Mobile web analytics studies the behavior of mobile website visitors in a similar way to traditional web analytics. In a commercial context, mobile web analytics refers to the use of data collected as visitors access a website from a mobile phone. It helps to determine which aspects of the website work best for mobile traffic and which mobile marketing campaigns work best for the business, including mobile advertising, mobile search marketing, text campaigns, and desktop promotion of mobile sites and services.

Data collected as part of mobile analytics typically includes page views, visits, visitors, and countries, as well as information specific to mobile devices, such as device model, manufacturer, screen resolution, device capabilities, service provider, and preferred user language. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance and return on investment, and is used to improve a website or mobile marketing campaign’s audience response.

The majority of modern smartphones are able to browse websites, some with browsing experiences similar to those of desktop computers. The W3C Mobile Web Initiative identifies best practices to help websites support mobile phone browsing. Many companies use these guidelines and mobile-specific code like Wireless Markup Language or HTML5 to optimize websites for viewing on mobile devices.

Drawbacks of applying traditional web analytics

Collecting mobile web analytics data is not as straightforward as traditional web analytics because many of the common methods for data collection are unreliable or do not work.

Traditional analytics software on a mobile website may only provide data for HTTP requests coming from the most advanced mobile browsers, such as those found in the iPhone and other smart phones and PDAs, with no data on other mobile devices browsing the site.

Traditional web analytics software that uses server log parsing and associates different IPs with “unique visitors” may fail to identify unique visitors, because the IPs from which cellular wireless network HTTP requests originate are the gateway IPs of the network access providers.

Source: Wikipedia

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One challenge that many people face when trying to use custom reports for analysis is determining what data relationships they should create in order to do segmentation.

An easy way to get started is to consider what you have control over. I like to segment by advertising parameters that I can change, like time of day. Why? I can make immediate improvements based on the data in these reports. Let’s take a look.

Google Analytics Custom Reports

You’ve all probably seen the custom reports interface. You can drag metrics and dimensions to create your own report. The columns are different metrics (counts, ratios, etc) and the rows are dimensions, which are the attributes of our visitors and the visits they create.

We can also create a drill down functionality by nesting multiple dimensions in the interface.

Creating the Report

Getting back to our example, let’s segment marketing campaigns by the time of day. Remember, I can run my ads at different times during the day using almost all online advertising tools. Nothing new here, this is called day parting.

Here are the settings for the custom report. Nothing crazy, just a column for visits and a column for conversion rate (in this case a conversion is a sale).

The Data

So this custom report will show all our campaigns and if I click on a campaign we’ll see data for the selected campaign at all hours of the day:

Here we can see the traffic and conversion rate for our chosen campaign at different hours of the day. 6.52% conversion rate at 16:00, not bad! [Website conversion rate is 2.1%]

Now check out this data:

Here we can see that traffic drips from 02:00 – 06:00. We may want to curb our spending at these hours and move the spend to a different part of the day.

[I know, some of the traffic may be 'upper funnel' traffic that is just starting the buying process. But we could easily modify this report to drill down to the individual keywords driving to make that determination.]

I could also create a different visualization that starts with the medium/source dimension, then shows the hour of day, and finally campaign name. This report would be useful if we wanted to look ‘across’ all paid traffic, regardless of campaign, but still retain the ability to drill down to the campaign level.

So here we have some really actionable info. If you’re looking to save some money you may want to see how well your time-based advertising performing at different times of the day.

Source: Cutroni

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What is a Cookie?

A cookie, also known as a web cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie, is a text string stored by a user’s web browser. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information, which may be encrypted for information privacy and data security purposes.

The cookie is sent as an HTTP header by a web server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. A cookie can be used for authentication, session tracking (state maintenance), storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing textual data.

As text, cookies are not executable. Because they are not executed, they cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses. However, due to the browser mechanism to set and read cookies, they can be used as spyware. Anti-spyware products may warn users about some cookies because cookies can be used to track people—a privacy concern.

Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, and the time frame to keep them, but rejecting cookies makes some websites unusable.

