On Saturday 14th of March, I’ll be presenting at Measurecamp London on on all the things you do to destroy your Google Analytics instalation.

The following is a short list of items of things I’m going to be covering.

If there is anything else missing from the list, please use the form at the bottom to let me know.

• Tags Missing From Pages
• Too Many GA Tags
• Set Domain Name Not Set Or Misconfigured
• Forgetting to exclude yourself / client / employees
• Excluding Browser Bots
• Not QA’ing Code in the Browser
• Mixing old and new versions
• No cross domain tracking
• Internal search not configured
• Goals Incorrectly Configured
• Session ID’s not removed
• Not excluding payment providers such as Paypal
• Incorrect campaign tracking

Google announced in the finding more mobile-friendly search results blog post that they would be “expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal“.

The change will “affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results”

In a nutshell, Google is making it clear that going forward sites that don’t present a mobile version will be degraded in the search results.

If you’re not sure whether you’re site is mobile ready, the latest version of developer tools in Chrome will show you what your site looks like in a wide range of devices.

Our narrated 90 second video below illustrates how to use this.

If you can’t view the video, the process is simple

1. Load the web site you want to view in Chrome
2. Press the Menu icon
   
3. Select More Tools > Developer Tools (or CTRL+SHIFT+I)
   
4. In the top left hand corner, select the phone you want to test it against
   
5. Refresh the page

In theory, self service tills at shops should have benefited everyone.

• Faster throughput of customers
• Happier customers as they are queing less

In practice, this simply isn’t the case as complicated interfaces and temperamental scales make users wary of them, especially the dreaded  ”unintended item in the packing area” message

My local Marks and Spencers in Swansea often has a queue of pensioners for the standard checkout while the self service till remain empty.

As with any new technology, people often find a way around the issue.

One of the biggest problems is that the machines don’t seem to be able to cope with the huge variety of shopping bags that people carry around and will frequently throw up error messages which then require a staff member to deal with.

Most machines will ask you to place your bags on the machine at the beginning of the process.

What I’ve observed people doing is to put their bags down to the side of the machine and tell the machine they haven’t brought any.

They then proceed to

1. Scan each item
2. Place in the bagging area
3. Pay
4. Then add the items to their bag

The 4th step can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes depending on the shop.

All the while you’ve got a queue of people who are getting increasingly irritated

This video describes the two ways that you can leave comments on an Adobe Acrobat document

Following on from yesterdays post about how Homebase appears to have forgotten about SEO in their new site launch, I decided to take a look at how they handled redirecting pages on the old site to the new site.

For quite a few products, the page has stayed the same so this isn’t an issues. Where the page no longer exists, you should use a 301 server redirect which tells the search engines that the page has permanently moved and is the solution that Google advises when moving sites

Using the site:www.homebase.co.uk we can see all the pages currently in the Google index such as this one.

Clicking on to a link takes you to this page which appears to have the correct product and they have used a 301 redirect

But on closer inspection, there is something a little strange in that the breadcrumb doesn’t appear to match the actual product

However it does appear that the redirect has taken you to the correct product.

A quick search on the site using the products id number 238413, shows the there is an identical product at

http://www.homebase.co.uk/en/homebaseuk/essential-kitchen—-amersham—grey—600mm-single-oven-housing-238413

which does have the correct header.

What’s the consequence of this
The site is now presenting two version of the products to the world which means that Google will need to choose which is the the correct one.

Update: 10:34am
It appears that the title, meta description have been added to the site. There are now also canonical tags on the pages which should point to the correct versions

Oops – Who forgot to SEO the new Homebase website?

Homebase has just relaunched their website and it looks like someone forgot to do any search engine optimisation.

Go to any page on the website and look at the source code and you’ll see this.

Looks like someone forgot to populate these fields with any content and its the same on every page on the site

If you run site:www.homebase.co.uk to see all the listed pages you’ll get something that looks like this. Notice that the home page doesn’t even appear.

The fun really starts when you select the top result and you get the following page.

