Google Data » Jeff Gillis

127 New Dimensions And Metrics Available In The API

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:09:00 +0000

One of our aims of the Google Analytics Data Export API is to provide access to all the data you find in our reporting UI. To that end, we are releasing 127 new dimensions and metrics via the API today!

Some of the powerful new data points are:

Unique visitors - ga:visitors metric has been updated to support the true number of unique visitors for any date range (instead of the daily unique visitors). It also supports significantly more valid combinations.
Organic Searches - The number of organic searches within a session.
10 new Adwords dimensions - Including Matched Query (what people searched for, not the bid term) and Placement Domain (which site you content ads were running on).
Search Result Views - The number of times a search result page was viewed.
3 Time dimensions - To simplify plotting graphs.

We also included 111 calculated metrics to make it easy to query most common calculations in the reports, such as bounce rate, cost per conversion, and margin. Now, getting calculated metrics is both more convenient and in parity with the calculated metrics in the UI.

You can see a complete list of the new dimensions and metrics in our public changelog.

With all these dimensions and metrics, it can be time consuming to find the values you are looking for. To simplify this, we’re also launching a new interactive dimension and metric search tool. You can use this interactive tool to search for a dimension or metric using its search-as you-type feature. Even more exciting is the ability to easily determine valid dimension-metric combinations just by selecting the dimensions/metrics that you want to request. Here's a screenshot:

We hope that you will find this new tool and additional data useful. As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback, in our developer group.

Posted by Jeetendra Soneja and Ivanna Kartarahardja, Google Analytics API team

Monetize Your Top Exit Pages

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 01:31:00 +0000

Google Analytics does a great job of allowing you to analyze your web traffic through a very important metric: top exit pages. This metric, along with bounce rate and time on site, is valuable as it allows you to measure the impact of changes to your webpages. Did exit rate go up or down? You can choose to optimize pages with high exit rates to try to keep your visitors longer or help them convert, or -- if the page is a logical exit point, you can monetize outgoing traffic on high exit pages by using Google AdSense. (As you may know, Google Analytics and AdSense are integrated, similarly to Analytics and AdWords, so you can optimize your AdSense campaigns using data in Google Analytics.)

If you choose to monetize an exit page, take a look at this short real-world example.

SavetzPublishing.com, on its FreePrintable.net site, provide documents and templates for individuals and businesses, ranging from business forms and certificates, to bookmarks and almost any other document someone would want to print. With sixty-six sites focusing on different niches in printing, Savetz Publishing was looking for a way to optimize their ad placement without having a negative impact on their core users. As a solution, they decided to “find the pages with the highest exit rates and put AdSense on them," according to Kevin Savetz, the owner of Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable.

Kevin has been an Analytics user for as long as he can remember and he had an idea of where the bounce and exit rates would be highest. Kevin used Google Analytics to confirm his theory and placed AdSense ads on some of these pages. He quickly realized that this advertising did not have a significant negative impact on his site’s core users and on conversions. Instead, as he describes, these ads provide “a means of monetizing traffic that would already be leaving. My users are still happy and getting relevant content.”

Savetz Publishing’s strategy highlights how sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that is already exiting the site. AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Kevin put it, AdSense allowed him to “see a huge jump in revenue after targeting exit pages.”

And taking it one step further...As a Google Analytics user, you understand how visitors interact with your website. With this knowledge and the controls in AdSense, you can even structure your AdSense ads to appeal to advertisers who want to display their ads on your site. In turn, you will earn revenue by displaying more relevant and high quality ads.

Here are a couple suggestions to get started with AdSense on your site.

Try testing AdSense first on your top exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your relevant traffic, by referring to your top exit pages report.
If, like Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not turn your relevant traffic away, increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. You can use the additional revenue you earn from AdSense to help you generate more qualified traffic.

Learn more about AdSense and start by testing on your exit pages.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Nathan Deoms, Google AdSense Team

Another Holiday Gift For The Practitioner

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 01:22:00 +0000

We hope your holiday season is going well, and you're full of good cheer and data driven egg nog (which doesn't really exist unless you love web analytics and have imbibed too much egg nog).

For those of you who really do dig web analytics and use Google Analytics specifically - you're going to really like our next gift. It's from the Santa Claus of the web analytics industry, Avinash Kaushik, the analytics evangelist here at Google. Avinash has written a must-read post that you should curl up with next to a roaring fire while you have time to relax over the holidays. In the post, he's basically done a ton of work for you. It's called 3 Awesome, Downloadable, Custom Web Analytics Reports and it showcases the power of Google Analytics and custom reports. In Avinash's words,

I love custom reports. They allow us to step away from the oppression of standard reports (/data pukes) and bring an increased amount of relevancy, calm and focus to our day-to-day work and to our beloved data consumers.

As you may know, you can create your own reports within Google Analytics. Here's a help article from our blog explaining how. In Avinash's typical style, he makes powerful analysis techniques accessible and understandable, and the best part is that he's created the reports for you allowing you to take action right away. You can click on a link that populates the report template right within your Google Analytics profile. Thanks for the holiday gift Avinash.

To give you a sneak peak and get you salivating to read Avinash's post, the three reports are:

Page Efficiency Analysis Report
Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Analysis Report.
Paid Search Performance Analysis Micro-Ecosystem!

If you're doing web analytics, these reports will be of use both educationally, and practically. Enjoy, and stay tuned for one more gift from Avinash.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

First Holiday Gift: iGoogle Gadget

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:15:00 +0000

The holidays are here, true believer. And we're stuffing your stocking with 3 posts-containing-gifts, and this is the first. The other two will come next week and are delivered by our very own Santavinash Claus.

Close your eyes and get ready - wait, don't close them actually - keep reading, because here it is: a gadget, because you love gadgets. But not just any gadget....As part of our efforts to make your analytics data more accessible, we are announcing the release of the Official Google Analytics Gadget. With it, you can get a quick snapshot of your website traffic and marketing effectiveness directly from your iGoogle homepage. Access any of your analytics profiles and view any of these standard reports, including Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals, in 7, 30 and 90 day periods.

It's a handy dashboard for Google Analytics.

Users can now add the Official Google Analytics Gadget to their iGoogle homepage here, or by searching the iGoogle Gadgets Directory.

The gadget can also be added multiple times within your iGoogle homepage to view multiple reports at once.

We must thank CPG Brand Marketers for encouraging the development of this iGoogle Analytics Gadget. They are using iGoogle as a Brand Digital Dashboard to mine search trends, news, consumer feedback, and more, in order to help make strategic investment decisions. Now they can easily add Google Analytics data to their brand digital dashboards.

Enjoy, and happy holidays!

Posted by Patrick Tedjamulia, Google CPG Team and Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Last Web Analytics TV For 2010 – Out With A Bang

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:44:00 +0000

Well, it’s the last episode of Web Analytics TV for 2010. In this series with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

In this episode, we award Lloyd in Capetown for his great question on how bounce rate is calculated and how AJAX sites can effect it. Lloyd, just send us an email and we’ll send you an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Here is the list of last weeks questions which we answered this week.

In this action-packed episode we discuss:

(0:27) How you can see the top landing page report by keyword.
(1:22) Calculating Avg Time to complete a goal.
(2:11) The recommended way to do internal campaign tracking.
(3:17) Creating funnel reports for different user types.
(5:19) How page title and URL are used in unique pageview calculations.
(6:40) Why you see google as a referral in Google Analytics.
(8:25) Can you use GA to track social networking links without link shorteners?
(9:28) Using canonical URLs to differentiate multiple links on a page.
(10:52) Calculating bounce rate for AJAX sites.
(13:34) Getting campaign data into Google Analytics without using URL parameters.
(14:43) Google Analytics campaign attribution and direct traffic.
(15:54) Working with Custom Variables in website templates.
(17:07) Using Ecommerce tracking for tracking conversions.
(19:02) Is there a way to see data broken down by day of the week?
(19:48) How tabbed navigation effects funnel abandonment.
(21:21) How to track various form selections.
(22:23) Fnding Average number of items per order in Google Analytics.

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

Apply segments to your funnel reports using PadiTrak
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools in the App Gallery
Avinash’s blog on how time on site and time on page are calculated

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below. And, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Optimize And Analyze For Mobile, part 3

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:28:00 +0000

This is part 3 of a timely 3 part guest post on mobile analytics strategy and implementation by Feras Alhlou at E-Nor, a Certified Partner in Northern California. Here's part 1, which explained how to look for trends in mobile traffic to your website, and here's part 2 about giving your reports more dollar power.

3. Act on your ROI

At this point, you are equipped with your positive trends and the (hopefully high!) revenue numbers generated on mobile devices. You’ll hopefully get additional time/resources to better assess and improve your mobile presence and mobile marketing initiatives.

But, we still have some more ground to cover, including more segmentation. Let's ratchet up your insights:

More Segmentation.

For your mobile traffic (viewable via an advanced segment or a profile you make specifically for mobile traffic), segment by medium (traffic channel) or campaign (e.g. Back To School Campaign). Take a look at these two metrics:

Bounce rate by medium:

click to enlarge

And conversion rate by medium:

click to enlarge

Do more with Google AdWords.

You notice in the reports above that your cpc (paid-search) traffic from mobile devices is not as prevalent as other mediums. Your results show that your mobile site is experiencing a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate - a good indicator that something is very wrong either on your landing page, or in your ads. Either your ads are not bringing in the right traffic, or you're scaring traffic away.

What you're most likely doing is proving that your site is not optimized for mobile device visits.

Fortunately, you can further back this data up within AdWords. Google AdWords now allows more visibility into campaign performance from different devices. In AdWords, in your Campaign reports, click on ‘Device’ in the Segment drop-down.

click to enlarge

In this situation, in the last cell in the rightmost column, you notice a 0.03% conversion rate for your mobile devices (compared to 0.52% on the non-mobile devices) and you know exactly where the problem is.

To fix the awfulness in the conversion rates, here are a few tips:

create a separate campaign for your mobile devices
send traffic to a custom landing page (or to your mobile site if you have one),
and/or better target the mobile traffic (by device, or using the click-to-call feature).

Last but not least and for tor the technically inclined, and to get a more comprehensive perspective on your mobile presence, take a look at the code site page on mobile. If you're developing for a mobile platform, you can use Google Analytics to track the following:

Activity on websites specially tailored for low-end mobile devices
Activity on standard websites accessed from high-end mobile devices
User engagement with a native iOS or Android application (using the Google Analytics mobile SDK)

In addition, there are a number of new niche analytics solutions specifically built for mobile, so keep on the lookout, and see if a specific tool has a feature that you really need. And, for more analytics tips and insights, follow @ferasa on twitter or check out the E-Nor blog.

Happy Analyzing!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Feras Alhlou, E-Nor

Custom Variables For Your Android Applications

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:39:00 +0000

With the power of the Google Analytics Mobile SDK, you can track activity within your mobile applications the same way you track activity on websites. In fact, this SDK turns Google Analytics into a great tool for analyzing mobile application usage, with the option to use many of the same great features like advanced segments, goals, and custom reporting. However, you could not apply custom variables to the pageviews and events you sent from your mobile application to Analytics... until now. Get ready for a holiday present.

We’re pleased to announce the addition of custom variables to the Mobile Analytics SDK for Android. Using the same simple interface, you can now apply custom variables to your mobile usage data, making for dead-easy segmenting of that data when it comes time to analyze usage and optimize your mobile application.