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How Google Analytics Uses Cookies

Google Analytics relies heavily on cookies. Using cookies allows Google Analytics to be much more precise in its measurements. If a visitor deletes or blocks their cookies, information for that visit or visitor will be misinterpreted or lost.

Unique Visitors

Cookies allow for unique visitor tracking. They tie all the activity of a visitor into a single visit. They are used to determine when a visit ends.

Activity

Cookies store vital information about each visit. They store the start time of the current visit and keep track of how many pages have been viewed so far. If a visitor closes his browser or is inactive for too long, the cookies will report that the visit ended.

Cookies store the date and time of the visitor’s first visit (allowing for calculations of how many visits it took to convert). The total number of visits from the visitor is stored in cookies, too.

Traffic Source

Cookies are the main vehicle for attributing visit information and conversions to specific marketing campaigns or traffic sources. Each time the visitor comes to the site, the code stores new traffic source information (if there is any) in the visitor’s cookies.

Dissecting Google Analytics Cookies

Google Analytics uses several cookies to record all of this information. The most common are covered here. The expiration dates for each cookie may be customized with built-in GA code.

All of the cookies store a domain hash that ties them to the same site. In the case that cookie information changes during a visit (e.g., a user-defined variable gets changed from “Prospect” to “Customer”), Google Analytics will attribute the entire visit to the last cookie value.

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With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer  questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.

How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participation on the social web  to those that don’t “get it”.

Social media marketing isn’t like an email campaign where you can track the number of emails sent out, the number that were opened, the number of clicks, visits, leads and conversions all in one process. Much of what happens in the social media world happens behind a login and the old ways of tracking web visitor analytics just doesn’t work in that scenario.

Just like any kind of marketing, each company has their own set of objectives and reasons for reaching them via social media channels. That means different methods and approaches to the listening, monitoring and measuring of both social web and web marketing activities at large. The field of social media analytics is still very new.  Here are 7 considerations as you evaluate what will work best in your social media tracking.

Quality over Quantity
This has been said again and again and lots of people still feel that the more followers/friends/subscribers/connections they have, the better. The reality is, quantity is not and end goal for lead or sales generation outcomes. What good is it to have 13,000 followers if 1/3 of them are spam accounts and 1/3 are auto followers who will never engage with you? Sure 13,000 looks good to those who can only focus on numbers, but what is the quality of those 13,000?  Seth Godin mentioned at the MIMA Summit that all you need is an audience of about 1,000. But it needs to be the right 1,000 people.

Hearing vs. Listening
Have you stopped to think about who is actually paying attention in social networks? A person or a brand may have X number of followers or friends, but how many of them are actively listening at any given time? How many people do you ACTUALLY reach when you post a tweet, make a status update or blog post?  Subscriber counts and reach are two different things. Think of it like a college professor talking to students: How many of them are paying attention during a lecture? With social media participation it’s the same thing; you need to realize that not everyone is always hearing what you have to say and factor in the difference between connections and actual reach.

Engage & Participate
Effective social media marketing is about is engaging and participating. If  a marketer joins a social network and focuses on promoting themselves, product or company, they’ll get an entirely different set of outcomes than those they have goals for.  Think about it. Social means to be conversational, friendly, helpful. When participating in social channels, talk to other members of the community, participate in the conversations and give people a reason to interact with you. Add a little romance before you ask to get engaged 

Social Media is About Being Where the Conversation Is.
Marketers need to stop and think about where their audiences are online and where relevant conversations are happening. That could be niche social networks, forums and blogs. Those niche areas may have fewer people, but will more than likely have more engagement value for relevant products or services being shared.  To find those niche communities and conversations, use social media monitoring software. Free tools includeGoogle Alerts or Social Mention. Low cost tools include Trackur and PostRank Analytics.

Assign Value to Get Value.
Whether it’s a tweet, retweet, a status update, comment, photo upload or story submission, if you want to find out how valuable it is you have to assign a value. It doesn’t matter how or what that value is, but setting up some sort of system will help determine what’s working and what’s not.

