As you will see from reading my books, most regular expressions I use are pretty straightforward – so you shouldn’t be deterred from delving in and understanding them inside-out. However, I have found over the years that many users are scared off the subject. My reasoning is that the general studying of regular expressions can rapidly become complex and overwhelming. However, the truth is for the vast majority of GA work, you don’t need the full power or complexity that regular expressions (built for the IT industry) can provide. Hence, I created this jump start tutorial for you to focus on….

A Quick Introduction…

Regular expressions, also referred to as regex, are a way for computer languages to match strings of text, such as specific characters, words, or patterns of characters. A simple everyday example of regular expressions is using wildcards for matching filenames on your computer. For example, *.pdf matches all filenames that end in .pdf. However, regex can be much more powerful than this. Within google analytics, regular expressions are primarily used when creating profile filters (see Chapter 8 of the book), advanced segments (also Chapter 8), and table filters (Chapter 4).

Understanding the Fundamentals of Regex

An important point to grasp when using regular expressions is that there are two types of characters: literals and metacharacters. Most characters are treated as literals. That is, if you wanted to match a URI containing advanced, you would type the literal character "a", followed by "d", followed by "v", and so forth (without quotes).

The exceptions to this are metacharacters. These are characters of special meaning to the regex engine and therefore interpreted differently. For example, the PDF example shown in the Introduction contains the metacharacter "*" (without quotes). The most common metacharacters are listed in Table 1. Ensure that you understand these before proceeding.

Table 1 – Common regular expression metacharacters

NOTE: Google Analytics uses a partial implementation of the Perl Compatible Regular expressions (PCRE) library. I use the word partial because a full implementation is more powerful and flexible than a software as a service vendor would want it to be! For example, if its use is unrestricted, it can be used maliciously to hack or break a website. Therefore, not every feature of PCRE is included in Google Analytics…

The best way to learn Regex is by example…

Using only literals, you can construct simple regular expressions. First, partial matches are allowed. For example, say you wanted to view only referrals from the website www.google.com. Using a regular expression, you could use the partial keyword "goog" in the table filter of your Traffic sources > Sources > All Traffic report. This will match all entries that have the letters "goog" in them, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Table filter using a partial literal match

NOTE: The break down of geographic google domains shown in Figure 1 is achieved by using the Custom SEO plugin for GA.

Being simple to use, literals can be very powerful—as long as you can identify a unique pattern match that includes the string of interest. Taking the previous example, to be more specific, use the OR metacharacter, as in this example:

google\.(com|co\.uk|ca)

This matches the literal google, followed by a period (this must be escaped because it is also a metacharacter), followed by com OR co.uk (period also escaped) OR ca. The result is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Table filter using the metacharacter OR

NOTE: Google Analytics automatically escapes periods in the report table filter and advanced segments for you. Therefore, you can omit the escape charter (\) for these. However, when you are learning regex, I advise you to always escape these yourself as best practice. This is because profile filters, as well as goal or funnel configurations, do not have the automatic escape feature.

You will notice from Figure 2 that subdomains of Google are present in the reports. Suppose you wish to remove these from your matches. Modify the regex query as follows:

^google\.(com|co\.uk|ca)

This results in only referrers that start with the pattern google being matched. Another example to practice with includes:

^go.+le\.((com$)|(co\.uk)$|(ca)$)

This extends the previous example to explicitly match only Google domains that end in .com, .co.uk, and .ca. This removes referrers such as google.com.au, google.com.br, and so forth, as shown in Figure 3. Note that I have also been a little lazy and used go.+le to illustrate how to use the + metacharacter. That is, it is used to match one or more of the previous character—in this case, any character.

Figure 3 – Table filter using multiple metacharacters

The following are examples to consider when matching URLs listed in your Content / Top Content reports:

\?(id|pid)=[^&]*

This matches the filename followed by the first query parameter and its value if its name is equal to id or pid. If you have a report with URIs of the following form, this regex will match the two URIs highlighted:

/blog/post?pid=101

/blog/post?id=101&lang=en&cat=hacks

/blog/post?lang=en&cat=hacks&id=102

/blog/about-this-blog

Typically, this regex format is used when defining a goal or funnel step. Note the use of the negative class to stop the regex match. That is, this regex will match all characters after id= or pid= that do not contain &. An asterisk is used (*) to also match zero occurrences of & so that even if there is no second query parameter present, as per the first URI, the regex will still match.

