Viewing Reports using Source/Medium in Google Analytics
June 5, 2008
I came across this tool that allows you to view reports in Google Analytics using Source/Medium on your website. The tool is actually a Firefox plug-in that when used with the Firefox browser you can view the visitor’s source by the medium they were delivered to your website on.
To get this functionality all you need to do is download the Greasemonkey plug-in and download the following script (addtosegment2.js). You will need to restart your Firefox browser in order for the changes to take effect.
Once you’ve downloaded this plug-in and installed the script and configured it you can go into your Google Analytics account and navigate to the following to view the results…
- Click on “View Reports” in your Google Analytics Account
- On “Traffic Sources Overview” click “View Report”
- Click “Search Engines”
- Beside the “Segment” field click on the down arrows
- You’ll see an option to view by “Source/Medium”
This means that you will see the Source (Eg. “Google”) and the medium (Eg. “Organic”) together, and making it easier to view how your traffic was obtained using Google Analytics reporting.
This will show you various ways that you can segment your reports in Google Analytics from the standard (out of the box) solution offered by the Google Analytics team.
Observing Traffic Spikes in Google Analytics
May 15, 2008
Naturally anyone who runs a web presence and more importantly analyzes the data of their web presence may encounter Traffic Spikes that occur on a given day. I found myself observing some days where articles I publish caused traffic to increase the day that they were published. At first I thought “This seems out of the ordinary!” and then left me to wonder “Why and How did this happen?” and “How can I duplicate this effect again?”
Google Analytics is very good at reporting the data that visitors to your website leave behind and put it into simple and easy to use graphs and charts. So you have the ability to capture the data but the real goal is to understand the data and make actionable decisions using that data. For instance this spike that I saw in my Google Analytics account I singled out the traffic for that particular day by clicking on down arrow beside the date range and then selecting the specific day that this traffic spike occurred on and then I clicked “Apply”. From here, you can select all the reports that are specific to that day and funnel out some of the “noise”. If we go to the “Traffic Sources Overview” you’ll notice that the pattern in the traffic being delivered and from there you can gain insights into why and how your website received the traffic that it did.
Luc
SEO Analytics - Tracking Search Engine Optimization
April 16, 2008
SEO Analytics is a term that has to first do with the optimization of a website so that search engines can “crawl” the web pages in the website making them “search engine friendly”. Tracking how people come to a website, understanding their behaviours and developing based off of factual results is the main idea behind Analytics.
If you put the two terms together then you get “SEO Analytics” which is the combination of optimizing a website for search engines using both on-page factors and off-page factors combined with reporting of how the optimization is affecting the customers, viewers or whoever makes up your audience that comes to view your website and in turn creating an intelligence about the efforts of SEO and the facts of Analytics.
So what are some ways to track SEO Analytics?
Internal Site Search (aka “Site Search”) – This can show you how your customers search your website once they are on, what they are looking for and how long they spend looking for it. If you’d like to have a look at what kind of metrics are tracked by Internal Site Searches in Google Analytics, feel free to write my article about this.
Referring Sites - Tracking where traffic is being referred from can help you develop new areas of inbound links to your website.
Comparing Natural (Organic) vs. Paid search – This provides you a benchmark to see how your Search Engine Optimization compares to that of your paid efforts.
Keyword Lists – This is helpful because the keywords are provided from search engines like Google or Yahoo! And show you the terms, queries and phrases people use in finding a page on your website.
All of these areas are covered when you install a tool like Google Analytics or Microsoft AdCenter Analytics to track visitors that are coming to your website. They can influence the design, layout and flow of the website and allow you to see opportunities for your business just so long as you are looking for them.
Luc
Setting up Benchmarking in Google Analytics
April 13, 2008
I recently got an email from the fine folks at Google about some of the functionality that they are releasing into Google Analytics for Beta testing. One of these was the option to use benchmarking in your Google Analytics and I can think of a few reasons why Benchmarking is important especially as you further develop your web presence.
The biggest reason is “How does my online business compare to the competition?” and benchmarking provides you a way to see how you stack up to the industry standard because it is hard plan where you want to grow your business when you cannot track the health of your business. So how do you set this up?
- Login to your Google Analytics Account
- Click on the Website Profile you want to add benchmarking to
- Click on the “Visitors” category in your dashboard
- Beneath that select “Benchmarking (beta)” option
- Lastly, click “Accept” and activate this feature
If you want to see more Google says that it may take some time to see the benchmarking data come through. That then you can compare your website, web portal, e-commerce store, etc to industry verticals when analyzing your web presence.
Luc
Google Analytics vs. Microsoft adCenter Analytics - Round 1 - Usability
April 8, 2008
The amount of forensics you can do on your data
Being able to understand the “why” and “how” of observing patterns in data is key to success to performing solid website analysis. I noticed that Google Analytics did a good job when it came to giving me the name of the source, durations and narrowing it down. However Microsoft was limited (even though it’s a Beta version) at best and you really have to dig to find the information you want. Have a look…
I find a lot lacking in the Beta release from Microsoft because Google Analytics is at a point where it is very user-friendly so in my opinion from a usability standpoint Microsoft could learn a ton from Google Analytics in terms of application functionality.
The graphs are too small; the views that are offered lack the thought of the people that will be using it. It wasn’t designed with people in mind. Most times people want more options of analysing and sorting data then just “view contents of the group” or “view segmentation by item = Age, Gender, Occupation or Geographic Location”. In terms of segmenting data for marketing efforts I feel that this is the bare minimum which Google Analytics offers more then vast amounts of information.
Because the term “Web Analytics” is turning into a big keyword for the next version of the web, an internet based on intelligence, intelligent web applications and the people who use them in everyday life, naturally many people believe that you just need to pick a tool, install and configure it and start tracking traffic but if Web Analytics is used wisely it runs deeper then the tools you use and it is a practice of applying tools and knowledge and business smarts to develop your business online.
Luc
