Tag Archive for Web Analytics

Conversion Conference London Keynotes

Posted on October 6, 2012 by

Conversion Conference

Conversion Conference 2012 has kicked things up a gear with the announcement of two amazing keynote speakers.  Running during Data Driven Business Week, Conversion Conference is focused on acceleration of online competitiveness through best practices, smarter adoption of web analytics and discovering better methods and technologies to provide detailed insights into your customers. Some of the other amazing conferences running that week include eMetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit and Predictive Analytics World.

Prof. Wolfgang HenselerThe opening keynote is run by Professor Wolfgang Henseler of Sensory-Minds who is a recognised expert of natural user interface design, usability and user experience.  He is also a consultant to Google & Microsoft on what you will see in the next generation of interface designs.  His keynote will examine challenges the role of applications in multi-touch computing and future dimensions in user experience.

Matthew Finlay, CEO of Rising Media responded about the keynote announcement “Professor Henseler is a global expert on customer and user-oriented e-business solutions as well as a user and brand experience specialist. He is creating the blueprint for the next generation of websites and as a result is in demand by global enterprises for his expertise in human-computer design.”

also adding that

“We are thrilled to have Professor Henseler open this year’s conference in what promises to be a very thought provoking keynote presentation.”

Nick HolzherrThe second keynote is being presented by Nick Holzherr of Whisk who has built a service to simplify the buying process for customers by converting recipes automatically into shopping lists within online supermarkets.

Matthew Finlay, CEO of Rising Media was quoted saying that “Nick is one of the UK’s most innovative young entrepreneurs and his new venture Whisk is set to change the way people do their food shopping online. The foundation for Whisk’s success lies the company’s focus on strategic conversion and delegates will see how this is being implemented in this exciting new business.”

Nathalie NahaiA final speaker Nathahlie Nahai of Web Psychologist has been added as a keynote speaker for Conversion Conference London.  Nathahlie is an award-winning speaker with a background in digital strategy and psychology and one of the leading voices in her frield to have both academic and hands-on experience in online persuasion.  Nathahlie is also a member of #OglivyChange that utilisies cognitive psychology, social psychology and behavioural economics to produce behaviour interventions in real life.

Conversion Conference 2012 Pass Options

  • Two Day Conversion Conference Pass (Access to Conversion Conference sessions and Expo Hall on 27th November AND 28th November)
  • One Day Conversion Conference Pass (Access to Conversion Conference sessions and Expo Hall on 27th November OR 28th November)
  • Combo Pass eMetrics (Access to Conversion Conference & eMetrics sessions + Expo Hall)
  • Super Combo Pass (Access to eMetrics, Conversion Conference AND Predictive Analytics World sessions + Expo Hall)
  • Exhibit Hall Only Pass (Access to Exhibition Hall Only – no conference sessions)

Conference Discount & Registration

Book early for London 2012 and save with our 15% Discount Code LOSTAGENCY12  and register for conference here
Conversion Conference Venue

Business Design Centre, Islington 52 Upper Street, London N1 0QH, United Kingdom Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7359 3535 Conversion Conference Social Media Links Follow them on twitter @ConvCon, and track the 2012 conversation with hashtag #ConvCon

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StumbleUpon Custom Tracking for Your Campaigns

Posted on May 3, 2011 by

Paid Discovery LogoIn a move that will take StumbleUpon from a trial platform for delivering traffic to your site or content maybe now a suitable alternative to Facebook Ads for business.  They have recently improved their account management platform so you can edit all your account URLs in a single page. They have improved the scalability of running multiple campaigns while controlling daily budgets but also smart enough to hide all URLs that don’t have an active campaign.

Account Management Made Easier: Introducing the Manage Page

Account Management Made Easier: Introducing the Manage Page

Last week StumbleUpon announced a move that will equip marketers with much better data so they are able to ensure their campaigns are leading them in the right direction with a move that allows marketers to tag their sponsored pages with custom tracking parameters. The new beta feature is being rolled out for all advertisers eventually but is initially just a beta program that requires you to complete a wait list request. The testing program will be progressively adding new advertisers into their Custom Tracking beta program on a weekly basis.

Omniture & Custom Tracking for Your Campaigns

Omniture & Custom Tracking for Your Campaigns

Their Custom Tracking feature is designed for all advertisers who are using web analytics solutions such as Google Analytics or Omniture and allows them to add a custom tracking parameter so you can track all your URLs in the way that works best for you.  You can choose to use StumbleUpon Paid Discovery with or without parameters so if you have any questions ping them on Twitter @PaidDiscovery and sign-up to their a beta wait list request.

