare how each post did, you might want to normalize the data, add a weighing factor to compensate for the sequence of the month in the year, or simply measure stats for each post in X weeks after it has been posted.

Additionally, and for the visually inclined, you can use a Google Analytics’ Motion Chart to “play” the graph over time and watch how each post did and compare the various metrics concurrently over the span of the year.

For example, the chart above represents a number of blog posts (from the GA Top Content report) along with few metrics. The x-axis represents pageviews; y-axis: average time on site; size of the bubble represents $index, and each color represents a specific post.

You see how the blog post represented in dark blue behaved differently than the post represented in lighter blue. For example, you see a “big bubble” on the right hand side of the graph, ~550 unique pageviews with a relatively larger $index value, both are positive outcomes compared to other posts. One can then do a bit more digging and find out what led to this positive result and repeat it!

Note #2: Blog Engagement Metrics

When it comes to blogs, you don’t just want to measure visits & pageviews (that is so 2009! ), you want to have more meaningful metrics. Who cares if you are pumping out posts like there is no tomorrow and no one is engaged. I’d look for things like feed subscriber rates, comments per post, words per comment, posts per blogger, among other things.

Here are a couple of snapshots from two bloggers that are active authors on the E-Nor blog, you’ll notice completely different patterns and user interaction.

A couple of observations

• Blogger A is more active in blogging 1.2 posts per month compared with 0.6 per month for Blogger B
• Blogger A gets fewer comments, 0.8 per post while Blogger B gets 8.4 per post
• One conclusion is that while Blogger A can write, his posts are not as engaging (ouch!) but Blogger B has a knack for getting people’s attention and input. Both bloggers can learn from this quick analysis and improve their posts in 2010 (Blogger A do something to get your audience attention, and Blogger B, charm us with more posts).

I hope you have found our 2009 posts useful! We’d love to hear from you for ideas, issues, questions and areas you like us to address in 2010. Leave us a comment below or email us directly at info @ e-nor.com

Related Posts

• Move Away from Old Metrics to Smart Metrics
• Google Analytics Features: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, Motion Charts and More

Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, motion charts

You don’t want to miss out on SMX or this seminar and the opportunity to meet and learn from Brian. The Search Marketing Expo – SMX West conference features 50+ sessions on the latest search and social media topics. Check out the full agenda, and sign up for the conference and for the Google Analytics Seminar.

For those of you that don’t know Brian, he is an internationally recognized Web Analytics expert who consults on website performance optimization for global clients. He is the author of the best selling book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (if you haven’t read it, you should ).

You can view the seminar details on the SMX West site and register online as well. Brian and I will be covering both strategic as well as tactical aspects of Google Analytics. CMOs, marketers, business owners, IT managers and staff would benefit from this seminar.

All the material will be provided to the seminar attendees. Also Brian and I will have a number of “on-the-fly” site audits during the seminar. Bring your toughest technical implementation and marketing questions and you’ll get expert answers. Here are the registration options:

If you are still undecided, check out the testimonials from previous Google Analytics Workshop attendees.

Brian and I look forward to seeing you at SMX! Feel free to contact us, email, call or leave a comment if you have any questions about the seminar.

Update, 1/7/2010 - we now have a 10% discount when you use the following promo code: GA@SMX.  Note that the code is case sensitive. 10% discount on All Access, Workshop Only and All Access + Workshop Passes. One more reason to attend!

Update, 2/7/2010 - due to unforeseen circumstances, Dr. Brian Clifton will not be attending the Google Analytics workshop @ SMX. Feras will be conducting the workshop according to the already published agenda, for both the morning and the afternoon sessions.

Technorati Tags: Brian Clifton, google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics, workshop

Google Browser Size

Google has recently introduced a new tool called Browser Size to help web designers “ensure that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible” by a wide audience. You basically type your URL in the tool and it’ll then load your page and show what percentage of users see what sections of the page, without having to scroll i.e. giving us a visual view of what is seen “above the fold”. The idea is if more people have to scroll to find your “calls to action” they are less likely to click and convert. For example, Google applying this method on Google Earth download page layout had an impressive 10% increase in their download rates by moving the download button up by 100 pixels.

So what does the Browser Size look like? Here is how our home page appeared in the Google Browser Size:

As you can see, 90%+ of the web population can see our “Optimize Your site” Call-to-Action, the green button (surrounded by a red box for you to see it in this above snapshot, but the home page doesn’t have this ugly red box ). Kudos to our creative director and web designer (luckily we recently distributed Nordstrom’s gift certificates for the Holidays, otherwise they both would be asking for a bonus after reading this post:)).

Design Best Practices

Now that you have a visual view of your most important page elements, it’s time to put this useful information into action. We do know that design best practices for usability and conversion teach us that your important information should be immediately visible and easily accessible to users. An example of such an element is a conversion button, such as “Buy Now” for an ecommerce website.

Let’s say you have a “Buy Now” button at the bottom of the page, where only 20% of users can see it. And say your “add to cart” rate is 5% for all the visitors that come to this page – so for 1000 visitors, that’s 50 starting the purchasing process.

If we know that according to design best practices, a visible “Buy Now” button that catches your users’ eyes will entice users to buy, thus, “above the fold” is the way to go – that is, making sure this button is visible to as many users as possible (not requiring them to scroll down) could significantly increase your “add to cart” rate. That is, if 20% of your users seeing the “add to cart” button is leading to a 5% “add to cart” rate, imagine what 90% of your users immediately seeing the button may do. Even if that causes a 5% increase in “add to cart” (the new “add to cart” rate will now be 10%), you’re looking at doubling the number of visitors that start the purchasing process and you are likely to double your sales/revenue.

So with the help of this tool, if your page is being designed for 1280×720 and you realize 20% of your users can see that resolution while 90% can view 800×600 – though you don’t have to change your design to be tailored to fit the smaller size, at least the important elements should take this into account.

It’s worth mentioning that some folks have other views about the benefits of the “above the fold” concept, for example we really shouldn’t be cramming too much information up “above the fold” and we should keep in mind that “less is more”. Nonetheless, the Google Browser Size is still very useful.

Google Analytics offers additional data points & insights

The data in the Google Browser Size is collected based on visitors to Google.com. What you can also do is to use screen resolutions data from Google Analytics on your own site . Here is how to get the data in Google Analytics:

• Click on the “Visitors” tab
• Click on “Browser Capabilities”
• Then click on “Screen Resolutions”

You’ll get a report on screen resolutions that visitors to your own site use. You can then optimize your site based on this information. Here is a look at the report for our site:

So it appears that from our own screen resolutions data, most of the visitors can more or less view the entire page (a very good thing!).

Now, if you had a site that had a different screen resolution distribution, like the one below, you’d want to review the current design/layout of your pages and tailor them to the different visitors’ pattern.

Segmentation, Segmentation Segmentation

And as always, don’t just look at data in aggregates, use segmentation to your advantage and zoom in on the data segment that is most important to you. Here are some examples of how to slice your data before you start your analysis and fact finding:

• If your targeted audience is only in US & Canada, then run the Screen Resolutions reports on an Advanced Segment for the US & Canada audience
• You might want to also segment by buyers and non-buyers and monitor any interesting trends between these two distinct groups of visitors
• If you have different page layouts on your site, for example, your blog, your home page and category pages, you’d want to run the above analysis on each unique layout and make sure the messaging/calls-to-action are where you want your visitors to see them

Testing with the Google Website Optimizer (GWO)

One last note. If you are used to running tests, whether A/B or Multivariate, then it’s probably a no-brainer to run an experiment before you make massive (or small) changes across your site. If you haven’t tried testing yet, then this is a perfect opportunity to take the data and analysis to your manager and convince them to support you with resources to begin testing and realize site and revenue improvements! You can use the powerful and free testing tool from Google, the Google Website Optimizer (GWO), or another testing tool of your choice, to confirm (or disprove) your hypothesis before your roll out the design and layout changes.

Hope you find this post helpful. Feedback, comments and questions are most welcome!

Related Posts

• Web 2.0 Button Design
• Visitor Reports in Google Analytics
• Custom Reports & Advanced Segmentation

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics, web design

No other changes were made but it is cool that Urchin can be used in so many countries in their native language!

You can download multilingual Urchin 6.602 from our Urchin Analytics page.  If you have any questions on Urchin, feel free to contact us via this blog, the form on the right, or our toll free number 1-866-638-7367.

Related Posts

• Urchin 6.602 released
• Multilingual Urchin 6.602 on the Google Analytics Blog

Technorati Tags: urchin

Today our dear friend Phil Mui, Google Analytics’ Senior Product Manager, announced at SES Chicago, new and advanced features in Google Analytics. We will have specific posts with detailed examples and case studies in the future, but for now here is a quick summary of these cool new features:

Annotations

I would say, a very very long-awaited for feature. You can now quickly add your own notes within the Google Analytics user interface!!! Say you see a spike in traffic in last week’s reports and you know exactly what caused it (e.g. a recent email campaign that worked well). Now, you can add use Annotations to add a comment about this email campaign, so few weeks down the road you’ll have a reference of what happened and you won’t be searching all over your email, notes, and asking your colleagues (and maybe pulling your hair as well ) to help explained the traffic spike. Other scenarios where annotations can be very helpful:

• Very successful marketing programs (or maybe unsuccessful ones )
• External campaign not tagged properly causing data from one source to show in another source
• Introduction of new design/landing pages
• Site related issues causing data collection problems and inaccuracies

As you can see the relevant marketing campaign and site information will be right there next to your Google Analytics reports “bringing more Intelligence to data” as Phil said in his post. Very very useful and time saving feature, give it a try and start using it! Also, you have two options in Annotations, you can have the comment private or shared with others.

Here is an example of using Annotations to comment on a spike in traffic generated by a blog post.

Multiple Custom Variables In Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports

You can now create custom reports and use advanced segmentation to leverage the power of the new Multiple Custom Variables functionality. Slice your data and reports based on the visitor, session, or page level custom variables you have created and get the insights and actionability you that will make you a hero!

