Category Archives: Analytics

5 Google Analytics posts you don’t want to miss in July

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In the last post of each month I’d like to share the top 5 interesting Google Analytics related resources I found on other sites. Here are the first five – you may want to bookmark those as they can be very useful:

How to Reclaim Your Google Analytics account

One of the most frequently asked questions on the Google Analytics forum is from people who can’t access their GA account due to different reasons – don’t know or remember the email associated with their tracking ID, the person who created the account no longer works with them, etc. In this article you can learn how to recover your GA access (hint: a Google AdWords account can help).

Get the Complete Story with Big Data Analytics

The guys at Blast Analytics & Marketing explain what is big data and what are the benefits of collecting and aggregating web and mobile analytics data, CRM data, social media data, consumer data, internal data, etc. They also show two solutions: Google Big Data and Tableau.

Re-imagining Segmentation in Analytics to Help You Make Better Decisions, Faster

At the Google Analytics blog you can read the official announcement of the updated advanced segments – now supporting user segmentation, cohort analysis, sequence segments, segment templates and refreshed new user interface.

Google Analytics Segmentation: Updated for Better Analysis

Justin Cutroni also published a post about the new Segmentation in GA covering the same topics – if you prefer his conversational tone and screenshot samples.

How to Solve Google Analytics Sampling: 8 Ways to Get More Data

Getting unsampled data for bigger sites with thousands of visits per day is very cumbersome and time consuming. Sayf Sharif from Luna Metrics offers 8 ways to solve this problem (only one of them being GA Premium).

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

Google Analytics Implementation – Custom alerts (Part 10)

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Welcome to the last Part 10 where we’ll look at the Google Analytics custom alerts. You can find the previous chapters of the guide here:

1. Google Tag Manager
2. Tracking code
3. Check the implementation
4. Profiles and filters
5. Settings
6. Goals setup
7. Virtual pageviews and events
8. Campaign tracking
9. Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards.

10. Custom alerts

Custom alerts are very useful if you don’t check your Google Analytics data and all the metrics every day.

There are two ways to setup a custom alert:

  1. Go to Admin, drill down to the profile you want to create the custom alert for, and choose Custom Alerts from the Assets tab, or
  2. From Reporting tab, choose Intelligence Events -> Overview, it will show the Automatic Alerts tab by default, switch to the Custom Alerts tab and click the Manage custom alerts button.
Setting up custom alerts in Google Analytics

Setting up custom alerts in Google Analytics

You need to name your custom alert, choose the profiles you want to apply it to, and select how often you want to monitor the data (daily, weekly, monthly) and the email address to receive notifications. In the Alert conditions section specify the segment of traffic you want to monitor, the metric and a triggering threshold for the alert.

Your next question may be what custom alerts to setup. There are so many great blog posts on custom alerts listing many different options you can use, depending on your site. Here is one of them: 55+ Google Analytics Custom Alerts – The Check Engine Light For Your Data at Luna Metrics.

And some of my favorites (don’t forget to specify the percentages that make sense for you):

  • Traffic drop & spike:

All Traffic
Visits -> % decreases by more than -> X% -> same day in the previous week
Visits -> % increases by more than -> X% -> same day in the previous week

  • Traffic flat line / no data:

All Traffic
Visits -> Is less than -> 1 (daily)

  • Drop / Spike on conversions:

All Traffic
Goal 1 – Conversion Rate -> % decreases by more than -> X% -> same day in the previous week (or weekly)
Goal 1 – Conversion Rate -> % increases by more than -> X% -> same day in the previous week (or weekly)

  • Ecommerce drop / spike:

All traffic
Revenue -> % decreases by more than -> X% -> previous week
Revenue -> % increases by more than -> X% -> previous week

  • 404 errors:

Page -> starts with -> /your-custom-404-page-URL
Visits -> Is greater than -> 0

  • Bounce rate spike:

All Traffic (or for example specific group of landing pages)
Bounce Rate -> % increases by more than -> X% -> same day in the previous week

  • Organic traffic drop:

Medium -> Matches exactly -> organic
Visits -> % decreases by more than -> X% -> same day in the previous week

 

This is the last part of my Google Analytics Implementation Guide. Hope you find it useful.

Still have questions? You can ask them as comments below and I’ll try to answer.