No comments Posted in Social Media

Webtrends integrates with Marin Software

Posted on August 28, 2010 by
Webtrends has been fairly aggressively trying to catch up to its competitors through a number of purchase Transpond (Social Mobile Marketer), Widemile (Testing & Optimising) and ClickShift (Ad Optimisation) and the partnership with Marin Software could easily develop into an acquisition. Webtrends is now the only enterprise level web analytics platform that is still privately owned and not part of a bigger software company but its clear that sooner or later it will either have to merge or be bought out.
MediaPost has reported Webtrends & Marin Software have signed a license agreement which also involves the integration of their technology platforms.  The move is smart as it allows companies to link the entire campaign metrics similar to Overdrive’s Social Eye social media ROI dashboard.
The benefit is that companies can analyse website traffic via webtrends analytics platform to measure campaign performance and goals/revenues and adjust the paid campaigns through their Webtrends Ads which is now powered by Marin Software to improve or optimise their traffic.  The benefit for those using Marin Software is they can now collect details on organic traffic to source new keywords for SEM campaigns and measure its impact on brand awareness for a particular product or service, similar to Google Campaign Insights.
Facebook Integrations
Webtrends announced one of the first analytics solutions for Facebook fan activity and interactions that happens inside Facebook on custom tabs , Facebook apps and shares back in March 2010. Also just recently Marin Software had announced their bid management platform now allows for managing Facebook ads, but has layered over the ability to use algorithmic bidding, advanced audience segmentation and ad testing/rotation features.  The companies are working along very close paths and by using API integration it is easier to pass data between platforms and reduces incorrect decisions made based on poorly aligned data that previously processed manually to find patterns.
Benefits in buying ads?
The benefits of being able to successfully purchase advertising space on Facebook with a pure focus on measurable campaign objectives and optimise the campaign to deliver the most sales or leads does offer an strong incentive for more agencies to examine their platform.  The obvious other benefits is the time saved in reporting and analysis which allows for larger and more complex campaigns to be run more efficient with less cost and decreased wasted spend.
Google Analytics Competitor?
It moves their technology platform closer to a true competitor for Google Analytics which has continued to integrate with DoubleClick and AdWords.  While the recent updates to Microsoft adCenter do improve the market place for advertisers it doesn’t integrate as well as this agreement.  It will be likely that a number of technology companies will be looking at either increasing their purchases of smaller players or examining how much a bid for the two companies would cost. Webtrends has continued to remain a niche player with only around 1,000 clients or around 1.74% of all web analytics installs compared to Google Analytics 48.9% of the market.
analytics marketshare
Who would buy the combined Webtrends/Marin Software company?
It would be a smart move for one of the search networks such as Microsoft adCenter, AOL or even ASK to buy the two companies as it will finally allow for a real competitor to emerge to Google Analytics.  The a smarter purchase of Webtrends/Marin Software would be by one of the two leading social media platforms that are trying to show their investors they have a solid business model for earning revenue and their ad network is more than just an experiment for advertisers.  If Twitter or Facebook purchased the combined Webtrends/Marin Software company it would allow for them to expand their Ad network and rapidly scale their value to advertisers.
The dark horse in the market is Apple, which based on Google’s purchase of Urchin which forms the base of their web analytics it would possibly approved by the FTC and European competition watchdogs who want more than one powerful player in the market.  IBM would likely be locked out of any more purchases in the analytics space due to its recent consumption of two of Webtrends biggest competitors.
Webtrends competitors purchased
  • Unica was purchased by IBM on the 13th August 2010
  • Coremetrics was purchased by IBM on 15th June 2010
  • Omniture was purchase by Adobe on 15th September 2009
  • Urchin Software was acquired by Goolge on 29th March 2005
The upgrade has begun with existing accounts and any new advertisers will have to wait until October 2010 to start using Webtrends Ads for their digital campaigns.  It will be interesting to see what competitors such as Kenshoo, Efficient Frontier or Acquisio might be doing over the next few weeks to counter this technology marriage. I say the analytics market needs some more consolidation and plenty of more agreements to share API access and cross platform integrations would be welcomed by most advertisers and agencies.
Keep up with The Sun?
4 comments Posted in search industry

Facebook Insights Update

Posted on August 4, 2010 by

Facebook LogoFacebook has drastically improved their insights platform for businesses using Facebook Fanpages, starting with a top level dashboard view that allows for a top level view across all the Fanpages that you manage.  The biggest change you will notice that the platform has dropped the reference to “fans” and replaced them with “users”, and they now offer a standard monthly or daily view for insights.  You cannot currently adjust the date range shown or cannot seek weekly stats which would be more useful than days as they are less prone to erratic spikes.