How, you ask, can custom variables be used to optimize an Android application? The same way they help you optimize web applications: by providing actionable context. Some starter ideas for how to segment your Android application users:

Free vs Paid users: What percentage of users went from demo to full version? How long did it take them?
Application Version: What version of your app gained the most users? Which version lost some users? Look at where things went wrong and fix them. Fast.
Platform version: Would bumping up the minimum version of your application cost you some percentage of your user base? Should you stay backwards compatible with cupcake, or focus on the juicy new features?

You can also use custom variables to tell how users interact with your application:

Modes of interaction: UI-wise, do your users use menu-items or long-presses more often?
Help/Tutorial: How many features of your application are explored by users who finished the built-in tutorial? How many get used by those who didn’t? What’s the conversion rate to paid users?
Portrait vs landscape: What mode are people in during most of their interaction with your application?

Thanks to the flexibility of the Google Analytics platform, this information is now available to include in your Android applications. And because it’s Google Analytics, you still have the advantage of analyzing all this data with our web interface, as well as all the data analysis and visualization tools provided by our ridiculously awesome community.

From all of us on the Google Analytics team, we hope you enjoy!

Posted by Alexander Lucas, Google Analytics API Team

GA As Networking Tool

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Talk about organic...Read about incredible organic growth below, and how Analytics helped enable it. We love to share these types of stories because they show practical usage cases of finding success with analytics. Enjoy.

Turning a hobby into a full-time job isn’t always an easy feat. Zach Weiner started drawing comics in high school and he never expected he’d make a career of his clever anecdotes. When his talent agency coworker asked him why he didn’t do his comics full-time, Weiner was inspired. He quit the agency a few months later to launch Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). The daily webcomic now has over 150,000 daily visits.

Weiner uses Google Analytics to better understand those 150,000+ daily visitors. After founding SMBC in 2005, Weiner installed Google Analytics in 2008. "At that time, my traffic was starting to take off, and my old trackers couldn't keep up," says Weiner. "And the other trackers we used couldn't keep up with the quantity of visitors and began reporting absurd numbers. I had heard good things about Analytics so I decided to switch over."

Since making the switch to Google Analytics, Weiner has used the information to track the referral path to his site. By analyzing referrals to his site, he ensures he is not missing out on business opportunities. Because the livelihood of the comic is completely dependent on visitation, it’s crucial for Weiner to open as many doors as possible.

"I have enough traffic now that I might miss the fact that a large blog linked me," says Weiner. "With Analytics, I can find those sorts of links and make contact with the Blogger." In this way, Weiner is able to build relationships with key Bloggers. As an example, Weiner noticed that Reddit.com was routing a significant amount of traffic to SMBC and he gave Reddit a shout out on his blog. Soon after, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian contacted Weiner and is now his publisher. Who knew Analytics could also be a networking tool?

Weiner also uses the Analytics data to build out new entry points. "I can find out which aggregators people use and try to make these aggregators more accessible. For example, I recently added a simple Facebook button under each comic after noticing how much of my traffic arrives from Facebook." To collect this information, Weiner checks the last year of referrals day over day to see what sources are spiking or dwindling.

Weiner’s attention to his Analytics data has also allowed him to make changes to his AdWords targeting. "I recently found that, for reasons unclear to me, Anime blogs tend to produce high quality traffic to SMBC," says Weiner. "I recently ran ads on an Anime site that, according to Analytics, sent about 35 page views per visitor!"

The author of SMBC is now a self-admitted Analytics addict -- he has to give himself a limit on the amount of time he spends in Analytics each day. By monitoring Analytics for crucial information about referral sites, Weiner has been able to open several new doors to his site and he’s built new relationships with other members of the online comic world. Make sure you get your daily dose of cereal!

Posted by Maren Bean, Google Analytics Team

Optimize And Analyze For Mobile, part 2

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:11:00 +0000

This is part 2 of a timely 3 part guest post on mobile analytics strategy and implementation by Feras Alhlou at E-Nor, a Certified Partner in Northern California. Here's part 1, which explained how to look for trends in mobile traffic to your website. Look forward to Part 3, "Act on your ROI", coming soon.

2. Give Your Reports More Dollar Power
Now that you know where your mobile trends stand (and hopefully it’s positive), make sure to analyze the data carefully. What does the trend signify and where do you want to go with the data?

After your CMO sees this amazing upward trend in mobile traffic (see the graph in the previous post), he will probably send the report to the CEO. The important question here is, can you show her the money? Surely, your CEO will be interested in how this trend impacts the company’s bottom line.

Again, check the Vistors->Mobile Devices report. This time, choose the Pie Graph version of the report to look at. You can pivot the table by Revenue if you are tracking E-Commerce or Goals with a monetary value. The report below graphs the revenue generated by mobile traffic segmented by mobile device.

Click to enlarge

Wow - iPad is bringing in the cash. This is highly actionable. You might want to ask yourself: is your site optimized for iPad? Is there a cross-promotional opportunity or coupon you can create with iPad?

And if you add up the total revenue from mobile devices, its more than $25k over the date range you're looking at. Let's say that's a week of data. Whatever you're paying to make your website ready for mobile, well, now you know - it's worth it.

If the $25K in revenue didn’t make analytics actionable, nothing else will. Your CEO can now easily connect the dots all the way to the bottom line.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Feras Alhlou, E-Nor

Code Site In Five New Languages

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:30:00 +0000

Google Analytics is not only a product but also a platform, supporting an ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. The Google Analytics APIs are an important part of this ecosystem and platform. In fact, over 80 new applications have been added to the Google Apps Gallery since we announced it 6 months ago. We love seeing this kind of innovation, and we want to do everything we can to encourage it -- not just in English-speaking regions, but around the world.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’re making an important development tool -- Google Code, the documentation on which developers depend to create these applications -- available in five additional languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. We’ve identified these languages as ones especially useful to users wanting in-language, technically involved documentation about Analytics.

Whether you are a long-time Analytics partner/developer in Brazil, a systems integrator in China, or a applications developer in Japan, you can now use Google Code in your native language.

To view the language of your choice, just go to http://code.google.com/apis/analytics and click on the language selector to the left of the Sign out link.

Happy reading, analyzing, and developing!

Posted by Patricia Boswell, Google Analytics Team

Optimize And Analyze For Mobile, part 1

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0000

This is part 1 of a timely 3 part guest post on mobile analytics strategy and implementation by Feras Alhlou at E-Nor, a Certified Partner in Northern California. A must-read if you're preparing for the mobile revolution that has been going on for a few years. :-) There's still time - use these posts as a starting point.

Only a few years ago, organizations were still trying to figure out the web. Forward thinking marketers contemplated the capacity of the digital medium to implement viable online business strategies and maximize marketing ROI. Over time, marketing managers and business owners saw the writing on the, er, screen. Those who invested in their online presence and established a measurement culture are now reaping great benefits.

Whereas the web’s ROI has proved rewarding, the possibilities in “mobile” have yet to be discovered. Just taking a quick look at the ubiquitous use of smart devices (Google’s Android, iPhone, etc.) should pique your interest. And rest assured, you won’t stumble across any hidden fees and dropped calls in this market. Lucky for you (and me), it's not too early to start taking the mobile market seriously and by following these simple yet key steps, the ability to “rethink possible” is just a few Google Analytics metrics away.

With these posts, I hope to share a few useful tips for marketing managers and business owners to better understand their mobile traffic and improve returns.

Can’t get good reception? (Pun intended). No problem! Just apply these three analytics tips. The first one is here, and the other two will follow in blog posts in the coming weeks:

1. Look for Mobile Trends
The number of visits to your site might not be the most attractive key performance indicator (KPI). Yes, that's exactly what I am saying- more traffic does NOT always translate to more sales! In fact, I’ve seen plenty of sites with traffic through the roof and sales down the toilet. Instead, give your metrics more context and you’ll transform it from boring to sexy at twice the speed of light.

Here is an example: if I tell you that your month-over-month traffic is flat, well, that’s not very exciting (and you might want to have a serious talk with your demand generation manager). But if I tell you that, while your overall traffic was flat your mobile traffic has increased at a rate of 25%, it's a different story altogether. The graph below depicts this upward traffic trend.

So show some love to this KPI and monitor mobile traffic to your website. This can be easily done with Google Analytics by clicking on the “Mobile” reports under the “Visitors” Tab. Then, follow these action items to realize your true mobile trends, in context:

1.1 Set up an auto report to be sent to your inbox (daily, weekly or monthly)

1.2 If you are interested in monitoring specific thresholds, you can create a profile for mobile traffic and then create a custom alert that is emailed to you when these thresholds are met

1.3 Or, for the Ninja analyst, using the Google Analytics Data Export API & plug-in (e.g. shuffle point), pull this data automatically into your marketing dashboard

Note: You can still add more context to your metrics to determine how engaged your mobile visitors are. You can even trend it over time. This can be easily done by creating an advanced segment for the engagement metrics that are relative to your business (e.g. non-bouncing visits, visits with more than X minutes and viewed Y key pages, etc.)

(note: while the case study we're using is specific to an e-commerce business, the approach and analysis are applicable to all businesses, be it lead-generation or content or other business models. Also, for technical accuracy, the reports and analysis in these posts reflect users accessing your website from a high-end mobile device. Please see the technical note at the end of the posts on mobile sites as well as non-smart mobile devices).

Stay tuned for Part 2: Give Your Reports More Dollar Power, coming soon.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Feras Alhlou, E-Nor

Take Advantage Of The Help Forum

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:44:00 +0000

Do you need answers to your Google Analytics questions? Do you want advice on customizing the tracking code? Eager to share your knowledge with other Google Analytics users?

The Google Analytics Help Forum is a community of people like you, who enjoy helping each other figure out the best ways to use Google Analytics. You can share your expertise or seek out answers in this user powered community. Also, there are active Googlers such as myself who are monitoring the forum and chiming in as often as we can. It's probably the quickest way to get help - usually you don't have to wait 24 hours for a response.

Our Top Contributors are highly knowledgeable and will point you to the right resources that'll help you troubleshoot your issue. We love giving them a shout out here - maybe next month it'll be you or someone who helped you.

Top Contributors for October
PPC_Guru (Phil Pearce)
Bronwyn Vourtis (Whims)
Thanks you two! Maybe we'll send you a little fun Google Analytics swag (or already have :-). And to everyone else writing responses and jumping in and helping out - thanks. And to those posting questions - thanks as well. It helps us figure out what's puzzling our users, or causing problems, so we can improve the product. This community never ceases to amaze us - you have driven improvements and refinements that make this product great. We're listening and evolving.

So, why wait when you have a question or a tip about GA? If you can't find the answer in our other resources such as the do-it-yourself resources under "Learning Center" over on the right hand side of this page, then go social and post them here in the forum.

Posted by Arunodaya Jayanti, Google Analytics Team

Major New Features Added To Intelligence

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:45:00 +0000

Today at Ad Tech NYC, we announced a few major new features in your Intelligence reports which should be very useful: Major Contributors for Custom Alerts, and SMS and Email alerts.

Major Contributors

When you have a custom alert set up to capture important changes in your account, you can now see a break down of the individual segments that are the most likely instigators of the change in traffic. For example, in the below screenshot we can see that on June 4, visits to the GoogleStore are up 510%. That alert was triggered because we set up a Custom Alert for "Visits Up By 10%".

(click to enlarge)

Now, as you can see underneath that Custom Alert there is a new sub-section called “Major Contributors.” When Google Analytics detects causes to a major change in traffic, this section will display up to 5 segments that have contributed to that particular change.

In this case, we see the source “gmail.blogspot.com” is sending new traffic to a particular landing page. You can click on the url of the referrer or landing page to view the path your users took to arrive at your site. It turns out that an article posted to the gmail blog is sending heavy traffic to the gmail sweatshirts on the GoogleStore. Digging in further, we also discover that it has resulted in an increase of 10 times the revenue for that day, which we can now attribute to a known cause thanks to this major contributor section.