Define an Objective.
Before jumping into social networking, it’s essential to set an objective. Going in and participating with social network and media sharing sites just to participate may not bring the kind of results you’d like. A clear objective as part of a social media strategy should be set so you know what you are working towards. It will guide your messaging, behaviors, networking activity as well as the kind of content you seek and share.

Social Media is An Investment.
Social media success takes time. The seeds of relationships need to grow and you’ll need to invest what’s needed to make it work for whatever end goals that are set. Expecting results in a month or two isn’t realistic; it may take a year or more. It really depends on the Roadmap that guides your: Audience > Objectives > Strategy > Tactics > Tools > Measurement.  Effective social media participation is about building a network and building trust. That doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, do it right, and you’ll be rewarded in the long run.

What other considerations should be in this list? If you’ve undertaken new social media programs with your company, what were some of the measurement and analytics hurdles that you overcame?

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The only drawback with GWO is that it’s a binary measurement: did the visitor convert or not? Granted, you have some flexibility in defining what that “conversion” is, but it’s still not a holistic view of what’s really happening. You also have to predefine any measurements that an experiment may impact, and that’s simply not possible in every scenario.

The solution to this is to use Google Analytics in conjunction with GWO.

How to Put Website Optimizer Data into GA

Integrating Website Optimizer with Google Analytics means that you will need to be able to see within GA which combination of an experiment a visitor saw. Put this into a custom variable by using a function from the Website Optimizer library, utmx('combination'). This will return the combination number the visitor is viewing, where zero is the original. (For a description of each combination, see the Website Optimizer reports.)

On the page you are performing the experiment, place code like this before _trackPageview() and after the first block of Website Optimizer code.

This code checks first whether the utmx function has been declared yet. Then it creates a visitor-level variable (that gets stored in the cookie) in slot 1. The name is GWO. The value is the combination number. We have to either convert it to a string (so that GA doesn’t dismiss zeroes), or we have to concatenate it to a string, like "Combination: " + utmx('combination'). //

Choosing the right variable scope

A word should be said about choosing the scope of the custom variable that stores this combination. The example above uses a visitor-level variable, but that’s not the ideal solution for every case. The ideal solution will depend on what your goals are, but here are some guidelines.

• If you are running multiple experiments on the same site, you will either want to use page-level custom variables, or assign each experiment to a different variable slot.
• If an experiment affects multiple pages on the site (eg. a navigation menu, call to action buttons, etc.), a visitor- or visit-level variable is probably best.
• If an experiment only affects one or two pages on the site, a page-level variable will be most accurate, because it’s not likely that one page will impact much else about the visit.

Although it’s beyond the scope of this article, it’s worth mentioning that because the utmx function is not object-oriented, if you are doing multiple experiments on a single page, you will need to set the custom variables immediately after each block of Website Optimizer code that you want to track in GA.

Analyzing Website Optimizer Experiments in Google Analytics

With this integration in place, you will now be able to do more thorough analysis of each variation of an experiment.

Considering the site’s goals, create a custom report where the value of each custom variable is the dimension and key KPIs are the metrics. Here is a sample report. (Click on it for a higher resolution image.)

Since these variations are delivered randomly, if they had no impact on anything else, one would expect all of these numbers to be pretty similar. However, some of these metrics seem to be influenced by which variation is shown.

Create advanced segments for each of the variations. This will allow you to see in greater detail exactly what different visits look like when exposed to a different variation of the experiment. (For example, if your experiment is testing different variations of the navigation menu, you can see clearly how each variation affects visitor click-paths.)

By digging deeper into each combination and doing further segmentation, we can begin to decide why different variations perform differently and whether Website Optimizer’s suggestion is, in fact, the best option.

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Bounce rate is a metric to indicate how many visits to your website were only to one page before the user exited. It is not to say that if a user only visits one page and then leaves that there is something wrong with the website. The user could have found the information looking for or may have followed a link from a site to another. Affiliate marketing sites will not so much look at the bounce rate if the user came in via a search term, but rather where the user went from the page. If the user clicked on the link leading to the landing site it will indicate success.