Facebook Pages Insights

You can also see that Facebook has also starting offering Insights for your domain, which starts to build the platform for a more detailed understanding about Facebook’s value to your website traffic and can deliver results and detail not available in most other web analytics tools. The information and insight will likely not be as detailed as java script based tracking scripts but it is a sign of where Facebook might be taking its platform, so Google Analytics stay tuned….

Facebook insights for your domain

The tracking authorisation works similar to Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools, by using a simple META tag added to your site, individual page, application or potentially your personal profile page.  It can be linked to your personal account or your Fanpage as I have done above.  The code was just added today so as you can see from the screenshot below no data has yet been captured and it will take up to 24 hours to process and display.

Repeated point its not real-time

The insight data is still not real-time which may present some issues for larger advertisers who have to rely on real time data to feed back to decision makers.  The Facebook insights data is aggregated on a daily basis and is usually made available within 24 hours after a full day has been completed.

Insights for your domain data

Facebook insights for your domain
The new insights for your domain, offers some great insights for any URL on your domain including sharing and demographics.  The daily activity report shows all the sharing and likes of all the pages on your domain including feedback per share and reshare rates. The demographic information provides gender and age details and can also provide geographic and language data to supplement other solutions such as Google Analytics that doesn’t provide such demographics on your website visitors.
Previous Facebook insights for Fanpages
The old platform didn’t come close to even the most basic web analytics product and was often regarded as the weak point when trying to use the internal Facebook platform for campaign analysis instead of paid solutions such as webtrends that offered some more detailed reporting. The benefit of the old version allowed for you to select particular date ranges and the page loaded quickly, the new update seems to fail in these areas.
Old Facebook Insights
New Facebook insights for Fanpages
The new platform does seem to match the look and feel of the continuously updated Facebook interface and brings a lot more of the bells and whistles that clients and agencies expect of any hosted analytics product.  The graphs offer mouse over for more detail on a specific day show but doesn’t yet allow for filtering by geographic or demographic information which would be more attractive for larger campaigns.
New Facebook insightsFacebook Reporting
The new Facebook insights offers initially 2 breakdowns for visitors by users and interactions, with what looks like room for more reports in future updates to the platform. The mouse-over feature shown below allows for a daily breakdown of any graphs show, but would be great if you could select and drag for an extended period of time such as the last 7 days.  The simplicity is obviously designed for self-managed campaigns, but it would be great if they could offer an advanced feature that could be customised to suit reporting for a particular fanpage.
Insights mouseover
Facebook Reporting – Users
The user report offers some great insights into your Fanpage, the first part covers daily active users.  The daily active users offers a great breakdown to see the current engagement with your Fanpage, along with the key sources of daily users shown here by page visitors and post viewers.
Facebook Active Users
Facebook Reporting – Users
The total likes is a good guide for how the fan base is growing for your page along with the number of users who have hidden your page updates from their news feed.  There is also the ability to show daily likes or total likes over the past period of time that Facebook decides, you cannot adjust the total time guidance and you can see here that its around 6-7 weeks which is far shorter than the total time the page existed.
Facebook New Likes Total
The like sources details where the common places that users decide to “like” your page, and some of the many Facebook fan sources are:
  • Application Directory
  • Applications Dashboard – Friends’ Applications (labeled section)
  • Applications Dashboard – Friends’ Recent Activity (labeled section
  • Applications Dashboard – Your Applications (labeled section)
  • Bookmark (Application bookmark)
  • Games Dashboard – Friends’ Games (labeled section)
  • Games Dashboard – Friends’ Recent Activity (labeled section)
  • Games Dashboard – Your Games (labeled section)
  • Stream (News Feed)
  • Suggestions (Facebook suggestions to users)
  • Requests (User to user suggestion)
  • Search (Facebook search bar at the top of the page)
  • Application Tab
  • Fan Page (Like button at top of fan page)
  • User Profile Page (Fan links from another users’ profile page)
  • Fan Box (“Like Box” social plugin)
  • Ads (Facebook advertising)
Facebook Reporting – Users
The demographic information has being increasingly important as Facebook passes 500,000,000 friends who have to provide some basic demographic information.  Using this report you can begin to understand some more details and background of your fanbase.  You cannot filter or sort the demographics by date period, geographic or user interaction at this stage but it might be possible using paid web analytics platforms.
Facebook Gender & Age
Facebook Reporting – Users
The country/cities/language detail is not anything ground breaking but it can be important to just the success of an international campaign or seek to limit access if it is only a national or local campaign.
Facebook Countries
Facebook Reporting – Users
The activity is one of the more useful report elements as it breaks down the users tab views and any external referrers that provided extra visitors to your fanpage.
Facebook User Activity
Facebook Reporting – Users
While Facebook is a platform for sharing media, some of the consumption rates drop sharply so fresh and relevant content should be added but also some video/media platforms don’t appear to offer the same level of data to Facebook relating to your fanpage.
Facebook user media consumption
Facebook Reporting – Interactions
The daily story feedback is a great report for providing guidance around did a particular behaviour such as overposting/oversharing lead to unsubscriptions. You can now quickly compare the daily story feedback against the most recent posts shown below.
Facebook user interactions
Facebook Reporting – Interactions
The reporting dashboard now includes recent posts, when they were posted, how many impressions they gathered and was there any feedback from the users. Again the ability to filter out geographic or demographic information would prove useful for campaigns that have very specific metrics or goals, and also for larger Fanpages who may have dozens or posts each day.
Facebook Recent Posts
Facebook Reporting – Interactions
The final part of the new reporting dashboard shows detail on how the page has been mentioned, discussions started, reviews given, and posts made to the page wall.  It is interesting that it offers media detail on video posts but does not include links or images posted to the page.  This extra media page data would be quite helpful as Facebook has been known to break Bit.ly links and other longer urls, and some pages are very heavily focused on sharing links to external content.
Facebook Page ActivityFacebook insights update reviewed
Overall its a very pleasant update to their insights dashboard but requires a fair few more enhancements to bring the platform closer to agency/enterprise ready until then people are going to continue to explore Bid Management platforms, paid Web Analytics software, exporting via Graph APIs or scraping report data by crawling the site.  The other great feature that is left out is the ability to generate an export of the data via CSV,TXT,XLS or even PDF.  While the competitors still struggle with real-time analytics I can let Facebook off the hook for that initial oversight.
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15 comments Posted in facebook

