Category: Web Analytics

Lots of sites use Google Analytics and that is good news.  The next question becomes: ‘is it installed correctly’?  Here’s one tool which can help answer the question: SiteScan™ by EpikOne. It will check up to 1000 pages on your site and report the results via email. Pretty nice for a great price: free.

I finally found in one place the Google Analytics API documented in one place, all on one page. This page lists the myriad functions which can be called from the pageTracker object.

It’s true – the best way to understand and be sure what activity happens on your website is to open the logfiles. You’ll find a lot of activity which is good for your cause, such as search engine spiders and real human visitor activity, and you’ll find abuse such as hacker attacks and content theft. Blogger Eric Lander wrote this thorough post which introduces log file analysis to webmasters and SEOs.

This Wikipedia entry provides a most complete list of server log analysis tools, but remember, to get started looking at logs, all you really need is a good text editor. Even Notepad works in a pinch.

Yes, the old 5 “w”s apply to web analytics too!

Turns out that in web analytics, we need to know who will receive the reports, data and insights gained from our analytical efforts; we need to know what information we should share (dependent on ‘who’ and ‘when’); we need to know where, as in where do we make this data known to our ‘whos’ so that we can ensure it is used and valued; we need to know when to share our findings; and we need to know why we’re expending all the analytical effort (as in what do we hope to learn?) and why site visitors behave the way they do when on site.

As you can see, the web analyst’s assignments aren’t much different than a news reporter’s or a detective’s. Read well-known analytics expert Jason Burby’s complete blog post. Enjoy!

I just found this interesting blog post at WebAnalyticsWorld which has links to compare Google Analytics to many other web analytics and stats packages. Some of these comparisons are better than others, but they all make for good reading and go a long ways into understanding the long tail of web analytics (check out the vendor list at WebAnalyticsBook – more than 100 vendors and growing!). Cheers!

It seems that WebTrends has made a neat tool publicly available recently, the WebTrends SDC Tagbuilder! I think this tool will make SDC a lot simpler for WebTrends users. This little app will help analysts build custom Source Data Collection (SDC) tags with rapid precision.

Many people I speak with regarding web analytics wonder if they have the right solution. Free solutions such as Google Analytics can get you a lot of insight, but how do you know when it is time to upgrade to a full sized solution such as [fill in the blank here: WebTrends, Omniture, ClickTracks, etc.]? Judah Philips over at Web Analytics Demystified blogs about the topic in two parts.

Judah highlights Custom Reports as one feature which sets apart the free or economy solutions from the full-featured products. I’ve had the good fortune of working with the WebTrends custom reporting feature and I used it to gain customer behavior insight many times. I’ll write about those experiences soon.

I think of it as enhancing, instead! Search engine marketer (and web analytics practitioner) Peter van der Graaf discusses enhancing Google Analytics without JavaScript and Tweaking and filtering GA. These blog posts aren’t so recent, but they are new to me and relevant to anyone still using Google Analytics ‘out of the box’.

Think of it that way – it’s a view of your site as a crawler sees it. I’m talking about a service called crawlscore which promises to give you a report of what your web site looks like from a search engine crawler’s point of view. The idea is that you’ll use this as one of the tools in your bag to help you optimize your site for search. It seems the pricing is reasonable. I’ll write more about this product after I try it out on site(s) I support.

I wouldn’t recommend total reliance on a product like this because no one will ever truly know the algorithms behind a search engine’s processes for crawling and post-crawl processing, but this tool combined with other common-sense SEO best practices may help you promote your site by achieving better positioning in search results. Once of these best practices is to get your site’s html coding syntactically correct once you determine the best html document header to use. And that’s at least a couple blog topics!

I just came across another discussion about on site search. This one is rather thought provoking as it asks the question: would there be times when you wouldn’t want site visitors to use your on site search facility. Of course we all want to think site designs and site navigation are so wonderful that no one would need to search, but unless a site’s internal search engine was so poor I can’t think of another reason not to want visitors to search.

What do you think?

Be sure to read the linked item on Avinash’s blog about internal site analytics for another perspective!