That's Major Contributors!

In order to use it, create a custom alert. Here's an image of the "Manage Intelligence Alerts" area in your reports:

And here's a help center article on examples of useful custom alerts, and you can also use the alert templates, pictured here, to quickly create custom alerts:

SMS and Email

Also, when a custom alerts is triggered, you can now opt in to be notified by SMS (US only) or send alerts to your colleagues with multiple email recipients.

This is a practical feature when you've set up important alerts such as traffic or conversions down by 50%, for example. That's info you or someone in your organization should know ASAP, wherever you are.

And, as a reminder, you can get alerts on GA's full suite of metrics, including all 20 GA goals, Adwords metrics like CTR and content metrics like time on page.

This latest version of alerts with major contributors is a first for the analytics industry anywhere. We hope you enjoy it, and use it to take action quickly.

Posted by Beth Liebert, Google Analytics Team

Analytics In The Palm Of Your Hand

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:09:00 +0000

This weeks’ featured app on the Analytics App Gallery is the BAM Analytics Pro app for the iPhone. If you have ever needed to reference your site metrics in a meeting or situation where it wasn’t appropriate to fire up the laptop and open up your account, then you may find a Google Analytics smart phone app valuable.

This app, developed by Blast Advanced Media (one of our Certified Partners), uses the Google Analytics API to quickly and securely access all of your reports, apply your Advanced Segments, and even create Custom Reports right within the app. You can view common preset date ranges, set a custom date range, or compare to a previous date range for additional context. All the functionality you could need within a clean, user-friendly interface. Here's a sample of custom reports functionality:

BAM Analytics Pro can be purchased here on the iTunes app store for $1.99. Our Google Analytics Certified Partners are some of the most inventive users and developers of our free API. Many of their business-driven tools and applications make it to our Analytics App Gallery, where you can find a variety of solutions that compliment and enhance our product.

Great work BAM!

Posted by Jesse Nichols, Google Analytics Team

Swissotel’s High Value Visitor Segment

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 22:53:00 +0000

Thanks to the Conversion Room Asia-Pacific Blog and Vinaoj's team in Singapore for this insightful, enterprise-class case study.

Need a little inspiration for ways to get a LOT our of Google Analytics? Well, Advanced Segments is a great place to start. As you might know, they allow you to dissect your traffic into audiences that you actually care and want to know more about. And here's a great example of use by a major hotelier.

Barbara Pezzi, Director Webmarketing, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, is back to share with us how Swissotel properties in Singapore used advanced segments to better understand the needs of their UK and Australian visitors. By using advanced segments and her detective skills, Barbara was able to determine that Australian visitors were seeking deals, while her UK visitors were more interested in the quality of the rooms. She was able to optimise her AdWords campaigns and messaging based on these insights, and quickly managed to see a 68% increase in revenue and a 92% increase in conversion rates.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Google Analytics Solutions JAPAC

Next Week: Ad Tech New York

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:45:00 +0000

If you're an enthusiast of "Mad Men" (a television drama about advertising in New York in the 1960s), and Google Analytics, well then you're probably enjoying the dichotomy that is advertising today: a mix of decades-old media creatives and buys, and cutting edge online tracking and social graphing, and a ton in between. Getting a birds eye view is wildly interesting and educational. And the ad:tech Conference in New York City next week might be a good event for you to attend. And the best part is that it not only gives a bird's eye view, but also offers compelling and educational sessions for the savviest online marketer.

Happening on Wednesday and Thursday (November 3-4), it's a fun, relevant, informative conference, where "brands, agencies, publishers and service providers come together to share, network, learn and do business." You'll see traditional advertising agencies there, as well as the latest in online. Just take a look at the different conference seminar tracks titles:

Brand
Social Media
Digital Demographics
Media Strategy
Performance

And we'll be there as well with a sponsored workshop called "Improving Your Online Advertising with Insights from Google Analytics" on Thursday at 11:45am. In it, Phil Mui, our senior product manager, will present some developments in the product, as well as existing features, that will appeal especially to online marketers and advertisers. Register here. We hope to see you there.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

PM POV: AdWords Reports Launch

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:24:00 +0000

This is the first of a new series of intermittent posts by Google Analytics Product Managers - the people leading the prioritization and production of features and improvements to GA. We wanted to add a little color to what you're seeing and let you know the how and why behind the process we take. In this first post, Jayanth Mysore tells what happened behind the scenes during the prioritization and development of the AdWords reports. Enjoy.

In June, we launched the new AdWords reports in Google Analytics. Today, I thought I’d share some of what goes on behind the scenes -- how we went from an idea to the actual reports that you see in Google Analytics today.

How did it begin? Many of you use Google Analytics expertly, and in innovative ways. You told us all the ways in which the product was lacking...in emails, blog posts, tweets, and in Q&A sessions and face-to-face meetings at conferences like SES and eMetrics. We’ve found that expert and innovative users are often the best at articulating what’s going to be most valuable to all users. So, we listen carefully to feedback, and one area we heard -- and learned -- a lot about was AdWords reporting.

For example, many of you told us that you were writing intelligent filters that would allow you to see actual search queries. Some of you were looking for ways to understand the effectiveness of campaigns on the content network. And many of you were struggling with how to make day parting decisions. We heard all this and said “We need to help here, here, here and there. Let’s go build!”

Next, we built a version of the reports and asked a few hundred of you to try it. This version did even more than what you see in the reports today because we wanted to test some promising, but challenging ideas. We can’t always put all the features we’d like into a product update. Sometimes we have to leave something out because it runs too slowly and making it run faster requires extensive design work. Other features simply won’t work for all Analytics users. Still, we wanted to test everything and determine which aspects of this we could offer everyone and how soon.

Our test users are terrific -- very innovative, highly trustworthy and they never hesitate to point out things that are too slow or too hard to use. We worked closely with these users and studied the usage data to figure out what we could and couldn’t do. It became amply clear that providing a list of AdWords dimensions to segment the reports was very very valuable. We wanted our users to have this right away. Other features were also valuable, but would require time to fully develop. In the end, we decided that we’d rather give users something significantly better immediately, and keep working to offer more down the road.

Finally, we rolled out the new reports gradually over weeks. We take user experience very seriously, no matter where in the world you are. During these initial weeks, we monitored usage, latency, bugs filed, tweets, e-mail feedback. The other thing we did was to translate the product so that all of you, across the world, could use the new reports.

Finally, when we were ready, we hit the go button, flipped a bit to expose the feature, blogged about it....and you all saw the new AdWords reports in the Traffic Sources section.

Work doesn’t stop after the release. We immediately started working on some of those hard problems I talked about and we’ve already made some progress. In August, we made the new AdWords dimensions available in Analytics Intelligence.

We continue to work on these reports, so stay tuned. And, thanks for your active usage of the product. You all make our day!

Posted by Jayanth Mysore, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team

Harvard University And A Geo Analytics App

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:52:00 +0000

Back in Web Analytics TV episode 8, Cesar Brea asked if there was a way to use Advanced Segments to get performance metrics for a list of target cities. As Cesar Brea pointed out in the post comments, because Google Analytics only returns city names (e.g. "Paris"), you need to request both the city and region names to disambiguate between cities with the same name (e.g. "Paris, Texas" vs. "Paris, California" vs. "Paris, France").

The Advanced Segment builder in Google Analytics allow you to create expressions only in the following form:

(City A OR City B) AND (Region X OR Region Y)

But what Cesar really needed was to build an Advanced Segment of the form:

(City A AND Region X) OR (City B AND Region Y)

One option is to create individual segments through the interface, export to CSV then open all the CSV files, and merge the data into a single file. Lots of work. The other option is more elegant and powerful: automate the task with the API.

An Elegant Solution
So Cesar did exactly that and partnered with Newcircle Consulting to built the free Target Towns Google Analytics API solution. With Target Towns, you simply authorize the tool to access your Google Analytics account. You upload a list of regions and cities, and the tool runs a bunch of API requests for you to get performance data for your top target towns. Simple!

Business Impact
What’s really interesting is how analysts are using this tool to get better insight into the geo-breakdown of their marketing campaigns.

One geo-information user is Perry Hewitt, Director of Digital Communications and Communications Services at Harvard University. One of Perry’s goals is to increase non-branded search referrals to Harvard’s website. Specifically when senior university leaders and faculty speak at events, Perry can start to measure which new keywords people use to learn more about the topics and speakers.

Perry says, "At Harvard University, analytics have become an essential part of our digital communications strategy. Services like the Target Towns report help us understand what resonates where -- and are an interesting new complement to the Google Analytics capabilities we already use."

We’re thrilled to see developers overcoming challenges and solving business problems with the API. If you have done some exciting work with the Google Analytics platform, lets us know in the comments. We love to hear your stories.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Chrome 6 Issue Corrected

Jeff Gillis — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 02:31:00 +0000

Chrome version 6.0.472.55 was an incremental update to a new version of Chrome released on September 7 and announced here. There was a bug in the JavaScript engine that reported the wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case. This caused Chrome to incorrectly execute Google Analytics' JavaScript, providing an artificially high visitor count for some websites, for their visitors using that particular version of the Chrome browser. Note, not all Google Analytics accounts were affected. The affected period will vary for accounts but would not have appeared before September 7.

A fix was released for all versions of Google Chrome on Wednesday, September 22. Chrome users were automatically updated to version 6.0.472.63 over the last few days.

You can determine whether a profile was affected by comparing visit data from September 7 to approximately September 22 with a previous date range. If you think your account was affected and want to segment out visits from that date range from the affected Chrome release, you can create an advanced segment similar to this one.

We are working closely with the Chrome team to ensure that an issue like this does not happen again. While we believe this issue is fixed, we’ll be closely monitoring this issue over the weekend and beyond.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

New! Status Dashboard

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:15:00 +0000

Google Analytics processes huge volumes of data for websites around the world everyday, thanks to Google’s globally renowned infrastructure. While we never stop focusing on system reliability and scalability (here's an example), we also want to make sure our users have an easy way to get the latest updates from us should there be a problem.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have launched the Google Analytics Status Dashboard. Now anyone can visit this Status Dashboard to check on the current status of components of the Google Analytics system.

The dashboard reports on the three main components of Google Analytics:

Data Collection (whether data from websites are being collected by the Google Analytics servers correctly)
Web Report (whether users can view the reports correctly when they sign in to their Google Analytics accounts)
GData API (whether the Google Analytics APIs are working properly)

The Google Analytics Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will benefit all Google Analytics users, from Fortune 500 companies to personal websites. The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for service availability of Google Analytics anywhere in the world. You can also get the updates pushed to you by subscribing to the RSS Feed. And of course, you can always get updates from us here at this blog or by following us on Twitter (@googleanalytics) and get help from the Google Analytics Help Center or the User to User Forum.

Posted by Yi Wang, Google Analytics Product Team

The Magic Of Weighted Sort

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:01:00 +0000

Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist here at Google. He is, without a doubt, our toughest, most vocal and valued critic and advisor - we couldn't be luckier to have him. He reminds me of a younger, more talkative Gandalf, the wizard from the The Lord of The Rings who just knows stuff. Lots of stuff. Basically everything. When it comes to analytics, Avinash is our Gandalf, except Avinash is a much more riveting public speaker.

So, when he lauds something, it should be noted. That's why his recent post, End of Dumb Tables in Web Analytics Tools! Hello: Weighted Sort, about the newly launched Google Analytics feature, weighted sort - which sorts table data according to its importance, not simply according to numerical value - is worth reading for this audience.

