Website testing regularly causes tracking issues and contained below are three basic checks as soon as any new test goes live:

(Assuming website test went live on = www.mywebsite.co.uk/test)

1. Is your site listed under the referrals section within analytics?

Yes – Since Implementing The Test

If a significant portion of your traffic is listed under the referrals section, it is highly likely that there is an issue with your tracking.

Yes – Including A Time Period Previous To Test Implementation

Your tracking has probably had issues for a while, and this should definitely be investigated further. At a guess, likely to be a result of subdomain/cross domain tracking issues or a combination of code placement and site speed.

No

Good, no issues so far.

2. Have you seen a sudden spike in Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic (or in fact, any traffic source) that coincides with the test?

Yes – Since Implementing The Test

It is likely that the source has been lost for an alternative traffic source such as paid search. Try navigating to the page that contains the test.

Now there are two main ways to see both test variations, use two separate browsers, navigate to the test page, and keep clearing cookies on one of them until you have a browser set to each page (an uncouth but still effective approach).

Google Analytics Specific

(The principal still applies to other tracking solutions)

Force analytics to show you a version by the addition of variables, add the following onto your URL and change the value after preview to view different versions:

# utmxid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;utmxpreview=1

To obtain your utmxid for website optimiser, preview your experiment and take the id from the preview URL. More details can be found here:

http://support.google.com/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=63841

e.g.

www.mywebsite.co.uk/test#utmxid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;utmxpreview=1

This should then allow you to choose which variation you are shown.

Now try adding ‘?utm_source=TEST’ into the URL, after being re-directed by the test, does the utmx cookie still contain TEST as the source value?

If not, it is likely the analytics cookie has not been set before the re-direct occurred, thus losing the original source. You need to ensure that the cookies are set before the re-direct takes place.

No

Perform the test above anyway, just in case a random traffic surge masks any spike you may have noticed (unlikely you say, at least until it happens to you).

1. Appear to have a small spike yet cannot find an issue?

Segment your traffic. If a specific traffic segment is causing the spike it is likely that that particular segment has an issue. It may be that your site breaks for all mobile traffic, does not work in IE, Chrome, Firefox or even the tracking above could be breaking on a single segment. Segmentation should help you narrow down any analytics problem to the source, not just for website testing.

Any questions or comments? Please leave them below or on Twitter -@JamesMHolding

The social data hub aims to enable social network partners to submit their activity streams, making the data available to Google Analytics users within a set of social reports currently in development.

This means that GA customers will be able to determine down to the activity level – e.g. +1 button, comment, vote – what activities are taking place relevant to their content, when, by whom, and how they help achieve goals.

This comes as an extension to Google’s recent development of default integration of +1’s into Google Analytics.

The social web offers a great opportunity for brands to engage with customers in relevant and genuine ways, but social measurement hasn’t kept up. The goal of the new social data hub is to provide marketers and publishers with a comprehensive view of how social helps customers discover their brand and drive sales.

Google has partnered with several social platforms allowing Google Analytics users to integrate their activity streams straight into GA.

The launch partners are:

• Digg
• Reddit
• StackOverflow
• TypePad
• Delicious
• Gigya
• LiveFyre

and of course

• Google+
• Google Blogger
• Google Groups

Google will be following the Activity Streams specification, an industry format for describing socially interesting events, or “Activities,” about the people and things an individual may care about. In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, and an object. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object. For example, “Geraldine posted a photo” or “John shared a video.” Any of the data submitted may potentially be used but it must adhere to the specification. Detailed requirements are available on the GA Developer Documentation site.

This is another fantastic step by Google. There are already paid services that exist in this field but this now makes Google Analytics an even more valuable tool to SMEs as they can really begin to get a handle on the social web without it costing the earth.

What are your thoughts on this announcement? -@danpeden

Ultimately, Google believes that users signed into their Google account deserve privacy with regards to their search activities.

This is a seemingly noble cause, though there has been much speculation as to whether it will continue once the premium version of Google Analytics has been launched. My personal opinion is that the scepticism is ill-founded due to the huge outcry such an obvious contradiction would cause – a company that commands such public interest as Google could not go back on its declared beliefs in pursuit of Analytics dominance…could it?

Whilst debate over Google’s intentions continues, the impact of the change has yet to be fully comprehended – and in some cases it has been miscomprehended.

How does it currently affect the UK?

As mentioned, the change was only announced by Google as being in effect for signed in users on Google.com. This led some to jump to the conclusion that it was only applicable for users in the US. However, the data I have access to seems to show that it is applicable to users signed in to Google.com in around the world – and has been since the 18th of October.

For example, one site with a significant traffic volume has received almost 6000 visits being specified as keyword ‘not provided’ since the 18th of October. These visits have originated from 134 countries.

Towards the end of last week, there were a number of reports that percentage of keyword ‘not provided’ visits was on the increase. Many webmasters in the US (where Google.com is of course very widely used) reported an increase over and above Matt Cutts’ initial prediction of below 10% of organic visits being affected.

The cause behind the increase is unclear. Looking into the data of the same site mentioned above, it can be seen that additional countries started referring keyword ‘not provided’ visits. Previous to the 31st of October, the visits could be attributed to 88 countries, including the UK. Prior to the 31st of October, the visits have been received from 134 countries.

However, the potential conclusion that the change has been rolled out to further countries is probably a red herring. It seems more likely that the SSL certificate was rolled out to a greater overall sample of Google.com users – no matter what their country of origin.