Updated Bing Webmaster Tools

Posted on July 22, 2010 by

Bing Webmaster LogoFollowing on from Google Webmaster Tools update, the team over at Bing have been busy and have finally taken the wraps of a vastly improved Bing Webmaster Tools. The official Bing blog states that the platform was rebuilt following feedback and all the updates were based on the webmaster and seo community feedback which called for more transparency on Bing. The platform also offers a hint of further updates coming in the following months which will likely add or adapt many of the Yahoo Site Explorer functionality. There has been much concern that much of the functionality that Yahoo offers maybe lost to webmasters so its great to see such a large improvement in the Bing search tools.

The new Bing webmaster tools offer more data on how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, what content is contained in the Bing index and guidance to help you optimise your sites for Bing.
The new Bing Webmaster tools provides a more intuitive experience focused on 3 areas key for search.
  1. Crawl
  2. Index
  3. Traffic
Bing Webmaster Sites Dashboard
The top level view shows a master list of all the sites you have verified in your Bing webmaster console, it shows an overview of clicks, impressions, pages indexed and pages crawled.  The other cool feature is it shows the percentage of change and an easy colour coded arrow to show if the change was positive or negative which makes it easy to spot problems or issues when you have a large number of sites.
Bing Webmaster Sites
Bing Webmaster Dashboard
The drill down into an individual site shows the current status of your site in Bing and the recent trends of your website’s activity within Bing search results
Bing Sites Dashboard
Bing Crawl & Index Summary
The top level view shows you a summary of pages crawled, pages with crawl errors, pages indexed and impressions and clicks. You can drill down into each of these section to see more details and information.
Bing Crawl Summary
Bing Crawl Summary Details
The crawl summary shows upto 6 months of crawl data so you can learn more about any issues that the Bingbot might have had while crawling your website.
Bing Crawl Summary DetailsBing Index Summary
You can explore your site’s directory and pages contained in the Bing index.
Bing Index Summary
Bing Traffic Summary
Similar to the recent Google Webmaster tools update, but much better as Bing offers upto 6 months of traffic data so you can track search query performance over time.
Bing Traffic Summary
Bing Search Queries
Bing also offers details around what keywords are showing in Bing search results, how many impressions they are getting along with clicks and average click-thru-rate from search results to your website.
Bing Search Queries
All Bing webmaster accounts get it!
The great point is that all the Bing webmaster accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new interface, no beta requests no delays just wonderful fresh interface ready to explore today.
Bing webmaster tools supports Chrome
The other point is that the whole platform runs perfectly in Google’s Chrome Browser which is what was used to generate all the images shown in this post.
Bing offers transparency
The more comprehensive and refined view from Bing gives the webmaster and seo community more transparency around whats contained in the Bing index, and i’m excited to see what new tools are going to be rolled out next.  This webmaster re-development seeks to improve transparency to help marketers and business make better decisions and offers more control over your sites in Bing. So I advise that you use Bing webmaster tools today! If you haven’t verified your website in Bing yet, do it now and start to explore how you can get more traffic from Bing, the interface is free to use and offers some wonderful insights into your seo.
3 comments Posted in bing