Here's a quote from Avinash's post:

Arthur C. Clarke said:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

That quote comes to mind when I think of a new feature in Google Analytics that carries the unassuming name of Weighted Sort. It is an advanced implementation of technology (mathematical algorithms in this case) and when used it very much feels like magic!

In this blog post I want to share with you why I am so incredibly excited about this feature, how it works and how going forward you will reject every tool that does not come built in with this feature (ok so maybe that's a stretch, but I promise you this is so cool that at least for a few minutes you'll think other tools are lame by comparison!).

We have a very long tail of data in web analytics. Tens of thousands of rows of keywords in the Search Report (even for this small blog!). Hundreds and hundreds of referring urls and campaigns and page names and so on and so forth.

Yet because we are humans we tend to look at just the top ten or twenty rows to try and find insights. The problem? The top ten of anything rarely changes (except in rare circumstances like a sale or on a pure content – think news – site).

Hence I have persistently evangelized the need for true Analysis Ninjas to move beyond the top ten rows of data to find insights.

He goes on to give great examples of use, and even gets into the math behind the feature. Love that! It's a must-read post for anyone interested in getting the most out of Google Analytics, or in web analytics as a whole.

We hope you're making use of this new feature. Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Hot Off The Press: A New Blog In JAPAC

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Here's another example of how complex and useful this product is. In addition to the six conversion and analytics-focused company blogs already in existence, Google is launching another Analytics blog in JAPAC, led by our own Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, lead specialist in the hemisphere, called Conversion Room Asia-Pacific Blog.

Vinoaj (aka Vinny) has already been a regular contributor to other Google blogs and is an expert practitioner so expect some fantastic posts, a few of which we'll repost here. Also, the JAPAC blog will be worth following for some more in-depth customer examples of usage.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

iOS 4 Compatible Mobile SDK Now Available

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:16:00 +0000

Google Analytics is very pleased to announce the latest release of the Google Analytics SDK for iOS and Android, which now runs on devices using the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 4. The new version of the SDK is 0.8 (ie. still beta) and it also includes fixes for Android.

If you are a current website administrator or Google Analytics developer and are beginning to branch out into Android or iOS development, the Google Analytics mobile SDKs can provide a familiar interface as you transition from tracking website visitors to mobile users.

These SDKs for iOS and Android enable you to track user activity directly in your native mobile apps -- for example, you can see what "pages" or panels of your application are the most popular or even how many clicks a particular button or control generates. As with Google Analytics for the web, this usage data can help provide insight on additions or enhancements necessary to boost user engagement or optimize your mobile ad spending. Even better, all "page view" and event tracking data is viewable in the same interface that you're already accustomed to for tracking website statistics, and integrating it into your app is as simple as adding a few lines to your iOS or Android source code. For example:

Sample code:

#import "GANTracker.h"

// ...

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {
[[GANTracker sharedTracker] startTrackerWithAccountID:@"UA-0000000-1"
dispatchPeriod:kGANDispatchPeriodSec
delegate:nil];

// Track a page view
if (![[GANTracker sharedTracker] trackPageview:@"/app_entry_point"
withError:&error]) {
// ...
}
}

// ...

For more sample code for both iOS and Android, please see the developer documentation. Also keep in mind that you can use Google Analytics to track usage activity for mobile websites using the server-side code snippets for PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, and Perl, also available in the documentation.

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager, Google Mobile Ads, and Beth Liebert, Google Analytics Team

Increase Your Productivity with the API

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:26:00 +0000

Back in Episode 10 of Web Analytics TV, (32:00), Lisa C from Melbourne asked how to pull a trending report from Google Analytics for the top organic search landing pages. This was such a great question, that we wrote 2 articles and released sample code describing how you can automate retrieving this data from Google Analytics Data Export API. But first let’s look at the results.

Here is a graph plotting traffic to the top 100 landing pages for organic search for all of June for www.googlestore.com.

Let’s Analyze. This is the typical trend graph you can find across the Google Analytics web interface. By itself, all you can tell is that something happened during the spike. What you can’t figure out is which page actually increased in traffic; to do so would require lots more digging.

Now let’s try again. Here is a stacked area graph of each of the top 100 landing pages for organic search.

Let’s analyze again. Awesome, right? It's obvious why this is better - there's more context. Notice how much more we can get from this graph. We can see the green page is what caused the big spike. Also we see that the blue and orange pages had interesting changes in traffic patterns; changes we couldn’t identify from the first graph. Being able to break down the totals is indeed a gold mine for analysis.

What actions might you take from these insights? Perhaps you should get your organic search keywords to send traffic to the blue page. Then, identify the keywords sending traffic to the green and orange page and see if you can increase traffic to other pages.

Exporting the Data from the web interface:
Anybody can pull this data from the Google Analytics web interface - but it's a bit of work. You create a custom report with landing pages and entrances. Then drill into each landing page, and export the data to a csv file. Finally you go through all csv files and compile them into a single file for analysis. Let’s illustrate:

Going through each report individually is a LOT of manual work, but we can automate all of this using the Data Export API, reducing hours of work into a few minutes!

Using the Data Export API to Automate

We mentioned we wrote two articles about the above graph. In the first article, we demonstrate how to use the Data Export API to automate the exact task above. A user specifies 1 query to determine the top landing pages. Then, for each landing page, a separate query is used to get the data over time.

This is great and we built it to work with any query with a single dimension. But notice that the number of queries grows with the number dimensions. In fact this program requires n + 1 queries so if you want data for 1,000 dimensions, it will take 1,001 queries.

This is bad because there is a daily quota of 10,000 queries for the Data Export API. So if you ran this program 10 times, with 1,000 dimensions, it would require 10,010 queries completely using your quota. ouch!

Optimizing Data Export API Requests

The second article describes an alternate approach to retrieving the same data, but minimizes the number of queries required. In this article, we use Data Export API filter expressions to return data for multiple dimensions in each request.

This approach dramatically reduces the amount of quota required. In the best case, only 2 queries are required.

Using this second approach allows analysts to run this report to their hearts content; for different time frames and different dimensions, comparing organic vs paid traffic, trends of keywords by search engine,and even traffic by geography.

In addition to the two articles describing both approaches, we've released the sample code for the application. We hope you use it! In the comments below, let us know the insights you find through using this tool.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

Urchin 7 64-bit Released!

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Do you need self-hosted analytics software? In some cases, particularly with intranets and other behind-the-firewall web services, running your own internal analytics application is the only way to access to usage data. In other cases, company or agency policy may prohibit the use of hosted analytics.

But whatever the reason, if you need self-hosted web analytics software, you need Urchin.
And like Google Analytics, it keeps getting better. Case in point: now available, a new version: Urchin 7. Urchin 7 represents the pinnacle of web analytics software, with a feature set only Google Analytics can compete with.

Check out these new features:

64-bit CPU support
Parallel log processing
1000 domains/unlimited logs
100% new UI
Advanced Segmentation
Event Tracking
Permalinks
API v. 2
Price: US$9995

Please see the Urchin 7 Features page for more information, or download Urchin 7 today. Please note that Urchin 7 is sold exclusively through the global network of Urchin Certified Partners.

Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Team

More On Instant Search

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:24:00 +0000

Since this week’s launch of Instant Search, we’ve been asked how to track Instant Search in Google Analytics, and in particular, whether it’s possible to see partial Instant Search queries in your reports.

You actually don’t need to do anything to track Instant Search queries in Google Analytics. All search referrals are tracked just as they’ve always been.

We’ve seen several clever profile filters in the blogosphere that are designed to parse out the values of the “oq” parameter so that partial queries can be easily seen in Google Analytics. However, the “oq” parameter is not related to Instant Search and is often not passed in the request.

Some answers to your other questions:

Should I change my search advertising strategy to serve ads on to partial keywords (e.g. if I sell flowers, should I advertise on “flow”)?
This is not a productive strategy. Please note that ads are triggered based on the “predicted query” and not the stem that the users types in. So, in this example, the partial query “flow” triggers results for the predicted query of “flowers”. The only way someone can see your ad for “flow” is if they specifically searched for that word and hit enter or clicked search. And since you sell flowers, it’s not likely that your ad for flowers will be served alongside such a generic and irrelevant word.

Does this change impact the ranking of search results?
No, this change does not impact the ranking of search results.

What term will I see in Google Analytics if a visitor comes on a partial query?
The keyword analytics sends is not the partial one but the predicted query. If a user was typing "web metrics" but got the search result she wanted at “web met” with the predicted term being "web metrics", then you will see “web metrics” in your Google Analytics reports.

How will this affect my AdWords impression count?
When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.”

Many of your questions related to ads can be answered here.

We hope this helps. Feel free to comment below.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

New Book: Conversions For Dummies

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Are you eager to optimize your conversion rate, but feel a little bit overwhelmed by all of the tools available to help you? Introducing ‘Improving Online Conversions for Dummies’!

We have just released a simple, easy to follow mini book, in conjunction with John Wiley Publications, to help you get a better grasp of the conversion improvement tools offered by Google. Improving Online Conversions for Dummies explains how you can make sure your ads show on searches that are most likely to convert into sales. Understand which ad clicks and impressions lead to conversions, better apportion your marketing spend and even develop your own conversion attribution model. Discover the secrets to getting more bang for your buck with this ebook!

For more information, visit www.google.com/conversion/fordummies

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

Deep Dive Articles For The Data Export API

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:36:00 +0000

On the Google Analytics API Team, we’re fascinated with what people create using the Data Export API. You guys come up with some really amazing stuff! Lately, we’ve also been paying a lot of attention to how people use it. We looked at whether the API has stumbling points (and where they are), what common features every developer wants in their GA applications, and what tricky areas need deeper explanations than we can give by replying to posts in our discussion group.

As a result of identifying these areas, we’ve written a few in-depth articles. Each article is meant as a “Deep Dive” into a specific topic, and is paired with open-source, sample reference code.

In no particular order, the articles are as follows:

Visualizing Google Analytics Data with Google Chart Tools
This article describes how you can use JavaScript to pull data from the Export API to dynamically create and embed chart images in a web page. To do this, it shows you how to use the Data Export API and Google Chart Tools to create visualizations of your Google Analytics Data.

Outputting Data from the Data Export API to CSV Format
If you use Google Analytics, chances are that your data eventually makes its way into a spreadsheet. This article shows you how to automate all the manual work by printing data from the Data Export API in CSV, the most ubiquitous file format for table data.

Filling in Missing Values In Date Requests
If you want to request data displayed over a time series, you will find that there might be missing dates in your series requests. When requesting multiple dimensions, the Data Export API only returns entries for dates that have collected data. This can lead to missing dates in a time series, but this article describes how to fill in these missing dates.

We think this article format makes for a perfect jumping off point. Download the code, follow along in the article, and when you’re done absorbing the material, treat the code as a starting point and hack away to see what you can come up with!

And if you’ve got some more ideas for areas you’d like us to expound upon, let us know!

Posted by Alexander Lucas, Google Analytics API Team

New Verification Integration With Asynch

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:35:00 +0000

Nobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you're ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They're very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today.

You can now use a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to verify ownership of your website, which is the start of using the rich information about your organic ranking and organic traffic available in Webmaster Tools. If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button.

This only works with the newer asynchronous Analytics JavaScript, so if you haven't migrated yet, now is a great time. If you haven't set up Google Analytics or verified yet, go ahead and set up Google Analytics first, then come verify ownership of your site. It'll save you a little time — who doesn't like that? Just as with all of Google Webmaster Tools' other verification methods, the Google Analytics JavaScript needs to stay in place on your site, or your verification will expire. You also need to remain an administrator on the Google Analytics account associated with the JavaScript snippet.