Again, using the same data as before, the number of encrypted visits originating from the UK increased markedly on the 31st of October:

But this was also the same for visits originating Australia:

Therefore in addition to the number of countries referring encrypted visits increasing, the number of visits from each country increased. Rather than new countries being added to the equation, it is more likely that the sample of users being affected was increased across all countries and this led to a greater probability that a user from a ‘new’ country would land on the site.

To conclude, it seems that the encryption currently impacts a sample of users around the world that sign in using Google.com. This sample was increased last week, meaning that it is applicable to a great percentage of users around the world.

It seems likely that the next stage of the ‘roll out’ will involve making encrypted search applicable to domains other than Google.com – including Google.co.uk.

What will the impact be to my website?

Currently, due to the encryption only being applicable to signed-in users on Google.com, the impact on your website is likely to be minor.

Prior to the 31st of October, the average percentage of affected organic visits across 11 websites (with primary UK focus) was just 0.3%. Following the probable increase in sample size on the 31st of October, this percentage has increased to 0.9%.

Webmasters in the US are experience percentages that around 10 time higher, so we should expect the same when the change is rolled out to Google.co.uk.

I believe the impact will eventually be seen to be widely contrasting according to the target audience of the website. For example, a B2B focused website targeting marketing professionals is far more likely to suffer from a significant signed-in user black hole than ecommerce counterparts.

Early indications (according to data that I have access to) support this notion. Though the proportion seems to be still comparatively very low in the UK, a brief study of 4 B2B websites and 4 B2C websites over for a week prior to the 31st of October shows that the percentage of ‘not provided’ searches for the former was just over double the latter – 0.65% compared to 0.32%.

Obviously this study has limitations, for example the comparative popularity of the websites in question, but the wide contrast definitely goes some of the way to show that B2B sites will end up being hit harder.

What can I do to retrieve the lost data?

Unfortunately, unless the premium version of Google Analytics will in fact contain this data, there will be no way to find out what key phrases signed-in users have used to find your website.

However, there are ways to estimate it.

The best way involves modifying your Google Analytics code to include a custom variable focused on recording the ranking of the key phrase referring the visit.

This will then allow you to discover the ranking of key phrase that referred the ‘not provided’ visit – plus the page that the visitor landed on.

This should at least allow you see when a ‘not provided’ term sends a number of visits to a particular landing page from a certain ranking position – and should allow you to attribute them to one of the small number of high traffic volume ‘short tail’ terms that the page ranks for.

For example, if the page is ranking 8th for a particular high volume phrase, and you receive 10 visits from a ‘not provided’ phrase with a ranking of 8th, then you can be almost certain it is the same phrase that is referring the visits.

@richlawre

You can expect SLAs, advanced tools, extra processing power and dedicated support – at the right price of course.

At a rate of $150,000 per year, businesses will get you the ‘GA on Steroids’ that many people have been asking for. The flat yearly fee could be of interest to some but Google has potentially priced themselves out of the mid-range market that currently pay less than that for their analytics solutions.

However, actual SLAs, unsampled data reporting and fresher reports all move Google Analytics towards a much more suitable enterprise level product. The additional features of 50 custom variables and the attribution modelling (more to come on this later but it’s like no other tool out there) also begin to help the cause.

I certainly don’t think this is the finished article as an enterprise solution but it’s certainly a start. I fully expect more and more features to be added over the coming 12 to 18 months which should make the overall analytics marketplace an exciting place to be.

Multi-Channel Funnels have many applications for search marketers. For example, it’s now possible to accurately tell how much each form of marketing contributed and how they work together to assist in sales. This attribution model has been available within PPC for almost 2 years – it’s only now we begin to see it cross channel.

Often a searcher will interact more with the first channels then they do with the final channel that actually resulted in the purchase. However, it is important to assign some credit to the first channels too.  I have found clients are often keen to find out how much of an influence PPC had in the number of conversions on their site. Now we are able to supply this sort of data back from January 2011.

Below I explain the features of this new addition to Analytics.

The Multi-Channel Funnels tab is broken down into five reports:

Overview:

This screen is simply an overview of the total number of conversions and the volume of conversions that were assisted before the final click.

Path length Report

This tells us the number of interactions visitors had with your channels. It’s easy to see on this page if conversions were due to different interactions in the marketing funnel or due to the last click. In our case, a lot of conversions came from visitors moving through 12 or more channels.

Time Lag Report

Here you can see the amount of time it takes a customer from the first channel interaction to the final purchase; this helps with understanding customer purchasing behaviour.

Top Conversion Paths Report

Probably the most interesting report, this helps marketers understand the actual paths taken by customers. It also tells you which channels work together and in what order.

Assisted Conversions Report

This gives users a breakdown of which specific keywords, channels or campaigns assisted. Here you can filter, add secondary dimensions and group channels to discover exactly how each area converts.

Have you found Multi-Channel Funnels to be useful? -@matt_buckley

Before you try this there are a few things to note:

1. You need to have a login to the AdWords Accounts.
2. You need to be an administrator on the Analytics account (using the same login as the AdWords accounts).
3. You need to be using the new version of the analytics account.

The linking process requires you to be signed into AdWords before you are able to link the accounts. The official Google blog recommends you make the new version ‘default’ before attempting this however I was able to swap to the new version within the AdWords interface without completing this step.

Update – I realise now that if you do not make the new version of Analytics the default one before attempting this process, when it comes to linking them for the first time, you will not be presented with the correct screen. Therefore it is important to change the default analytics view to the new version before trying this process!

1. Once in the interface select the cog –> at the top right hand side of the screen.
2. Browse to the account that you wish to link (all accounts can be selected at the top left of the centre panel).
3. Once in the relevant account, navigate to the data sources tab
4. Link accounts.