New Google Analytics Setup Wizard

For those of us that are less technical savvy, this Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) Wizard will be our best friend . You don’t have to manually construct the GATC code for sub-domains, multiple domains, cross-domains, mobile, etc; the wizard will help you get the code in a packaged and ready to use form.

For the GA ninjas, you also have a reference on How to Structure your Google Analytics Account.

New Version of the Google Analytics API

More details to come out later this week, but get ready for more capabilities in the GA API, namely support for Advanced Segmentation.

Whoa, it sometimes feel like it’s a challenge to keep us with all these new features, but it’s worth every bit of effort. Roll up your sleeves and give these features a try, and start improving your site and your marketing campaign performance.

Comments or thoughts about these new features?

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

Google AdWords Alert functionality allows you to proactively monitor your AdWords campaigns with custom alerts. Set your campaign criteria via custom alerts and AdWords will notify you within the account or via email.

Log into AdWords and Alerts will greet you and you are presented with changes to key performance indicators at a glance.

Increase Traffic with New Keywords Alert

Please note the keyword suggestions need careful review. Please take the time to review the keywords before adding, also consider giving feedback to AdWords regarding the relevancy of suggestions.

Custom Alerts

To support active monitoring of KPI fluctuations you want to track and take action on, email yourself the Alert. In the office or on the go, use the powerful AdWords Alerts to stay plugged in to your campaign performance.

Similar to the Google Analytics intelligence alerts, AdWords offers customizable alerts – thirteen alert types!

From Impressions to Conversion metrics, you can choose:

• metric
• operator
• comparison timeframe
• frequency of alert
• method of delivery

Powerful data formally requiring a manual investigation is now neatly delivered to your AdWords interface or email for quick action!

If you have a MCC, hang on because there is no alert access via MCC yet; you will have to log in to each account for Alert control.

See AdWords Alert blog post more details. This functionality is only available in the USA and a few other locations for now.

Happy Optimization!

Technorati Tags: google adwords, pay per click

• An experiment management API which allows you to create and manage experiments outside of the interface.  For those that work with a lot of experiments or deal with third party integration, this will save you a lot of work!
• Conversions over time charts can be found on the reports page of GWO.  Conversion rates are rarely a static number and websites might undergo changes during an experiment, so visually seeing how your combinations performanced over time might give you that extra bit of insight you were looking for.

Technorati Tags: google website optimizer

The problems with Omniture’s argument are that they are irrelevant and out-of-sync with the challenges that exist in the web analytics industry. When was the last time technology/features were the main issue in analytics? Also, the argument of cost is extremely misleading. So what if a Google Analytics solution isn’t free? That plain and simple ignores the fact that Omniture’s solution is priced well above what a Google Analytics “total package” would cost. When you criticize your competitor for a point that you’re not particularly strong at yourself, the argument loses all credibility and respect.

The biggest challenge facing all of us in the web analytics industry has little to do with the tool; the real challenge is creating an analytics culture. Getting the right people with the right processes to think “measure, analyze, take action” is way more meaningful. Google Analytics is more capable of facilitating this because:

• Google Analytics allows you to stretch your marketing dollars. According to Forrester: “Enterprise companies must ask themselves if they are paying too much for capabilities that they simply do not need. In some cases, gaining fewer seldom-used capabilities is a worthwhile trade-off if funds can be reallocated to hire more resources necessary for analysis”
• Google Analytics ease of use (GA has set the User Interface standard really high)
• Google Analytics support eco-system (see details below)

There have been many articles, posts, comparisons, etc. between GA and other solutions, so I won’t bore you here with repeating the details. I’ll just shed some light on two areas of misinformation:

• Over-emphasis on Technology
• Customer Support & Consulting

Over-emphasis on technology

You don’t have to be a CMO or a CFO at a Fortune 100 to realize that tools and software alone don’t get you the intended results. This applies to project management, accounting, Sales Force Automation and other aspects of running a business, and not just web analytics. For example, if you are looking for a sales force automation or a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can invest all the dollars you want in a solution like SalesForce.com but until you train your sales personnel and build the in-house processes for lead management and client communication, you can’t claim that you have a CRM system in place. So whether you use SalesForce.com or use an open source CRM, the investment you should be prepared to make is NOT just in the software, it is in people and process. It’d be gullible to think otherwise.

• The often repeated messages we keep hearing from fee-based analytics vendors is the over-emphasis on technology and feature-set.
  • Features are indeed important and Google Analytics is definitely feature-rich. Yet what matters is not the long list of features, but what’s important to the customer. Who cares if your solution offers a gazillion features but your customer’s business only needs 7 metrics/features and your solution doesn’t give them what they need!
  • Analytics industry experts across the spectrum have said it over and over, it’s not just about technology. Consider: people (in-house staff, consultants, professional services organizations), process, the organizational analytics maturity, among other factors. We are aware of Avinash’s 10/90 rule, and Eric Peterson reminds us of the staffing and process chasms.

Customer Support & Consulting – Investment in People & Resources

• If one listens to some of the fee-based vendor claims, they’d think that Google Analytics has no support or at max very limited support. This is far from the truth. Google is a unique company and does things in a unique way. Instead of establishing a professional services organization, Google Analytics opted to create an open, global and collaborative eco-system, which as a model, is more superior than a traditional, centralized, and closed professional services organization.

• As an enterprise manager/business owner, you have many options to establish and nurture your in-house team’s expertise and/or leverage the Google Analytics eco-system resources. Education, Training, Customer support & professional services are available through the following channels:
  • Ask a question, report a problem, or suggest an enhancement: Google Analytics Support
  • Answers for common issues: Google Analytics Help Center and Google Analytics Help Forum
  • Professional Services & Paid SLAs: Google’s worldwide network of authorized consultants, known as GAACs offering:
    • Technical Implementation
    • Validation & Configuration
    • Consulting & Best Practices
    • Ongoing Optimization
    • Testing
  • Training
    • In-person through the Google Analytics seminars
    • Regional Summits, Conferences & Webinars
    • Industry Conferences (workshops at eMetrics, SES, etc.)
    • Certified Training Programs (GAIQ)
  • The GAAC partners go through a rigorous vetting process, have direct access to Google Analytics technical team members and are required to maintain up to date product know-how, including training at the Googleplex. The GAAC global network is 100+ strong and provides professional, local (and personable ) services in these regions:
    • North America: USA, Canada, Mexico
    • South America: Argentina, Brazil
    • Europe: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands,
    • Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK
    • Middle East & Africa: Israel, South Africa
    • Asia Pacific: Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka

• In addition, fee-based solutions providers do have “professional services” organizations and they do sell these services (last I checked, these services weren’t free either!). Here’s a quote from Omniture’s services: “Omniture Engineering Services provides both standard packages as well as custom solutions. Specialized solutions are priced hourly on a per-project basis. Please coordinate with your assigned Omniture Account Manager to discuss your needs. The Engineering Services team will then engage with you and your Omniture Account Manager to scope the project, provide timelines, and deliver your specialized solutions.”

One final thought on technology/features. While there is always room for improvement and the product can benefit from additional capabilities, Google Analytics’ commitment to innovation is evident by the on-going enhancements including:

• Last year’s features: advancement segmentation, custom reporting, on-the-fly analysis capabilities, etc.
• Data Export API (and it’s network of developers and innovations), and
• The recent announcement at the D.C. eMetrics , including: “intelligence”, custom alerts, mobile tracking, and multiple custom variables.

So here you have it. Don’t get distracted by the misleading information, and stay focused on building your expertise in analytics and nurture a team (in-house and/or outsourced) that will utilize all the “free” resources to save you money and improve your returns!!!

Related posts:

• Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics
• Top Ten Myths about Google Analytics
• Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent
• Google Analytics No Longer Free

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

Here is a quick overview of the features included in this release:

• Switch between supported languages (total of 10)
• Added SSL/TLS protocol support to External Authentication (LDAP)
• The Urchin “Home” page (sometimes called the Roll-up Report) now displays metrics for all profiles visible to the logged in user. Data can be shown in 3 views: Basic, Business, and Admin.
• Easier one-click installation: New one-click installation which also sets up the included postgresql database server at the same time! This reduces much of the setup time, since the database server no longer has to be setup and configured. The user can still opt to use existing database servers if desired.
• Optimized GeoDB. You can now select between a full GeoDB or a lighweight GeoDB providing metro information up to the country level only. This significantly reduces the memory footprint.
• The zip utility has been updated to work with data files > 2 Gb.
• New UI tweaks have been made on the Marketing Summary report so that the user can sort metrics sources, keywords, and campaigns by their appropriate metrics.
• Remote log file downloading. A new configurable parameter for remote log download timeout has been added to urchin.conf.

In addition, many bug fixes in the areas of log processing, licensing, migration, and embedded help were included in this release.

Important notes:

• Urchin 6.6xx no longer supports the MySQL 4.x.x. database. If you are using this version of MySQL, you’ll need to upgrade to 5.03+.
• FreeBSD 5.x platform has been deprecated.

That’s a lot of new stuff for a point release upgrade   This new version has currently only been released to Urchin Resellers.  If you would like a trial copy, please contact us, or you can download version 6.6.0.1 (the current version) here.

Technorati Tags: urchin

As announced today on the Google Analytics blog and at eMetrics, the Google Analytics team is rolling out a new version of GA (version 4) with exciting new capabilities, many more customization options, and the totally awesome and super powerful Intelligence feature.

Over the next several days I’ll be posting specific posts about each of the new GA features, but for now here is a quick summary of what you’ll start seeing in your reports.

• Expanded goals
• Mobile reporting
• Advanced table filtering
• Unique visitor segmentation
• Multiple custom variables
• Sharing of custom segments and custom report templates
• Intelligence
• Automated and custom alerts

Please note that some of these features are rolled out as we speak (ok, it is past noon Pacific, 10/20/09 ), and others will be rolled out in the next few days or weeks.

More Power!

• Goals and more goals! We have conveyed your requests to Google. You weren’t satisfied with 4 goals and now you can have up to 20; yes, 20 goals! Measure those important actions! In addition, you can now measure two engagement metrics, Time on Site and Pages per Visit.
  