An example that is useful when filtering within Keyword reports (search engines and internal site search) is to consider misspellings. Perhaps you need to find all matches for “colour” and “color.” The following regex will achieve this:

colo[u]*r

Here are some other misspelling examples:

Voda(ph|f)one

Ste(ph|v)en

Br[ai][ai]n

(My name is sometimes spelled Brain!)

Finally, although not directly relevant to Google Analytics, a common regex used in web development for processing forms is:

^(.+)@([^\(\);:,<>_]+\.[a-zA-Z.]{2,6})

Use this to test your understanding. Broken into its constituent parts, this regex checks an email address to ascertain if it is a valid format—that is, brian@mysite.com and not brian@@my_site:com, for example. From left to right, the English interpretation is as follows:

• Match one or more of any character before the @

• Match any character after the @ but do not include any of following characters: ( ) ; ; , < > _

• Followed by a period

• Followed by between two and six characters that must include an alphabetic character (A–Z as either upper- or lowercase) or a period

I have highlighted the middle section of this regex to help guide your eye, that is, the part between the @ and first period.

If you have followed these examples, you are well on your way to understanding regular expressions for use with Google Analytics. If not, reread this post and use one of the regex tools listed in Appendix B of the book. Further regex examples are shown throughout the book, though none are more complicated than those shown here.

Tips for Building Regular Expressions

• Make the regular expression as simple as possible. Complex expressions take longer to process or match than simple expressions.

• Avoid the use of .* if possible because this expression matches everything zero or more times and may slow processing of the expression. For instance, if you need to match all of the following: index.html, index.htm, index.php, index.aspx, index.py, index.cgi

use

index\.(h|p|a|c)+.+

not

index.*

• Try to group patterns together when possible. For instance, if you wish to match a file suffix of .pdf, .doc, and .ppt

use

\.(pdf|doc|ppt)

not

\.pdf|\.doc|\.ppt

• Be sure to escape the regular expression wildcards or metacharacters if you wish to match those literal characters. Common ones are periods in filenames and parentheses in text.

• Use anchors whenever possible (^ and $, which match either the beginning or end of an expression), because these speed up processing.

Some useful regex tools to help you

I have used all of these though, I would love to hear about others:

• Browser plugin for Chrome - Regular Expression Checker
• Desktop app for Windows - The RegEx Coach (I cut my regex teeth on this one)
• Online tester - RegExPal (I discovered this recently via @JohnWedderburn) – really useful
• For other really useful tools see the recent post: Best GA Add-ons

Was this post useful…? Please let me know by adding a comment or sharing the ‘social love’ with a tweet, +1, Like etc…

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3. Troubleshooting Tools for Web Analytics

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Post tags: add-on, add-ons, regex, regular expression, tools, tutorial

• Ch 7, page 254 – Figure 7.15

Figure 7.15 illustrates a hostname differentiation filter. The “Field B” and “Output To” have no option selected, and only show a dash -. They should instead read “Request URI”. Replacement image shown below.

With thanks to Eric Erlebacher of befoundonline.com for pointing this out.

Replacement Figure 7.15. Click for full size.

• Ch 8, page 298 – Excluding labeled visitors

On page 298 I refer to the value (label) of “Dynamic IP”. But in Figure 8.15 I show the Filter Pattern as “dynamic” only. The filter pattern should be “Dynamic IP”. [ FYI - Using only dynamic will still work as the filters work by apply a regex match. ]

With thanks to Joe Seidler of seidler.com for pointing this out.

• Ch 8, page 309 – Segmenting Social Network Visits

On page 309 Figure 8.28 shows the Medium containing “social media”. But in the paragraph under the figure I state the medium is set to “social network”. These should of course match (you can chose any preferred text). For clarity, the text will be changed to “social media”.

Again thanks to Joe Seidler of seidler.com for pointing this out.