A much easier process for the occasions when clients have multiple adwords accounts going into a single account.

Any thoughts? Please leave your comments on here or Twitter – @JamesMHolding

If you are measuring the cost per transaction, or goal, in Analytics then you are likely optimising toward these metrics.  The transactions in Analytics are fully attributed to the last advert a visitor clicked, but this is not the whole picture.

A visitor may search multiple times before purchasing, and so the last advert and keyword the visitor used may not be the most important one.  Consider this – the visitor conducts three searches over the course of a week:

Widget -> Blue Widget -> Widgetworld

The conversion would be attributed to Widgetworld, but the process started with Widget and involved Blue Widget.  If this were always the case, then you would presume Widget made no sales and stop focussing on it; this would ultimately result in losing all your sales, or a large proportion.

In the above example, Widget is called the initiator, so we can change to a first click model instead.  However, we would quickly end up in the same boggy mire.  After the initial search, the visitor would not see your advert again and may choose a competitor.  We need to assign some of the conversion to both the initiator and Widgetworld – the converter.

There is still a step missing here.  We would end up focussing on Widget and Widgetworld, but not Blue Widget; this intermediary step is called a contributor.  We must continue to bid on this since otherwise the visitor may not have typed in Widgetworld (especially if this is our brand name).

The answer is to give each of these terms a share of the conversion.  This is conversion attribution, and will ensure you continue to focus on all terms that drive conversions, which will help you drive maximum return on investment.

The big question is – how much of the sale (how much weight) do you assign to the initiator, contributors and converter?

What are your thoughts? -@ChrisRowett

FAQ sections are useful areas of content on a website as they help to dispel any fears from a potential customer about delivery, warranties and the like. However, FAQ sections are rarely structured to what the potential customer might ask, and are generally tucked away in a content plan that lands on a copywriter’s desk.

Just as you wouldn’t ask a delivery driver to sell something to a customer, you wouldn’t ask a copywriter to solve a customer service problem. But in effect, by sending your FAQ content brief to your copywriter directly, that is exactly what you are doing.

What is absolutely essential is that the questions in an FAQ section are real questions – this means questions that customer service teams get asked regularly. So in effect, the customer service team should devise the content brief for this area. When new questions or queries come up, these should be added to the FAQ section of the website on a regular basis.

If you are struggling with what to enter into this area, take a look at your Google Analytics data (other web stats systems are available), specifically at the keywords that drove traffic to your site in the last six months. This will unearth a surprising amount of questions (how do I do this, what can I do about that) which your customer service team should be able to answer easily. These tend to be very long questions, but should form part of your keyword strategy moving forward. Enter these questions exactly into Google and see how many results answer the question posed. Think also about how you search when looking for financial, computer-based or car related issues on the internet! This approach will then provide more copy for the copywriter to rewrite, and more content to add to the FAQ section. Fresh content is good for Google, so this is a small but significant way of ticking this box.

So by assessing your FAQ’s in this way, you are providing content that is good for users as it informs them of things pre and post-sale, and is also good for search engines as you are adding new content to the site that is specifically aimed at informing your user base. Which brings us back to the long tail…

In any search marketing campaign, the long tail is absolutely essential. A lot of top level focus is on short tail keywords (car insurance) which shows a client that they rank highly in Google for such competitive terms. While these terms account for a good proportion of traffic to a website, the cost per conversion for a purchase driven by these terms is usually the most costly.

The long tail of search, when implemented correctly, can account for around 80% of traffic to your website. There are generally hundreds of thousands of keywords that could deliver three or four visits a month to your website. However, these will generally convert at a much lower cost per conversion than the short tail terms, which will in effect bring down the overall cost per conversion keyword wide.

A narrow short tail ranking strategy can also result in a massive swing in rankings. If you are putting all your resource into ensuring you rank highly for things like car insurance, you are leaving yourself open to any algorithm changes Google decides to make, or any outside unplanned factor (your website going down for a period of time). Once something like this happens, your traffic from these phrases could plummet as a result of a loss of rankings which is at a massive cost to your business. A smart long tail strategy will underpin this and lessen the effect of a massive fluctuation in rankings.

The long tail is generally less competitive too, so easier to attain rankings for. It also allows for quicker results overall, and ends up giving your website a more natural SEO profile. You are adding content that is genuinely what people are searching for and Google will class this as good informative content.

So there you have it – your FAQ’s could be the key to driving down your cost per conversion!

Any thoughts on this? Please leave your comments below!

(Photo: SoloSEO)

Two of the most important metrics that are tracked with Google Analytics are Time on Site and Bounce Rate. There are direct correlations between the time spent on your site and the likelihood of conversion. The bounce rate (the proportion of people who only view a single page on your site and then leave) is an indicator of how well your site draws people in.

From a website optimisation point of view, you want people to look at as many of your pages as possible and to spend as much time on your site as possible. So it was interesting this week to receive Google’s Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter, which has collated data from hundreds of thousands of websites that have opted in to their anonymous data sharing pool. The results for time on site and bounce rate are interesting, not so much from the range of results but from the geographic results. It seems that countries that we think of as being more leisurely do in fact spend more time on websites, and have a lower bounce rate.

In the graphs below (taken from the Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter 2nd July 2011), you can see that the countries such as Aruba, St. Lucia and the Bahamas have a very low bounce rate and, on average, spend longer on each site. In the middle are the Western democracies (UK, France, Spain) and the more technologically advanced nations such as Japan. Then at the far end are North Korea, Cuba and China.