• Expanded mobile reporting. Not only you can track traffic from your iPhones, but now GA allows you to track mobile applications built for iPhone and Android devices (great way for application developers to measure engagement). In addition, traffic to mobile sites can be tracked (for sites built in PHP, Perl, JSP, ASPX), for devices with or without JavaScript.
• Secondary dimensions and pivoting. Great table and filtering features. Check out our post on these here.
• Unique Visitors Segmentation: now available across many dimensions in your Custom Reports. Answering the question of “how many actual visitors” got a little bit easier.

More Flexibility and Customization Options

• Multiple custom variables. The requests of the analytics ninjas have been answered! Define an important interaction for your site and set a custom variable to track it. Tracking can be done at the page, session, and visitor level.
• Sharing custom segments and custom report templates. If you can create them, you can now share them . It’s as easy as copying and pasting a URL.

Intelligence

• Analytics Intelligence. This new feature is just great! Any time a tool can help automate the mundane and allows you to focus on the business, you gotta love it! This new report will provide automatic alerts when significant changes in your data occur, in daily, weekly and monthly intervals.
  
• Custom alerts. You can create your own custom alerts and be notified by email or through the UI.

That is it for now. Log in to your GA account and check out some of these features and let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, mobile marketing, web analytics

Jim Sterne and the eMetrics team have an incredible line up of speakers and tracks, including multi-channel metrics, search analytics, emergent media and many others.

In addition, there is a number of workshops offered. Topics include: reports, predictive analytics as well as a workshop on Google Analytics by our dear friend and GA Ninja Caleb Whitemore of AnalyticsPros.

So don’t miss out if you can make it, you can still register here.

Technorati Tags: emetrics, google analytics, web analytics

Didn’t take a lot of notes (I was mesmerized most of the time) but here are some takeaways:

• Data is available and relatively cheap but we still need humans to analyze and make sense of all these piles of data
• Check out this graph about the US recession, http://www.slate.com/id/2216238/, and I’m sure you’ll agree it is not a pretty picture!
• I really liked his comment, “if you torture the data long enough it’ll confess to anything.”
• If you haven’t already, check out this very cool and super useful tool, Google Search Insight. With this tool, one can assess patterns of search volume. you can select a specific region or categories, time frames, and properties. See seasonality impacts on keywords related to what you sell, compare search volumes, and more. Don’t forget to examine the “forecast data”.

With his usual charisma and humor, Avinash covered a number of areas including the process of making decisions and smart analytics. I’ll summarize a few points in this post. This is not meant to be comprehensive so to get more, buy Avinash’s new book! ) .

• Websites are not the center of the universe anymore and neither is centralized analytics tagging. The model used to be Content Creation  —>  Content Distribution  —>  Content Consumption. This model is changing. The way we create content, the way we consume it is changing (blogs, tweets, etc.); marketers and analysts don’t think about this issue enough. Just looking at your site analytics is not going to be sufficient. The data that we need to make marketing decision effectively is more distributed and not in one centralized place.
• The challenge is going to be to figure out how to integrate all this data from all different systems automagically as Avinash put it; pull the data in, scrape, integrate, and then correlate and compute.
• Vendors, practitioners, and consultants should start thinking beyond existing (read this as old) metrics: (visits, pageviews, time on site, etc.), and look into things like engagement, reach, velocity, demand, network strength, and activity. As we have moved away for hits (hits = How Idiots Track Success ), we need to move to smart metrics.
• An example of smart analytics for measuring twitter. Move beyond just number of followers, look how my message that I am communicating is amplified. Look for number of retweets per thousand followers. Twitter is not an ad – it’s about conversation and not shouting. Conversion rate is another cool metric. Numbers of replies sent/day and replies received/day indicate you are communicating with people.
• Another example for measuring a success of a blog. Go beyond pageviews! RSS/feed subscribers is much more important than visits or visitors. Metrics such as conversion rate per post, words in posts, words in comments all are very insightful.

And finally think of outcomes and behavior that adds value to business.

Technorati Tags: web analytics

Yes the election is over and this might sound like an out of the date post, but actually the message here is that Dan went on to found a start-up with the knowledge and expertise he gained from the Obama campaign. What he accomplished and learned in the political campaign is very applicable to the private sector and hopefully we can all learn a thing or two.

Some interesting facts about Obama is he out-performed McCain in the “new media” category significantly, in terms of Facebook friends, YouTube views, and website unique visitors, as well as the very important aspect of fund raising. The money raised for Obama was $656 million versus $201 millionfor McCain (not counting the Federal funds). Out of the $656 million, a staggering $500 million was raised online.

Analytics Lessons Learned

1. Define success and also define quantifiable success measures.Metrics, like cost per click, email sign up rate, and revenue per email recipient. In Dan’s startup, he is now measuring: cost per click, cost per playing user (free account), revenue per paying user (paid account). So when the revenue per paying user exceeds the cost per playing user, they make money!
2. Question assumptions.Testing is king, A/B and multivariate testing both play a key role in deciding what call to action, what creative, and other aspects work best!
3. Divide and conquer.Segment users, for example, those that never signed up, those signed up but never donated, and those that previously donated.
4. Don’t reinvent the wheel.Use available and free tools like Google Apps, Google Websize Optimizer, and Google Analytics.
5. Take advanatage of circumstances.Whether it is internal to your business or something external (economy, competitiion, etc), give your visitors current and relevant content.

Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, google website optimizer, web analytics

As the glow in the room reaches epic proportions, a faint sound begins resonating in the distance. What is that wailing sound? Someone please make it stop! Is that a human voice? As a hush falls over the crowd, the voice now clearly identifying itself as human comes through loud and clear. “Are you sure your data is accurate?” It’s the voice of that most dreaded of all phenomenon’s….the web analyst!

As our trusty friend, the web analyst points out, it’s equally important to ensure your data is accurate as it is to have the data in the first place. What’s the point of having all that cool data if it’s not accurate? Would you want to make a business decision or drive some marketing effort based off of misleading or inaccurate data?

It’s crucial to invest time and resources in checking and re-checking your data to ensure it’s as accurate as possible. Let me share a recent example to illustrate the importance of data accuracy to the wonderful world of web analytics.

I got a call from “Customer X” recently questioning why traffic to their site was so low in their Google Analytics account. After a couple of minutes of discussing the issue, we came to understand that there was roughly a 30% decline in visits over the last week. The date that the visits dropped coincided with a site outage that required a backup version of the site to be restored. We did our due diligence and made sure the GA code was present, and that the site was functioning properly, but didn’t find any other code related issues.

We asked the standard questions to determine if any offline marketing (or termination of some campaign) would have resulted in a decrease in traffic, but the answer was no.

After poking around on the site, we found that any users going to the non-www version of the domain were seeing a slightly different version of the site. This version of the site had no GA code on it. Apparently there was a DNS problem which was sending visitors to a staging environment instead of the live site. This was resolved quickly but no tangible increase in traffic was found. We still saw roughly 30% decline from previous weeks/months.

So, faced with no obvious conclusions we started diving into GA and found something interesting. It appeared that visitors using IE had reduced by 2/3 from the last week. We thought we had it nailed! Our assumption was that something in IE was preventing the GA code from loading under certain circumstances. We tested IE inside and outside, right side up and upside down, but found no anomalies whatsoever. This led us to believe this issue was just a symptom of a deeper problem.

Finally, after exhausting all normal troubleshooting procedures, a colleague of mine suggested we look at the problem from the reverse angle. Instead of assuming the data was accurate before the restore, let’s assume the data is accurate after the restore, and perhaps it was messed up before. We dove backwards in time through the data, and found a date 4 months prior, where the data had shot up 30%. Hmmmmm!!! After consulting with the customer again, we were informed that another site outage had occurred on the exact date that traffic had shot up 30%, and this outage also required a site restore from backup. The data from before the first site restore and after the second restore was exactly the same. The anomaly was the 4 months between the two site restores. Now the problem data was isolated, but what the heck was causing the data to be so off?

We asked the customer to restore a backup of the site (from the time period in question) to a separate environment for further analysis. Upon doing so, we continued our investigation. On a whim, we started checking some common code files, and to no one’s surprise, we found two versions of the same GA code being loaded. Sure enough, the second version of the GA code was in a design template file that was only being used 30% on the site.

So after hours and hours of troubleshooting, we were able to nail down the problem for this customer. Many high-5’s and manly grunts ensued and we all lived happily ever after…well at least until next time!

Data accuracy is the core of Web Analytics. Don’t take it lightly.

Here are some practical suggestions for assessing the accuracy of your web analytics data:

• Conduct a periodic audit on your web analytics code.
• Review your Google Analytics account configuration. Check your profiles, filters, segments and goals to make sure they are setup right.
• Review external tagging.
• Question the data (especially for sudden ups and downs).
• Speak with other departments in your organization to confirm/deny what the data is indicating. This will help give your data some context.

Related Posts:

• Cleanup your URLs with Search and Replace Filters
• How Accurate is your Analysis Data?

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

1. Learn practical steps on how to improve your online business. Whether you have an eCommerce site, a lead generation site, a corporate site or a content site, this workshop will teach you how to use data to optimize your site as well as how to measure and improve the return of your marketing campaigns.
   

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2. Learn from the experts. Brian has written a book on Google Analytics and both Brian and Feras founded companies that are certified by Google as Authorized Google Analytics consultants (you know, they must know the stuff to be accredited ). Jokes aside, Brian and Feras have worked extensively with clients across the globe helping them capture, track, analyze, test and continuously improve online businesses using Google Analytics.
   

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3. The training caters to both the technical/webmaster as well as the marketing /business folks. As a matter of fact, you can have the marketing person attend the first day and the webmaster attend the second day (split the cost across two departments, might be easier to get approval this way )

   

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4. All workshop material will be made available for you in a digital format. This includes PowerPoint presentations, documents and sample excel spreadsheets.
   

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5. FREE book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton! And it is signed by the author too!
   

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6. Breakfast and lunch are provided and included in the registration fee.
   

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7. Meet Brian Clifton in person! Ok, Feras is local, you can meet him any time

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop on October 19 & 20!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing & Business!

A two-day workshop on web measurement strategy and planning, and Google Analytics implementation. Marketers will greatly benefit from Day 1 and webmasters will find Day 2 full of implementation techniques and best practices. You can sign up for one day only or for both days.