Google Analytics Implementation – Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards. (Part 9)

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Welcome to Part 9 where we’ll look at the Google Analytics advanced segments, custom reports and dashboards. You can find the previous chapters of the guide here:

1. Google Tag Manager
2. Tracking code
3. Check the implementation
4. Profiles and filters
5. Settings
6. Goals setup
7. Virtual pageviews and events
8. Campaign tracking

9. Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards.

Now that you have everything setup and you can start collecting and analyzing your data, the advanced segments and custom reports in Google Analytics can be very valuable. Here are some of them that you can setup from the start.

The advanced segments allow you to slice the data in your GA profile. There are some default segments like New visitors, Returning visitors, Search traffic, Visits with Conversions, etc. But we can also create our own segments by clicking Advanced Segments and the button + New Custom Segment.

Advanced segment setup

Advanced segment setup

Good-to-have advanced segments:

  • branded organic/paid traffic – copy this segment, and don’t forget to specify your brand name; you can also choose specific medium like organic or cpc
  • non-branded organic/paid traffic – copy this segment, and don’t forget to specify your brand name; you can also choose specific medium like organic or cpc
  • (not provided) traffic – copy this segment to see what’s the behavior of the visitors using secured search
  • keyword length – interesting to understand the performance of head keywords and long tail search: 1 word keywords, 2 word keywords, 3 word keywords, 4+ word keywords (longtail)
  • social media traffic – copy this segment to see the combined social media traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Youtube, Stumbleupon, Quora, Tumblr, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Pinterest and some others. You can easily edit this advanced segment to select only the social media networks you want.
  • content ideas – copy this segment, go to Organic reports and apply it: you’ll see what type of information people are already searching for using keywords including questions (how, who, what, why, where, etc.), so you can get ideas for new content creation.
  • segment by subdomain / subfolder – if you’re tracking multiple subdomains together, this type of advanced segment will show the performance of the specific subdomain or subfolder you specify.
  • visits from country – this can be useful if you’re interested in the visitors’ behavior from particular country.
  • visits that dropped out of the funnel – copy this segment, it will show who started the conversion process but dropped at some point without completing it.

The other helpful tool in Google Analytics are the custom reports. They allow you to group the metrics and dimensions you need very quickly and easily. Even if there’s a more detailed standard report that I can use, I prefer to create a new custom report with the primary and secondary dimensions and the one or two metrics I specifically need for better exporting purposes.

Custom reports in Google Analytics

Custom reports in Google Analytics

You should be careful, however, when combining different metrics which are hit-based and visit-based (please read this wonderful article on hit and session dimensions by Avinash Kaushik). With this warning in mind, here are my favorite custom reports:

  • Conversions by source/medium – dimension: Source / Medium, Keyword; metrics: Visits, individual Goal Completions, individual Conversion rates.
  • Conversions by landing page – dimension: Landing Page, metrics: Visits, individual Goal Completions, individual Conversion rates.
  • Conversions by country – dimension: Country, metrics: Visits, individual Goal Completions, individual Conversion rates.
  • Conversions by time of day – dimension: Hour of Day, metrics: Visits, individual Goal Completions, individual Conversion rates.
  • AdWords performance – dimensions: Campaign, Keyword; metrics: Visits, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, Impressions, Clicks, Cost, CTR, CPC, individual Goal Completions, individual Conversion rates; filter: medium = cpc.
  • AdWords keyword vs. matched search query – dimensions: Keyword, Matched Search Query; metrics: Visits, Goal Completions, Transactions and whatever else you want to see.
  • you may also create custom reports for advertising campaigns on other networks, different SEO-related custom reports, and so on.

The Dashboards in Google Analytics show summaries of different reports as widgets on a single page. You can monitor many different metrics at once and check what’s going on quickly. Here’s how to create your own dashboards:

Google Analytics dashboards

Google Analytics dashboards

Also, this useful article from Econsultancy shows 10 useful Google Analytics custom dashboards.

 

Go to the next chapters of the guide:

10. Custom alerts

Or jump to the whole thing: Google Analytics Implementation Guide.

Still have questions? You can ask them as comments below and I’ll try to answer.