Google happily tells us the localisation of our visitors through Analytics – which is great, if we find that we’re having more visitors from a specific country, county or town/city. We can then create tailored content, advertising campaigns and even focus our sales in those areas.

But what if we want to find out more specific information about where our visitors originate?
I recently rediscovered the Visitors > Network Properties report. Sure I’ve always known it was there, but I only ever skimmed over it while getting to know Analytics.

Something I’d overlooked was the Service Providers report.

Finding Unique Service Providers

We can see that most of the visitors use Tiscali or Easynet – not exactly helpful (well not yet!) – but did you know that some companies and institutions have their own Service Provider names?

For example, universities:

And a variety of businesses:

This report is cluttered with the common service providers such as Easynet, Sky, Tiscali and a huge range of localised service providers.
As you can see, there are 2,715 service providers for 18,551 visits – that’s only 6.8 visits per unique service provider – that’s a lot of service providers!

Let’s add a filter to try and cut down on the chaff.

Scroll to the bottom of the report and add a new service provider ‘excluding’ filter:

Paste this into the filter text box and  choose ‘excluding’:
easynet|broadband|internet|adsl|dial-up|pool|ip|static|telecom|service|services|provider|llc|
dynamic|isp|routed|connection|block|bloc|network|phone|cable|communications|mobile|
wireless|firewall|proxy|telecommunications|addresses|customer|customers|telekom|
telkom|telefonica|abts|tiscali uk|newnet|psinet|singnet|iinet|road runner holdco|talktalk|
migration to 21cn|openzone|ntl infrastructure|aol inc|ntl|vodafone|orange home uk plc|arcor ag|
plusnet|at&t|wlms|telstra|eircom|02 online|o2 online|cellco partnership|abts delhi|
orange high speed|bellsouth|h3guk|optus|pipex|fast.co.uk|tiscalinet|telepac|virgin media|
websense|sprint|bluehost|hosting|range|city of|plusnet|sympatico

The regex above very simply removes all entries by common providers, such as ‘tiscali’ and also entries with words commonly used by other providers – for example ‘llc’, ‘routed’, ‘telecom’, ‘internet.’

So now our report has a list of more specific service providers:

There’s still a good 1,000+ service providers, but this information is a potential gold mine for finding out more specifically where your site visitors are coming from.

For example, if you’re getting a lot of visitors from large financial institutions and your website sells security systems – then you might want to start actively targeting those specific institutions that show up on your report – because someone there is interested in your site/product!

Getting Specific

We can add more filter rules to make the results more specific.

If we wanted to find all the educational institution service providers, then you can just add a ‘containing’ filter in addition to our previous filter:

universit|educat|college

And now that our report is far more specific, we can see which educational institutions some of our visitors come from:

Of course, we can swap the filter out for a number of options, such as:
plc|ltd|inc|& co|pty|limited|corporation

This will bring back a list of all company titled service providers.

This must be used in conjunction with the original ‘excludes’ filter, otherwise you’ll just get back a big list of generic service providers, as many have ‘ltd’ or ‘limited’ in the their titles.

Of course, you could also use a simple filter to find out if your competitors are regularly accessing your site. Just apply a ‘containing’ filter with a partial match to their business name – hopefully they’ll have their own Service Provider entry and show up in our report!

Segment Reporting

You can save your Service Provider filter as a custom segment report by simply setting the report up like so:

This means you’ll then be able to easily access a dashboard based around those visitors thus allowing you to quickly identify specific content that they’re interested in.

For example, this would allow you to find out if all your educational visitors are looking at your “super funny Twitter feed” page, or your “student debt” services pages.

Therefore, letting your potential customers tell you exactly what they want!

One Step Further – Combine with Visitor Profiling

Although Analytics is great about telling you which pages were viewed, in what order and how long, the visualisations provided by some profiling services such as Mouseflow and UserFly allow you to review the intent of your visitors much easier.

It can take a bit of work to narrow your recorded profiles down to match your targeted profile, but it’s worth it as reviewing a visitor recording for those in your segment report can also allow you to review their intentions.

All of your educational Service Provider-based visitors from Leeds might be visiting your ‘ABC Product’ page, but are they interested in the product itself, an advertising banner or a humorous review that’s got past your spam filter?

Opting-Out

If you don’t want any of your browsing data to be captured by Analytics, you can stop Analytics from tracking you by installing the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Addon (beta).

Please leave your comments either here or on Twitter – @MeniroDev

I suspect this addition will come as no surprise to most; social buttons have become a more and more common addition to webpage. The need to understand and track interaction on these has also grown. For the most part, more advanced implementations of Google Analytics have used virtual pageviews or event tracking to monitor this interaction – these are required no more!

Google has created a specific social tracking tag (_trackSocial), which will allow the tracking of most social elements. This tag looks like a spin off of event tracking, but with the welcomed addition of its own unique section under the ‘visitors’ report heading in Google Analytics.

This is a great little addition from Google. The only downside being the amount of additional code required to enable tracking – this is by no means an out of the box solution.

The main problem Google faces with tracking other social elements is the lack of consistency each of the providers (Facebook, Twitter, etc) take when designing their social buttons. Google has done a great job of creating some working examples of Fackbook and Twitter integrations, but even with this there is a large amount of (above average) Google Analytics code required to make this work.

One social element that is tracked automatically is the recently expanded Google +1 – any interaction with these buttons will automatically be reported within Google Analytics.

It’s still too early to be drawing conclusions on how this new data will influence our marketing strategies but what is clear is that a lot more sites will be able to gather a lot more data on social interaction.