It looks like a badly implemented 404 page. However the site isn’t even sending a 404 server response code back, so it appears to the search engines that the page is still live. It it happens on enough pages, the site runs the risk of being penalised by Google in the same way that the Reading Festival was a couple of years ago.

The moral of this story is ensure that when you enagage an agency to do a site build they have a good understanding of technical SEO especially when creating a new site.

We’ve helped companies such as Renault, Citibank, Pets at Home and Mothercare with their search engine strategies, so please contact us to find out how we can help you

Over the last couple of months you may have noticed a referring site called SEMalt appearing in your Acquisition > Referral site reports in Google Analytics.

It appears as both semalt.com and crawler.semalt.com

These are not real visitors but an attempt by the SEMalt company to get your attention by cleverly crawling your site and triggering Google analytics.

If you have a small site you may find that is it on one of your top referrers. As the bot has a 100% bounce rate, it can affect your overall stats.

Clearly we don’t want to see this in our analytics so we can excude these visitors by setting up a Google Analytics filter.

You’ll need to have admin access to the account to set this up.

1. Go to the Admin section
   
2. Select the Appropriate view and select Filters
   
3. Press the New Filter button
   
4. Type Exclude SEmalt in the filter name box
   
5. Select custom filter
6. Choose exclude
7. In the filter field choose campaign source
8. In the filter pattern enter \.semalt\.
9. Press Save

In this case using a regular expression to capture both semalt and crawler.semalt so we had to escape the periods at the beginning of the email and then end we backslashes

Any traffic from this point forward from SEMalt will not be recorded.

You can use a Google Analytics Advanced segment to exclude any historical traffic

If you haven’t studied real live humans interacting with your site, it’s pretty likely that you’re missing the small, but very important details on what annoys them.

Over the years, we’ve run usability tests for companies such as Disney, Chelsea, Travelodge and Nickelodeon’s.

Each time, there was something in the design that stopped people in the tracks as they couldn’t quite work out what to do.

A perfect example of this was my recent experience with the Noddle credit check web site.

The form was clearly laid out and worked really well until I got to the password field.

On the surface it looks like a normal password field, but with one minor difference

You can’t paste into the password field

After having my Google Adwords account hacked a couple of year ago, I use the excellent and free KeePass Password Safe tool to automatically generate a password such as this &Lp#]2x-S<K+?(B(

which would take a while to crack.

As I can’t paste this in, I had to go for a far simpler password which had to be entered in twice.

As you can see from the screenshot, their password needs to be

• 8 characters long
• Upper and lower case
• At least one number

Would you like to understand your users better?
Over the last 17 years, we’ve run a variety of different usability tests and surveys for a wide range of customers, all at a very reasonable price.

Contact us and find out more

In response to a story in yesterdays Sunday Mail, WHSmith has removed the whole web site and replaced it with holding page..

Whilst this seems overkill especially as it should be relatively simple to shut down just one section, they probably have their own reasons

What’s clear is that they didn’t have a strategy for just such occasion as the page has been uploaded so quickly that someone forgot to add the Google Analytics account code to the page.

Instead you get UA-XXXXXXX instead of the correct code

<!-- Goals can be created in Google Analytics to track these error pages --> <script> 
(function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); var _gaq = _gaq || []; 
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX']);
 _gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]); 
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','holdingpage']);
 _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
 </script>

What I especially like so the comment that Goals can be created to track these pages. Good luck trying that with no data.

I wouldn’t want to be the person at BTFresca or WHSmith who has to explain that one away.

If you’d like to know how to setup a relatively inexpensive backup server for occasions such as this, please do contact us

Last Saturday, I ran a session at Measurecamp III in London called ’10 or more ways to destroy your Google Analytics Installation

After presenting the talk, there was lively discussion about the topic with plenty more good examples which I updated my original deck with.

What I’d like to do know is open up the document to the analytics community and get as many different examples as possible before publishing a final version.

So please

• Have a read through the embedded slidedeck
• Download the presentation as a PDF

and then

• Complete our really short form with any other examples
• Contact me on twitter – @charlesmeaden
• Add a comment below