Register before September 30 and receive a signed copy of Brian Clifton’s book, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

Mark your calendar and stay tuned for more details!!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

Especially with everyone surfing the net using their tiny mobile devices, you want to make sure your domain is simple to remember and simple to type using those tiny, sometimes virtual keys (which makes it easier to mess up)!

For illustration’s sake, let’s pretend you’re the greatest basketball player of all time – Michael Jordan.  You want to buy a domain that represents your company.

Here are some things to consider:

1) Branding

The number one search engine everyone uses is the search in their brain. If they can pull your url from memory, chances are they’d rather do that before they bookmark it or use a search engine. So we need to make it as easy for them as possible. If you’ve done a good job branding your business name, it’s a good idea to stay consistent and simply have your domain be your business name.  That’ll be your prospect’s first guess.

If that’s the case, let’s go with the most straight forward domain – michaeljordan.[something]

2) “.com” or “not.com” – that is the question…

“.com” has been the url standard since the beginning of the internet and should be your preference. Most people, whether intuitively or through experience, usually understands this and thus “yourbusiness.com” is usually their default guess. However, respectively, .com’s are the most in demand, which means the specific domain.com you’re looking for could be taken.

Challenge: A business savvy geek has bought “www.michaeljordan.com”, and is holding it for ransom! He’s demanding $100 billion for it! MJ is rich, but maybe you’re not. If you want to avoid this hefty fee, you have a couple options explained in my next points to make a unique “.com”.

In this case, if domain.com is taken, “domain.[somethingelse]” like domain.net or domain.org may be  the next best thing, but before we eliminate the “.com” option, let’s see what we can do.

3) Extra Words (watch the length!)

You do have the option of adding simple words related to your brand that hopefully don’t veer your domain name too far away from your company name. It’s best to choose words that are associated with your business or have some other logical association.

Ex. michaeljordanonline.com or michaeljordanbasketball.com.
Ex. thedarkknightmovie.com, where The Dark Knight is a movie.
Ex. theofficenbc.com where the tv show is The Office is on the tv station NBC.

Challenge: As I said in the intro, if adding words ends up making your domain hard to remember or hard to type (consider mobile virtual keyboards), this may not work.

4) Extra Characters (watch the length and the confusion!)

We can add a character to see if that gets a us a unique domain name.  The usual character to add is the hyphen. Ex. www.michael-jordan.com

One hyphen may not hurt, but you’d be surprised how much the human brain hates hyphens. No matter how sure you are or how logical it is, believe me, your mind will play tricks on you. “Wait, is it a dash or an underscore?”, “Wait, is there even a dash or underscore?”, or “Is it between ‘Michael’  and ‘Jordan’?”.   Thus, I’d avoid this and pretend the option of multiple hyphens doesn’t even exist.

What about other characters? Generally, other characters aren’t used in domain names.

What about numbers? Unless you have a number that is heavily branded, like in this case, Michael has been forever associated with “23″, or your company name has #1 or 123 or something, I probably would avoid numbers. Numbers look like an afterthought that got you the email you wanted. If your domain reminds someone of their friend spidermonkey626@mail.com, chances are it wont seem as professional.

5) Symbolic Words Representing Your Branding

If target.com was taken, theredbullseye.com may be a little far-reaching. However, for you MJ, since Nike has worked so hard to brand your symbol the “jumpman”, “jumpman.com” may work.

6) .net, .org or dot.[something else]

MJ, you’ve exausted all your “.com” options. In that case, you may want to consider having a very easy straightforward “.net”, i.e. www.michaeljordan.net.

Repeat steps 1-5 above for “.net”, and chances are you’ll find something. If in the off chance that none of the “.net’s” work for you, you have the option of choose other suffixes, such as “.org” (if you an organization), “.us”, “.info”, or international suffixes, such as “.uk” (England) and “.ca” (Canada). In my opinion though, with the exception of the international urls, “.net” is your next priority after “.com”.

In conclision, like everything else in marketing, there’s no right answer.  You have to do your best to understand your business, your market, and outweigh the above points to hopefully get you a great domain that’ll even itself be tool for conversion.

Roll-up Reporting

• In Urchin 6.600, attempting to log in to an account with a large amount of data often resulted in the following error: Session Error – unable to call default routine. (2002) Please login again.This error occurred due to slow performance in calculating roll-up reports. In Urchin 6.601, the performance of the Urchin roll-up report data extraction has been significantly improved.
• The default view has been changed from ‘Month’ to ‘Day’. This was done to improve the performance on installations with a large number of data-heavy profiles.
• The “Completed Goals” calculation logic has been corrected to report the total number of goal conversions. (Previously only one conversion per defined goal was reported, so Completed Goals would only show values from 0 through 4.)

User access to AdWords Tools

• A new ‘Access to CPC Sources’ setting has been introduced on a per-user basis. By default, only Super Admin has AdWords tools enabled. For all other users, this access must be explicitly granted via this new setting.

Copy Campaign Tool

• The Copy Campaign Tool has been disabled due to legal issues. It may be reintroduced at a later date.

Support for Bing.com

• Support for the new bing.com search engine has been added.

Master tracking codes with CPC sources

• Profile filters are now applied to CPC sources.

Special characters in CPC source passwords

• Certain special characters were not allowed in CPC source passwords. This has been fixed and certain special characters are now allowed.

Licensing

• Regular license re-set and reactivation were required after upgrade to 6.600 on Linux and FreeBSD. This has been fixed and reactivation is no longer required.

Migration

• In certain cases, when migration of the reporting databases from Urchin 5 to Urchin 6 crashed or was interrupted, subsequent attempts to resume failed with “WARNING: (8010-577-1192) Database file is the wrong size – run sanitizer”. This issue has been fixed.

Enable all Regions

• All regions have been enabled.
• IMPORTANT: If urchin 6.601 is used to upgrade from the international version (Urchin 6.501 or 6.402), the language settings for all users will be switched to English, while preserving other regional settings.

The geo database has been updated.

Here is a link to download Urchin. If you have any questions on Urchin and you need any technical support for Urchin, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Technorati Tags: urchin, web analytics

It’s always a pleasure to speak with Avinash. You’ll hear about analytics, online marketing, and also about what is going on in some of the world’s top brands.

I was able to take some notes that I wanted to share. OK, the notes are brief as I was typing on my iPhone and I think Avinash thought I was playing Sudoku too . Here you go:

Why aren’t more people testing and why is testing a rarity. Avinash mentioned a couple of things that made a lot of sense:

• Vendors and consultants are sometimes at fault. In their effort to highlight the capabilities of their products and services, they inadvertently set a high barrier to entry. All they talk about is multivariate testing and the gazillion variations you can have.  While impressive, it might be overwhelming or intimidating to marketing managers and site owners. Simplifying what to test, starting with a couple of ideas, and setting realistic expectations might get the decision makers to grant you the go-ahead and get your testing effort off the ground.
• The second point is that while it is easy to simplify things, it’s hard to come up with two good ideas to test (not just “let’s change the button color”). It does take creativity, knowledge of your audience, among other factors to come up with two very good ideas to test.

These were the two points that Avinash emphasized and I find very helpful. Then there was an interesting discussion about some experiments with 19 PhD’s (I’ll pass on this for now), and another discussion about embarrassing the highest level manager you can (this way they listen to you), but this one needs another post altogether, and Avinash talks about it on his blog, so you can read his comments on the topic and apply it at your own risk!

I would also add that looking for some easy wins, taking some risks, and finding a sponsor that will support your effort, will pay off big time in getting more out of your site, and also in setting/starting a testing program within your organization.

So to summarize:

• If you/your organization is new to testing, start with A/B Testing
• Be creative, take some risk, look for low hanging fruits and get some early results to get your testing program supported within your organization

For more information on testing, check out Google Website Optimizer, make sure you get a copy of Always Be Testing, and feel free to contact one of E-Nor’s consultants.

Technorati Tags: google website optimizer

Who’s on the panel?

• Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing
• Ron Belanger, SES Advisory Board & Vice President of Worldwide Agency Sales, Omniture
• John Marshall, SES Advisory Board & CTO, Market Motive
• Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite
• Feras Alhlou, President, E-Nor, Inc.

You have vendors and consultants sharing their experiences and how to enable data-driven decision making in your organization.

For my presentation, I intend on sharing real life examples and case studies and to “show” more than to “tell”. And definitely no sales pitches (learned not to do that long time ago ).

I hope to see you all at SES. Drop me a comment or email me directly for any specific questions on the session.

Technorati Tags: web analytics

The impact of having a button is far greater than just having a link on your site. For example, if your site said “Contact Us” at the bottom within the content, the viewer would most likely have to read through the content until they get to the “Contact Us” to even know its there since its buried in text. But a button that clearly states “Contact Us” is more likely to visually attract their attention.

In this post, I’m going to go through how to make web 2.0 buttons that “pop”, even if you’re not that Photoshop savvy.

I just learned how to create web 2.0 buttons a couple months ago. It usually takes me a couple hours to get the right effect and gradient exactly the way I want it to look. Luckily, I stumbled upon an awesome resource for gradients and styles that made making buttons much easier than I could’ve imagined. I was searching around various blogs trying to find a post that was interesting and useful and found this BIG TIME TIME SAVER!!!

After downloading these photoshop styles/button templates, all you really need to do is minor tweaks, and your button is ready to go.

Here’s how:

1. First thing you have to do is download the zip file from dezinerfolio.com, who shared their styles on their blog.
2. After you download the zip file on this page, upload it into your Photoshop,
3. Open up a new Photoshop file and go to Window > Styles to bring “Styles” into your toolbox (shown below).

   
   Now that you have uploaded the style, you’re ready to create a web 2.0 button in little to no time!

4. Open a New Layer on your file and find a style you like best.
5. Once you’ve found a style you like, simply click on the style and the settings of that particular style will automatically be implemented onto the layer.
6. As you can see in the images below, the image on the left shows the styles in the toolbox and the one on the right shows how the styles effects automatically updated into the layer.