This addition isn’t going to radically change how we view web analytics however. Google has reacted positively to meet a growing need for visibility on social interaction – a ‘nice to have’ that follows in the wake of a number of big Google Analytics announcements.

My biggest tip is to get those change requests in! Start the process of getting this implemented into your website – the sooner you start collecting data the better.

Other Resources:

+1 Reporting in Google Analytics

Earlier this month, Google launched the next phase of its +1 buttons, allowing you to embed +1 buttons on your own websites. These +1 buttons look and act similar to Twitter and Facebook buttons do currently, but it is yet to be seen if the Google +1 button will be as wildly adopted.

However if you do wish to use the +1 button on your website, it is handy to be able to track how users interact with it in Google Analytics.

Step 1: Creating the Google +1 button

You first need to create a Google +1 button: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html

Here you can complete the basics that include choosing a button size and what language the button should use.

Step 2: Generating the Google Analytics callback

Once you have done the basics, you now need to click on ‘Advanced options’ that will reveal some new fields.

One of these advanced fields is called ‘JS Callback function.’ This field should be filled in with a unique term such as ‘plusone_vote’ as shown in the image below.

Step 3: The Google +1 code

Once completed you will then be given the code to use on your website to embed the Google +1 button. The code, to be placed either in the <head> of your site or just before the closing <body> tag, should look something like this:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”>
{lang: ‘en-GB’}
</script>

And the code to be placed wherever you want a Google +1 button to appear should look like this:

<g:plusone callback=”plusone_vote”></g:plusone>

Step 4: Google Analytics tracking code for the +1 button

To tell Google Analytics to track the activity of the +1 button, the following event tracking code needs to be added:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function plusone_vote( obj ) {
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','plusone',obj.state]);
}
</script>

This code can be included with the previous generated code to be placed either in the <head> of your site or just before the closing <body> tag.

Once all of the above code has been placed on your website correctly, you will then be able to track how users interact with your +1 buttons as unique events within Google Analytics.

Any comments or questions are welcome either on here or Twitter. Catch me at @PG_Martin.

We’ve had the privilege of being able to play with this version for some time so it’s great it’s been finally released into the wild.

The new version has a large restructuring of reports and layout along with some nice new shiny features.

My personal favourite is the new account search area – YAY.

Meaning you can type a text search in the top right instead of having to selected an account, wait for it to load, select a profile, wait for it to load.

My other favourite is that when you move accounts the date doesn’t reset!!
Making monthly reports that little bit quicker and avoiding (as I’m sure we all have done) doing the analysis on the wrong date range when you accidentally forget the date range has changed!

There will be more on the new features over the coming weeks – until then – Enjoy!

Official Google announcement

Using event tracking within onclick events only works if the user ISN’T moving between pages.

By that I mean if the event is placed on a flash element or anything that doesn’t change pages.

Something as simple as:

<p><a href="#" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, label);
">Track This</a></p>

Is fine, why? The href=”#” ensures the user doesn’t move between pages. Change the above code even slightly:

<p><a href="/nextpage.html" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, label);
">Track This</a></p>

And this won’t send the event to Google and therefore won’t show up in your reports, why? The trackEvent() function doesn’t have enough time to fire off before the user is moved to the next page.

The solution?

Add a small delay to the onclick event allowing time for the event tracking to fire off.

Start by creating a function to hold’s your trackEvent() call and a small delay:

<script type="text/javascript">
function trackclick(link, category, action, label) {
  try {
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1");
    pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, label);
    setTimeout('document.location = "' + link.href + '"', 100)
  }catch(err){}
}
</script>

Don’t forget to replace the UA-XXXX-1 above with your actual account id and include before the closing head tag.

The onclick event then changes slightly:

<p><a href="/jfnhdsnfn" onClick="trackclick(this, 'Button', 'Click', 'Label'); return false;">Track This</a></p>

Install this across all areas you want to track. These can be button tracking for internal promotion, external / outbound click tracking (although I would use virtual pages views for that one) or even just navigation interaction tracking – they can go anywhere!

Change the ‘button’, ‘click’ and ‘label’ areas within the onclick event to better represent what you are tracking – for help understanding those areas see Google’s event tracking guide

The lessons here can be directly applied to the asynchronous version of Google Analytics as well

Happy Tracking!

Some weeks ago, one of our campaigns had an increasing number of clicks generated through search partner websites. At the same time, our client told us about enquiries from the Philippines – which was really a bit far away from the originally targeted region in South-East England.

After analysing the Google Analytics report we found out that on that day only 4 clicks came from the targeted region but 274 clicks from the Philippines. We immediately stopped the search partner websites and fortunately people from the Philippines lost their interest in products from our UK client.

Asking Google how it is possible to receive clicks from outside the targeted region, it was first explained that Google AdWords uses several methods of determining a user’s location, while Google Analytics uses only IP address and it doesn’t usually indicate a technical issue. As in fact the campaign generated enquires with Philippine postal addresses, the adverts must have appeared in this region. After further investigating this problem, Google finally refunded the costs for the clicks from the Philippines. However, as we can’t run adverts on the search partner websites any more, it has cost the client a significant number of good leads.

In summary, it’s worth checking in Google Analytics if campaigns with location targeting only generate clicks from within the targeted region, especially when advertising on Google Search Partner Networks.

Have you had similar experiences with clicks from outside targeted regions? I’m happy for any feedback!

Google is aware of the issue that only appears to be affecting the web reports with the data collection and API reports showing a full service.

