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  • Does ‘not provided’ plague Google Analytics Premium?

    The question came up the other day whether or not ‘not provided’ keywords info was a problem which plagued Google Analytics Premium the way it does Google Analytics (free). According to this post at Cloudshapes.co.uk, it does. All this ‘not provided’ silliness comes from Google encrypting search query data if the user is ‘signed in’. To make things worse, Firefox begain defaulting Google searches to https within 8 months of Google’s change.

    This lack of keywords info further complicates web analytics, so it is somewhat comforting to know that this not provided issue affects Google Analytics (paid and non-paid) equally.

    There is some hope – SEO and WA pros have written various posts describing custom GA reports which can shed a little light on the missing keywords data.

  • Odd bedfellows: using SiteCatalyst code with Google Tag Manager

    Brett Hale’s Straight from Hale WA blog has a detailed and interesting post which explains his efforts to make SiteCatalyst’s code work asynchronously with Google Tag Manager. What a concept! GTM is not the most robust tag manager, but the price point is always agreeable, as with most other Google offerings.

  • Capture search keywords on VPASP 6 into Google Analytics, logfiles, etc.

    Amazingly I couldn’t find any writeups about how to modify VPASP to capture on site search keywords into Google Analytics or the http logfile, etc. So I decided to take a look at shopsearch.asp looking for opportunities for a quick mod. I quickly found the location to add one line of code so that I could pass the search term as a querystring parameter to the shopdisplayproducts.asp template (search results page).

    On the system at hand, the location was on/about line 57:

    Change line
    responseredirect "shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes&sppp=" & howManyItems
    to
    responseredirect "shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes&sppp=" & howManyItems & "&kwd=" & allwordsString

    So, what we’re doing here is passing the ‘allwordsString’ variable (the search term) as a query string parameter value to ‘kwd’. ‘kwd’ could be anything unique on your system, but you’ll need to add whatever you call ‘kwd’ to the Google Analytics Site Search query string parameter setup in order to capture the data. (Let me know if you need more help with that part.)

    The next improvement on this mini-project will be to pass some data into Google Analytics so that failed searches (on site search where search term generates zero results) can be quantified. More on that later…..

  • Linear Conversion Reports in Google Analytics (horizontal funnel reports)

    I don’t see much written on linear conversion reports like you might think. They are a great way to monitor key metrics on a website, such as the steps in a site’s conversion funnel. While I have long known how to get these reports running in Adobe SiteCatalyst, I had never tried creating one in Google Analytics (tsk, tsk!!) until now. So, if you’re interested in learning how to get these reports for your own GA account, here’s a great how-to article from Tim Leighton-Boyce at CXFocus.com entitled Get an Instant Checkout Health Check with this one-stop Report. The important thing about this post I’m citing is that it has been revised multiple times with more relevant information and improvements.

    Enjoy, and please share your results, time permitting!

    PS – I haven’t tried creating a horizontal conversion funnel in Webtrends – has anyone else tried?

  • Webtrends Presentations Channel on SlideShare

    Just for fun I popped in to SlideShare today looking for Webtrends Engage presentations and I found that there is an entire channel of material ready to be used at any time. When you have a few moments to fill and you’re in need of a new idea for your analytics (any tool, really) you should have a look around!

  • Facebook Graph Search beta

    While I personally can either take or leave Facebook, I am interested in search, and a lot of folks are at least trying to monetize Facebook. So FB’s latest tweak makes for a little blog post for the new year! Anyway, this new update in Facebook, while currently in limited beta, is aimed at making its search functionality more powerful and easy to use. According to the article at the link above, the first four parameters are to be: People, Photos, Places and Interests. Apparently there is a waitlist to get this feature, so FB can monitor usage during the rollout. Wouldn’t you like to be privvy to those analytics! (Thanks go to my colleague Brian Reilly at RevD for his timely LinkedIn post about Graph Search!)

  • Convergence Analytics

    ClickZ is working towards coining a new term, Convergence Analytics, and so in writing this post, I guess I’m helping with that process. Besides sounding cool, it does nicely summarize what we’ve been doing the hard way for the past few years: joining data from various analytics tools into a single tool. Of course now, the tools we’re using are more savvy and accept data from other sources and that is what is enabling this convergence of data and data analytics. Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, etc. are able to accept external data and join it with the ‘native’ data captured by the tool and process all the data together to formulate reports. As one of my business colleagues always mutters… ‘there’s never been a better time to be alive… (or a data analyst) with all this innovation around us!”

    More to come on this topic – its just going to get better!

  • Limitations of Google Analytics, and How Much are you willing to invest in Web Analytics?

    Brian Clifton’s Measuring Success blog is full of good posts. The blog complements his book, now in its 3rd edition. The first post I spotted was a detailed listing of the limitations of the non-paid public version of Google Analytics. This kind of info is valuable for those who need to size a web analytics solution for a larger site. Most normal or low-traffic websites would never reach these limits. Sizing is a perfect segue into the next post I found interesting: “Should You Pay $150,000 for your web analytics tool?” This post provides some great guidelines, such as not paying for web analytics unless the site is generating $1million in annual revenue at minimum. I’d never heard a number like that before, but I’ve never claimed to be a P&L expert either.

    These two posts are great for making you think about what you’re really trying to accomplish with your analytics; I hope you’ll take a few moments to read through them.

  • Quantifying website “friendliness” to mobile devices

    Looking to determine if your site is mobile-friendly?  The W3C has a nice tool just for this purpose, their mobile validator.  Give it the URL of a page or site you’d like to check out, and it will provide a detailed report which can help you gauge how the mobile experience will be for that site.   Try it on a site you like – you may be surprised at the results returned!

  • Recovering some insight from ‘not provided’ in Google Analytics Keywords reports

    One of the most frustrating details with Google Analytics and its ever-changing features is dealing with the sad ‘not provided’ listing in Keywords reports. Here’s a couple of nicely detailed blog posts which can help you regain some insight into which pages of your site get this ‘unidentified’ traffic, and therefore get you some ‘intel’ into visitor interest/intent.

    First helpful ‘not provided’ post at Custom Report Sharing for Google Analytics

    Read that post and you’ll find this one at eConsultancy.

    Enjoy and best of luck unraveling these mysteries!