   

7. Next, choose a shape for your button; I like using the rounded rectangle tool for a button.
8. After you’ve chosen a button shape, click and drag the mouse to make the rectangle as big as you want. As you can see in the image below the color of the style/gradient I chose fills in the rectangle.

   

9. After you have the button, color, and style you want all that’s left is adding text and layer effects. Below I have an example of the button with text. I have put some layer effects on the text to make it pop out of the button.

   

10. After you have stylized the button how you want it, you can trim the white space around the button.

    

11. And there you have it, a button! That didn’t take long at all!

    

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, web buttons, web design

• Deep, deep, deep integration with Google AdWords
• Data Export API
• External Authentication (LDAP)
• Auto CPC cost data import from Yahoo
• A number of Admin, Log Processing, Security and Utilities bug fixes and enhancements

If the above has piqued your interest, then read more below.

Urchin Integration with AdWords

• Budget Alerts: Notification when AdWords campaign budget is about to expire.
• Keyword Generation Tool: Addition of the Keyword Generation tool in Urchin, add & delete keywords in your AdWords campaigns.
• Direct Access to AdWords: Skip the AdWords login process, directly link from Urchin to AdWords after proper set up, save time.
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion: Import cost data simply from AdWords with this new feature which inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs.
• AdWords Optimizer: Optimize AdWords campaigns in Urchin & those changes are automatically applied in AdWords.
• Copy Campaign Tool: Copy campaigns from other ad networks into AdWords.

New Urchin Metrics & Reports

• Performance Comparison: Compare & Analyze campaign performance from all sources & mediums.
• Time on Site: Dig into customer engagement with visitor time on site information.
• Campaign & Keyword Views: Reports display paid campaign & keyword data.

Urchin API

• Export your data from Urchin and run your own application. Protocols supported: SOAP 1.x & REST

Other Enhancements & Bug Fixes

• Demo license change. Profiles & log sources now have a limit of 5 each. No other limits have been implemented.

Go to our Urchin sofware page to download the new Urchin files. For additional information about Urchin, contact one of our Urchin experts.

Related Posts

• Urchin 6 released
• Adwords and Urchin integration
• Detailed Urchin 6.6 changelist

Technorati Tags: google adwords, urchin, web analytics

• Secondary dimensions
• Pivoting

To find out more, keep reading or watch our video:

Secondary Dimensions

Personally I’ve found this new feature to be extremely helpful. It has helped me focus more on analysis and less on digging through reports (yay!) and it definitely decreased the steps taken to get to a particular report. Secondary Dimensions allow users to view two different dimensions within the same GA report. This makes analyzing your data more efficient and saves you time. Instead of having to run different reports and compare the data, you’re able to run the report and see the data side by side. Let me show you an example:

One of our clients observed a sudden spike in their direct traffic. We needed to ascertain where the traffic was coming from. Since the client had attended a couple of recent trade-shows, our initial assumption was that this spike in direct traffic resulted from the buzz around the shows. Stop – do not settle on this conclusion so easily! We’ve been trained to use data to validate assumptions and conclusions.

In the “All Traffic Sources” report, I selected traffic sources by medium, and then I added a secondary dimension for “Country/Territory”, and voilà, the report was created and it showed us that out of 1972 direct visits, 1037 were from Pakistan.

Wait a second, we knew that the trade-shows where in the US and not in Pakistan, and the client’s target audience is US-based as well. It turns out that this particular client has an offshore software development office in Pakistan. which explained the recent spike in traffic as the developers were making updates to the site.

Even without the Secondary Dimension feature this same information is available, but you would have to leave the current report and go to a “direct segment” and then look at a geography report to find the information that is now available using the secondary dimensions feature (with one click). As stated earlier, deep dive analysis at your fingertips!

Pivoting

If you are an Excel geek, and I might qualify for one , you know what pivoting is all about. But for the purpose of this post, pivoting in Google Analytics will allow you to see additional metrics in the same view.

For example, say you are looking at your top landing page report. With secondary dimensions, you can now view the visitor type (new versus returning) as well.

This above report is for a news website, “/” is the homepage, and “/Politics” is the politics page. We see that the bounce rate for the “/Politics” page is much higher for new visitors than for the Returning Visitors. Time for action! Equipped with the new findings, you can review the “/Politics” page content and/or layout and assess how to further engage the new visitors. Keep in mind that when you are doing this type of analysis, keep statistical significance in mind; don’t waste time on something that is not statistically significant such as a seldom visited page.

With pivoting, the deep dive analysis is about to go into over drive. So while I am in the same GA report, it occurred to me that the client makes frequent updates to their homepage and maybe some browser incompatibilities have been introduced along the way. With a couple of clicks, I can get the insight I am looking for.

In the Secondary Dimensions drop-down, I selected “Browser”, then I selected the “Pivot” view and I choose “Operating System”. Here you go, all the cool analytics data you want right here in one table. We are now seeing:

• Home page (our landing page in this example)
• Viewed by browser type (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and more)
• Viewed by Operating System (Windows, Mac, and more)
• By Entrances and the respective Bounce Rate
• Wow, a lot of numbers to view, but the report is much more insightful and there is so much context!

What do I do next? Easy! Meet with the web design team, share the data, and hopefully help the team prioritize fixing browser incompatibility issues starting with Firefox on Mac, and then Safari on Windows. Obviously, if you are not happy with the 34.27% Bounce Rate of traffic on Internet Explorer, then you’d want to allocate time to improve it on this segment of traffic since Internet Explorer represents a significant percentage of the total.

So to summarize, the secondary dimensions and pivoting features in Google Analytics allow us to dig much deeper into the data, and all done on-the-fly. Give these features a try and let us know what you think.

Related Posts:

• Share Customizations and Dive Much Deeper
• Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics

Technorati Tags: google analytics, pivoting, secondary dimensions, web analytics

While missing this boat can make you question “Why isn’t my page converting?”, getting it right can change your page from an occasional “hit-or-miss” to a conversion machine.   In some cases, simply changing your design to make a button or link more intuitively available might end-up increasing your conversion rate by 100’s of percentage points.  That small design update just grew your business astronomically.

There are two main aspects when it comes to understanding logical user-flow:

1. User-interface and page yayout – actual elements of the page that the customer will be interacting with.
2. Site structure and navigation – how your pages are organized.

In this post, I’d like to go through the first item – UI and page layout.

User-Interface and Page Layout

As I said, it’s important to remember the way your user will interact with your page while designing your page layout.  Take into account your users’ natural reading pattern – which in the U.S.A is left to right, then top to bottom. Thus, the top-left-most content will be the first thing they see then and they’ll be moving in an “F” pattern down your page.

Here’s an example of a login form that does poorly at following user-flow:

Can you spot the issue here? ANSWER: The “Login” link is in a bad place (you see it at the top right).

1. A user will go to the “Customer ID” field and enter their ID.
2. Moving left to right, they will move on to enter their password.
3. Resetting now like a type-writer (I don’t know if people still remember those), the user will move to the “Language” field below.
4. Ok, now were ready to login. When I move down and to the left…where the heck did the “login” button go?

The placement of the login button is not in the next logical place, and not only breaks up the user flow, but is also hard to find (aside from the fact that it is not a clear clickable button).

Now this may not seem like a big deal here cause there’s not much going on in this form. But what happens when the form is longer down the page and they have to scroll back up to search for this login/submit link? Should we assume the user knows to do this?

No. You’ll be surprised the percentage of people clicking such a link decreases or increases based on simple logical placement of this button.  Remember, a as surfers, we do not want to think.  We do not want to search.  It is as easy for us to close the page, and move on to the next site in a blink of an eye.

Worse – let’s say this is a “Checkout Now” button and your site makes $10k a month in revenue on this product. If the placement of this button even affects conversion even  by 10%, that’s enough to make a difference.  Larger sites that make significant online revenue a month would be greatly impacted, where even a small percentage of decrease would hurt (or a small increase could pay-off big time).

In the case that you are a smaller/medium size online business, online conversion may be your businesses only means of survival, so a small design detail like this could even make or break your business.

Technorati Tags: usability, web design

A lot of time, the issue is not reporting nor analysis but it is making sure:

• Data is accurate (or as accurate as it can get )
• What we think we are analyzing is truly what we are analyzing

If you think one of your most important pages has a 100% bounce rate, you might panic (and rightfully so) and gather all your resident experts to figure out what is going on. Imagine, after hours or days of analysis and review you find out that all of your bounces come from a statistically insignificant number (in our example, 3) of pageviews! Most of us would not bother to investigate further and try not make the same false misperception again.

Let’s explore this issue in more detail.

Question: How does my e-commerce thank you page, which is not a landing page, have 100% bounce rate in the Top Content report in Google Analytics?

Answer: You are in the wrong report, my friend! Let us start with the definition of Bounce rate: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page,” by Google Analytics. “Single page view visits divided by entry pages,” by the Web Analytics Association.

So bounce rate is a metric for only landing pages and not for all pages. Reading the bounce rate for pages that are not entrance pages will lead to misperceptions, incorrect conclusions, and wrong actions.

What is the issue?

The issue starts when we try to make sense out of the bounce rate column in the content performance report. This report contains all pages visited in your site, including entry pages and non entry pages.

So let’s say we want to study and analyze the performance of the ‘confirmation.htm’ page and we started with the top content report.

When we look at the bounce rate on the content performance report, it is quite misleading since the 100% bounce rate is only applied to visits when this page was a landing page. One might ask, if this page is not a landing page and you have to go through a few steps before you reach it, where did these three visits in our above example come from?

There are a few scenarios where a non-landing page could be tracked in Google Analytics as an entry page (landing page). These scenarios include but are not limited to:

• The thank you page was bookmarked by the visitor for future reference.
• The visitor hit the refresh button on the non-landing page window after 30 minutes of no activity.
• A direct visit to the non-landing page by developers/site owner. Excluding the internal traffic will solve this one.

If we look at the “Landing Pages” report, we can see these leaked pages and their bounce rate; 3 single pageview visits out of 3 entry pages leads to a 100% bounce rate.

Suggestions for web analysts:

I advice my dear analyst friends to not look at the bounce rate column in the “Top Content” report for non-landing pages. If you insist then I suggest excluding bounce visits with an Advanced Segment.

