Web Analytics Posts Round up May 30
Filed under: Google Analytics, Omniture, Omniture, Web Analytics
Ok here’s more reading for all you web analyst out there. Some great articles worth spending some time on.
Web Analytics Industry:
- Web Analytics in Awkward Phase; Forrester Asks Humiliating Questions About Its
Changing Body - Web Analytics – Who is Omniture’s Biggest Competitor (Phil Kimelor)
Omniture
- Tracking Organic keyword by ranking
- Engineering Services Omniture: An article which’ll help you understand when you need to reach out for custom tracking or tweaks
- Video Reporting in Omniture
- Event Pathing – Omniture SiteCatalyst
Google Analytics
- Using Google Search suggest to monitor your brand and keywords
- Understanding Correlation in Google Anlayics
- Top Ten Myths About Google Analytics
- Youtube Brand Channel Tracking via Google Anlaytics
- Tracking Social Networks in Google Anlaytics
- How to Create Twitter Profile in Google Analytics
Landing Page Optimization
Optimizing Website and Landing Page Copy
Adwords:
- Improve ROI with New Adwords interface
- 6 Tactics to Maximize your Adwords Investment
- Managing Keywords and Search Query Report
Usability
Other Prominent Blog posts/Article
- Verified by Visa: A conversion rate killer
- Social Networking: A different kind of friendship
- KPI for small business
- 300+ Tips for Ecommerce Professionals
Here’s some video worth watching!
Useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Small Businesses – Avinash Kaushik
Google Analytics Strategy:
Google Analytics features: Pivoting & Secondary Dimensions
Happy Reading!
Web Analytics Weekend reads may23
It’s been really sometime you saw some posts, i was away on a long vacation and had lot of catching up to do. Here’s some posts worth reading in the weekend. Some great posts and updates.
1.) Stephane Hamel Immeria.net: Stephane covers his Web Analytics Maturity model in this presentation. A great way to measure where your firm stands in terms of Web Analytics Maturity.
2.) ROI Revolution Blog: A must read article to understand the optimal usage of Google Analytics advanced segmentation for ecommerce sites
5 Advanced Segments for Ecommerce Analysis
Tracking Transactions back to initial referrer with Google Anlaytics
3.) Enhanced Search Query Reports: Adwords reporting update
The Search Query Performance report will show all queries that resulted in a click, where the user has not specifically blocked their referrer URL. In other words, this includes all queries that you would see in your server logs or if you use a tool like Google Analytics. So you can now actually see the search term (clicked) report in your adwords.
Read more here
4.) Dennis Mortensen’s Visual Revenue Blog: One Blog i dont miss reading, check out the latest presentation worth every minute.
5.) Measuring Social Media Ads: Wondered where to start and what to measure for all your social media campaigns, here’s a great set of best practices and guide released by IAB.
IAB Article
Found any intresting read/article or blog post? let us know via comments.
Google Analytics Launches API
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 ?
Notes Searchmasters09 Google India Event – Bangalore
Filed under: Events India, Google Analytics, Search Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics India
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?
- Entertainment
- Education/job
- Banking/finance
- News/
- Travel
- Directory
- 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
- Users today use search to navigate sites and find information
- Search integrated in minutes using look and feel of your own site
- Better user retention via target search instant high relevance
- Better clickthru rates and conversion on your site
- Enhanced indexing via cse index and on demand index
- On demand indexing: give a portion of your site all content will be indexed within 24 hours
- Features such as labels, synonyms, date biasing, promotions
- Synonyms/acronyms – you can now promote certain things for select queries (can be urls or information)
- Monetize with relevant ads via custom search keywords
- Features like, add keywords for relevant ads
- Advanced api’s customization, branding and support options
- Branding options available
- 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.
Google Analytics Variable List
Filed under: Google Analytics, Web Analytics, Web Analytics Tutorials
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
