onceinaweb

Category: Google Analytics

  • 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!

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Google Analytics Visitor Flow feature

    It seems that forever one of the advantages paid web analytics tools had over Google Analytics was path analysis. Not anymore – for a few months now GA has had something called Visitors Flow and it is pretty cool. This “new” feature allows you to segment on the fly and visually view a chart of the different ways site visitors traverse your website. For me the best part is that the visitor flow feature works retroactively with your data, unlike some setup and configuration which works going forward from the time it was set up. More posts to come about this really nice feature addition – the pressure continues on paid web analytics vendors!

  • Excellent Analytics

    Nice post title, right? Excellent Analytics is something we all strive for, but this time the topic is actually the name of a plugin / add-in for Google Analytics which allows you to pull Google Analytics data directly into an Excel spreadsheet for further processing.

    Excellent Analytics is free and open source, and has been around for a couple years now, so there’s no reason not to try it except for the fact that it relies on Windows and the Microsoft .NET framework. Click the link above to get the plugin, view the FAQ and a little gallery of sample results.

    On the same topic of pulling GA data into other tools, this blog post explains how PBS has automated some of its web analytics reporting with other paid tools such as DataGrabber ($299 street).

  • Regular Expressions: a web analyst’s best friend

    Ever heard of Regular Expressions? The first time I read the term I thought, “Hmm, so what’s the difference between a regular expression and an irregular expresson?”

    Ha ha. 🙂

    Since that day I’ve used regular expressions to save time and to cover a lot of ground really fast when searching through large text files (http log files), for text parsing in programming, and when confiiguring web analytics tools.

    So, what are regular expressions, anyway? First, you might see them referred to as Regex. Regular Expressions are short, rather cryptic patterns used for finding text within large files. If memory serves, Regex originated in the Perl programming language. Anyway, regular expressions are fast. And handy. (And why on earth aren’t they more widely supported in Omniture?) Many widely used tools such as text editors and many programming languages support various implementations of Regex. Take the time to learn them and you’ll save a lot of time combing through large files trying to find all occurrences of a certain text string.

    Web analytics consultancy Lunametrics has kindly released a nice little ebook about Regular Expressions and how they can be used in Google Analytics. It’s a free download – check it out! Your web analytics will be better for your learning effort.

    One fantastic tool I use which supports Regex is AstroGrep (available from Sourceforge.net). I frequently use AstroGrep as a programming tool and as a http logfile utility. So useful for finding all log entries for a certain site visitor (sessionalizing a user’s clickstream), etc.

  • Comparing web analytics tools

    This post will grow and eventually turn into a more complete resource, but for now here is a start. This comparison page places three web analytics tools side-by-side, and as a little bonus lists CMS integration info (at the bottom of the table). The three tools examined at the link above are Piwik, Google Analytics, and Open Web Analytics (OWA).