Another instance where the bounce rate will not matter that much is the first page of a blog. The user may have read all the posts on the main page and then leave – not an indication of poor website performance, but rather that the user has found the content useful, provided the time spent on the first page was enough to read through the various posts. In this instance you will look at the time spent to measure website performance as part of internet marketing rather than the actual bounce rate.

How to measure the bounce rate as an indication of website performance related to internet marketing

The bounce rate is obtained by looking at the number of visits to the page. The formula for the bounce rate will be number of one page visits divided by the number of persons entering the website through the specific page. Google Analytics is an excellent tool to use if you want to identify the bounce rate. Many of the website analytics and statistics tools normally found at the website control panel also provide the information without having to do complex formulas to get to the answer.

Why is the bounce rate so important for measuring website performance as part of internet marketing?

Often when clients approach an internet marketing company because their site is not performing as desired, the internet marketing company will first use an analytics tool to discover flaws in the site and thus identify areas that can cause poor website performance. The bounce rate is one of those metrics used simply because it is such a good indicator of what is transpiring on the website. High bounce rates universally give an indication of poor website performance except for the cases already discussed. If someone lands on a page and then leaves without visiting another page or taking an action it indicates that the person did not find what they were looking for or it was their perception.

When is the bounce rate high and thus an indication of poor website performance?

Above 90% normally indicates that there must be some kind of technical difficulty while a bounce rate above 70% can indicate a problem with keywords or content and information structure including navigation. The range between 30-60% is rather difficult as it can indicate a bit of a problem, but not enough to give a clear indication of what the problem area may be. In this respect you may want to also check where the visits originated from and analyse whether the links to your site were not relevant. Below 30% means your website performance is excellent and you are at least getting part of the internet marketing spending back. Keep going on this track!

Internet marketing companies will also look in-depth at the website performance to see whether there is a problem with content, specific types of traffic or technical problems which may cause high bounce rates at specific pages.

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Dashboards are great because they enable you to set targets, track your progress and obtain early warnings. This is extremely important if you want to optimize your web activities on a continuous basis.

But how do you build a successful dashboard? How do you ensure relevance and impact? How do you ensure that your dashboard lead to concrete action?

The steps towards a successful dashboard
Although there are many ways of building dashboards, in my experience it always boils down to the following steps:

1. Target your dashboard
2. Select only the most relevant KPIs
3. Visualize data as much as possible
4. Include benchmarks
5. Explain the results
6. Make the dashboard interactive

1.  Target your dashboard
Do you work for a large company with several departments? Are you the responsible for distributing updated reports to many different persons on a monthly basis?

In this case, you should first of all think about your target groups. How can the users of your dashboards be categorized according to their needs? And how can you best build dashboards that serve these different needs?

For example, you could operate with the following groups:

• Web team
• Marketing department
• Sales department
• IT department
• Top management

Each of these groups is likely to demand very different types of dashboards. The top management might want a high-level aggregate view of all web activities. The sales department might want a list of new hot leads. The marketing department might want to measure ROI of their online marketing activities. And so on.

Even if you are only building dashboards for yourself, you should think about the different contexts in which you will use dashboards.

What is the purpose of the specific dashboard you are building? Are you trying to measure the effects of the newsletter? Are you aiming to optimize the internal search field on your website?

The more focused you make your dashboard, the higher relevance and impact it is likely to have. Focus is also the prerequisite for the next step, namely to select the right KPIs.

2. Select only the most relevant KPIs
In case you don’t already know, a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a measurement which quantifies the success of your web activities. Given that “success” is a subjective thing (it depends on the goal you set yourself), a measurement becomes a KPI the moment you decide it to be so.

In principle, all measurements could therefore be turned into KPIs. The art, however, is to confine yourself to the most important measurements.