Now you have clean and accurate data

Suggestions for Google:

I suggest to the Google Analytics developers to remove the bounce rate column from the top content report all together. Or at least make it possible to remove the column from the display.

From now until the next blog post, I wish you a happy April and an enjoyable month of analysis.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics

Today, let’s talk about a great new usable design for multi-level drop down navigation menus. The “Uber-Menu”.

What the heck is an “Uber-Menu”? I recently attended a webinar given by Hagan Rivers, a UI navigation expert, and she brought up a great concept of “uber menus” which many sites are using today. Uber menus, as they relates to web sites, are basically drop-down or flyout menus that lay out certain levels of your site in one big box – most likely to layout your second and third levels.

a) Often, third level dropdowns or flyouts can be quite annoying (see above). The main problem is that our hands aren’t usually steady enough to go in that perfect “L” shape to perfectly hover over 1st, then 2nd, finally 3rd level drop down or flyout. Most of the time, you slip, and both menus disappear! Freaking annoying! Enough unsuccessful tries, and your user may end up frustrated enough to try your competitor’s menu.

b) Another usability standard to take into account is laying out links versus keeping them an extra move (click or hover) away. Studies show that links are more likely to be clicked if they are explicitly “laid out” as opposed to someone having to hover over their parent or having to click their parent link to get to another navigation page or tab containing the link. (See above).

Also, many sites have recognized the error of including a third level in your drop down menu – you run into the problem outlined in (a).  The usual solution is to cut out the third level completely from the menu. Which is kind of the same thing as saying, “This compass is a little hard to use, I’m just gonna chuck it in the river.”

Uber-menus seem to solve (a) and (b) outlined above, coming up with a nicer navigation layout.

We can see here, the level 1 parent being “Patio and Garden, level 2 and 3 are completely laid out – level 2 in bold and level 3 is indented in normal font, which allows the user to easily differentiate the two. You don’t have to worry about keeping a surgical hand on the path to the third level of the dropdown menu. On top of that, your user at first glance can see all goodies and pages your third level has to offer.  One thing to also notice that you can’t see in the picture is that by clicking on “Patio and Garden” the menu stays open.  A positive of that is moving off the menu wont cause it to vanish.

Interested in advanced web design and navigation techniques? Give us a shout!

Technorati Tags: usability, web design

We had a full day packed with presentations, discussions, Q&A’s, and case studies. Some of the attending consultants had specific questions and wanted additional references, and I thought I would share it here for all to benefit:

• Here is a link to a previous post on additional Google Analytics tips.
• There was a question regarding on-site search in Google Analytics. How do you configure two different on-site search tools (for example, one search technology on your www.e-nor.com and another search technology on www.e-nor.com/blog)? Answer: you can configure GA to look for up to 5 query parameters and 5 category parameters.
• Another question. How are screen resolution reports generated? GA reads it from computer settings since the ga.js is executed locally on your computer.
• How to exclude a range of IP addresses in Google Analytics.
• Site scan is a tool to verify if the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) is correctly installed on your site.

I hope you found the above Q&A helpful. Feel free to send us an email or leave a comment if you have any other questions.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

We typically run a 2-day Google Analytics workshop and pace the material accordingly. So cramming everything in to one day is going to be a challenge. Don’t worry WSI consultants, I won’t cram too much – I’ll be selective . The other challenge I am going to address is the needs of a mixed audience: some beginners, some with working knowledge of GA, and others that are pretty GA savvy. I don’t have a perfect solution for this challenge, but having done a number of these online marketing and analytics workshops over the years, I think we have managed to figure out a way to run them effectively. We will ensure that at the end of the day everyone will leave with a lot of practical tips, step-by-step guides, and references on how to enhance their Google Analytics implementation, analysis, and consulting know-how.

The workshop agenda has been sent to the attendees but I am planning on a couple of extra sessions. I would appreciate your comments on what you want to see in these extra sessions. Either email me directly at (feras @ e-nor .com) or leave a comment on this post.

I am known for being a last minute guy , so me writing this post almost two weeks ahead of the event is almost unheard of! The first thing the folks in the office will say when they read this post is “are you feeling ok?”

Thanks!

PS. We also have an upcoming Google Analytics workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area, on June 17 & 18.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, seminar, training, workshop

A few days after my colleague and I wrote about content grouping in Google Analytics, E-Nor president Feras Alhlou asked if it is possible to apply the same concept to referring sites.

Our objective is to group all domains and subdomains of related referring sites as one referring entity. For example, nextag.com, nextag.co.uk, and affiliates.nextag.com should appear as a single Nextag entity.

1) Create an advanced filter that renames all domains and subdomains of a particular referring site to one entity.

2) Repeat step 1 for every group of referring sites that send you significant traffic.

Another example of related sites: cnet.com, zdnet.com, download.com, and shopper.com. Affiliates and dealers could also be grouped this way.

3) Apply the filters you just created to a new profile.

New profile – my colleague Rehan Asif cannot stress this enough!

Congratulation, we have grouped related referring sites as entities!
Now we can look at the traffic from those referring sites at an aggregate level.
Happy, Feras?

Stay tuned for the next post on how to group pages based on their functionality. It is actually Avinash’s idea from the previous content grouping post and I promised him that I will write about it.

Finally, do not forget to adjust your clocks this coming Sunday and analyze your performance before and after the change

From now until the next blog post, I wish you a happy March and an enjoyable month of analysis

Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, web analytics

Google is also offering a Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test as a proof of proficiency in the fundamentals of Google Analytics (GA). For this test there is a $50.00 fee.

What will you learn? A lot!

• Installation of Google Analytics tracking code (GATC).
• Familiarity with the GA user interface.
• Canned reports and how to interpret them.
• How to set up profiles, filters, goals, funnels, and more.
• Campaign tracking, eCommerce tracking, and events tracking
• An entire section on recent features, including custom reports, advanced segments, and motion charts.
• Cookies, regular expressions (regex), and all the fun stuff to do with tracking mutiple domains and sub-domains.
• There are also few sections focused purely on analysis of reports.
• And more!

Our consultants here, including myself, have gone through the curriculum; we liked the structure and the thoroughness of the course. If you are serious about analytics, specifically Google Analytics, I highly recommend you invest some time to take the course.

Depending on where you are in your organization, I see a couple of challenges that you’ll need to overcome:

• If you are not technical, say your focus is on reporting and analysis, you are going to need some strong coffee as you go through the technical sections (regex, cookies, etc), but you will have a better understanding of the scope of work involved in implementation.
• If you are technical and focused on implementation challenges, then you’ll probably enjoy getting away from coding for a little bit and seeing how all your hard implementation work is put to use during analysis.

What if you can’t stand staring at a computer screen for hours going through an online course? Othere sources for Google Analytics education and training are available:

• Books: Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics, Justin Cutroni’s eBook, and a few other books you can find on Amazon.
• Google Analytics help forum
• Your friendly neighborhood Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (no sales pitch here, the link is going to all the GAACs).
• A good number of blogs focused on Google Analytics.
• Webinars offered by many GAACs.
• In-person Google Analytics workshops (San Francisco Bay Area) and seminars (national)

Happy learning!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics

I want to highlight the steps required for a seamless integration, as well as a few additional pro-active steps you want to take to keep your Google Analytics data clean. The same concept would apply to other analytics tools you might be running. As Avinash always reminds us, data accuracy is always one of the biggest challenges in web analytics.

Here are my steps:

1. Create Adwords and Salesforce accounts.
2. Link Google AdWords with Salesforce.
3. Exclude SalesForce parameters from Google Analytics.
4. Set up AdWords lead tracking.
5. View report.

1) Create Adwords and Salesforce accounts

You need to have a Google AdWords account and a Salesforce account before you can integrate them.

• Create an AdWords account
• Create a SalesForce account

2) Link Google AdWords with Salesforce

• In Salesforce, click the Google AdWords Setup tab.

• Enter your AdWords customer ID and login e-mail.

3) Exclude SalesForce Parameters from Google Analytics

When Salesforce performs its integration with AdWords, it appends parameters (_kk and _kt) to all destination URLs in your AdWords account. We suggest that you strip these query parameters out of URL to insure no duplicate entries in your Top Content report.

To strip the query parameters, please follow these steps:

• Login to your Google Analytics account
• Go to “Profile Settings” and then click “Edit”
• Exclude the following query parameters: _kk and _kt

*A note for AdWords managers. Keep in mind that when Salesforce appends the destination URLs with its _kk parameters, this is actually “editing” your AdWords ads and the stats associated with these ads will now reset, according to how Google AdWords works.

4) Set up AdWords Lead Tracking

1. Back in SalesForce, click on the Google AdWords Setup tab.
2. Click on the “Set up Lead Tracking” button.

i – Create a Web-to-Lead Form

• Click on the “Create Web-to-Lead Form” button

• Add the form to your page

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html;
charset=UTF-8">
.
.
.
<form action="https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?
encoding=UTF-8" method="POST">

<input type=hidden name="oid" value="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx">

<input type=hidden name="retURL"
value="http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html">

<label for="first_name">First Name</label><input id="first_name"
maxlength="40" name="first_name" size="20" type="text" /><br>

<label for="last_name">Last Name</label><input id="last_name"
maxlength="80" name="last_name" size="20" type="text" /><br>

<label for="email">Email</label><input id="email" maxlength="80"
name="email" size="20" type="text" /><br>

<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>

ii – Add the Salesforce Tracking Code to the Website

Add the following tracking code to every page of your site right before the </BODY> tag

<!-- Begin Salesforce Tracking Code -->
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" src="https://lct.salesforce.com/sfga.js">
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">__sfga();</SCRIPT>
<!-- End Salesforce Tracking Code -->

iii – Test Your SalesForce installation

By clicking the “Test your Setup” you will be able to test the installation of the codes in step i and ii

5) View report

This report gives an overview of the leads submitted to SalesForce from your website

For more detailed information, click on each lead and learn more about the lead source

Technorati Tags: google adwords, google analytics, pay per click, qualitative analysis, salesforce, search engine marketing, web analytics

“Google has no parallel to it!!” I have to admit that I took this statement personally as I consider Google Analytics my baby. So I went to my colleague, Rehan Asif, to discuss this and in less than twenty minutes we came up with the following concept:

• Categorize pages into groups of related content.
• Collect these pages together on one page and treat them as a single entity.
• Specify the URLs that you want to include in each group by defining URL patterns.
• Create a filter for each group.  Each filter will search for the group identifier and replace the entire URL with a new URL.

