Web Analytics India Blog

Probably the most awaited feature was the API for google analytics. This has been long overdue and here it is now. Analytics Data API’s are seen as the next step in web analytics, which gives you the flexibility to take ur data and use the way you want it.  Here’s some quick uses of data API’s

Develop a Standalone Application: Ok now this is very useful if you know analytics needs of your organization and would like to build a “custom” application which shows the data and metrics specific to organization/Departments!, or even better you could build 3 different apps say one for the “marketing team” and one for the “Products team” and one for the “management team”. Of course all this can be done if you have the time and resource.

Data Sources Mashup: The whole point of API’s is Data Mashup!, assuming you have different Data sources (who does’nt now?) you can now say pull ur lead generation data and mashup with Google Aanlytics data giving you a holistic view of your web performance. That’s just one example, you can do more mashups if you have API available from your email marketing service provider, or your ad partner and many more!

Analytics everywhere!: for all the data lovers, you really dont have to login to google analytics anymore, with API’s you can create iphone/andriod apps (there are few already) and access your data on the go!.

Right so if you want to get started! Here’s where you go

Google Analytics API Code Base

Google Analytics Tracking Overview

Google Analytics GAjs reference

What more! Google Analytics team has provided client libraries to abstract and simply the process for JavaScript and Java Programming Languages:

Keep yourself  Updated Join these groups/forum

Google Analytics API Notify: for the latest news/updates on API

Google Analytics API Group: Checkout the latest products/apps being created by various folks here

Checkout Examples here

All the Examples can be found HERE

Few Examples which stands apart are

1.) Polaris Desktop Widget: An Adobe Air application, free to use (one Account/one profile only) and they also have a paid version:

2.) Concentrate by Juice Analytics: 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.

3.) Axiom CMS: A great example of how GA is integrated with CMS

Have more informaiton/examples on the API, share it via comments. So what’s your API plan how do you plan to use it ?

Late to write this, but here it goes

The Searchmasters09 was indeed a great event to attend, one of the first event hosted by Google in India. This event had great sessions to keep one occupied for the entire day. Here’s a brief overview of what’ll happened in the event.

The event started with a talk from Vivaik Bharadwaaj (Manager of the Search Quality Evaluation team)  who spoke about why this conference was held, and also an introduction to the “Indian webmaster community” . He also gave a overview of Google’s initiatives in India and future plans.

He then shared some findings by Google about “India’s internet” status. Here are few important things i could make a note of

• Internet users – 81 million
• Internet subscribers 11.7 million (BB)
• Mobile users – 287 million
• Mobile internet capable 75.6 million
• Mobile is the next big thing!

What works in Internet market in India, or rather what’s popular right now?

1. Entertainment
2. Education/job
3. Banking/finance
4. News/
5. Travel
6. Directory
7. Others

On the terms of how sites in India are doing, here’s what Google Observed

• Most site does not have robot.tx
• No xml sitemaps ( majority of site dint have it )
• Half of the sites analyzed dint have html sitemaps
• Most of the site missing metatags.

India specific initiatives by Google

Orkut communities, India corporate blog, mobile search, transliteration tool, webmaster help forum, Google bus (a bus which is internet enabled, spreading knowledge of internet – started of in Chennai)

Webmaster Central and Beyond – Adam Lasnik – Mountain View

A sampling of best practices

• Discovery (getting great pages discovered)
• Accessibility (for googlebot and users)
• Promotion (having your pages stand out)

What you can do with webmaster tools?

• Diagnose issues: crawl errors, robot.txt concerns
• Change settings: canonical domain, crawl speed
• Get insights: Back links, referring keywords
• Make improvements: enhanced 404 pages, sitemaps

Webmaster Best practices details

Discovery: Helping Google find our page

Sitemaps: A must have preferably in two formats

• HTML: have this in your site
• XML: this is great to have!

How do these help?

It tell the search engine, these are the pages I want you to look, these are the priority of the pages

Links: A bit more about links

Properties of good links

• Just like good friends – attracted naturally
• From trustworthy, relevant, choosy sources
• Similar to votes: they’re given consciously

How can you get good links?

• Create a notable site with original and compelling content
• Participate thoughtfully in communities
• Make pages easy to share and link to

Remember! Links that aren’t worth it

• Those you beg, trade, bargain or pay for
• Links from sources that aren’t respectable or selective

** don’t focus on beauty focus on function!

Content is really the foundation

Great Content is

• Original: your own information or commentary
• Compelling: People are likely to note and share it
• Accessible: Users and Google bot can find and understand it

2.) Accessibility: Make your site accessible:

You site is accessible when users and googlebot can

• load all the pages
• Navigate successfully from page to page
• See what’s on each page
• Understand the content