• Ch 9, page 341 – Differentiating PPC Network Partners

On page 341 for Differentiating PPC Network Partners, step 1 references “Custom Field 1″, but the image examples show “Custom Field 2″ being used. In fact, the name of the custom field is not important – you just need to select one of them (two to choose from). That said, I want it to be as clear as possible in the book. I have therefore revised the images for Figure 9.20 below.

With thanks to Steve Grush of nylontechnology.com for pointing this out.

Replacement Figures 9.20a and b. Click for full size.

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1. Book corrections and typos

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I would love to hear your experiences of tools/add-ons that have helped make your GA life easier. Please let me know via a comment at the end of this post.

My recommendations come in two flavors:

• Browser add-ons that help you use or manage your reports — configuration aides, segmentation help, and so forth.
• Those that help you perform a site-wide audit of your Google Analytics Tracking Code deployment.

Often these two scenarios overlap, and marketers frequently find themselves using the same toolset as webmasters and web developers. I also list two Windows desktop applications that have helped me over the years. Regardless of your job role, all these tools are straightforward to use. There are lots more useful information like this in the 3rd edition of the book (released March 2012).

Browser Add-Ons

Developed by third-parties, add-ons are installable enhancements to your browser. They are available for the Google Chrome and Firefox browsers because historically these browsers have encouraged third-party customization. The vast majority of add-ons are free to use.

• More information on Firefox add-ons is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox
• More information on Google Chrome add-ons (known as extensions) is available at: http://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions

The following add-ons work with the latest version of Google Analytics (v5) and help with your implementation and usage of it. I use all of them:

1. Analytics Helper (Chrome)

This simple add-on displays a green icon in the browser address bar whenever a GATC is detected on a page you browse. Clicking the icon shows the account number of the tracking code, the code type (asynchronous, traditional), and a note on the positioning of code. Developed by Oliver J Fields of Metronet, Norway.

2. GA Copy & Paste (Chrome)

An extremely powerful add-on that greatly simplifies the management and administration of goals and filters. Developed by Eduardo Cereto Carvalho of Cardinal Path.

3. Regular Expression Checker (Chrome)

Regular expressions are used throughout Google Analytics for filtering, creating advanced segments, defining goals, and configuring funnel steps. This useful add-on helps test your expressions for troubleshooting purposes. Developed by www.simon20.com.

4. Google Analytics Debugger (Chrome)

This official Google Analytics add-on prints useful information to the JavaScript console about any web page containing a GATC. When you enable the debug version of the GATC (ga_debug.js), the information shown includes error messages and warnings about your tracking code implementation and a detailed breakdown of each tracking beacon sent to Google Analytics. Developed by Google.

5. Annotations Manager (Firefox)

This Greasemonkey script allows you to copy, delete, and export your chart annotations. Developed by Vincent Giersch.

6. Stats Calculator (All browsers)

This clever bookmarklet takes a statistical approach for comparing two e-commerce conversion rates and your overall goal conversion rate. The bookmarklet performs a z-test to show the confidence interval of two selected dimensions. This shows if the differences you observe are statistically significant. Developed by Michael Wittaker.

7. Web Developer Toolkit (Firefox and Chrome)

This add-on adds a menu bar to your browser with a whole range of useful features for anyone who has an interest in creating web pages. It has an excellent browser error console and DOM inspector as well as quick lookup tools for cookies, source code, and so forth. Developed by chrispederick.com.

8. Firebug (Firefox)

Adds debug capabilities for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML live in your browser.

9. Live HTTP Headers (Firefox)

Similar to the Chrome add-on Google Analytics Debugger, this add-on enables you to view HTTP headers of a page while you are browsing. All the communication requests sent and received by your browser can be viewed. By filtering the URLs to show only Google Analytics requests (via regexp set to /__utm.gif.*), you can view all the information sent to Google Analytics.

GATC Plug-ins

These are scripts that make modifications to your GATC to automate tasks that can otherwise be laboriously manual. Use these, if you cannot achieve this in your Content Management System.

10. Autotrack file downloads and outbound links

Normally, to track file downloads and outbound links, you need to manually modify each link across your site—a painful process for all but the simplest of websites. This JavaScript plug-in scans all your page links for you in the background and automatically adjusts them accordingly for Google Analytics
by adding an onClick event handler. There is also the option to modify the bounce rate calculation.

