onceinaweb

Blog

  • Check out my feed – on the right sidebar

    I’ve just added a feed subscribe widget to the blog. I welcome your subscription, it will be served by Feeedburner. Thanks for checking it out, and let me know what topics you’d like to see covered at onceinaweb.com!

  • Universal Analytics: coming soon. What are the implications for the future of web analytics and privacy?

    With each day that passes, we’re getting closer to seeing a new offering from Google, which they are calling Universal Analytics. This is a progression of Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium which will allow more seamless tracking of visitors across multiple devices using a single, simpler visitor id (vid) cookie. It will also provide a mechanism for table lookups (already a long-time feature in paid offerings such as Webtrends or SiteCatalyst).

    This is all great news for marketers and other analysts going through web traffic data, but what about for individuals? I’m not yet sure how the vid will jump between the various devices used by a single person. This tracking capability may turn into a playground or battleground for those concerned with privacy.

  • Gain Google Analytics knowledge one tip at a time

    The Google Analytics blog GA Tip of the Day will email a new tip to your inbox daily. It’s a good way to remember to look at your analytics daily if you aren’t already.

  • Tuning Bounce Rate Metrics in Google Analytics

    I just found this post so I haven’t tried the tactics explained, but the explanations of the mechanics of bounce rate are so useful I have to pass along the link. What the author is demonstrating is that Google Analytics out of the box has little way to calculate time on site without some tweaking. So if visitors stay on page for 15 minutes, GA may guess the visitor spent no time on the site at all because only one page view was logged. This could have big implications for news or blog sites where many visitors only view a single page, scanning headlines, etc. I hope to experiment with these tweaks soon – let me know if you do the same.

  • TwentyFeet for social stats monitoring

    Need to monitor your social stats on major platforms such as Twitter and Facebook? Try TwentyFeet – it is free for personal use and pricing is nominal for larger accounts. Another social media monitoring tool to try out is Addict-o-matic. It works a lot like SocialMention, but I’m not sure how long SocialMention will last. Does anyone know what’s going on with it? It does continue to function, but Alerts which should have been working ‘last week’ have been down a couple years now, it seems. I’d love to know the back story on SocialMention.

  • Stealth report rollback feature in Webtrends on Demand

    Things had been quiet over at the Webtrends Outsider blog, but not now – they’ve got big news to report. It is now possible to do little (1-3 day) data rollbacks with their hosted web analytics product which will allow users to see the effects of newly added report configurations faster than waiting for the next update.

  • Identifying User-Agents for web analytics and web development

    This topic is a moving target, with new devices and browsers constantly entering into the wild. The User-Agent string is how well-behaved browser programs identify to the web server on each request for web content. This info is handled by the web application and is generally logged by the web server and/or web analytics system in place. If you’re doing web development, in particular mobile web development, you might find the User Agent String.com site handy to help you adapt your web application to handle the increasing number of web-enabled smartphones and other devices such as tablets, etc. The big thing I learned today was that “Fennec” is the nickname for Firefox in the mobile arena. I’m sure you’ll find something useful as well!

  • Five little-known factoids about Google Analytics

    Here is a post at ClickZ which explains some facts about Google Analytics. They are indeed facts, but if you look carefully you’ll see the post was sponsored by Adobe. Pretty ironic, huh? That might be like vegetarians sponsoring an ad for meat or something, since Adobe owns SiteCatalyst, a major player in the paid web analytics arena. I think the point of the post is to make potential or existing users of Google Analytics think about the features they really need in a web analytics tool. Who knows how long Analytics will remain free of charge, but if I were a web analytics vendor, I’d be watching Google Analytics rather closely on an hourly basis because new features we only dreamed of are now available to virtually any web site owner.

    I’ve been fortunate to have access to SiteCatalyst and Webtrends (but not Yahoo Analytics) and those paid tools still offer many features not yet available in Analytics such as reliable report scheduling, data export capability and customization. However, who can beat Google Analytics’ price and feature set for what it is? Have a look at the article and think it over.

    Point number 5 in the article, “GA is no better than its implementation” really bugs me since the article was sponsored by Adobe. No one more than SiteCatalyst users know how true this is, and SiteCatalyst implementation is quite a handful. Just because you pay for the tool doesn’t make the implementation any better in many cases. Implementation is a complex task for any web analytics tool and so many organizations struggle with it. The good news is that it can be fixed even when it has been done incorrectly – given enough time and resources.

  • Help for those who need to recover access to Google Analytics

    It happens often enough because most web site owners don’t get ownership of their Google Analytics assigned to an email account to which they have control. Most times the web developer sets up access under his or her own email and never shares access with anyone else. It isn’t easy to find (such as near the Forgot Userid/Password link, hint, hint Google), but there is a link where Google provides help for those who request to regain access to the Analytics account. I’ve had to look for this link many times, so I’m posting it here for myself and for others who might need it. Please comment with your experience using this link – I’m sure there will be interesting stories to tell!

  • Link Builders – scratchpad post

    This will serve as a scratchpad post for URL link builders.  As tracking becomes more complex and meaningful, the tagging requirements are more exact.  Many vendors and analysts have developed tools to get more consistent results by more web analytics users.

    (A quick search did not turn up tag builders for Coremetrics or Yahoo! Analytics, but as I find other tag builders, I’ll add them.)