Other points to ponder

• And when users can bookmark their favorite pages, Homepage or even just “[company name]” is useless when reviewing history/bookmarks! Make sure page title is included as a best practices
• Share pages with others Via social networks like orkut & facebook) business networks, email,im
• Transact appropriately on your site ( submit forms, order materials, etc)
• ** javascript are missing on many users, Ensure you have your site enabled for them
• The most important word to remember is*****TEXT******, Even if it’s video, talk about it in text. Your core content and navigation should be in plain text

Testing Accessibility

• Access your site with different browsers
• This includes mobile browsers and screen readers
• Also a text only browser, such as lynx
• Or at minimum, a regular browser with JavaScript turned off
• Make sure you not only browse but transact
• Try submitting a form conducting a search etc
• Have colleagues test it out

From accessibility to understanding

• Ensure people and search engine understand what your pages are about
• Create title tags, that are brief, descriptive, and compelling
• Annotate photos with alt tags and user descriptive filenames
• Add thoughtful text to give context
• Effective use of Page titles

Good titles are

• Specific to the page
• Mention the company or organization
• Are phrase based not a sentence
• Making most of your images
• Use alt text
• Good Example: src=googlebot.jpg” alt =” googlebot with flowers”
• Bad Example: googlebot photos with flowrers
• Use descriptive filenames
• Describe appropriately in plain text
• Be Kind: Optimize your images for users.

Suggestions for Images, videos and more non text!

• Use Points to check for / questions asked
• *video xml
• *transcript of the videos will help!
• Keyword density does not have huge importance
• Business name:city:what the page is about ( do not repeat it many times)

Google Custom Search! Rajat Mukherjee (Product Manager – Google Custom Search platform)

One of the most widely used internal search tools, It helps customize the Index, Ranking and Presentation

Why CSE

1. Users today use search to navigate sites and find information
2. Search integrated in minutes using look and feel of your own site
3. Better user retention via target search instant high relevance
4. Better clickthru rates and conversion on your site
5. Enhanced indexing via cse index and on demand index
   1. On demand indexing: give a portion of your site all content will be indexed within 24 hours
6. Features such as labels, synonyms, date biasing, promotions
   1. Synonyms/acronyms – you can now promote certain things for select queries (can be urls or information)
7. Monetize with relevant ads via custom search keywords
   1. Features like, add keywords for relevant ads
8. Advanced api’s customization, branding and support options
   1. Branding options available
9. Integrated with Google platform, webmasters tools, sitemaps

Google Analytics and Google Web Optimizer:

This session was an Introduction to Google anlaytics and Google Web Optimizer tool. The following was covered in this session.

• Introduction and capabilites of Google Anlaytics
• Implementation and new features
• Google Analytics Custom Segmentation
• Tracking Campaigns and rich media
• Google Analytics reports explanation
• Google weboptimizer introduction
• Using A/B Test and Multivariate tests
• Advantages of Testing
• Resources and Help

Next Steps by Google as some suggested is

• Hold more events in India
• Dedicated events to other Google products used by web masters

P.S: these were the random notes i took. There are few more folks who wrote about the event, find the links below.

• Digital Inspiration Blog Notes- Amit Agarwal
  
• Daily Seo Blog: Mani Karthik

Google Analytics is indeed one of the best web analytics tool around, and what more can you ask when it’s free. While i was doing a training for our new interns one of the task suggested was to understand all available variables in Google analytics.

Ok so here’s the list of Variables (credit goes to Anuj) in google analytics, it’s function, when it’s used and some examples for each. This list can be quite handy when your doing a QA of your Google Analytics Implementation.

utmac
Function:Account String. Appears on all requests.
Example:utmac=UA-2202604-2

utmcc
Function:Cookie values. This request parameter sends all the cookies requested from the page.
Example:utmcc=__utma%3D117243.1695285.22%3B%2B __utmz%3D117945243.1202416366.21.10. utmcsr%3Db%7C utmccn%3D(referral)%7C utmcmd%3Dreferral%7C utmcct%3D%252Fissue%3B%2B

utmcn
Function:Starts a new campaign session. Either utmcn or utmcr is present on any given request. Changes the campaign tracking data; but does not start a new session
Example:utmcn=1

utmcr
Function:Indicates a repeat campaign visit. This is set when any subsequent clicks occur on the same link. Either utmcn or utmcr is present on any given request.
Example:utmcr=1

utmcs
Function:Language encoding for the browser. Some browsers don’t set this, in which case it is set to “-”
Example:utmcs=ISO-8859-1

utmdt
Function:Page title, which is a URL-encoded string.
Example:utmdt=analytics%20page%20test

utme
Function:X10 Data Parameter
Example:Value is encoded.