Here is a real example on an online shoe store where we want to take all pages that focus on specific brands (for example, Converse, Timberland, Vans, and Reebok) and treat them as one content group.

1) First, we studied the URLs and found that they contain the brand name.

http://www.domain.com/authentic-vans-shoes-satain-blackpink.html
http://www.domain.com/adidas-bg-superstar-whtblk.html
http://www.domain.com/puma-big-kids-drift-cat-jr-blkwht.html

2) Using an advanced filter, all pages with “vans” in their URL will be renamed to “/vans.html”

3) Now create filters for each brand and apply the filters to a new profile called “Content Groups”

4) Now we have created content groups that allow us look at all pages for any brand as a single entity. We can now study the links where people exit, the entrance keywords, the entrance sources, other pages they visit on the site, and more.

Now, as I like to say, the real analysis begins!

Technorati Tags: content grouping, google analytics, web analytics

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In Google Analytics, you noticed that links from press releases are tracked as:

• Source = cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, or domain.com
• Medium = referral
• Campaign = (not set)

I am sure you are not satisfied with this basic level of tracking because it does not tell you much, especially if you wish to track across different campaigns and mediums.

The following example makes more sense and will help you evaluate and analyze your campaigns.

• Source = cnn.com
• Medium = press_release
• Campaign = hurricane_katrina

To overcome this challenge of tagging links from unknown sources, I came up with the following trick.

Algorithm:

• Add a parameter on all links to your site that are in the press release. (example: http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html#id=1)
• On the target page (http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html), check the value of the “id” parameter.
• If the “id” parameter equals “1″, replace the parameter in the URL with the following utm parameters (utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign) before the call to pageTracker.
• If the “id” parameter does not equal 1, call the pageTracker function normally.

View the entire code segment.

Let us explore the code, section by section:

var parameter = get_parameter('id');

function get_parameter(name)
{
name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
var regexS = "[\\?&#]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
var regex = new RegExp(regexS);
var results = regex.exec(window.location.href);

if( results == null )
  return "";
else
  return results[1];
}

This portion of the code will return the value of the “id” parameter from the URL and assign it to the “parameter” variable.

if (parameter == '1')
{
window.location.hash = "utm_source="+srcPage+"
&utm_medium=press_release&utm_campaign=hurricane_katrina";
}

If the page url contains the “id” parameter and its value is 1, then the url will be updated with the utm parameters.

Link URL
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html#id=1

New URL
http://www.mysite.com/myfile.html#utm_source=www.cnn.com&utm_medium=press_release&utm_campaign=hurricane_katrina

* Notice that we did not use window.location.href function because this function will re load the page with the new URL, which is not what we want to happen. We just want to update the URL, without affecting the visitor experience, in order for the Google Analytics tracking code to attribute the visit in a certain way.

How to get the value of the utm_source (referral site)?

var srcPage = getDomain (document.referrer);

function getDomain (thestring)
{
var urlpattern = new RegExp("(http|ftp|https)://(.*?)/.*$");
var parsedurl = thestring.match(urlpattern);
return parsedurl[2];
}

This portion of the code is responsible of assigning the URL of the referral site to the variable scrPage. The “getDomain” function parses only the domain name (www.domain.com) out of the long url string (http://www.doman.com/file.html?parameter=abc)

The last piece of code that needs to be added is the setAllowAnchor command, which allows the # sign to be used as a query string delimiter instead of the question mark (?).

We used # in the press release link instead of ? for SEO reasons, but you could use ? in the original link and still use the above method.

pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);

Alright, now it is time to use our friend Advanced Segments to track our press release visitors, measure their engagement, and analyze their behavior.

Now we can really analyze!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, web analytics

• How does Google Analytics improve my search engine optimization (SEO)?
• How can I get more out of my SEO?
• What is the real effect of ranking on search engines for my business?

I am hoping the case study below will shed some light on these questions. If you apply a similar analysis you can help your customer, manager, or whoever is delaying your SEO effort. But instead of answering “the importance of ranking” question, maybe something more quantifiable and measurable might get your decision makers’ attention! How about “how does ranking on a specific keyword, or lack thereof, impact the bottom line?” Answering such questions will help us make the most of our marketing spend during these tough economic times and help us do a more effective job in marketing and campaign optimization.

I’ll use real time data and analysis but won’t mention the name of the website for privacy reasons. Here are the details:

• Website type: eCommerce
• The website used to rank near the top of Google on two competitive keywords until August 2008.
• Historically, these two keywords have driven traffic to the site. For a specific time period, these two keywords drove 5,684 visits and led to 46 conversions for a 0.81% conversion rate.

If you have your Google Analytics eCommerce features properly configured and working, the above data is easily accessible under the Traffic Sources -> Search Engines -> Non-paid report. The inline filter was used to get data for just these two keywords.

• We then start examining the time period when the ranking for these two keywords took a big hit.
• Next, using the date comparison function in Google Analytics, we compared the traffic generated by these two keywords for this year with poor ranking versus last year with better ranking. Here is the result:

The table on the left is for one of their keywords and the table on the right is for the other. As you can see, a significant drop in visits in 2008, 4471 to be exact. So the negative impact of the drop in SEO ranking was less opportunities to make sales on their primary keywords!

• The 4471 visits might be a small percentage of the overall website traffic but when you put a dollar sign next to it, we typically react to it more quickly. Take the 4471 visits and multiply it by your average conversion rate for these keywords, which is 0.81%, and then multiply by the average order value, which is $846.
• 4471 x 0.0081 = 36 lost sales
• 36 x $846 = $30,456 of lost revenue!

Now one can argue that this number is not accurate because of many factors BUT the findings are very actionable! If I were to present this analysis to my boss or client, I would add 2-3 other scenarios:

• Scenario 1, with a higher conversion rate of 1.62% after improving the design and usability of the site, the lost revenue would be $60,852. (ouch!)
• Scenario 2, with a lower average order value and the existing conversion rate of 0.81%, our lost revenue would have been $15,228.
• You could create a table to show the range. The main point is that there was between $15K and $60K of lost revenue. In tough economic times, wouldn’t you rather have that revenue?

Depending on your company size, marketing budget, and other factors, the $30K might be a significant number or it might be a rounding error. But at the end of the day, $30K of lost revenue is $30K of lost revenue, especially in times like these where cutting cost and marketing optimization is more important than ever. By doing similar analysis, you can find other lost sales opportunities, monetize them, and get some corrective actions underway.

I think you can take this analysis to a business owner or marketing manager, and I am pretty sure they would get the SEO effort prioritized.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, web analytics

• The best new feature: a Pay-per-Click (PPC) data manager lets you create PPC sources that automatically import cost data from Google Adwords.
  • These PPC sources can then be applied to profiles as easily as you would apply log sources and filters!
  • Currently, this feature does not work with the autotagging feature of Google Adwords.
• Urchin has been updated to show Chrome as a browser and Android as an operating system.
• The installer has been improved to make for a more seamless installation or upgrade.
• The Urchin configuration management utility has had its functionality extended.
• The geo database has been updated to December 2008 data.
• Some localization issues have been fixed.
• Urchin help topics (both internal to the application and in the online Urchin Help Center) have been updated.

Feel free to contact us for all your Urchin consulting needs.
You can also download Urchin from our Urchin software page.

Technorati Tags: google adwords, google chrome, pay per click, urchin, web analytics

During the meeting we were told that we are under an NDA so I won’t go into the specifics.  But here are some comments and thoughts:

• We applaud Yahoo’s efforts to be open, reach out to their clients (advertisers and agencies), and solicit their input. That spirit was felt throughout the council meeting, from the Senior VP that hosted the event to managers and other Yahoo staff.  They really wanted to be transparent and sought input from us.  Good job, Yahoo!
• Despite the poor picture that might have been portrayed in the news about Yahoo and search, we were reminded that Yahoo! is still a profitable company and has some very high traffic sites, including Yahoo! Sports (we were told it has more traffic than ESPN) and Yahoo! News (gets more traffic than CNN).  I didn’t know that and I would say it is pretty impressive!
• Various folks from Yahoo! presented about new features and innovations (sorry, can’t blog about it yet ) but expect to hear from Yahoo! on areas they are strong in, including Display (banner) Advertisement.
• There was a talk about Traffic Quality and the favorite discussion topic of click fraud.  Without spilling their beans, we got a better picture of how Yahoo! handles click fraud and also learned that you can get reports from within your Yahoo! Search marketing account about credits your accounts is getting for false clicks.
• Lunch was really good too, including the Israeli Couscous which was very tasty!  To be fair, I have to say that the food in Mountain View during the GAAC Summit was really good too.

So in summary, I am really glad to see Yahoo! opening up and creating additional forums to communicate with advertisers and agencies.

While we are on the subject of Yahoo! Search Marketing, there is another topic that we have been wanting to blog about but didn’t get to until now.  Yahoo! has a mechanism of optimizing your accounts and campaigns on their own! Yes, that means without your
knowledge.  Maybe this is not so recent but many clients I speak with are still not aware of this mechanism, so it is important that we share it. The following was drafted by a couple of folks in the office:

Yahoo does the whole nine yards when it comes to campaign creation (naming convention, ad group, keywords, ad copy) but they miss a very crucial step. They don’t tag the campaign at all with tracking parameters so a web analytics tool can recognize it as PPC traffic. This means traffic from this new campaign will be recorded as organic traffic and will dilute the quality of your data. The number of visits attributed to Yahoo cpc and Yahoo organic will be wrong, and conversion rates for these two sources will be subject to speculation.

There are two ways that you can deal with this issue:

1. If you would like to try these optimized campaigns and see how they will perform while capturing the data properly in your analytics account, you need to go to your Ads under the AdGroup they created and make sure that you tag the destination URLs properly. If you are using Google Analytics, here is a good post from our friends at PPC Hero that will help you.
2. Otherwise, once you see a new optimized campaign in your account, pause or delete it and make sure that you opt-out from this service. You can opt-out by submitting a request to Yahoo customer support.