Google’s update on the current issue is:

“We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by November 6, 2010 12:00:00 AM UTC detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Starting Oct 25th, a 24hr delay with processing in sampled reports was identified in some accounts. No data has been lost and a fix is in progress.”

This being a fairly large problem, I would expect this to be resolved much sooner.

At the time of writing, Google updated their service dashboard to show:

“The problem with Web Report should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

For a lot of people once you set-up Google Analytics you might worry: Have I done it right? There are several ways you can find this out:

1. Look at the Google Stats in a couple hours and see if your recording visits.
2. Use a Firefox plugin such as Live HTTP Headers to view the image calls being made
3. Use SiteScan by EpikOne

All these are great and will allow you to see if the code is installed and in most cases working properly but to take it one step further and identify any errors you may have Google have released their own Chrome extension.

Google released its ga_debug.js script a while back with the main problem being you had to re-tag your pages to use it. They have now taken this and incorporated it into the extension meaning there’s now no need to tag up those pages; allowing you to quickly and simply debug your Google Analytics installation.

What’s great about this is it will provide you with messages on where your problems lie. So instead of just finding out – my Google analytics doesn’t work. You can now find out why it doesn’t work!!!

Hats off to Google again for this – the debug script was a good addition but to transform it into a browser extension is a great move. I want to caveat this post by stating that the extension will only analyse simple installations and will only analyse the page you currently on. Always consult a registered GACP for those advanced implementations not only are they experts at identifying problems but will likely come up with tracking aspects that don’t come out of the box.

• Page load times
• Data collection & accuracy
• Error rates

As a general overview Google Analytics seem to have gotten it right – yey! Google Analytics never really had a problem with page load times but the new snippet improves the load times of even lightweight sites.

Data accuracy and error rates also seem to have improved…..when the code is implemented correctly – this brings me nicely to the purpose of this post. Despite a large level of information supplied by Google on how to migrate to the asynchronous code, web development departments still appear to be getting it wrong!

So here are some of the common problems I have witnessed and some simple code migration tips:

Common problem #1: Leaving the older code present

Although you might think it is silly, I have seen sites with the new asynchronous code implemented inside the HTML head and the older ga.js snippet implemented in the body.

Tip #1: Locate all ga.js code first

Get your site’s source code and use a decent search tool such as Notepad++ to scan each of your code files for “ga.js”, “UA-“ and “pageTracker”. This is a good way of quickly locating all the pages that contain your current Google Analytics code. Make a note of these pages as you WILL need to change them at some point. In the majority of cases you will be removing the code completely because the Google Analytics code moves from before the closing body tag to before the closing head tag. This leads me to:

Common problem #2: Incorrect code location

It’s amazing the number of different locations I have seen the asynchronous code located – I think my favourite was above the opening HTML tag

Sometimes it’s clear that web platforms have restricted the location of the code but where possible it should be placed in its correct location.

Tip #2: The async code should be place just before the closing HEAD tag

If you can’t get it in there get it as close to the opening body tag as possible.

Common Problem #3: Not using the migration guide

Ok this is a bit of a cop out, but on some sites it looks like developers just guessed what code needed to be present. Google provides the migration guide as a reference, you can look at what code you have on your current site and what the equivalent asynchronous version is. This leads me to:

Tip #3: Use the migration guide

The migration guide from Google is a great reference if you are unclear about what code should go where. The one area it doesn’t cover and our final common problem:

Common Problem #4: Incorrect snippet order

A standard ga.js snippet looks like:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

It is essentially in 2 parts:

[TRACKING CODE] being:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>

[TRACKING ELEMENTS] being:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

From an overview perspective the code is in the following order:

[TRACKING CODE]
[TRACKING ELEMENTS]

The same is NOT true of the asynchronous code. The async code is still essentially in 2 parts but the parts are in reverse order to that of the ga.js.

Tip #4: Ensure the code order is correct

The async code still has the same 2 parts:

[TRACKING ELEMENTS] being:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

[TRACKING CODE] being:
(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);
})();

</script>

But the orders are reversed. The tracking elements are now in front of the tracking code.

The order of the tracking elements is also important with the ­_trackPageview call being the last tracking element on all basic installations and the majority of advanced ones. This brings me to my final tip:

Tip #5: Ensure tracking elements order is correct

Having an incorrect order for the tracking elements is a sure fire way to have inaccurate stats. As a general rule the _trackPageview call will be the last of the tracking elements and the _setAccount call will generally be the first.

If you are in doubt, unsure or just don’t know – ask a Google Analytics Certified Professional (GACP) for advice – most (including ourselves) will offer Google Analytics advice completely free.

The new code provides users with an alternate way of tracking their website by putting the JavaScript code in the header!! Shocking I know!

In a nutshell, the code provides faster code loading times and browser execution. Elimination of errors when the JS doesn’t load and some enhanced data collection.

The beta is now available to all users and I recommend that you all get this up and running sooner rather than later – and why wouldn’t you – with some minor changes you can have more accurate data overnight!

On another note, if you’re interested in seeing Google Analytics’ newest features in action – you can! On December 9th at 10am PST (6pm GMT) Google is presenting its new features via a Webinar. Worth a watch if you don’t have the time to play with the new features yourself.

One of which is custom alerts, which is in the new intelligence section of analytics. This section itself is a great little tool that shows expected results for almost all aspects of the site, and should the data not fall between these expected margins, it creates an alert.  I look forward to see where they take this feature – some form of correlation between the alerts would be very useful, so instead of “x happened” (which is what we currently have) we should be looking at “x happened because of y and z” – but that discussion is for another day.

