If you’ve struggled with Custom Reports in Google Analytics, here’s the ticket for you! Crowdsourced Google Analytics Custom Reports at CustomReportSharing.com.. I struggled with custom reports as well, but that was in the Webtrends world – until I took a class. Finally Dimensions and Metrics made sense in my head. So click over to CustomReportSharing.com after you peruse a couple more posts here. Pick up a few new ideas to try and… Enjoy!
Blog
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Yahoo! Web Analytics going away – but where was it?
I always wanted to try Yahoo! Web Analytics, but never met anyone using it because in order to access the product, it was necessary to be a Yahoo Business customer. So to me it is no surprise that this product is going away.
Everything I read about Yahoo! Web Analytics stated it was a good offering. I can’t understand why Yahoo! didn’t open access to the tool, except that it would have become necessary to devote resources to supporting it. Hopefully any new technology involved in the product will be used to enhance other products in the future – I hate to see this product go even though it was not really accessible to the world. I may recycle the book written about this product by Dennis Mortensen, which I purchased at Ollies Closeouts – it won’t be much use any more except as a paperweight. Goodbye YWA!
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Miracles can happen, even in the web analytics field!
No, the miracle isn’t that I’m making the first post in nearly three months! (If you only knew the rest of the story!)
The miracle is that a new, publicly available book about SiteCatalyst will be published in Fall 2012 by Adam Greco (aka the omni-man). This is the best news I’ve heard in quite some time since I discovered the Key Metrics report in SiteCatalyst 15 which lets you put various measures together in a single report.
Anyone who has read Adam’s blog (see blogroll below, right) knows he is quite the expert in SiteCatalyst since the Omniture days. So I have high expectations for the upcoming book. And I’m thankful the book is actually coming out for the public!
I hope to post more often in the coming days – until next time!
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Free web tools
You’ve already used some or all of the tools in this list, but in case you have not, the list includes links to Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Page Rank Checker and more. One caveat, they need to delete Yahoo Site Explorer and add Bing Webmaster Tools.
For social media analysts, take a look at this list of 20 Social Media Monitoring Tools also at LunarPages.com’s blog page. Some of these are fee-based, but many are free such as SocialMention.com, my new favorite.
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Social Media ROI
This huge infographic poses the question, Is Social Media Marketing Effective? Then goes about proving or disproving it. Most web analytics tools have added the ability to track the effects of Social Media efforts, but implementation is not simple and reading the results less than straightforward. Looking at any reports, keep in mind the real reason you’re making efforts in the Social Media arena: most likely it is to increase conversions. Keep the real reasons in perspective when quantifying all thoses Likes and Followers! -
Google Analytics skill training and test
GoogleAnalyticsTest.com – It isn’t the same as the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test, but it is a free resource for testing your Google Analytics skills without paying for a costly test. You can use it as a practice place before taking the IQ test, or just use it to learn important Google Analytics concepts and best practices you can apply elsewhere.
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Analytics Referrer Spam
Recently my associates and I have been seeing something in our Google Analytics reports we now know to call referrer spam. This post very neatly documents all the particulars of this latest ploy. In the article the author recommends not visiting the oddball referring sites, which is a rather irresistible thing to do as a web analyst. It is our very nature to visit new referring sites to see how our content is being referred to, etc. Bad news is, the way the perps are going about this, you won’t ever find any links to your site on these referring sites. I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before there is a clever response from the web analytics community or from the analytics providers themselves. Time for another game of cat and mouse, unfortunately; and, a good reason to frequently review your web analytics reporting!
Update: more information is available at this post, and includes other links you may find in your reports. I am not mentioning specific domains because they are listed in the posts I’m linking to, and I don’t want to give them any more attention since the attention they’ve earned was ill-gotten to begin with.
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Responsive Design reading
New topics around Responsive Design such as Responsive Content and Responsive Content Thinking are emerging, and this ClickZ article handles these in a Feb. 1 post titled Responsive Design, Nimble Architecture. The bottom line is that a lot of upfront preparation and thought go into achieving a responsive site and good information architecture is essential. Web analytics can play an essential part of migrating an existing site into a new information architecture and responsive design. On the other hand, implementing a new design/architecture is a great time for a web analytics implementation checkup.
