New Google Analytics features on the way!

Google has just announced a ton of new features for Google Analytics at the eMetrics conference. The official Google Analytics blog reviews the new features with video of them.

Some of my favorites are:

• 20 (twenty!!!) goals, up from 4, per profile.
• Secondary dimensions and pivots which some people have been talking about are rolling out for everyone!
• Alerts! Just pick a metric, say visits from organic traffic, and when it goes up by X%, Google Analytics will alert you.

Google Analytics continues to move towards an enterprise-class package, and I can't really wait for these new features to roll out. 

everybody knows somebody who loves a honda

While watching television this weekend, I caught a Honda commercial which targeted social media. The "everyone knows someone who loves a Honda" campaign looks to drive users to Honda's Facebook page to prove their point. And by taking it to Facebook, they want to make sure everyone knows it.

So far? Well, it looks to be working. A cached Google page shows almost 40,000 fans on October 5th. A week later, they are up to 54,000 fans. Not to mention that their Facebook wall is filled with posts of why people love their Hondas both old and new. Some people even have posted pictures of their old beat up rides. This is a great example of taking on social media the right way. Create a great product, and provide an outlet for people to be evangelists for the brand.

Great job Honda! (but I did love my old Nissan)

Abode Acquires Omniture for $1.8 Billion

Adobe announced that they will be acquiring Omniture for $1.8 Billion today.

I've never used Omniture before, but the cost is typically a big deterrent from implementation when there are really good, free options like Google Analytics and Yahoo Analytics out there.  Add in the increasingly robust functionality of free tools, and Omniture is facing a lot of challenges in the marketplace. What type of integration Abode might offer to give their analytics tool the upper hand?

A Clear Message on Your Landing Page

Home pages and landing pages should have a clear message and call-to-action. Sometimes this can get lost in that amazing Flash navigation you now have or wanting to tell everyone about this one new great feature. So, how can you tell if your landing pages and their messaging are effective? Just check everyone's favorite web metric - Bounce Rate! In Google Analytics, just hit the Top Landing Pages report under Content.

There are a couple things you can do to help bring your bounce rate down. First examine your own landing pages. If you are looking for the user to take a specific action, don't hide it under a bunch of text as a tiny little link! You've gotten so far as to getting the visitor to the site, so why should they have to struggle now that they are here? If you want someone to sign up, put a big ol' sign up button in front of them above the fold. Want them to search? Put a big search box front and center. It will make you and the user much happier.

Okay, so maybe you have a great call to action and a clear message to the visitor. You are telling them all the great things about your service/product/self, but they still seem to be disinterested. It's time to drill a little deeper into the Top Landing Pages report. Pick one of your landing pages and then Click on the Entrance Sources and Entrance Keywords (if a search engine driving the traffic). This will let you know how people found that landing page. If the referring site's content doesn't jive with your own, then maybe you can re-work your content to match what people would expect to find. If people can't find what they want, it leads to frustration (and heading back to Google to find what they needed).

Ok, so head over to your analytics package and check out your landing pages! And let me know about your new found love of Bounce Rate in the comments.

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha!

A "computational knowledge engine" that can compute various mathematical, statistical, and physics equations. In addition, it can do other computations like 'red + yellow' or genomes or music.

If the website isn't live yet check out this video.(There's a live webcast of the launch right now, but there looks to be problems)

Wolfram is ridiculously cool, but also makes me curious about how this will impact people, specifically students. With the coming of the internet, it has brought instant sources of data (for writing papers) and Wikipedia. I wonder if not having students work out integrals stifle their development. Maybe integrals themselves aren't that important (I'm not sure I could do a complex integration right now), but I feel something could be said about the process of doing and learning. I guess my argument is a little short-sighted as the same could be said about calculators, and how they just let people do things more efficiently. Actual knowledge needs to be behind the calculator. So I'm on the fence about this, and I wonder what other people think.

All in all, it's an amazing piece of technology that has been put together, and I'm really excited to try it out.

Google Analytics API Released!

Google has just released an API for Google Analytics. Go check out their blog to read more.

Also, as noted in the Google blog post, you should check out Desktop Reporting. They just released their Google Analytics desktop widget, Polaris, but there will be a full Google Analytics desktop app coming soon too!

(Google Maps is incorporated as the Map Overlay in Polaris so no more wierd looking states/territories!)

Goals and Funnel Reports

Image: adselwood

So you have your website running, your content is great and people are flocking to your site to sign up. Wouldn't it be nice to see how many people are signing up? How about optimizing the sign-up process? This is where goals and funnel reports come into play.

If you have a specific page which will serve as your goal (i.e. a thank you page) you can set up a goal in Google Analytics. We can also track the pages leading up to the goal and set a monetary value to it as well. Setting up a goal funnel is easy to do! Just edit a profile and you'll find where you can set up your goals. Set your goal to active, and let's get started!

In most cases, head match will work fine. If you have dynamic content appended to the end of your URL (for example, thankyou.html?id=19234kad3) just put thankyou.html as your goal URL.

You can set a monetary value in "Goal Value", and you will be able to see your efforts monetized in the reporting.

The next step is setting up your funnel. This is not necessary, but it can provide a lot of helpful information as to where you lost your customers going from the product page through the check out and eventually to the goal/thank-you page. Defining your funnel will only apply to the Goal Funnel report. A good first step is the shopping cart. You can set your product page as the first step too if you like.

If you are wondering about that required step checkbox, that requires your visitor to see that page before entering the funnel process. If they do not view the first page before viewing the goal page, then they will not be counted as a conversion. However, this will only apply within the funnel report. Outside of the funnel report, goal conversion numbers will reflect anyone who has seen the final goal page, regardless of the step-wise process you set up.