Moving on to my useful tip:

Knowing when there’s a problem

How often have you had a client or novice web developer *angry face* down their analytics? If you’ve had it, you know how annoying *second angry face* it is to see that lovely blue graph just flat line:

If you haven’t had this yet….it WILL happen, but you’ll be pleased to know when it does you can react quickly.

In the intelligence section you can now create your own custom alerts – yey!
These alerts will email you when someone downs their analytics so you can immediately pick up the phone and in the following order:

1. Fix it
2. Fire the person responsible

So how do I create these wonderful alerts I hear you ask, well it’s simple.
In the intelligence section click the “Create a Custom Alert” link:

Create your alert name, I’ve gone for the aptly named “CODE RED”; ensure the period is set to “Day” and that you have checked the “Email Me” box.

Ensure the alert conditions apply to “All Traffic” and you can then customise the “Alert me when” to: “Visits” : “% decreases by more than” : “10%” : Compared to “Same day in the previous week” – we use same day in the previous week as, for example, comparing a Monday to a Sunday usually created false emails.

This is not a hard and fast rule for every site, you can use day to day and also the percentage will need tweaking depending on the level of traffic consistency each site has. I always ensure this is set-up to be on the more ‘paranoid’ side of things. I’d much rather the system emails me than something goes unnoticed.

You should now have something that looks like this:

Click the button and you’re done!

You will now know (relatively quickly) when there is a problem with tracking in Google Analytics.

There is another useful custom alert coming soon, but let me know what you’ve got set up.

Two weeks ago, Google hosted their annual conference for Google Analytics Authorised Consultants (GAAC’s), to which Epiphany sent along 2 employees. This conference has been taking place for around 5 years now, and is typically a chance for leading authorities of Analytics to share ideas and practices. As well as dining all week at Google’s expense – attendees are
given exclusive previews of the latest developments to Google Analytics.

This year’s conference was packed full of influential speakers and thought leaders, who explored new tools for Website Optimisation, better ways to use Google Analytics and the future of search. Our two representatives returned with a better understanding of how Google intends to shape its future and also new, innovative ideas which will add value for our clients. This knowledge will ensure Epiphany stays ahead of the curve in 2010.

Our star pick of the new tools available is ‘AttentionWizard.com’ which Epiphany is currently testing. ‘Attention Wizard’, developed by Tim Ash [http://twitter.com/Tim_ash], brings eye-tracking technology to the masses at an affordable price. Using analysis of data from real eye-tracking tests, this is a tool which simulates the results of running a real eye-tracking test and will offer great value for Website Optimisation.

We cannot discuss these advances until they are officially released, but we are rapidly disseminating the information internally; and when the features and products are officially released, our clients will immediately see the benefits.

Analytics Intelligence will provide you with an overview of any significant changes in the behaviour of visitors to your website.  For example, if your bounce rate were to increase then analytics intelligence would point this out.  It would even go on to tell you if this was as a result of an increase in a specific region, such as London.

This new feature will appeal to analysts with little time to spend trawling through every metric to spot changes and to those who find statistics daunting.  Furthermore, you will be able to set up custom alerts to send you an email when a specific event occurs, such as visits per day falls below 200.  A very useful warning system, especially if you have many clients to deal with.

If you have logged into your Google Webmaster Tools account recently, you may have noticed a new item under Site configuration -> Settings. Welcome to Parameter Handling.

The new Parameter Handling feature of Google Webmaster Tools lets you potentially take control of how Google handles the indexing of pages within your site that contain parameters. Google’s own ‘Learn more’ text gives more info.

So what can you do with the new Parameter Handling functionality?

As Google state, you can create up to 15 rules (that they don’t guarantee to use) on how parameters found within your URLs should be handled. You simply add the parameter name and select Don’t Ignore or Ignore.

So if we used a variable to reorder the elements on a page which means that /page.html and page.html?order=1 are basically the same page with the content reordered, we might want to say ‘Hey Google, save yourself some hassle and us some bandwidth. Ignore pages with the order variable attached.’

And to do this you would simply add order select Ignore and click Save.

What benefit will using Parameter Handling have?

Well it may have none (see the Google ‘Learn more’ text) but what Google are trying to achieve is more efficient crawling. More efficient crawling means that the robots will have more resource to crawl more of your site rather than wasting time on duplicated pages.

How does using this feature compare to the canonical meta tag or 301 redirects?

Well one important thing to remember is that this only applies to Google. Yahoo have supplied similar functionality for a while (which of course may disappear) while Bing haven’t. The canonical meta tag on the other hand should work across all 3 (but seems to be a bit flaky at the moment on Yahoo and Bing). Another benefit of the canonical tag is that it handles all cases in 1 go. No matter what variables get added to the end, the same rule is triggered.

The canonical tag however, doesn’t aid crawling as the page still needs to be crawled and analysed to find the tag in the first place.

Compared to 301 redirects, using this functionality can in some cases be a better choice. Consider a random unavoidable tracking variable. This variable creates the URL /page.html?source=aff123. Now traditionally we might have set up a 301redirect to handle this. 301 redirects have the advantage of passing some link power but they can be hard or sometimes impossible to implement. They can also sometimes play havoc with tracking.

Other things worth a mention

Well the first interesting thing that I noticed was that Google list all of the individual parameters that they have found on any of the URLs for your site they have crawled. In the case of the site I was looking at they found the variables i, referrer, loc, ftype and a few others.

Now you should really know what parameters are being used within your site but there are always going to be times when you don’t and this is a good piece of insight.

One important item to mention (and this applies to 301 redirect, the canonical tag and a whole lot more) is the need to use the functionality correctly. Although this functionality gives a lifeline to people who are non-technical or don’t want to get the techies involved, it can very likely bite you if you set it up incorrectly – so be careful.