Don't forget that once you've verified ownership, you can add other verified owners in Webmaster Tools (not Google Analytics) quickly and easily through the Verification Details page. There's no need for each owner to manually verify ownership. More effort and time saved!

Webmaster Central has also introduced an improved interface for verification. The new verification page gives you more information about each verification method. In some cases, we can now provide detailed instructions about how to complete verification with your specific domain registrar or provider. If your provider is included, there's no need to dig through their documentation to figure out how to add a verification DNS record — the new interface will walk you through it.

The time you save using these new verification features might not be enough to let you take up a new hobby, but we hope it makes the verification process a little bit more pleasant. Please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions. And much thanks to the Webmaster Central team for launching this feature. If you're not already, make sure to read their informative blog. It's a must for any site owner.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team, and Sean Harding, Webmaster Central Team

New Google Blog For SMBs

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Most every business, including Google's, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger, faster.

In a recent series on the Official Google Blog focused on small businesses, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. The team received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. And obviously, Google Analytics is one of the best, in our humble opinion. :-)

That’s why we’re giving an introductory shout out to the new Google Small Business Blog here on our blog. It's a central hub that brings together all the information about Google products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place. And we'll be contributing content on Google Analytics there as well.

They already have a few great posts, with more to come, and we're confident their audience will continue to grow, much like a small successful business.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Launch: Intelligence Just Got Smarter!

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:54:00 +0000

Hopefully, by now, you’re making good use of the Intelligence report in Google Analytics. If you’re looking to avoid the feeling that Google Analytics is “puking” too much data at you - a phrase coined by Google’s beloved analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik - you're not alone. We've heard you, and Intelligence is your first stop. As we mentioned in a previous post introducing Intelligence, it’s your dedicated assistant, monitoring your website traffic for significant changes that you should know of. Wondering what’s going on under the hood of your site traffic? Intelligence will tell you.

And it’s improving and getting smarter. Here are two improvements we’re announcing today.

New! AdWords Alerts

If you have linked your Google Analytics account with an AdWords account, Intelligence will now automatically surface important changes in your AdWords campaigns performance right in Google Analytics. So, in addition to the alerts you are used to getting, such as time on site and revenue, you’ll now receive alerts about your AdWords campaigns and the traffic they are bringing to your website.

You might already be familiar with custom alerts in Google AdWords, which alert you when important changes you specify happen in your account. With AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you benefit from automatic detection of significant changes, with no extra work for you to configure these yourself. For example, you might see an alert if the CTR for one of your campaigns increased unexpectedly. Or you might find that revenue from one of your destination URLs has dropped significantly from the week before. In both cases, you didn’t need to know ahead of time what to look for. These important changes are automatically detected and brought to your attention.

Here's how to use them. AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence work just like automatic alerts have in the past. You can learn more about how to use Analytics Intelligence here: http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-intelligence.html.

In order to use AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you need to have a linked AdWords account. Additionally, you need to have destination URL auto-tagging turned on. If you already use the AdWords reports in Analytics, you’re all set.

1. Sign into your Analytics account

2. Select Intelligence from the left-hand navigation

3. Choose daily (default), weekly, or monthly alerts

Directly underneath the graph, you’ll see check boxes for Custom Alerts, Web Analytics, and AdWords, which is next to the orange arrow in image above.

If you want to focus solely on your AdWords alerts, you can uncheck Custom Alerts and Web Analytics. Then, you can adjust the sensitivity slider to see just the most significant alerts or create an advanced segment to more closely investigate the change.

New #2! More options in Custom Alerts

It always easy to create a custom alert if there is a metric you’d like Intelligence to specifically monitor. See the orange arrow again, below:

You name the alert, apply it to a profile, designate a time period, and then set conditions for the visitor (such as City matches New York, or Campaign matches Fall Sale), and the metric (such as time on site greater than 5 minutes, or % of new visits is greater than 30%).

And now, we’ve added a ton more options in the Alert Conditions drop downs, including all of the 20 goals you have configured in each profile. They’ve also been dressed up for a night on the town, wearing their actual goal names such as “Goal8 Value: Visited >10 pages.” Only goals that you have configured will show up in the list, keeping the drop-down menu clean and courteous.

Among the other conditions and metrics now available: e-commerce and AdWords metrics, as well as more traffic sources, and more content page metrics. And remember, you can tell Intelligence to email you when an alert is triggered.

Intelligence is getting smarter and smarter, making you more effective. Try it out if you haven’t already.

Posted by Beth Liebert and Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Summer Excuses?

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Google Analytics workshops and seminars are happening everywhere this summer! If you've had excuses in the past, there's now no excuse not to take a day of training to become an expert and get a leg up. Chances are there's one happening near you when you're available -- just take a look at the Google Analytics seminars offered on the Seminars For Success portal. These are one day seminars, either beginner or advanced, where you'll ramp up into a high proficiency or fine tune your knowledge with fantastic instructors. Over the next 3 months, they are happening in:

Berkeley, CA
Austin, TX
Washington, DC
Los Angeles, CA
San Diego, CA
Boston, MA
Dallas, TX

And internationally, you can attend seminars in Glasgow, Manchester, London, Melbourne or Sydney. They're inexpensive, and you'll get a lot of bang for your buck, including hands on instruction, an AdWords credit, educational materials and some more good stuff. Take a look and register!

And then, after the Summer ends, there will be more opportunities to learn about Google Analytics, and here's one we want to highlight. The SMX East conference is a fantastic place to bone up on the latest in the world of SEM, SEO, social media marketing, analytics and more. In partnership with SMX East, Feras Alhlou, Principal Marketing Consultant @ E-Nor (a Google Analytics Certified Partner) will be conducting a full day workshop on Google Analytics at the conference. When registering at this page, you'll see a workshops option, including Google Analytics - that's the one you want.

Whether you are a marketer or a webmaster, this workshop will help you help give you more clarity and help you take the right action. I've attended Feras' workshops before, and they're insightful, practical, inspiring and helpful.

Here's the workshop agenda:

Morning Session – Marketer/Business Focus – Strategy & Planning

Web Analytics Strategy – approach, opportunities and limitations
How It Works – overview, accuracy and privacy implications, integrating with other data
Practical – understanding the user interface
Advanced Features Overview – clever stuff you can do with Google Analytics

Afternoon Session – Webmaster/Technical Focus – Implementation

Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properly
External Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email & banner campaigns
Reporting – dashboards & insights
Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights

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Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

A Shout Out About Annotations

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:35:00 +0000

A few months ago at the Google I/O conference, we were approached by Zach Steindler, a co-founder at Olark (a way to gain customer insight and sell better through live chat) who was raving about Google Analytics Annotations. He had such a great business case, we decided to let him rave here. Enjoy, and thanks Zach.

Making good business decisions is hard, and making the right one is even harder. At Google I/O I realized many people use Google Analytics but they aren’t familiar with the recent annotations feature that has helped us make smarter business decisions.

When we look at our Google Analytics, we don’t really care if our numbers are up or down; what we really want to know is why. This means asking a lot of questions, particularly questions about what happened when, like:

“How long has that ad trial been running?”
“When did we release that update to the website?”
“What happened after that last blog post?”

To answer these questions I might have to dig through e-mails, commit logs, and probably end up pestering my teammates for an hour while we try to figure out what happened when. But this is serious stuff; if our numbers went up 50% in a week, you better believe we want to know why so we can do more of it!

Annotations are exactly the tool we needed to answer these questions without having to pester teammates and dig through the past. If you don't know, basically, they allow you to add notes of what events happened on a particular day. These notes are then visible for the different views in Google Analytics, so you can see how the events impacted your page views, goals, or whatever else you are tracking.

You can annotate whatever you want; we annotate things like external publicity, major updates to our site, blog posts, even service issues, to see how all these events are impacting our business.

We’re big believers in the power of open data; everyone on the team has access to Google Analytics and can contribute events they think are important. This has been incredibly useful for us. Now I can answer many why questions for myself, just by looking at the data other people have contributed. When I do need to interrupt the team, it’s because I have big-picture questions, not because I need them to help me track down dates. Also, you start to notice a rhythm of events, and if that rhythm changes, how it impacts your business. As a bonus, now we have this cool timeline of events the team thought was important, which is useful for retrospectives and end-of-period reports.

We’re far from being able to make perfect decisions with perfect knowledge, but annotations have made it much easier to answer the why questions so we can make good business decisions.

Posted by Patricia Boswell, Google Analytics Team

Will Using Google Analytics Have A Negative Effect On My Ranking?

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Good news from the horse’s mouth. We don’t mean to call Matt Cutts a horse, but, well, if you know him, you know what we mean. Matt heads the webspam team here at Google and also speaks on behalf of Google answering questions about ranking and results on Google’s search engine. When people have questions about things Google-search-related, Matt is the one who answers.

He posts regular video blogs to the Google Webmaster Help channel answering your questions. So we were very pleased when he recently answered the question, “Will using Google Analytics have a negative effect on my ranking?” In short, the answer is no, especially now that we’ve launched the asynch tracking code . Take a look at the short video:

Thanks Matt!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Analytics Intelligence Tips: Custom Alerts

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:39:00 +0000

Last week, we shared a video on how to get the most out of your automatic alerts. Now that you’re familiar with automatic alerts, you know that Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that monitors your traffic and posts alerts when it sees something unusual. Now we want to tell you about "custom alerts." With custom alerts, you can add on to this capability and tell Google Analytics to also watch out for specific things that you know you’re interested in.

Custom alerts can be used in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to know where and when to incorporate them into your workflow. This week’s video, also below, shows how to use custom alerts as a campaign management tool. The idea is that, when you set up a new campaign, you set up alerts that help you manage the campaign -- for example, alerts that trigger when revenue from the campaign increases or decreases.

Campaign management is just one of the ways you can use custom alerts. We’d love to hear how you’re using them. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Analytics Intelligence Tips: Automatic Alerts

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:23:00 +0000

When was the last time you checked the bounce rate for visits from Hong Kong? You may never have needed to, until an “alert” in your Intelligence reports tells you that the bounce rate from Hong Kong has suddenly doubled.

An automatic alert in Intelligence is triggered when the expected performance of a metric, historically, differs from what is happening now. Intelligence monitors the past and current activity of all your metrics and lets you know when something out of the ordinary happens. One reason why these automatic alerts can provide so much insight is that they often bring your attention to traffic segments you might never have thought to examine before.

Now that the alert has caught your attention, you're ready to dive in and learn more. In this 3 1/2 minute video on automatic alerts, also below, you'll learn how. Did you know that you can graph the bounce rate from Hong Kong with a single click? Or that you can quickly create an advanced segment from the alert and start using it throughout your reports? You'll learn these tips and others, including how to use annotations with automatic alerts, and when to use daily, weekly, or monthly alerts.

Enjoy the video and feel free to share your own automatic alerts tips in the comments. Next week, we'll look at custom alerts.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Advanced: E-Commerce Roll Up Reporting For Websites With Different Languages

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:48:00 +0000

If you're a business owner of any size, you've at some point considered expanding. And as the web makes the world smaller, one way to expand is to offer your website in different languages and take your business across borders or to different segments. By entering other markets with your website, you can gauge new markets and find ways to grow and generate revenue.

Getting set up to offer your products and services in a different country can have a number of steps including localization and legal processes. Another thing to keep in mind is how you will set up your web analytics for the different languages and countries your site now serves.