11. Customizing the SEO list for Google Analytics

For digital marketers running SEO accounts where regional differences are important. For example, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Australia. This JavaScript plug-in, separates out 264 regional search engines—for example, google.co.uk, google.com, google.co.nz, and so forth—instead of just “google” as reported in Google Analytics by default.

Desktop Helper Applications

12. WebBug

WebBug is a Windows application that allows you to enter a URL and see exactly what is sent to the web server and what response is sent back. This is the information that your browser takes care of when rendering a page. I use this mainly to check a web server’s status code response. It is very useful for tracking redirection issues—a common problem that can result in the loss of campaign variables from your landing page URLs. WebBug is free to use but for Windows only.

13. The Regex Coach

Regular expressions (regex) are snippets of pseudo code that match pat- terns within text. In Google Analytics, regular expressions are used for filtering—for both filtering within a report (table filter) and for creating separate profile reports (profile filters), for defining advanced segments, and for configuring goal conversions and funnel steps. In other words, regular expressions are important, and I refer to them throughout this book. Going beyond the basics, things can rapidly appear complex because regular expression often appear like algebra. Therefore, before implementing your regular expression, validate it through the excellent Regex Coach application (Windows only). Regex Coach is free to use for Windows only.

Find More Apps…

Google Analytics maintains an App Gallery of third-party-developed add-ons that extend Google Analytics functionality. At my last count, there were over 140 apps listed at www.google.com/analytics/apps (the editor’s picks are certainly worth a look). Some of these apps are described in more detail of Chapter 12 of the book.

However, rather than listing all possible add-ons that are available, I would love to hear your real-world experiences of tools that have helped make your GA life easier. Please let me know via a comment.

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1. 12 Useful Tools for Google Analytics Administration
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3. Troubleshooting Tools for Web Analytics

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Post tags: add-on, add-ons, regex, regular expressions, tools

1. What is driving visitors to my website?

2. What do they do once they arrive?

These are the same questions no matter what position you have in the organisation – its just the level of detail in the answer that changes. Essentially, no matter what your role of interest or responsibility is for your website, these two questions are where you start your investigations. For that is what “analysis” is – an investigation of data and the building of a hypothesis from it.

As a practitioner this is what I do for a living and this is what the 3rd edition of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics is all about!

***View the launch party photos in (Stockholm, March 29th)***
Many thanks to the 60-70 people that came. Lots of new friends!

I am happy to announce the 3rd edition has started shipping from the publisher’s (March 19th) and should be in stores e.g. Amazon, within the next week or so – depending on location. So much has changed in the past two years since the 2nd edition – see my last post for the bullet list. And the changes are not just in terms of new Google Analytics features (of which there are many) such as the new User-Interface, Multi-Channel Funnels, Real-Time reporting etc.; But also industry changes – the new EU Privacy law, the rise of HTML5 to replace Flash, the importance of social media and the growing interest of senior managers who actually want to have an understanding of website performance, not just view reports!

So the 3rd edition is not simply an update, but a complete re-write. It is why it takes me so long to produce – one every 2 years – and why I insist that I have written three books to date, not the one! This one took 5 months to complete…

What’s new in the 3rd edition…?

The 3rd edition covers all of these changes and more (see my last post for feature changes). Its written for the latest version of Google Analytics with all code examples formatted for the async version. Download the Intro, Table of Contents, Chapter 1 and the Index (1.60Mb PDF).

Don’t worry if coding is not your thing – I did not write any of my books for engineers! I wrote them for web analytics practitioners i.e. anyone who wants to know what is happening with their website. Be it the performance of new marketing campaigns, the impact of a social media strategy, the sales of online products, or the readership habits of content rich sites. That is, to help you answer those two fundamental questions…

Of course, garbage in = garbage out. So having a good, solid implementation of GA is critical. I cover this in detail in approximately half of the book. The other half is about actually using the tool to understand your website’s performance using real-world tasks.