Google Analytics Implementation – Campaign tracking (Part 8)

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Welcome to Part 8 where we’ll look at the Google Analytics campaign tracking. You can find the previous chapters of the guide here:

1. Google Tag Manager
2. Tracking code
3. Check the implementation
4. Profiles and filters
5. Settings
6. Goals setup
7. Virtual pageviews and events

8. Campaign tracking

It’s very important to track all of your campaigns so you can attribute traffic properly. With campaign tracking you add parameters to your URL which are variable-value pairs and contain the campaign information you define for source, medium, campaign, term and content. You can either write them manually or use Google URL builder to build them for you. Your tagged URL will look like this:

http://www.domain.com/landing-page.html?utm_source=mashable&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=July_720x90

where “mashable is our source, “banner” is the medium and “July_720x90” is our descriptive campaign name. Be careful when naming your values, because Google Analytics is case sensitive and will treat “banner” and “Banner” as two separate mediums.

Here’s a list of campaigns you should track:

  • Bing cpc campaigns or advertising on other networks – you should manually tag your Bing cpc campaigns (for example http://www.domain.com/landing-page.html?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=my-search-campaign and if you don’t use the free Bing ads auto-tagging tool by Bizible) and your advertising campaigns on other ad networks.
  • Social media links – you can use for source facebook, twitter, gplus, for medium social or sm (for social media), and for campaign the content you’re sharing like blog-post-name, button (if you track social media sharing buttons on your site).
  • Email marketing – it’s very important to track all email communication because usually the visits from clicks in emails are considered direct visits.
  • Software – if you sell some kind of software it’s very useful to track clicks from your trials or downloadable versions, because otherwise they will be counted as direct visits as well.
  • Whitepapers / PDF files – don’t forget to tag all links you have in your whitepapers and ebooks so you know your content marketing is resulting in visits and conversions.
  • Videos – if you have a Youtube branded channel and use annotations linking to your website, don’t leave these links untagged.

 

Go to the next chapters of the guide:

9. Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards.
10. Custom alerts

Or jump to the whole thing: Google Analytics Implementation Guide.

Still have questions? You can ask them as comments below and I’ll try to answer.

Google Analytics Implementation – Virtual pageviews and events (Part 7)

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Welcome to Part 7 where we’ll look at the Google Analytics virtual pageviews and events. You can find the previous chapters of the guide here:

1. Google Tag Manager
2. Tracking code
3. Check the implementation
4. Profiles and filters
5. Settings
6. Goals setup

7. Virtual pageviews and events

As mentioned in the Goals setup section, there’s a number of situations where you need to implement additionally a special tracking like virtual pageviews or events. It’s very important to determine in advance all elements you want to track and adopt a consistent and clear naming convention – this will help create a clear reporting structure. You can use event tracking for any flash element, AJAX elements, page gadgets, file downloads, load times for data, etc.

The Virtual pageview uses the _trackPageview() function to assign a path/page name to the element you want to track:

onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’, ‘/virtual/download/pdf1.pdf’]);”

All user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Pages in the Google Analytics reporting interface. Here’s how the code for a virtual pageview looks like:

<a href=”#” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’, ‘/virtual/download/pdf1.pdf’]);”>click me</a>

One of the disadvantages of using pageviews is that they artificially increase the number of pageviews. A best practice when using virtual pageviews is to have a clear naming convention, for example start all your pageviews with /v/something/ or /virtual/something/ so they can be easily excluded in a new profile.

The Virtual event uses the _trackEvent() function to set up categories, actions, and labels for the content you want to track.

onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘opt_label’, opt_value]);”

Let’s look at the virtual event components:

  • Category – this would be the name which will group the objects you’re tracking, e.g. videos
  • Action – describes the type of event or interaction you track for a particular object, e.g. play, stop, etc.
  • Label – the label is optional, and it’s used to provide additional information, e.g. video-name
  • Value – the value is also optional, e.g. it could be the time in seconds for a video player to load

All user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Events in the Google Analytics reporting interface. Here’s how the code for a virtual event looks like:

<a href=”#” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘opt_label’, opt_value]);”>click me</a>

Please note that as explained in the Tracking code section, using virtual events will impact your bounce rate metric because it’s considered an interaction request.

 

Go to the next chapters of the guide:

8. Campaign tracking
9. Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards.
10. Custom alerts

Or jump to the whole thing: Google Analytics Implementation Guide.

Still have questions? You can ask them as comments below and I’ll try to answer.