WordPress add automatic Analytics Notations

Posted on December 17, 2009 by

Following on from Google Analytics recent update that includes the ability to add notations to track significant and key events such as new campaigns, new content or site changes.  The team at WordPress.com appears to have followed this lead and has also rolled out a new feature which automatically adds annotations when a new item is posted.

This feature is only visible on the current period of time shown in the stats window and only when viewing views per day, not week or monthly data traffic.  While it is likely this feature will be expanded and improved it is a great start and makes it easy to start to understand how recent posts influence your website traffic.

It would be great if this could be further improved to allow the ability to see how particular post tags or categories attract visitors to your blog, as a following update to the stats reporting.  Being able to see how popular particular post tags or categories in relation to traffic is a real benefit for bloggers using the free hosted version of WordPress.

No comments Posted in Web Analytics

Adobe flash cash to buy omniture

Posted on September 21, 2009 by

omnitureThe world’s leading web analytics company Omniture was purchased last week by Adobe Systems for US$1.8 billion.

The move has sent shockwaves among the web analytics community as it is likely this will begin a stream of consolidation in the industry and limit alternative solutions. The next likely web analytics providers which could be purchased include: Coremetrics, webtrends, Lyris.

The web analytics purchase supports Adobe in their ability to better optimise its suite of content creation tools.  Adobe can use now use Omniture within its software to perform better analysis and content optimisation leading to improved user experience.

Typically flash has been difficult to track and optimise for search and Adobe now has a vested interest in making it work for business. Because of the now open access to Adobe IP the Omniture development team is in a strong position to provide the best flash tracking solutions.

Adobe already has several established products which allow for creation, deliver and user engagement.

  • Flash (Web Apps)
  • Acrobat (PDFs)
  • Air (Desktop Apps)

Adobe can now examine the use of benchmarking usage of web or desktop applications and measure user activity or track campaign success.  Using a benchmark system powered by Omniture, developers can potentially have the ability to rate their Flash/Air applications usage and revenue by categories such as industry or demographic.

This better feedback will allow companies to build larger more complex projects based around Adobe technologies.  Adobe can also extend the potential revenue stream by closing the loop and advertisers can now begin to explore how to track campaigns beyond the web to desktop/mobiles.

The purchase places Google in an interesting position with a heavy dependence on Flash within its own web analytics platform and even across its ad network. Does Google have the resources to replace flash with AJAX/Java as used in its Google Apps suite?

Google Analytics has previously had the advantage over Omniture because it’s free but Adobe also built its market dominance on that same freeware concept. Based on past Adobe product launches they will release an Omniture Lite that just offers reporting similar to Google Analytics soon.

No comments Posted in Web Analytics

Free Web Analytics Reports by Industry

Posted on August 21, 2009 by

Earlier this year I prepared some research material looking into the worlds use of web analytics solutions, most of this data was captured in February and processed by March 2009.  Since many corporate websites appear to be rarely updated the data is likely to be consistent, if there has been any change it is usually the addition of another secondary analytics package is added. The world’s top 1200 public listed corporations were reviewed and studied if they use web analytics.

The Canadian auto industry use of web analytics has be studied in more detail by Stéphane Hamel on his blog and is worthwhile reading to get an understanding of how local operations compare to corporate websites. It was a common trend that local operations often differed from global sites and were often more proactive regarding web analytics.

I have been working to complete some more of these reports and have had requests to publish some of these.  I will try and get some more industries analysed over the next few months and they will be added to the list.

The report was prepared with the assistance of WASP, the world’s leading web analytics profiler and debugger plugin.