utmfl
Function:Flash Version
Example:utmfl=9.0%20r48&

utmhn
Function:Host Name, which is a URL-encoded string.
Example:utmhn=x343.gmodules.com

utmipc
Function:Product Code. This is the sku code for a given product.
Example:utmipc=989898ajssi

utmipn
Function:Product Name, which is a URL-encoded string.
Example:utmipn=tee%20shirt

utmipr
Function:Unit Price. Set at the item level. Value is set to numbers only in U.S. currency format.
Example:utmipr=17100.32

utmiqt
Function:Quantity.
Example:utmiqt=4

utmiva
Function:Variations on an item. For example: large, medium, small, pink, white, black, green. String is URL-encoded.
Example:utmiva=red;

utmje
Function:Indicates if browser is Java-enabled. 1 is true.
Example:utmje=1

utmn
Function:Unique ID generated for each GIF request to prevent caching of the GIF image.
Example:utmn=1142651215

utmp
Function:Page request of the current page.
Example:utmp=/testDirectory/myPage.html

utmr
Function:Referral, complete URL.
Example:utmr=http://www.example.com/aboutUs/index.php?var=selected

utmsc
Function:Screen color depth
Example:utmsc=24-bit

utmsr
Function:Screen resolution
Example:utmsr=2400×1920&

utmt
Function:A special type variable applied to events, transactions, items and user-defined variables.
Example:utmt=Dog%20Owner

utmtci
Function:Billing City
Example:utmtci=San%20Diego

utmtco
Function:Billing Country
Example:utmtco=United%20Kingdom

utmtid
Function:Order ID, URL-encoded string.
Example:utmtid=a2343898

utmtrg
Function:Billing region, URL-encoded string.
Example:utmtrg=New%20Brunswick

utmtsp
Function:Shipping cost. Values as for unit and price
Example:utmtsp=23.95

utmtst
Function:Affiliation. Typically used for brick and mortar applications in ecommerce.
Example:utmtst=google%20mtv%20store

utmtto
Function:Total. Values as for unit and price.
Example:utmtto=334.56

utmttx
Function:Tax. Values as for unit and price.
Example:utmttx=29.16

utmul
Function:Browser language.
Example:utmul=pt-br

utmwv
Function:Tracking code version
Example:utmwv=1

P.S: Related Posts

7 Habits of effective Google Analytics User

After i wrote about the Searchmasters event in bangalore this month end, many readers reached out to me for the invites and passes. I reached out to Google to see if i could get more passes and i was pleased to see a mail from google announcing “Open invitation for searchmasters event”.

Here’s the excerpt so go ahead and register now and hopefully you should get an invite soon!

As you know, the event has limited seats and we have almost reached full capacity.
You can register through, or point your referrals to, the registration link mentioned in our latest blogpost: Opening invitations for Search Masters 09
We cannot guarantee a slot, but will send a registration confirmation mail only if you are slotted for the event.

Do drop me a note in case you get a invite so we could catchup and for those who cant make it. I’ll make sure i cover all the sessions via this blog.

Searchmasters09 -Bangalore Registration Link

P.S: In case you have any specific question you would like to ask on the sessions covered. Please mail me or leave a comment here. I’ll be glad to get that answered for you

I stumbled upon this great event which is a must attend if your part of the internet industry. Now everybody knows how google dominates the search market and also it’s extensive tool list to enhance your website from setting it up to reaching millions of people online.

This event is one of it’s kind with some valuable sessions, The event named as “Searchmasters 09” is a must attend. Here’s what it’s all about.The session 3 (Google Custom Search Engine) and (Google Analytics and Website Optimizer) are of great importance if your a web analyst.

1.) Webmasters Central and Best Practices

• Understand why accessibility is important, how it improves the presence of your site in Google.
• Discover the webmaster resources that Google offers and how it can help you.
• Learn about webmaster guidelines and best practices to build websites.

2.) Webmaster Help forum

• Learn about the thriving webmaster community and how it will help you find answers to search related questions.
• Get to know more about the new platform we’ve recently launched for the help forum and its new features.
• Get introduced to our community builders or ‘Bionic Posters’ as we call them.

3.) Google Custom Search Engine

• Provide a better user retention via targeted search.
• Achieve better click-through rates and conversions on your site
• Monetize with relevant ads via Custom Search keywords.
• Use Advanced APIs, customization, branding and support options.

4.) Building Mobile Friendly Websites

• Find out why there is a need for mobile friendly websites.
• What to consider while designing mobile websites.
• Tools that will help in designing such websites.
• Learn a few design tips and tricks.

5.) Google Analytics and Website Optimizer

Google Analytics is the next generation Web Analytics tool from Google that shows you how people find your site and how they navigate through it. It brings new accessibility to enterprise class web analytics, making it possible for all advertisers, publishers and web site owners to improve their online results. Learn the best way to make use of the product.

The Google Website Optimizer  helps in improving the effectiveness of your website in getting a return on your investment. Determine how you can best attract users and lead them to your site.

Registration: It’s by invite only and limited seats, so hurry up to ensure you get in touch with someone who can get you invite to this great event.

Look out for the coverage of the event and if you are attending the event, reach out to me or leave a comment below so we can catch up .