If you have too many campaigns in your own or your client’s accounts, the easiest way to spot the Yahoo optimized campaigns is by their naming convention. See the below snapshot for an example.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

The project initially started in December of 2007 as a conversion of their original pure HTML site to Dotnetnuke (open-source Content Management System), but ended up turning into a significant redesign and restructuring project.

The services we provided were:

• Basic online marketing consultation
• Creating a new, brighter aesthetic look.
• Implementing a different site-structure based on our understanding of their users flow.  (We also took some tips from their more successful and professional competitors, such as the commercial magazine www.parenting.com)
• Improving their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by cleaning up their meta tags and recommending some content enhancements. Their site is now on the first page of Google for some keywords when previously it was nowhere to be found.
• Helping promote their videos on Youtube.
• Cleaning up their Google Analytics setup to properly track where visitors are coming from, which external sites they are going to, and which PDFs they are downloading.

Oh yah, I forgot to mention the project was done PRO BONO. We had a great working relationship with the client, in that any work we recommended, if they could find volunteers to implement, they did, which saved us time.  Any technical implementation we could throw in, we did, and they practically understood that since the work was pro bono, it would take priority accordingly with respect to our other projects.

E-Nor encourages our clients, partners, and blog readers to support non-profits.  Though altruism may already be inline with your corporate and personal values, a year’s worth of pro-bono work may scare even the most giving of companies and people.  However, here are some benefits you may not have considered (in no particular order):

1. Necessity is the mother of innovation. The nature of non-profits is that their revenue is limited yet they provide great services to the community. Thus, they may require strong functions for their site. You’ll be forced to learn valuable work-arounds when their budget may not cover high end modules or spending, giving you great ideas for options when you need to close a sale with those paying clients who are a little tighter with their money.
2. Practice makes perfect. Just like anything you do in life, the more you do it the better you will get. You can chalk this pro bono run as practice. For us, TLC being a year project, it strengthened and even expanded our research on techniques, functions, modules, etc, that we can now apply to all our sites!
3. A non-profit “word-of-mouth” could still lead to profit. We know that as technology evolves, so does marketing. If Google has taught us anything, free services and products actually go a long way in branding and exposure, and could result in lucrative opportunities in the future. Non-profits do have friends that could end up being your paying clients with the right referral. And because your existing relationship had no financial motives, the trust and rapport has already been built.
4. Had a bad day? They’ll pick you up. For all those clients who didn’t see the extra work you did for them and who complained instead of showing gratitude, you could expect the opposite for your non-profit pro bono clients. They can’t help but see the void you filled for them and be grateful for it.
5. Testimonials. Along the same lines as the above, a testimonial will virtually be an everyday occurrence if you’re doing your job right.
6. Pat yourself on the back.  You did a good deed! Because of the site you provided for a parenting non-profit or a domestic violence shelter, a lost parent now has a little bit of direction or a helpless victim is a little bit safer.
7. Experimentation (with the permission of the client). Since your client doesn’t have dollars riding on this project, they are more likely to allow you to do light experimentation on it, within reason of course. Not only are they more comfortable since no hard earned grant money is at risk, but that also means there’s a more flexible timeline for you to play with the site. For example, if you see a new module you wanted to try or your organization is new to analytics and you need a site to try it on, especially if the end result could possibly benefit your client, non-profit free sites may in fact welcome experimentation. Don’t forget to back up, though!

Technorati Tags: dotnetnuke, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, web design

1. Understanding Web Analytics Webinar
2. Intro to Google Analytics Webinar Part 1
3. Intro to Google Analytics Webinar Part 2
4. Maximize ROI Webinar Part 1
5. Maximize ROI Webinar Part 2

Written by Mohamed Ghoneim.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, webinar, workshop

As Google Analytics was updated over time, the way the filters were using Custom Field 1 was no longer possible and so the profile broke. The smart folks over at ROI Revolution came up with another way to get to the exact PPC keyword data using the User Defined field and adding 2 lines to the GA tracking code. This was a great solution and probably suitable for a lot of people. However, I preferred not having to update the tracking code (this can be very difficult on some client sites), saving the User Defined field for other uses, and also being able to isolate the keyword extraction and concatenation to one profile.

I still see some blogs referring to the original method that doesn’t work anymore so one day I tried playing with the original filters approach and after 2 months of observing the data, it appears to be working correctly. Please follow these screenshots & instructions to give it a try for yourself.

Filter 1 – look at only paid traffic data.

1. From your account, click on Filter Manager.
2. Click on Add Filter.
3. Give it a name such as Data Filter – PPC.
4. Filter type is custom filter.
5. Select on the Include option.
6. The filter field should be Campaign Medium.
7. The filter pattern can be cpc|ppc
8. Click on Save Changes.

Filter 2 – extract the actual keyword that was typed and concatenate it to the paid keyword that was matched.

1. Assuming you are still in the Filter Manager, click on Add Filter.
2. Give it a name such as Data Filter – PPC Keywords.
3. Filter type is custom filter.
4. Select the Advanced option.
5. Field A -> Extract A should be set to Referral and the value needs to be (\?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
6. Field B -> Extract B should be set to Campaign Term and the value needs to be (.*)
7. Output -> Constructor should be set to Campaign Term and the value needs to be $B1 – ($A3)
8. Field A required, Field B required, and Override Output Field all need to be set to Yes.

Please click on the screenshot to view the full version.

Finally create a new profile with a name such as PPC Keywords Data and all your usual settings (default page, search settings, goals, etc). Make sure you apply these two new filters to it.

This method seems to work for Google, Yahoo, and MSN paid traffic. Below is a screenshot with sample results. Let me know if it works for you!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, msn adcenter, pay per click, search engine marketing, web analytics, yahoo search marketing

Visit http://webanalytics.alltop.com/ for exciting web analytics news and visit http://www.alltop.com/ for top stories.

Technorati Tags: RSS

• Account Management Dashboard
• Advanced Segmentation
• Custom Reporting
• Data Export API
• Integrated Report with AdSense
• Motion Charts

Read more about these features on our original post.

Interested in learning more about Google Analytics?  Attend our upcoming Google Analytics workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

I am pretty sure you’ll have a lot of fun, network with your industry colleagues, and even an opportunity to get some of your GA questions answered

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Venue: Gordon Biersch
Address: 640 Emerson Street, Palo Alto, CA

Technorati Tags: google analytics, web analytics, web analytics wednesday

Save the date and join us in our upcoming Google Analytics implementation and marketing optimization workshop. The training workshop will be held at the Westin, San Francisco Airport, from 9:00 to 4:30 and we will provide lunch.

We have some amazing feedback from our last workshop in the Bay Area (see testimonials at the end of the post) and we are doubling the dose this time around! Yes, two days of nothing than Google Analytics, from the ground up, from basics to advanced topics, including all the new and cool features recently announced by Google.

What are we planing to cover?  Day 1 is dedicated to implementation and setup, ensuring you have GA properly installed, filters, profiles, overview on reporting, the new user interface, and more.  In Day 2, not only we will cover more advanced implementation techniques such as advanced filters, event tracking, and custom segments, but we will also dive into marketing optimization, measuring and ROI, KPIs, dashboards, and much more. Please preview the detailed agenda.

Day 2 builds on the topics discussed on the first day so we recommend you attend both days to maximize your learning. If you have attended our previous Google Analytics workshop then you are ready for day 2 of this upcoming training.

You will have ample time to speak with our Google Analytics specialists and log into your account to show us issues that we can troubleshoot for you.  We will cover case studies in real time.

As an added incentive, register before Dec. 3 and receive a free copy of Web Analytics – An Hour a Day.

Again, visit our site for more information and click here to register. We have a limited capacity so reserve your seat today!

Testimonials

Hello Feras,

I wanted to thank you for yesterday’s workshop.  I found it to be immensely valuable.  I’m sorry I did not have a chance to thank you in person, but I had to leave early to catch a train back to San Francisco. Thanks again.  Please keep me posted about the advanced training. Also, a colleague of mine may be interested in attending the intro class.

L. G., Internet Communications Coordinator

I just wanted to say thank you for the most excellent and helpful seminar on Google Analytics. I learned many useful tips and tricks that I would probably never have learned otherwise w/o digging deep into some forum or random blog posting. Please do keep me in the loop for future seminars, I’ll be first in line.

E. N., Online Marketing Specialist

I want to tell you that I very much enjoyed the class and that I felt you did an excellent job.  I am less interested in the specifics of how to implement Google Analytics and more interested in what I must look for.  I want to tell you if I ever have the right client, I would recommend your firm and hope that is the case.  It was excellent all the way around and I look forward to reading the book and all the rich wealth of materials you provided.  Thank you sincerely.

R. S., Marketing Consultant

Very good, lots of good information that I didn’t know, even though I’ve been using GA for 1-1/2 years.

T. P.,  SEM Specialist

Technorati Tags: google analytics, training, web analytics, workshop

If for any reason you cannot convert your dynamic URLs to friendly URLs…search and replace filters are the answer!

The screenshot below demonstrates the nightmare some people might experience when they view content reports.

In order to make the URL readable, we have to identfy the parameters that we want to change. In our above example the URL contains three parameters: departmentID, CategoryID, and ProductID. We first create a “search and replace” filter for each department, category, and product. Then we replace each dynamic parameter with easy-to-read text.

• Create the “Search & Replace” Filters

Filter# 1

Filter# 2

Filter# 3

• Now apply all created filters to a test profile and verify data accuracy before applying to your regular profiles.

Your content reports will now look like this:

Note:

• We do not advice using “Search & Replace” approach on e-commerce sites because you will have a very large number of filters.
• The easiest way to never have to deal with dynamic URL addresses is by using friendly URLs at the development stage.
• You can use tools such as Apache’s mod_rewrite to present clean URLs to both your visitors and your web analytics application.
• Clean URLs will have additional benefits such as helping with your SEO campaign and improving conversion rates..

Technorati Tags: google analytics, search engine optimization, web analytics