No comments Posted in Web Analytics

Google Analytics Pivot Tables

Posted on July 24, 2009 by

google analytics logoGoogle Analytics continues to add and test new features to its free web analytics package but these are often not rolled out immediately as they need to be tested and evaluated.

This new data view feature does not appear to be available on all accounts but will likely be rolled out as there is some real benefit for better understanding your web analytics data. The benefit of Pivot Tables are they allow you to summarise hundreds of thousands rows of data in seconds.

Typically Pivot tables are used in applications such as Excel but many people don’t know how to make best use of them.  They can also be complex to construct but Google Analytics generates them in seconds using your account data with a single click.

What is an Pivot Table?

  • A pivot table is an interactive table that provides a powerful tool for summarising large amounts of tabular data easily.
  • Similar to a cross-tab table, the pivot table classifies numeric data in a list based on field selected.

What can you do with Pivot Tables?

  • You can quickly summarise existing data from your web analytics account
  • You can visualise visits, pages/visited, counts, avg time on site, % of new visits, bounce rate.
  • You can then export this data to generate charts

The image below shows how quickly and easily using pivot tables you can view how many visitors are driven to particular cities by the top 3 search engines.  While this is not of as much value in Australia where Google has around 87-92% of the total market.  For international clients/campaigns it can show how in Chinese locations search engines such as Baidu perform against Google based on factors such as page views or time on site.
google-analytics-pivot-basic

The Google Analytics Pivot data by options include all the standard visitor and traffic metrics such as

  • Source/Campaign/Keyword
  • Visitor type
  • Landing page
  • Language
  • Geographic
  • Browser capabilities
  • Network properties

The advantages of using Google Analytics Pivot Tables for your data analysis is

  1. Pivot tables are interactive
  2. Pivot tables are dynamic
  3. Pivot tables update automatically with new data

google-analytics-pivot

You can see from the screen shot that we can quickly analyse our visitors based on city locations and how search engines differ between locations. Using various metrics such as keywords you can quickly understand how your brand or generic keywords perform in particular cities.  Within the one screen you can also further refine this by using the advanced search filter to only include those with bounce rates over 50% to be shown in the table. The only point is that this advanced filter at this stage only works on the “totals” not the sub groups generated by the pivot table, this would be a great future feature to be able to filter this pivot table data.

While these pivot tables are an amazing addition to the report view options, it would be useful if Google Analytics allowed for automatic or manual resizing of the columns.  The current tables seem to waste too much screen space and cannot display more than a few sets of data.  So if you cant see these new features in your account yet, stay tuned and keep an eye on the official Google Analytics Blogspot, and we look forward to more cool features such as advanced filters.

2 comments Posted in Web Analytics

Google Analytics Advanced Filter

Posted on July 24, 2009 by

google analytics logoGoogle Analytics continues to add and test new features to its free web analytics package but these are often not rolled out immediately as they need to be tested and evaluated. One of the issues with the existing search filter at the bottom of each page is that it is limited and often cannot easily provide more advanced search patterns. This search feature offers the ability to quickly check or search for data captured in a particular report.

This new advanced filter feature does not appear to be available on all accounts but will likely be rolled out as there is some real benefit for better understanding your web analytics data. The search feature is useful for when you are searching for particular data or keywords displayed in the report but need to find this quickly before using long term solutions such as setting up advanced segmentation.

The “advanced filter” is shown at the bottom of certain report pages within Google Analytics replacing the existing search box.  The example below shows that you can quickly search for text contained in the page title, but the real benefit is that you can also apply metric filters to this search.  The improvement is that you can quickly search for particular pages by setting conditions such as only those with less than 100 pages to filter out highly trafficked pages and also those with low bounce rates. You can add multiple conditions to further refine this on the fly to include conditions such as goal conversion on certain reports.

google-analytics-filters2google-analytics-filters3

While these advanced filters are an amazing upgrade to the current search features, the only disappointment is that it doesn’t use the “search as you type” available in advanced segmentation.  While this is likely because it works differently it might be a nice touch. So if you cant see these new features in your account yet, stay tuned and keep an eye on the official Google Analytics Blogspot, and we look forward to more cool features such as pivot tables.

p style=”text-align:center;”>If you want to learn more about Web Analytics we suggest you check out the following books on Amazon as their authors are well respected and very knowledgeable.