• New features – see my last post about this
• A colour insert – at last! I have been pushing for colour since the first edition but apparently that’s too expensive for the publisher to produce. So I have the next best thing – 16 pages of colour insert for the important images where colour is just too important to miss.
• The book is now a little fatter – now 600 pages, up +20%. The amount of new content is considerable, yet I also removed content. That is, old features – such as the Benchmarking reports that was deprecated last year, and any now redundant code.
• The book covers everything I have done for clients over the past 2 years – all the non-standard stuff that goes beyond simple pageview numbers. From tracking YouTube embedded videos, producing roll-up reports to allow for a broader overview, building custom reports, how to create and manage and effective campaign tracking strategy, considerations for tracking mobile and social media visitors, integrating GA data with your CRM system and other 3rd party applications,  and even measuring the performance of off-line marketing efforts.

Comments from the industry

What to do next?

• Download the Intro, Table of Contents, Chapter 1 and the Index (1.60Mb PDF)
• or Read more about the book content from me
• or Order from Amazon.com
• or buy the PDF ebook - coming soon from this site (for some reason ebooks take a couple of weeks longer to arrive!)
• If you haven’t read one of my books you may be interested in what others have said. I keep reviews here on a separate site. Also the back cover has reviews from industry luminaries such as Avinash Kaushik, Chris Sherman, Sara Andersson, Stephane Hamel.

I would love to hear your feedback via a comment, +1, retweet, or whatever…

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Post tags: 3rd, 3rd ed, book, book launch, third edition

Launch Party

Come and celebrate the book launch with sparkling wine in a circle of friends and colleagues and other amazing people! I will make a short presentation with focus on new material for the third edition and there will be the opportunity to buy the book (personally signed!) at a special price:

March 29th at the Scandic Grand Central Hotel, Stockholm (4:30pm).

Please complete the sort invite form so we can estimate numbers.

What’s new in the 3rd edition?

As you may know, my aim with these books has always been to give the reader a thorough understanding of web analytics, from a practitioners point of view, using Google Analytics as the tool of choice. There are lots of details (well the book is called Advanced…!), but only when it is necessary. That is, where there is a good business opportunity/insight to be gained from it…

In 2011 alone there was a wealth of announcements from the GA Team (coolest first):

• New user Interface, referred to as v5 (just coming out of beta)
• Multi-Channel Funnels – this is the different referral paths visitors use to find your site and how they interact/combine (no more last click wins!)
• Real-Time analytics – this is cool…
• Flow & Goal Visualisation – think path analysis on steroids!
• New Custom Report builder – more intuitive with filters (very nice!)
• Webmaster tools integration – great SEO info
• Social plugin – tracking “love button” engagement such as Likes, retweets, follow, share etc.
• Site Speed reports – measure the impact of slow loading pages
• Premium product – the paid for version of GA
• Events & Threshold goals – events can now be defined as goals
• New dashboard approach – widget based

All these are described in detail in the book. In addition, all code snippets have been updated for the async version of the GATC (that was introduced just after the 2nd edition came out!), and of course my writing is improving all the time – understanding what users of GA “get” easily, what requires more explanation, and what requires further examples.

 In March, I will be posting more details about the book contents

When’s it due out?

• March 19th 2012.

How to get it

• You can order at Amazon et al, as a hard copy (ebook and Kindle follow a few weeks behind). Or why not join me at the launch party on March 29th at the Scandic Grand Central Hotel, Stockholm @4:30pm. There will be the opportunity to buy the book (personally signed!) at a special price, meet awesome people and drink some bubbly – thanks to Search Integration AB for sponsoring of the event. Just complete the sort invite form so we can estimate numbers as we need to estimate numbers.

How can you help?

• Please retweet to spread the word via a retweet, Like, G+ or other share.

What’s next…?

With the 3rd edition I have taken the time to revise this website. Not only to freshen up and match the new cover design, but also to practice what I preach. For example, many of the book’s screenshots and analysis examples come from this site. As such, writing the book enabled me to perform deep-dive analysis on my own performance. The result, I hope, is an improved user experience and clearer call-to-actions. If you have a mo, please pass on your thoughts on the new layout/design via the the feedback button – triangle at the bottom left on every page.

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