And to close, the real solution to all this is to apply various techniques to handle every eventuality. Handle requests for pages with variables at the server via a 301 to the human readable URL. Avoid using old style URLs in your internal navigation. Use the canonical tag and this new functionality in the knowledge that it may be ignored. But don’t just leave it to fate.

Good luck.

SEOMalc.

1. The ability to link AdWords and Analytics accounts which, until Google’s update regarding cost data reporting meant all CPC traffic was recorded as direct.
2. The inability to create new profiles  which are essential for testing and segmentation
3. The inability to apply filters essential for filtering out your own IP. Applying filters also has some very powerful data manipulation uses.

Each Google account is allowed 25 new Analytics account creations; therefore it shouldn’t be an issue for web development agencies and search agencies alike to be creating new analytics accounts for all sites.

When taking over a site that has the all sites account, I recommend you create a brand new GA account and run the two accounts in tandem. This will allow you to compare trends on the old analytics account whilst reporting more accurately from data in the new account.

When setting up analytics for a site:

• Ensure the site is given an individual analytics account
• Create at least one testing profile
• Ensure goal / e-commerce tracking is correctly set-up
• Filter out your own and the clients IP address
• Link the accounts through Google AdWords
• Grant access to the required users

Hopefully the next time you take over an account the agency will have followed these best practice rules.

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions allow cross-tabular analysis of data. The possibilities of this addition are huge – in Google’s example they selected keywords and used city as the second dimension. They also pivoted by source, showing all visits per city and keyword from each search engine.

Without explaining how this works and to avoid getting people confused, my best advice is to view the video below. It’s a great real world example of how this works:

At heart, I am a code monkey. I love to code. Some of my strongest memories of my childhood revolve around sitting with my Grandfather, inputting reams and reams of code into a BBC Model B and spending the following month debugging it. So when Google finally released its Analytics API as a public beta (cough) I immediately started considering what I could do with it and how.

Now to clarify, this isn’t a technical post and I won’t discuss my actions or intentions. At the moment, I have had little more than a play around – so sorry! I plan to do a basic guide style post in the future, which will be much more technical (if it hasn’t already been exhausted by then), but for now I will just review the history, potential and some of the stuff that’s already happening.

Background

Since its launch as a free analytics package in 2005, Google Analytics has become immensely popular. It has its limitations much like any other analytics package but through recent developments including the switch from urchin.js to ga.js and the addition of custom filtering it has become a pretty solid platform – a platform that provides access to a hell of a lot of information and varying ways of viewing it.

In a way, one of the positives with Google Analytics is, in turn, a flaw. By providing access to such an abundance of data, reports, filtering options etc. it has become inoperative to some and even clunky to navigate at times.

About a year ago, Google first announced its API as a private beta project open to a select few. It has now come into the light as a public beta project (God only knows if it will ever come out of beta) with similar limitations to most other APIs, such as a maximum of 10,000 requests by a given web property (presumably IP address) and 100 requests within a 10 second period. Whether these limitations will be eased in the future as other popular applications arise I don’t know, but at the moment, it isn’t stopping people being extremely creative and investigating the true potential.

What does this all mean?

Basically, by producing an API, Google have provided access to all the information present within Google Analytics without the need to use the standard Google Analytics interface. This means the data can be viewed in even more ways and reduced to the essential information. Your imagination is the limit well, apart from the request limits, coding restrictions…..

Potential uses

At launch, Google provided interfaces for Javascript and Java. Already several very clever people have expanded this via user contributed libraries for Python, PHP, .NET and more. Most languages have graph plotting extensions and bolt-ons such as JPGraph for PHP by now. So in theory, you create an application that authenticates itself with Google Analytics, requests data, manipulates the returned data and visualises it in a graph, a chart, or any other appropriate fashion.

I may want a box on my website detailing where my latest visitors come from, which of my blog posts are the most popular, what words people use to visit my site etc. Some noted applications already developed are;

• http://www.analyticsmarket.com/mobileapps/mobile-ga/android – An app for easy access to Google Analytics via Android.
• http://www.desktop-reporting.com/polaris.html – An Adobe Air based desktop app for quick and easy access.
• http://labs.nypl.org/2009/04/29/visualizing-search-data-whats-the-right-amount-of-visibility/ – The New York Library are looking at how to visualise their search data as tag clouds.

There is also a list containing some of these and more at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataGallery.html.

As you can see some people have already put considerable time into their ideas and I would expect this to continue with some really revolutionary stuff coming soon from reskins to complete outside of the box utilities.

I know I can’t wait to put some time aside to mash something together using JPGraph or similar with PHP to see what I get.

Malcolm Slade

Resources

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataDeveloperGuide.html – The official documentation area.
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/google-analytics-api-and-php/ – The stuff I have been reading regarding using PHP.
http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/, http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php, http://graphpite.sourceforge.net/ – some of the popular graph creation tools one of which I will very likely be using.

Google analytics is something that I, and I’m sure most online marketers, use on regular basis. It is a great way to identify patterns and trends in your traffic and conversions. The only drawback was that you couldn’t compare different time periods to monitor year on year patterns and trends and see obvious areas of growth and/or decline.

The comparison tool is easy to find and easy to use and, as always it produces excellent reports in seconds.

I have to say that for me Google Analytics is fast becoming the most useful metrics program available. It’s free, it’s comprehensive and it’s easy to use. I’m sure it will soon become the industry standard for all search marketing agencies. It’s fab!