2 comments Posted in Web Analytics

SLI Systems improve ‘No Results’

Posted on July 13, 2009 by

sli-systemsThis post is based on a recent email newsletter I received from a search technology company SLI Systems.  I have spoken with SLI Systems in the past for client projects where clients are looking for more advanced uses of automated web analytics solutions.  Their email newsletter was good as it outlined a common issue for most new ecommerce websites as they face the same common issues when they are just launching or looking to increase their conversion rates without rebuilding their entire store.

When I speak with advertising agencies and prospective clients they sometimes don’t have the budgets for an entire website rebuilds but web analytics can often present an opportunity to improve current conversion rates. SLI Systems, offers an intelligent search technology for websites, e-commerce stores and internal search engines as their technology is based around visitor behaviour to continuously improve your search results.

SLI Systems advise that based on their experience around 10% of all searches on your website return a “No results” page.  While Google Analytics can show which terms visitors use on your website have used, it does not advise which generated poor or no results.  There are some great points that SLI Systems advises around how to give your customers a better site experience.

  • Use the Language of Your Customers
  • Expand your Product Lines
  • Incorporate an Auto Complete Feature
  • Show Results with Some of the Words
  • Show Spelling Suggestions
  • Show Popular Searches
  • Show Popular Products
  • Show Keyword-specific Banners

If you want to provide better service to your customers, SLI Systems can help:

  1. Enabling website visitors to effectively find content on your site
  2. Gain additional natural search traffic from Google
  3. Automatically generate paid keyword ad campaigns
  4. Substantially increase your websites revenue

Register with this form today to receive more information about increasing your websites revenue using SLI Systems.

No comments Posted in Web Analytics

Reverse goal path report will be going away?

Posted on July 9, 2009 by

Google Analytics is a great web analytics package and is usually very proactive regarding updates and changes to its standard functions and reporting.  The product team at do a wonderful job with detailed blog announcements at the Google Analytics Blog with exceptional videos, screen shots and reasons behind the change and how it will benefit or improve the experience.

This happy world was shaken recently after logging into a client account to see a small notification showing a message that one of the best features of the goal tracking would be vanishing soon.  The screenshot below shows a help icon, but it contained no link or more detailed information about why this was happening, would it be improved or even when it would be occurring. There is a small statement from the Google Community blog, and a tweet from last week, but outside that no other reaction even from some of the leading GAAC blogs such as EpikOne’s Analytics Talk or Mangold Sengers. These GAAC blogs are usually the first to break new features and discuss retirements of existing or legacy features so what is happening is there something better coming?

google-analytics-reverse-goal-path

This post will help explain the benefit of the Reverse Goal Path report and why it will be missed by many web analytics professionals such as The Lost Agency.  Reverse goal paths can help you understand if particular pages are encouraging higher conversions.  It is also more useful than the funnel visualisation to understand longer but successful paths to conversion. While many people may not be taking advantage of this wonderful feature it can be very useful for usability analysis and working to lift conversion rates for your clients.

An example is that a majority of the conversions might go from A to B to C, but it is likely that not everyone may follow that path, and with reverse goal path report you can clearly see how many sit outside the basic ABC path.  This can be useful for understand if changes to page navigation may need to be improved and it can also be useful for identification as to which pages can add value. Another powerful use is to identify common “engagement” points along goal paths that don’t typically get captured in a standard goal path.

All these navigational changes to you website can be tested using Website Optimiser to confirm and measure the increase in conversions. It is a shame if the Reverse Goal Path report vanishes and is not replaced with something that is bigger and better. The Google Analytics Blog also has a great recent post 60 seconds using Website Optimiser & Google Analytics together.

If you want to learn more about Web Analytics we suggest you check out the following books on Amazon as their authors are well respected and very knowledgeable.

4 comments Posted in Web Analytics

Boost your conversions with ClickTale Analytics

Posted on June 26, 2009 by

The ClickTale Blog recently posted a great breakdown of 8 Brilliant tips that can be used to Boost your conversions using Web Analytics software. The benefit of using Web Analytics to make decisions about your website is that they are free from Bias and can be measured to show if there was an increase or decrease in site conversion due to the change.

There is often a few key points that if followed can ensure that you online business will have good conversion rates and if continuous refined will ensure that you business ROI continues to increase over time. It is important that you dont remove existing web analytics software if you want to try a product like ClickTale, our advice is to always look at using more than one Web Analytics package to get the best possible data about your website.

So have a look over these 8 brief tips based on the ClickTale blog post and use them to help your website conversion rates and give a analytics product such as ClickTale for FREE!