Web analytics includes so many interesting measurements that they cannot all be listed here. Let me instead simply say that web analytics measurements divide into the following main groups:

• Marketing KPIs which measure the effectiveness of search engines, online banner campaigns, e-mails/newsletters and other traffic sources.
• Engagement KPIs which measure the website’s ability to retain visitors, stimulate interest in content and make visitors perform certain actions
• Usability KPIs which measure the effectiveness of the website’s navigation, including the website’s search field
• Conversion KPIs which measure the website’s ability to convert visitors into customers, leads or prospects
• Loyalty KPIs which measure the website’s ability to make visitors come back often and with short intervals and to use certain functionality repeatedly

If you break down each of these main groups, you will get a very long list of potentially interesting measurements. From this long list, you should carefully choose a unique collection for each dashboard target group.

3. Visualize data as much as possible
Gestalt psychology tells us that the human mind is much better at understanding visual forms than processing raw numbers. If you want your dashboard to communicate clearly and rapidly, you must carefully consider how to apply visualization. In the end visualization can be what makes or breaks your dashboard.

Visualization of data, as I see it, is not simply about choosing the right chart for the right numbers. It is also about using colors appropriately, arranging the information in meaningful ways, putting visual emphasis on important information, using icons for warnings, exploiting space in the most efficient manner, etc.

One of the best books on data visualization for dashboards is “Information Dashboard Design” by Stephen Few. Although his views are sometimes a bit extreme, the underlying principles are no doubt sound.

4. Include benchmarks
KPIs are almost useless, if they are not related to standards of good and bad values. In order to make a particular KPI stand out as good or bad, you must include benchmarks.

There are several ways of doing so. The simplest type is a static value indicating your goal. For example, such a static value can be displayed in a column graph by a straight horizontal line. In gauges, you can add color ranges – e.g. green, yellow, red – indicating good, medium and bad values.

It is also possible to work with dynamic benchmarks such as a line calculated as X % increase of the value previous year or, even more sophisticated, an error band from a linear regression. Finally, benchmarks can be calculated as average values across content sections, across the company’s websites and/or across competing websites.

5. Explain KPI trends
Benchmark is one way of providing your dashboard with “context”. Another important way is to include information which explains your main KPIs. Ideally, a dashboard should consist of a number of data visualizations which supplement each other.

Although dashboards can rarely offer exhaustive explanations, you should at least try to include the most obvious first step in an in-depth analysis. Let’s say you include a line chart showing an upward traffic trend on your website. In this case, it would be interesting to know which traffic source has contributed with most new visitors. This can be done, for example, by adding a bar chart which breaks down the traffic on sources such as direct entries, search engines, link traffic or paid-for campaigns.

Immediately the dashboard viewer will understand not only that the traffic has gone up in the last few weeks, for example, but also why this might be the case. Even if you always need to supplement with in-depth analyses, you should still think in terms of cause and effects when designing your dashboard.

6. Make the dashboard interactive
I believe it is important to distinguished between dashboards and in-depth analysis. A dashboard should enable the viewer to see all of the relevant information on a single screen. In-depth analysis, on the other hand, involves exploring data and searching for answers by applying new filters and looking at data from different angles.

The primary purpose of a dashboard is to monitor, not to analyze. Having said this, however, there is no reason for a dashboard not to support exploratory analysis. The best dashboard applications allow the viewers to move seamlessly from a passive state of monitoring to an active state of analyzing. In doing so the dashboard transforms itself into a powerful analytical application, which enables the viewer not only to see “what” is happening, but also “why”.

Here are some interactive features that I consider important to a dashboard that supports analysis:

• Global filters: The ability to remove unwanted data from the entire display
• Local filters: The ability to remove unwanted data from a particular chart
• Highlights: The ability to highlight selected segments across all of the views
• From static to trend: The ability to transform a single KPI (e.g. a gauge) into a trend line and vice versa
• More charts: The ability to quickly add or remove a chart to the display

Conclusion
Dashboards are a powerful way of monitoring websites and distributing information to different target groups. However, they can be extremely difficult to design, because successful designs require deep insight into the needs of the target groups as well as into the field of web analytics.