We're highlighting a series of posts on the topic, called "Google Analytics reporting for multilingual e-commerce stores" by Gavin Doolan, a Googler based in Dublin specializing on Google Analytics for Europe. The posts are all from our Analytics blog in Europe, the Conversion Room. This is obviously a topic very close to the European businessperson's heart.

The great thing about the posts is that Gavin presents solutions for different structures of sites, since not everyone is doing the same thing when they sell products internationally or in different languages.

Part #1: Multiple languages on a single domain

Part #2: Multiple profiles, multiple domains and a single payment gateway

Part #3: Roll up reporting, multiple domains and a single payment gateway

We hope you'll find this information helpful as you think about expanding your business and your website.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

New Edition Of A Great Book

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 23:32:00 +0000

A few years ago, Brian Clifton was working at Google in London, leading our team in Europe. Since then, he's left to focus on growing his own Google Analytics Certified Partner called GA Experts From Omega Digital Media and written a fantastic book called Advanced Web Metrics With Google Analytics, which has just released a new edition. According to Brian, here's what's changed in the new edition:

"Since the first edition was published in 2008, a lot has changed - both for Google Analytics and the web as a whole. Remember two years ago hardly anyone had heard of Twitter. In that time Google Analytics has integrated with AdSense and Feedburner, launched event tracking, advanced segments, Intelligence alerts, motion charts, custom reporting, custom variables and the data export API. The new edition covers using all of these in detail from a practitioners point of view and with as many real-world examples as I could muster."

It's very well written and readable with screenshots - a great resource for all things Google Analytics. Ways to get the book:

Order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or direct from Wiley the publisher, or buy the PDF ebook

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Use Case: Twiddy & Company

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:12:00 +0000

We’re excited to hear from users that are able to attribute some incredible growth to Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, and many of the other tools we offer. Today, we’re taking a quick look at Twiddy & Company, which uses Google Analytics on a daily basis to optimize their website. They are one of our best examples of using marketing tools from Google to generate skyrocket growth. If you run a business, we think you'll enjoy this story and be inspired - it's like a blueprint for using Google Analytics for a successful SMB that relies on their website. Make sure you read to the metaphor they use around bounce rate - we love it!

Also, Twiddy & Company was also recently featured in a CNN Small Business Article, where they shared their success in using Kampyle, which uses the Google Analytics API to analyze web analytics and user feedback.

Meet Doug Twiddy

Doug Twiddy started selling real estate in 1978 in the sleepy village of Duck, North Carolina. After selling a few oceanfront lots, the owners built a few homes and asked the question “can you rent out my home when I’m not using it?” Today, Twiddy & Company manages 860 vacation rental homes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. These homes range from a 23 bedroom oceanfront on 20 acres to a 3 bedroom soundfront.

We sat and talked with Doug at length, and here's what's important to him, in his own words.

Favorite Reports

“Before Google Analytics, we only knew half of the working equation. Now that e-commerce tracking is installed, we can see the complete formula and it illuminates the true end result. Before we were following indicative numbers, now we can follow the most fundamental and necessary ingredient in all of business. Top Content is also especially useful at highlighting the exact exposure an individual home receives. This feature has created an all out addiction for home owners. Now their first question in relation to their performance is how many visitors their individual home has received.

Bounce rate is also a must-have for us. It’s the online equivalent of the human senses. We know a higher bounce rate means that something on that page doesn’t smell, look, or taste good.”

How Analytics has changed their approach in analyzing the website

“Google Analytics is our compass in terms of allocating our resources. It allows an evolution of marketing. The more successful ideas draw more time and capital. Even the non productive ideas yield educational lessons. In many instances, we learn more from a quick failure than a slow success.”

How they tested changes on the website

“We’ve recently started testing with Google Website Optimizer. How did we ever survive without this? Our old testing setup was an elementary A/B test but Google Website Optimizer engaged the hyper drive. David Booth at Webshare helped us get started and the results quickly produced the laughter of humility. The variables are now part of our secret sauce. Not only did it make it easier, it made it more successful in an exponential fashion.”

How Google Analytics has changed their company

“Google Analytics gives Twiddy the tools to outperform the market; the metrics for successful marketing. One of the unforeseen benefits includes the hospitality of the phone calls. By examining what the visitors are looking for online, Twiddy is able to produce more relevant content online that decreases the redundancy of questions for the reservationists. The reservationists now can focus on the more personal side of the vacation experience and guests can fulfill their desire to research the choices and arrive at a very intelligent decision.

Google Analytics has had a very tangible impact on the success of the company. It’s become ingrained into the daily routine and crucial to the marketing strategy. General Patton had the 3rd Army, Twiddy & Company has Google Analytics.”

We congratulate Twiddy & Company on their success. If you find yourself in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, be sure to stop by their offices and say hello.

Posted by Ashish Vij, Google Analytics Team

The Power of Multiple Custom Variables, part 2

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:30:00 +0000

This is the second part of a two part deep dive guest post about using Multiple Custom Variables written by Allaedin Ezzedin from E-Nor, a Google Analytics Certified Partner in Northern California.

2. Creating Custom Advanced Segmentation

Enough coding!! Now is the time to create some custom segments for some deep analysis.

In this section, we will set up a simple custom segment for all visitors who used the Spanish version of the site, visited the men's department, bought an item during their visit, looked at suits and visited the wedding registry section.

Sign in to your Google Analytics account
Advanced Segments > Create a new advanced segment
Add the following dimensions:

3. Viewing Reports

If you're still with us to this point, you are now ready to conduct analysis based on customized segments. Let's apply the advanced segment we just created and compare it with another advanced segment:

Segment 1: visitors who used the Spanish version of the site, visited the men's department, bought an item during their visit, looked at suits and visited the wedding registry section.
Segment 2: visitors who used the English version of the site, visited the men's department, bought an item during their visit, looked at suits and visited the wedding registry section.

At first glimpse, the dashboard numbers confirm that the Spanish-speaking customers who visited the wedding registry and looked at suits is more likely to buy than the English-speaking customers who visited the same store sections! This is invaluable feedback to report back to your marketing team.

Concluding Remarks

We can easily create additional segments/reports (or use Secondary Dimensions & Pivoting, or extract the data via the GA API) and have a much deeper understanding of user behavior on the site, and act on these findings.

What if you don't have an ecommerce site? No worries, the same concepts explained in the the above example are totally applicable to other types of sites. Lead generation sites, content sites and other types can definitely benefit from this powerful MCV feature. Just think of visitor segments & user actions that are important to you and then apply a similar implementation approach.

Now go out, segment, analyze and truly understand your users!

Related Posts

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

The Power of Multiple Custom Variables

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:30:00 +0000

This is the first part of a two part deep dive guest post about using Multiple Custom Variables written by Allaedin Ezzedin from E-Nor, a Google Analytics Certified Partner in Northern California.

This time of year is the perfect time for a deep-dive analysis of your online business. Summer is about to get under way, and the school year and holidays are a ways off. Equipped with the "Google Analytics more Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent" feature set, we are now able to extract insights that weren't available to us in the past, and go beyond the out-of-the-box reports and segmentations. We'll take a deep dive below, and you can also read more in the help center here.

One of the most amazing features made available in the October 20, 2009 announcement was Multiple Custom Variables (MCV). Google calls it "MCV" and I call it "Google’s gift to humanity". Prior to the MCV announcement, we were limited to tagging visitors by a single variable (SetVar) based on their interactions with a site. With the new MCV feature we can now track visitors according to any number of interactions and behaviors on the site.

In this post, I will walk you through a practical example that I hope you can apply to your own business.

Say you have an online store where you sell clothes for men, women and kids. You (and your boss) are not satisfied with aggregate data, so you go to your friendly marketing manager and web analyst and ask them to segment and segment deep! What you really want is to have more visibility into the shopping experience based on:

products and departments of interest

departments: men, women, etc.
categories: athletic, suits, shirts, etc.
special sections: wedding registry, wish list, etc.

buyers & non-buyers
site language selection: English, Spanish, etc.

Your request shall be answered using the powers of MCV! Here is a brief illustration of how it works.

What does "Multiple Custom Variables" do?

The Multiple Custom Variables feature allows us to label visitors at three levels, "visitor", "session" and "page". Note: none of the data from MCV personally identifies a visitor - these are totally anonymous labels.

1. Visitor-level Labels

These labels are permanent and will stay attached to the visitor for the current and future visits as long as the visitor's cookies are not cleared and the specific label is not overwritten by another label.

2. Session-level Labels

These labels stay attached with the visitor as long as the visitor is active on the site. Once the visitor leaves the site or the session expires, the labels will disappear.

3. Page-level Labels

Visitors can be assigned to labels at the page level if they interact with certain events (flash, video, Ajax...) or view certain pages.

Now, let's go back to our online store example and walk through our implementation strategy and technical details.

The Strategy

As visitors enter the store website, they will be tagged with different labels based on the pages they visit (products and store departments):

Example 1:

Tom is an English-speaking visitor, viewed a product (women pajamas), added the item to the shopping cart and then completed the purchase transaction.

At the end of the session, Tom’s visit will be labeled as the following:

Example 2:

Sara is a Spanish-speaking visitor, viewed a few products (men and women apparels), and then left the site without buying.

At the end of the session, Sara’s visit will be labeled as following:

The How

1. Customizing the tracking code:

Visitor-level Labels

At the visitor level we will use custom variables to segment visits based on the site interface language selection. This custom variable will stay attached to the visitors for future visits starting from the visit in which they selected the interface language (until they clear their cookies).

Setting the value of "interface-language":

Visitors are assigned to the language segment according to their selection in the language form.

Add custom code to the form onSubmit event as illustrated below:

Session-level Labels

At the session level we will use custom variables to distinguish visitors’ behavior across sessions based on their conversion. In this way, we can segment visits by those who complete ecommerce transactions versus those who just browse products in the site.

A visitor will be tagged as a "buyer" if he or she completes a transaction.

Setting the value of "visitor-type" to "buyer":

In the transaction confirmation page (thank you page) add the following code inside the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) right before the pageview GIF request _trackPageview()

pageTracker._setCustomVar(2, "visitor-type", "Buyer", 2);

If it is not possible to add the custom code inside the GATC, then add the following code after the GATC:

Page-level Labels

At the page level we will use custom variables to determine which products' categories and store departments are more visited. We will set a custom variable at the page level for each product, where the product category and the department for that product is set as a custom variable.

Setting the value of "store-department" and "product-category":

In each product page, add the following code inside the GATC right before the pageview GIF request _trackPageview()

pageTracker._setCustomVar(3, "store-department", “Men", 3);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(4, "product-category", "Suits", 3);

Setting the value of "gift-option":

Visitors will be tagged based on their gift card and registry selections.

Add the below code to the respective pages right after the GATC:

www.domain.com/baby-registry.html

www.domain.com/wedding-registry.html

www.domain.com/wish-list.html

Enough coding! You should now be equipped to create and use MCV. Next post, we'll take another slant and show you how to create custom segments using the values you've designated in your MCV.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Working with AdWords Conversion Products

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:01:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of the launch of the new and improved AdWords reports in Google Analytics, we wanted to let you know about a few upcoming events which will help you take better advantage of conversion tools in AdWords.

Tomorrow, July 10, 9am PDT / 12pm EDT: attend a free one hour webinar on AdWords Conversion Products, including Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimizer and Search Funnels. We'll do an overview of each feature, and do a walkthrough of the new Search Funnels reports. Read more about is on the AdWords blog post, and register here. We'll also go over importing Analytics goals into AdWords.