1. Fantastic visuals grab visitors attention
Visitors like to click on images
Good Looking people & faces get clicks

2. Great headlines encourage action
Are your headlines short and to the point?
Are your benefits clear to the visitor?

3. Float your best content to the top
Areas near the top get around 17x more exposure
Newsworthy and call to action needs to be above the fold

4. Make important content stand out
Experiment with changes to text font size and colours

5. What’s In It For Me?
Is this any actual value to your audience
Should they care and is it going to be useful?

6. Fewer questions boost conversions
Visitors are sensitive to quantity and type asked
Additional questions decrease conversion rates
Low intrusive with few questions convert best

7. Run usability tests
Usability testing discovers whats broken

8. Test, repair, and retest
Use software like website optimiser to test
Make changes and use website optimiser to retest

What is ClickTale?

ClickTale is an interesting product that allows website owners to watch every mouse movement, every click and use this information to increase revenues and improve site usability.  Some of the advanced capability of ClickTale are:

Experiment with font size, colours
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Google Analytics API

Posted on April 23, 2009 by

The Google Analytics team has finally annouced that the Google Analytics Data Export API is now in public beta and available to all Google Analytics users. It has been one of their most widely anticipated features and a number of GAAC partners have been experimenting with it for close to a year.

So what is all the excitment about? Well the API allows developers to extend Google Analytics to new creative ways that can benefit developers, business and end users.  The other advantage is that large organisations and agencies can now have a standardised platform for intergrating their Analytics data with their own business data.

Developers have the flexibility to now integrate Google Analytics data into their existing products or can create standalone applications.  Developers can now create custom dashboards or gadgets, also working with individuals and businesses, they have the opportunity to access their Google Analytics data in a variety of new and exciting ways.

Google has listed some customer examples the apps demonstrate only some of the creative possibilities as there are many more interesting ways to use the Analytics API.

Axiom CMS
Axiom CMS is a Web-based content management system built on the Java Axiom Stack open source development framework.

Analytics360
E-retailers use MailChimp’s Analytics360 tool to track the ROI of their email marketing campaigns.

Concentrate
Concentrate is an innovative long-tail search analytics tool designed for SEO and paid search professionals who want to make sense of search keyword data and make the most of search investments.

GX WebManager Google Analytics integration
For our web Content Management System, we created a component that utilizes the Google Analytics API and displays the KPIs of pages and documents in the CMS.

Mobile GA
Mobile GA allows you to securely monitor your Google Analytics statistics directly from your mobile phone, using the Google Analytics API.

OnTarget
OnTarget provides full optimization, testing, and improvement cycle recommendations on how to improve goals online and increase conversions from marketing campaigns.

Polaris Desktop Widget
Polaris is a cross-platform Google Analytics widget for the desktop.

ShufflePoint
ShufflePoint integrates Google Analytics with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint using a powerful query language (GAQLT) and an intuitive drag-and-drop query builder.

youcalc – On-demand Analytics
youcalc connects to Google Analytics data API to provide custom Aanalytics apps that run in iGoogle, iPhone, intranets, blogs, anywhere! Access and analyze live Google Analytics data without opening Google Analytics.

How does the Data Export API work?

The Data Export API is easy enough to use and provides read-only access to all your Google Analytics data. Any thing that’s available through the standard Analytics web interface is available through the Export API.  Google use the same API protocol for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster Tools. To those developers who have used any of these APIs, the Google Analytics Data Export API will look familiar.

To help with JavaScript & Java programming languages, Google have provided client libraries to abstract & simplify the process. Google have said they are working on expanding this to more programming languages.  Any programming language can now make requests directly to the API over HTTP and access the data in XML.

How do I get started using the Data Export API?

Three key resources you’ll want to use when you start developing on top of the Google Analytics API

1) The documentation you need can be found on our Developer site at Google Code

2) Sign up for the Google Analytics API Notify email group so you get the key announcements on feature updates, code changes and other service related news that relate to the API

3) Become a part of the Google Analytics developer community by joining the Google Analytics APIs Group.

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Web Analytics Rumours

Posted on April 15, 2009 by

This list is a new post that makes public the rumours around if particular companies or industries are planning on either dumping expensive analytics solutions or upgrading current entry level solutions to an enterprise level.  This list will be updated in time to give you an idea of how successful these predictions are, and what time frame it typically takes to make such a decision.

  • Large US Bank moving from one web analytics provider to WebTrends (April)
  • Large Automotive company moving from one web analytics provider to open source Piwik (April)
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