That's it! You can make more goals if you like (up to 4 per profile).

Beyond setting pages as goals, there should be other goals for your website. Landing page bounce rates, time on site, pages per visit. Things that will let you know that you are succeeding in engaging the visitor. You can find benchmarking data under the Visitors tab in your reporting. This will compare your site with similar sites. Or you can set your own benchmarks based on past performance. After all, every website is unique!

For something like a blog,measures of success can be a little difficult. A few good metrics are comments, visitor frequency, RSS subscribers, and perhaps your "About Me" page. With Wordpress and some other blogging platforms, number of comments can be easily monitored on your dashboard.

That about sums it up for goals in Google Analytics. Help me out with my goals and leave one in the comments!

Two Ways to Exclude Internal Traffic in Google Analytics

Last post, I said I'd talk about goals, but I'm going to put that on hold for a second. More than tracking your goals, you should ensure that the data coming into your reports is accurate. And as such, you should be excluding internal traffic (that's you!) from your Google Analytics reports. There are two ways to do it. Which way you pick mostly depends on whether you have a static IP (the same IP everytime you go online) or a dynamic IP. If you know which you have, skip the next paragraph.


If you are doing this from an office, you have a good chance that it is static. If you are doing this from home, you likely have dynamic. You can ask your ISP what you have. Also ask if there is a range of static IP addresses, which is common for offices. You'll need the actual range for the next part.


(Alternatively, you can go to whatsmyip.org and see what your IP address is, then disconnect from the internet for a while and reconnect, checking the site again. Although there is a chance you'll get the same number with a dynamic IP. I'd check with my ISP to be sure)


The first way: Okay! Let's keep ourselves from showing up in our Analytics reports. If you have a static IP, it is easily done using the "Exclude All Traffic from an IP Address" filter. After you log-in, you can find the Filters menu in the bottom right. Name your filter something like "Exclude Internal Traffic", and select "Exclude All Traffic from an IP Address" from the drop-down.


Now you'll have to put your IP address in there. If your IP address is 63.212.171.10, you'll have to put in 63\.212\.171\.10




For those of you with a range of IP address, you can use Google's IP range calcuator. As they mention if you have 2 ranges, it's likely you'll have to put them in the calculator separately. In the filter, you'll put in something like this


^First_IP_Range$|^Second_IP_Range$


Of course, substitute the ranges the calculator gives you, but remember to keep the ^, $, and | symbols as shown above. Now just add your site profile, and you are all set!


The Second Way (credit is due to the guys over at ROI Revolution for this one): This is a lot easier than the first way, but it admittedly does not work as well. We are going to do this by filtering out by URL and manual tagging.


First, go to the filters page and pick a custom filter. Select the "Exclude" button. Then, in the filter field drop-down, pick campaign source. Third, for filter pattern, pick "internal". You are done! That was easy huh? But from now on, you are going to have to go the URL "http://www.example.com/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=internal&utm_campaign=internal". Be sure to bookmark it and urge everyone you want to exclude do the same!





If you click on a link to your page from a Google search or a referring site, you will not be exclude from your reports.


Some of you that have done some research will know that Google has a second (or third in this case) of doing this. It uses the SetVar function, and while this works really well, the SetVar cookie is really valuable and I'd prefer to save it for something else. However, excluding internal traffic is essential, so use Google's SetVar method if you can't do the above. You want your reports to be accurate! I hoped this helped! Questions on implementation? Leave it in the comments.


BLam

An Introduction to Me and This Blog

This blog is going to be dedicated to talking about web analytics, ranging from beginner to intermediate things. As you'll discover as you continue reading (hopefully), I'm pretty new to the world of web analytics. This was my motivation for starting this blog. There are a lot of people that are new to analytics as it becomes a growing industry.

As I discover things in web analytics, I want to be able to share with others. So the topics of this blog will generally gravitate towards more beginner/intermediate things, but expect an evolution as I continue learning more about analytics.

A little more about myself. My current job is my first experience with web analytics, and I've been at it for about 6 months now. The main analytics platform I've been working with is Google Analytics, but there is also an internal reporting mechanism which is used too.

I don't have much experience regarding computer programming and whatnot, just what I dabbled in during my high school days. While it is a plus, web analytics doesn't require much too experience in programming unless you are doing some more advanced things. However, during college, I used statistical software for many of my projects.

So that's me and this blog. I hope that I can open up some insights for those of you new to web analytics (and maybe some more experienced people too!).

Getting Started With Google Analytics

I'm going to start this off with implementation of Google Analytics. There are a number of great tools out there, but if you are just testing the waters on your personal blog, Google Analytics is great (and free!). For those of you deciding on a package for your company, Google Analytics provides robust reporting and statistics. All in all, it's a great place to start and understand what your company goals are. Also, you'll find out looking for in your web analytics package when you are shopping around. So let's start from the very beginning: putting Google Analytics on your website. Doing so is a fairly simple process. Just hop over to the Google Analytics website and create your account to get started. After entering the standard info, you'll presented with the tracking code which will open up the Gates of Analytics Insight for you! (Whether you want to share your info with Google is up to you. It's anonymous and will give you benchmarking stats which can be useful)


Follow the instructions putting the Analytics code on all your webpages just before the </body> tag.


If have dynamic content or just have access to a template, you can add it to your template.


Congratulations! You just set up Google Analytics. Quick and painless, huh? Data should be pouring in, and you'll be able to see it in 24 hours! (I know it's exciting, but you have to be patient!) In fact, if you haven't already you should probably think about the purpose of your website. What pages do you want your visitors going to? For e-commerce, it will be a 'thank-you for your purchase!' page; for blogs, maybe the about me section. I'll let you think about it because we'll be setting up goals and funnel reports next time!