And then, jump into Summer with a fun and beneficial contest: the Conversion Champion Challenge! Implement AdWords Conversion Tracking (which you also can do by importing Google Analytics goals into AdWords) and then use Conversion Optimizer and/or Search Funnels and let us know how they're working for you, and you might win a trip to Google HQ, including a flight, hotel stay, lunch at Google, and an optimization, a blog post about your story on the AdWords blog, and also that summer beach body you've always wanted.

OK, maybe that last one is all you, but at least your conversion rates will look fantastic!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

A Segmentable Funnel

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:23:00 +0000

Ready for a fun workaround that you can use in Google Analytics if you like? We enjoyed this contribution from a poweruser that anyone can try.

Are you familiar with the Funnel Visualization report?

It's a visual representation of your onsite conversion funnel, showing how many visitors go to each step and how many leave the funnel at that step. You can spot trouble points with your funnel and take steps to correct the issue. Looking for a way to use Analytics to find a small tweak that will make a big difference on your bottom line? Improve just one step of your funnel abandonment - say by 1% - and that could translate to lots more conversions and money by making it easier for people to buy on your site.

However, an issue with the data and the visualization is that you can't segment it to find out what types of visitors are abandoning. For instance, which step is posing more problems for new visitors, than return visitors?

John Henson from LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Certified Partner, has written a post on the LunaMetrics blog called "Segment your goal funnel in Google Analytics" about a workaround that will allow you to segment the funnel visualization. He calls it the "horizontal funnel" because visually, you look at the funnel from left to right, by using a goal as a step in the funnel, instead of the 10 steps in each funnel provided by Google Analytics. You'll see what he means below and in his post.

He uses the example of what a traditional e-commerce funnel looks like:

Shopping Cart -> Address Info -> Payment Info -> Review Order -> Thank You

And flips it on it's side to be able to segment it. In the image below: the values outlined in blue are the visits to each step, and the values outlined in orange are the exit rate between steps.

In John's words: "It's like a regular funnel, just flipped on it's side, using goals, first steps in funnels, and custom reports....As you can see, this is in a keyword report. So, the funnel can be seen in-line in the report, for whatever segments you want; in this case for individual keyword phrases. And you can apply Advanced Segments or Secondary Dimensions to the report."

He then explains how to implement this workaround easily. Curiosity piqued? Head over to John's post for all the details.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

New Google Analytics Book Released

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 27 May 2010 22:50:00 +0000

A new book by a stellar team is now available for you to take your usage of Google Analytics to the next level. It's called Performance Marketing with Google Analytics, by Sebastian Tonkin (former Googler), Caleb Whitmore of Analytics Pros and Justin Cutroni from WebShare (both Google Analytics Certified Partners). Here's what Sebastian told us about it when we asked him how this book was different from others:

Sebastian: "Google Analytics can save you money! Use it to figure out what works with your online marketing, invest in that, and throw out the rest. This is the focus of our new title on Google Analytics geared toward business people and online marketers with an eye toward the bottom line."

Avinash Kaushik pitched in with a Forward, writing: "The key to real and magnificent success is not the ability to purchase a tool... but rather the ability to ensure a clean implementation and bring to it a mental model that will rock this world. This book is focused, page after detailed page, on doing just that."

See how real-world businesses use Google Analytics to drive online strategy and improve ROI on a daily basis. Follow step-by-step examples and learn how to:

Track and optimize social media, SEO, email and offline campaigns.
Maximize ROI on your marketing spend.
Build a strong team to support Google Analytics inside your organization.
Get more from your Adwords campaign.
Use the web to understand what customers want.
Create customer loyalty on your site.
Use feedback from users to guide online strategy.
Win share from competitors.

Caleb went further into depth on the contents: "This book tackles the delicate challenge of teaching how to think as well as what to do.

The first section focuses on the philosophical, managerial and organizational aspects of succesfully utilizing web analytics technologies to drive greater marketing performance.
The second section covers the end-to-end of how to plan, install, configure, and use Google Analytics to its fullest capability.
The final sections then covers application of the concepts and capabilities from the first sections to specific marketing disciplines - site optimization, display and sponsored search ads, organic search engine optimization, offline, email marketing, and more.

The end result: learn how to think, get guidance on setting up Google Analytics correctly, and then discover practical steps to drive higher performance from all aspects of marketing."

Thanks guys, and great work. Grab a copy on Amazon or find out more on the book's companion site, www.analyticsformarketers.com.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Videos From Master Class In Singapore Now Online

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:10:00 +0000

Last month we held 3 successful Google Analytics Master Classes in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Sydney. We were pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of interest in web analytics in this region with close to 1000 advertisers, agencies, bloggers, developers, and technophiles attending the events. For those of you who made it out, we thank you for your participation and interest, and hope you gained valuable insights from our all star team of speakers.

The videos of all the talks from the Singapore event are now available. Each session was kept deliberately short - no speaker goes on longer than 20 minutes - in order to maintain the audience’s interest and to keep the topics flowing at a good pace. Therefore, each video is a good length to watch during work, on break, or at home, enriching your Google Analytics knowledge in convenient bite-sized portions.

Above is Beth Liebert’s (Google Analytics Product Manager, Google) keynote on web analytics. Please surf on over to this post on the Solutions for Southeast Asia blog for the full list of the videos.

Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, JAPAC Google Analytics Lead, Global Technical Services

Updates To Our Homepage

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:51:00 +0000

Take a look at the Google Analytics homepage and you'll notice some small design and content changes that will improve your experience. Besides some under the hood improvements such as HTML5 and CSS2 validation, here are a few of the changes:

Added dropdowns to the top navigation across the whole site so users can find their way to the content they want better. Try hovering over Product to see a dropdown.
Updated the features scroller in the middle of the page with a more intuitive UI and cleaner look.
Updated the News & Hightlights section, which now includes a link to a recent Forrester Research article, "Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics".
Added a new box to the bottom right that allows the user to flip through our Strategic Solutions, including the recently announced Application Gallery.

Thanks to our fearless webmaster Mike Rigoli for spearheading these. Let us know what you think in comments below, but only if you love it. Joke :-) Enjoy.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Updates To .NET Library For The Export API

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:33:00 +0000

We’re incredibly proud of the diversity of applications and tools making use of the Google Analytics Export API. We also know that several of the folks developing these tools have been asking about our .NET client library and requesting sample code.

So we’re happy to announce we’ve updated the .NET Google Data client library to support all our recent features.

In addition, we’ve added 2 reference examples for both the Account Feed and Data Feed which show how to pull advanced segment, custom variable, and goal data from the API. As you can see from the examples, this client library makes pulling data from the Export API incredibly easy.

Now that the .NET developers among you have this library, what will you use it for? Fancy visualizations? Automated reporting? Extreme data mining? Let us know in the comments, or bounce a few ideas off your peers in the GA Data Export API group!

Posted by Alexander Lucas, Google Analytics API Team

New Name and New Badges for Authorized Consultants

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:20:00 +0000

Your friendly neighborhood Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program is getting a new costume and superhero name, though their powers will remain the same. (Read: we are renaming the program and with that comes a shiny new logo - we think of our partners as superpowered).

Our partners are now called Google Analytics Certified Partners. Here's the new logo:

If you are looking for help with your Google Analytics account, look for companies that display this Google Analytics Certified Partners logo. Companies displaying this logo have met our rigorous requirements demonstrating a level of expertise, agreed to our terms and conditions, and have proven experience to work with you.

Yes, we’ve made them jump through hoops because it’s important that we vet the best to service you. We don’t take it lightly because optimizing your Google Analytics account is serious business. So, whether it’s a quick consultation, help with an implementation or tracking a campaign, or long term support or training - look for companies that display the new logo. The new logos include a "Click to Verify" element that takes you to a listing on our partner page for more information.

You can find the latest list of Google Analytics Certified Partners here. The new logo is part of our plan to produce consistent naming and badging for all Google product partner programs.

Posted by Eva Woo, Google Analytics Team

Next Week: Two Incredible Conferences In One

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:25:00 +0000

Hey marketers and data heads: heads up! Next week is a good week to tell your boss you’re taking “enrichment time off.” We totally support using this excuse to take afternoons off and go to baseball games, or using it to let your boss know you won’t be at work on a Friday, when you're actually planning to hit the slopes early for a long ski weekend. “Enrichment time”. But regarding next week, we’re actually talking about legitimate, professional, guilt free, educational enrichment time at two web analytics conferences happening at the same place in San Jose -- next week!

You’ve heard of eMetrics, a premiere event for marketing and website analytics. We’ve launched a bunch of stuff at this conference over the years because the atmosphere fosters innovation. Well attended and sponsored by the Web Analytics Association, it’s also a chance for the web analytics industry to get together and share best practices and help each other.

In conjunction this year, there will be an additional conference in the same space, targeted specifically at conversions, called Conversion Conference. This conference is aimed specifically at helping you make minor or major adjustments to your website or campaigns specifically to increase your online conversions. It will share social events with eMetrics, and registering for both will help you take full advantage of the week. And when you register at the Conversion Conference site you can get a late-bird discount of $250 off. Enter the code CCW646.

Here are some of the must-see sessions:

Monday, May 3:

9am - 4:30pm: Google Analytics Workshop, led by Caleb Whitmore from Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. This promises to be a great training, with hands on examples from one of our most experienced partners. Make sure to register this week.

Tuesday, May 4:

11am - 12pm: Introduction to Google Website Optimizer as part of Conversion Conference
1:50pm - 2pm: "What’s New with Google Analytics" with our very own Brett Crosby
2pm - 3pm: see Brett again at the Conversion Conference in a panel with Eric Peterson called "Web Analytics & Uncovering Problems"
3pm - 3:30pm: Book signing and giveaway of a new book on Google Analytics written by Caleb Whitmore, Justin Cutroni and Sebastian Tonkin, who used to work on the Google Analytics team. This will take place in breakout room Cupertino.

Wednesday, May 5:

9am: keynote by Avinash Kaushik: "Leveraging Bleeding Edge Analytics Goodies"
12:15pm: Brown bag deep dive into what’s new with Google Analytics with product manager Jayanth Mysore

We hope to see you in San Jose next week, data heads, and you will return to work, savvier at all things web analytics, on the cutting edge of online tracking, and linked in with more professionals in your industry. Truly enriched.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

5 years ago today: Google acquired Urchin; Urchin became Google Analytics

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:45:00 +0000

It's been an amazing journey. Five years ago today, Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation. At the time, we had no idea how popular Google Analytics would become. To a great extent, Google Analytics' popularity is a reflection of the phenomenal accomplishments and hard work of many talented and passionate people here at Google. But mostly it is you, our customers, who have made the product what it is today. You've requested features, provided feedback, and asked tough questions. We're humbled and thankful. And, we're excited for the next 5 years. Congratulations and happy anniversary!

Posted by Brett Crosby and Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Web Analytics TV #8 with Avinash and Nick

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:32:00 +0000

This is the 8th edition of Web Analytics TV with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski where you ask questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

Here is the list of last week’s questions. In this episode we discuss:

How to create Advanced Segments for many sites (or other parameters)
AdSense in $index calculations
Tracking affiliates in Google Analytics
Using an Event as a goal like tracking people who watch videos to conversion
Measuring embedded Flash with Google Analytics
Should you use two analytics packages like Google Analytics and Urchin?
Using custom reporting to display landing pages and page titles
Breaking down paid vs organic search by landing page
How site overlay currently works and reasons why it could not work
The difference between unique visitors and absolute unique visitors
How to get the / and /index.html pages to be the same
Properly setting up Advanced Segments for time on site

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

Google Analytics Campaign Tracking help center article
Avinash discussed calculating visitor lifetime value
Using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
Using Advanced Table Filtering Google Analytics in 60 seconds video
Avinash discusses Daily, Weekly and Monthly unique visitors
Configuring the server default page in Google Analytics

If you found this post helpful, we'd love to hear your comments below. If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

How To Measure The Quality Of An Online Form

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:58:00 +0000

Guest post written by the team at Bluerank, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Online forms. You enter information into them all the time. You fill them out to make online purchases, sign up for things, sign into things, complete surveys, and more. They're an integral part of the online processes. And like all things, they can break.