In this post I have given some guidelines as to the characteristics of an effective dashboard. If you have other ideas about best practices for building dashboard, please leave a comment below.

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“What marketing questions can website statistics like Google Analytics answer?  What should I do with this information?”  Here are nine key marketing questions, the Google Analytics stats to get a handle on them, and some followup questions to pose.

I’m ignoring metrics from Google Analytics that help with site design, like browser usage and connect speeds. We’re talking hard-core marketing here.

In case you need a refresher before we start, here are links on basic definitions (clicks, visits, visitors, and page views), how to install Google Analytics tracking code, and an intro to Google Analytics.

VISITORS

1.  Is traffic to my website growing, declining or stagnating? What are the trends?

Stats to focus on: Visits per period vs last period;  absolute unique visitors per period vs last
Questions to ask yourself: Are numbers of visits and unique visitors growing, steady or declining?  Do I see spikes when I run various campaigns and promotions?  Because of technical limitations in tracking, trends are more meaningful than absolute numbers.

2.  How useful are visitors finding the site? What are the trends?  In essence, are users engaged?

Stats to focus on: Average pageviews, time on site
Questions to ask yourself: Are pageviews increasing or decreasing?  What about visitor time on the site?  If there are changes from last period, why? Are high pages views and time on site due to visitor interest or their difficulties finding what they are looking for?

3. Who are my visitors? Where do they live?  Are they new visitors or returning?

Stats to focus on: Map overlay and  new vs returning
Questions to ask yourself: Where are my visitors concentrated geographically?  Does my copy need to be modified (language, jargon, pitches) to tailor the appeal?   Which group is growing faster, new or returning visitors?  Do I need to run new campaigns targeted to the slower group?  How should I reposition product and service offerings on web pages to encourage visitors to return?

Sorry, no individual visitor emails from Google Analytics. You marketers already have data on user actions from other sources:  email inquiries, mailing list signups, downloads if visitors register with an email, and of course purchases.  Work on a system to add these client and prospect emails to your database.

CONTENT

4.  What pages of my site are most useful to visitors?

Stats to focus on: Top content, content by title, bounce rate
Questions to ask yourself: What are the five most frequently visited pages? What pages should be top pages that aren’t?  What can I change to make those pages more useful, accessible or interesting?  How can I change the link structure to get visitors there? Which page has the highest bounce rate, and why?  What can I do with that page to keep people on the site, i.e., substantive content or offers or page redesign?

5.   Where do visitors first land, and how do they proceed through the site?

Stats to focus on: Top landing pages,  click patterns
Questions to ask yourself: What are my top entry pages? How many visitors land on the home page versus  other pages? Where is traffic coming from that is landing directly on internal pages, and how can I get more sites like that to link?  What is the click path from the home page — where do most visitors go, and where do I want them to go?

6.  From what pages do visitors exit the site?

Stat to focus on: Top exit pages
Questions to ask yourself: What are my top exit pages?  For other than Thank You landing pages after purchase, how can I change copy or links there to keep visitors engaged in the site? Are they clicking outbound links, and do I want them to?  (Maybe yes if these are Adsense ads or affiliate banners.)

TRAFFIC SOURCES

7.  What traffic sources — direct (typing a URL), referral, search engine or paid ads — are driving visits to my site?

Stat to focus on: Traffic Sources Overview percentages
Questions to ask yourself: What traffic sources are growing over last period, and why?  Is off-web promotion increasing direct traffic?  Are a growing number of related sites or blogs linking to mine?  Have I changed copy on pages, which is leading to better organic search engine traffic?  Are my paid ads campaigns working better than last period?

8.  What other websites are referring visitors to my site?

Stat to focus on: Referring sites
Questions to ask yourself: Where can I find sites similar to those referring traffic and request a link?  Which referrers are bringing visitors who stay on the site the longest?  View the most pages?  These may be the best sources of high-quality prospects.   Should I request that other referring site improve the link description to drive more traffic?  What sites should be referring but aren’t on the list?  Why, and what can I do to get them to add links?

9.  What keywords are driving traffic?

Stats to focus on: Keywords and phrases
Questions to ask yourself: What are the most popular keywords bringing visitors to my site in organic search?  Are those keywords in my site’s metatags?   What keywords are NOT driving traffic, and how can I tweak my site (with substantive copy, page redesign, or formatting)  to change that?  How can I modify my paid search ads, if any, to incorporate keywords that my customers are already using in organic search to find my site?

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One of the main keys to a successful website or blog is knowing how much and where your overall traffic is coming from.  Having this information at your fingertips will allow you to experiment with different traffic techniques and see which one works the best and then capitalize on it.  Without knowing your website statistics you will have no idea what traffic techniques are working and which are not, making it harder to improve your campaign!

Google Analytics, a free service offered by Google, keeps track of your website statistics for you, allowing you to keep track of where your visitors are coming from so that you can adjust your traffic techniques and marketing campaign accordingly.

How To Install Google Analytics

Installing Google Analytics is not all that difficult.  It requires the understanding of some web code, but if you follow the steps below you should have no problem getting it installed on your website or blog.

Step 1: Go to the Google Analytics website  http://www.google.com/analytics/

Step 2: Sign up for a Google analytics account.

- Click on the Sign Up Now link underneath New to Google Analytics

- If you have a Google account sign in.  If you don’t click set up a Google account and follow the steps.

*If you have an account with google analytics sign in by clicking the Access Analytics button on the right side of the homepage.

Step 3: Create a New Account

-  Once signed into Google there should be a screen that pops up asking you to enter your website address.

-  Enter your Web address, A name for your account, your Country and time zone

-  Click Continue

-  Fill in your name, phone number(not required), other info

-  Click Continue

-  Agree to the terms and conditions and click Create New Account

Step 4: Add Google Analytics Code To Your Site

-  Google will then give you code that needs to be pasted into your site so that they can track your statictics

-  Copy all of the code in the box

-  If you have a website paste the code in between the <body> tags, most people paste it towards the bottom, but the code is for Google’s purposes only it will not be seen on your site so as long as it is before the </body> tag you are good.

-  If you have a WordPress blog sign in to your dashboard –> Appearance –> Editor –> footer.php  Next, paste the code anywhere inbetween the <body> tags, but it must be before </body> tag.  Click save when done pasting and that is it.

Step 5: Sign In To Google Analytics Account

-  You should see your new account set up, There will be a yellow caushion symbol under status this means Google did not reconize your site yet, this may take a couple hours or days then it should change to active after it reconizes your site.  When it is active you will be able to see your site statistics!

-  If for some reason after a couple days it still does not reconize your site I would suggest contacting Google anaylitic support.

Step 6: Install Google Analytics Complete!  Congradulations!

WordPress Google Analytics Plugin

If you have a WordPress blog you can download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, which automatically tracks for blog statistics for you without having to paste code.  This plugin is very easy to install just download the file and save it to your wp-content/plugins folder and you are all set!

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Well certainly a interesting question! and this is exactly what was discussed in the Web Analytics forum long back. It sure was a great thread, reading views from various industry specialist was amazing.

This sure is a great source for those who are getting started in Web Analytics.

Here’s one of the response for the email thread!

“That brings up an interesting point. What does a web analyst really
need to know? I am unaware of any certification program for
analysts. I know that WAA has some courses available. Perhaps
someone will clarify this for us. At a minimum, I would think an
analyst should be familiar with:

1) Terminology
2) Methods of tracking
3) Creation of KPIs
4) Conversion analysis
5) Referer Analysis
6) Path Analysis / Dropoff points
7) Familiarity with Analytics tools
8) Auditing and implementation
9) Multivariate Testing
10) Usability Testing
11) Communicating Results
12) “Common Sense”

Frankly, there’s a lot to learn. Reading books. I would add the conferences such as e-metrics, WAA courses.

A Combination of above and a great article below makes the picture more clear!

Here’s another great article from the Clickz.com team by Neil Mason.
What makes a good analyst

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