Let's talk about them from your point of view, as the manager of a website. If you have one or more on your site, it's important to check how they perform and see whether they are a hampering a conversion process because of low quality. The great news is that you can use Google Analytics to do quality control on your forms. Read on to learn how.

Forms usually consist of a number of fields grouped into several steps. What's more, many of them are subject to validation. The presence of validated fields is a prerequisite for conducting a test of the form. It is advisable to validate the form at the time of sending.

Form Error Rate (FER)
When we want to measure the quality of a landing page, we check the Bounce Rate. However, in the case of measuring the quality of a form, we introduce a new metric called Form Error Rate.

SubmitError: number of unsuccessful attempts to send the form

SubmitAll: number of unsuccessful attempts to send the form + number of successfully submitted forms

Example 1
A visitor was looking to buy an insurance policy online. In order to do that, he had to fill in a form with 25 fields. He got a confirmation that the form was successfully submitted on the 3rd attempt. Here is how to count the Form Error Rate in this case:

SubmitError = 2

SubmitAll = 2+1=3

Example 2
Visitor 1 managed to fill in and submit the form at first attempt, while visitor 2 submitted the form successfully at third attempt. Lastly, visitor 3 tried 3 times, but finally resigned. In this case:

SubmitError = 5

SubmitAll = 5+2=7

Error registration in Google Analytics

To track errors in online forms we can use _trackPageview() function. When the user tries to submit the form, it undergoes validation and the information about incorrectly filled fields is coded.

Example
There is a form with 2 fields.

Fields 1 and 2 get validated. When the user makes an error in a field, it will be coded as "1" and a "0" means that the field was either filled correctly or it was not subject to validation. So "10" means there were two fields, and the first was filled in with an error, and the second was filled in correctly.

(click to enlarge)

If the form is submitted successfully, the code will look like this: "00". In that case, the function that registers information about errors will look as follows:

pageTracker._trackPageview("/onlineform/00");

In order to analyze the data registered in Google Analytics, we should export it to an Excel worksheet. Let’s assume that during some period of time the following data was registered for our 2-field form (which the trackPageview function will populate in the Content report called Top Content):

There were 23 page views of a form. An error occurred 18 times, and 5 submissions were successful.

SubmitError = 18
SubmitAll = 18+5

The higher the Form Error Rate, the worse situation we have with our form. Obviously, an FER of 100% would mean that our form is not working at all. In the example above we have an FER of 78%. This means that our form needs improvement. In general, when the FER is under 20 % it means that our form doesn’t hamper the online sales process.

When analyzing the data, we can find the reason for low form quality. In the example, field 1 was the most problematic what means we should give it some extra attention.

We hope that this method is helpful, and you use it as a model for your forms, or even for other functions or operations you have on your page. Registration of errors enables you to calculate the error rate, identify the areas that are the most difficult for users, and optimize them.

Posted by Tomasz Lewandowski from Bluerank, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

New In AdWords: Search Funnels

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:53:00 +0000

Yesterday, AdWords announced the launch of Search Funnels, a new set of reports available only in AdWords that describe the Google search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion. They are rolling out over the next few weeks and work if you are using AdWords Conversion Tracking or importing your Google Analytics goals into AdWords.

What are Search Funnels?

Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad clicked before the conversion happened. However, it's likely that customers perform multiple searches prior to finally converting.

These reports provide data on how "upper-funnel" keywords behave on the conversion path prior to the last ad click. These funnels are not to be confused with funnels in Google Analytics, which are on-site funnels. These are the paths users take when seeing and clicking on your ads after doing a search on google.com, on the way to converting. They look back 30 days prior to the conversion.

In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consists of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last ClickAnalysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. Take a look at this video giving an overview of the new reports, and at the AdWords blog post to learn more.

How is this useful?
Search Funnels data gives you more data to help you gauge the true value of your keyword and ads in AdWords. By showing whether an ad was shown prior to a conversion and whether it was clicked or not, they help you analyze assist relationships. For instance, find out whether generic keywords actually contributed to conversions occurring from a branded keyword search, and vice versa. You're no longer limited to a last-click perspective in AdWords.

Take a look at the AdWords help center for a complete description of the new reports and metrics. These reports are currently in beta, and again, they'll be available in your AdWords account over the next few weeks. Bravo AdWords!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

SES New York Is Next Week!

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:52:00 +0000

The Search Engine Strategies conference is next week in New York, and googlers from search, AdWords, AdSense, YouTube, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer will be there in force. We'll have a large booth where we'll be demoing the coolest new features from any and all of our products. Come by and say hello, and also be sure to attend some of the Google sessions.

Of special note, 4:45pm on Tuesday where Sissie Hsiao, a senior product manager on Google Analytics and AdWords, will be launching something really cool at the "Getting the Most Out of AdWords Features & Tools" session. We can't say any more, but we think you'll like it. I'll also be talking at the same time at the "Deep Dive Into Analytics: When Bounce Rate No Longer Floats Your Boat". Choose one of them and you can't miss.

Also - a must-see is the keynote on Day 2, given by our very own Avinash Kaushik. Here's the blurb about his keynote:

Be Awesome: Ideas for Approaching Search Analytics Differently
Click through rates, page rank, conversions, page views are all sweet. Yet they rarely scratch the surface of the true opportunity of search and subsequently quantifying the true impact of this massively data driven ecosystem. In his keynote Avinash will share specific ideas you can execute to find the audiences you crave online and use data to ensure that you are getting highest possible ROI. Keyword trees, yes. Attribution analysis, sure. Monetizing the long tail, got that. Micro conversions, yep. Bring an open mind.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Integration With Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

One of the core principles of Google Analytics has been to democratize the utility of the web analytics tool, and to open up the platform with an API. This enables developers to innovate new uses of Google Analytics to help analysts, marketers, and executives make better data-driven decisions. Since we launched Google Analytics, developers have extended the product to track Flash/Flex and recently Android and iPhone Devices.

To that end, we’d like to share that Google Analytics is now integrated into the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework.

The framework is opensource and enables non-technical designers to quickly track how users interact with their Silverlight content. Using the Google Analytics component, designers can simply drag and drop icons to track the number of interactions on a design element. Then within Google Analytics, they can segment and compare the difference in behavior between users who interacted and those who didn’t.

Each of our various tracking solutions have various levels of feature support. Currently the Google Anlaytics integration with this framework supports event tracking, pageview tracking and custom variables. You can read more about the supported features in the Google Analytics specific documentation and find out more on the project homepage.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

Master Class In Singapore And Kuala Lumpur

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:39:00 +0000

Are you ready for a Google Analytics Master class, happening Tuesday, 9 March in Singapore and again on Thursday March 11 in Kuala Lumpur? We bet you are, and we bet, as seekers of data and truth, you ask, what makes it a Master class? And why so far away from Mountain View, CA?

Well, you know how proud we are of how global Google Analytics has become. But this is a special class because it's run by the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer team in Southeast Asia, spearheaded by the excellent Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Southeast Asia, who manages the Southeast Asia blog. He's an engineer's engineer, and has organized a great day of sessions, including a keynote by Beth Liebert, Google Analytics product manager here in Mountain View who has helped launch a bunch of great features, including Motion Charts.

There will be a session on Website Optimizer of course, and a full day of talks by both specialists on the Google team both from here in Mountain View and also from Southeast Asia, as well as local partners who have great case studies from the region and techniques anyone can, and should, use.

Take a look at the agenda and register if you're in the area. It will be worth the time.

Singapore: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/singapore
Kuala Lumpur: https://sites.google.com/site/analyticsmasterclass/malaysia

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Powerful, Flexible, Secure and now approved by the US Federal Government

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:28:00 +0000

This week, the US federal General Services Administration (GSA) has approved listing Google Analytics in its apps.gov web site, which is a place for government agencies and services to find approved cloud computing applications. It's goal is to drive innovation and adoption of cloud-based apps in the government, and Google and the GSA have worked together to ensure that Google Analytics is compatible with the needs of US Federal agencies (e.g., Department of Homeland Security, NASA, FCC, and others).

We are very proud of and humbled by this listing and excited by the potential opportunities to serve US federal agencies and help them monitor and improve their website experiences. We understand that working with US Federal agencies includes a responsibility to protect our users and we would like to take this opportunity to further explain how seriously Google Analytics takes data security and protecting data privacy for our users, as detailed in our Terms of Service.

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Privacy and security are core elements of Google's design and development processes, and we're proud to pass that benefit on to users of Google Analytics. Google's security philosophy is outlined here, and Google's commitment to protecting the information stored on its computer systems is outlined in the Google Code of Conduct.

We're gratified that the US Federal GSA has approved the listing of Google Analytics in its apps.gov site. We will continue to work hard to ensure that we earn this approval in the years ahead.

Posted by Phil Mui, Sr. Product Manager, Google Analytics

Upcoming Google Analytics Workshop

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:39:00 +0000

Feras Alhlou, president and principal consultant of E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will be conducting a Google Analytics workshop at SMX West on March 5, called "Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing & Business." Register here and get 10% off with this discount code: GA@SMX

Many organizations, large and small, struggle to go beyond basic web metrics of visitor counts and pageview volumes. In this workshop, senior consultant Feras Alhlou will walk you through what you need in order to drive your online marketing strategy ahead of your competition. I've had the pleasure of sitting in on Feras' workshops in the past, and it was the one of the main reasons we were so proud when E-Nor in the Bay Area joined our Google Analytics Authorized Consultant network. His clear, engaging and energetic teaching style will make the day fly by as you learn. It's time well spent.

Workshop Agenda

Morning Session – Marketer/Business Focus – Strategy & Planning

Web Analytics Strategy – approach, opportunities and limitations
How It Works – overview, accuracy and privacy implications, integrating with other data
Practical – understanding the user interface
Advanced Features Overview – clever stuff you can do with Google Analytics

Afternoon Session – Webmaster/Technical Focus – Implementation

Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properly
External Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email, banner campaigns
Reporting – dashboards & insights
Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights

The Google Analytics team will also be at SMX West, and we'll blog about that in the near future. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Quick Survey on the Help Center

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:02:00 +0000

We're always looking for ways to improve Google Analytics - not just the product itself, but also the ways in which we provide information about the product. So help us help you - take a minute to fill out this quick survey on our Help Center, and let us know what we can improve!

Posted by the Google Analytics Writing Team

Google Analytics Even More Global

Jeff Gillis — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:21:00 +0000

Today, Google Analytics is available in 6 more languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovak and Vietnamese, bringing the total to 31 languages. It's a large cross-functional effort to localize the product, and we're so proud to welcome these new languages and users!

We also now have over 150 Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs), from every major region (US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific) and over 35 countries! Chances are, there's one near you.

GAACs are our partners; each has been vetted by an internal team here at Google. They are experienced Google Analytics experts (and often, also SEM, SEO and testing specialists) who are available for anything from hourly consultations to training to advanced implementation and analysis.

It's been amazing to see the growth in the analytics industry over the past few years, and as usage and the analytics dialogue scales internationally, our product, team and ecosystem are scaling right along with it.

Posted by Dai Pham and Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team