Archive for Analytics
Using Goals in Google Analytics to Track Conversions
Posted by: | CommentsA simple and free way to track a conversion on your website is to use Google Analytics’ Goals feature.
Scenario:
Imagine that you have just rented an email list from a list broker to promote your latest product. Not only are you interested in knowing how many product sales you make from this email list to your custom landing page, but are also interested in knowing how many people sign up for your e-newsletter after landing on that page. Of course you want to know this so that you can better understand the ROI of this campaign. You could use Google Analytics’ Goals to learn how many landing page visitors also signed-up for your newsletter.
Goals:
A simple non-technical explanation is that Goals count the number of unique pageviews of a specific url that you predetermined during the Goals setup process. When a visitor reaches that predetermined page, Google Analytics increases the numerical count by one for that particular goal. A goal is incremented only once per single visit, so if a visitor during a single visit reaches that predetermined page more than once, the goal count is only incremented one time so as to not inflate your goal count.
During the Goal setup process, you can also specify the urls of pages prior to your Goal page. What this does is enable you to track visitors who go through a specific first page (by selecting the required step checkbox during setup) before they go through a certain set of predefined pages to reach your goal page, commonly known as a Funnel.
An oversimplified but useful explanation of how to use a goal would be if you wanted to learn how many visitors that went through a specific page (let’s call this page.html) went on to sign-up for your email newsletter on a different page. If after they signed up for your newsletter they were redirected to a thank-you-for-registering page or confirmation page, you would set your Goal page as that thank you page (for this example, this page only being reached by filling out the registration form), and your required step first url as page.html that we referred to above. By configuring a Goal like this, you could see how many unique visitors that go through page.html continue on and sign-up for your newsletter.
Now there is a little more to the planning, set-up and preparation than mentioned above in order to help filter out some of the noise to get closer to the true data, but overall set-up of Google Analytics Goals is really a snap. Currently, Google Analytics only allows you to have 4 goals per profile set-up at one time which means you have to plan accordingly.
Advanced Segmentation to be Included into Google Analytics.
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle this past week announced some new enterprise features to Google Analytics to increase its functionality. This means new insight allowing you to take action to move closer to your website’s goals.
These new features will be released in beta to all Google Analytics Accounts in the upcoming weeks.
The new feature that I simply cannot wait for is, get ready……Advanced Segmentation:
Advanced Segmentation will allow you to separate out your data (on-the-fly, nonetheless) so that you can look at smaller sub-sections of your traffic. This will help you to really gain the necessary insight into what your visitors are doing and how they are performing for you (behavior anyone?). Compare this data against your desired actions, and unravel some presently current mysteries. It also includes the ability to see both historical and current data, and then compare it side to side and learn what if anything has been changing over time. Compile this information along with the optimization efforts you have been making for clearer interpretation of what’s going on with each segment of your traffic.
How will this help you?
One way is that you will be able to perform more in-depth and more detailed analysis of your traffic. This will allow you to look at micro-segments instead of grouping all your traffic into one inter-mingled group and be forced to make grand generalizations as a whole. Advanced Segmentation if it was a person, would be one of your best friends.
If that’s not enough reason to be excited about advanced segmentation, how about when Avinash Kaushik makes a statement like this:
“If you want to find actionable insights you need to segment your web analytics data. You need to separate out the various Sources, Behavior and Outcomes” in his Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja! blog post.
Can you say optimization opportunities are awaiting you just around the corner!
For a complete list and description of new features such as custom reporting, a data export API, and Motion Charts, including demos and links to more detailed FAQ’s, visit the Google Analytics Blog post, More Enterprise-Class Features Added To Google Analytics.
Using IP Filtering in Google Analytics – The Basics
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are using the free Google Analytics software (or any other analytics package such as Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrics, etc.) to track where visitors to your website are coming from and how they behave once on your website, make sure that you add a filter to exclude the data gathered from your own IP address. This keeps the data reported to “actual visitors” and disregards your own company’s internal traffic data. You don’t want to take action based on information gathered from tainted data . You or others at your company are probably uploading content and viewing it, reviewing comments, looking at your new graphics, reviewing your test pages, etc., and are adding behavioral and other data to your Google Analytics report that derives from your own time spent on your site.
To make sure that you are excluding your IP address in Google Analytics it’s extremely easy to setup:
- First you need to know your IP address. If you don’t know it, you can get it in less than a second from: WhatIsMyIpAddress.com or WhatsmyIp.org.
- Next, log into your free Google Analytics Account.
There are two ways to proceed,
The Short way:
- In The Website Profiles view, select the large Filter Manager link that appears on the right hand side near the bottom of the page
- Select Add Filter link link on the right hand side
- Name your Filter (i.e Work IP, Home IP, etc.)
- Select your filter type, in this case select Exclude all traffic from an IP address
- Enter in your IP address, but note, you need to do it in the following format:
If your IP address is: 11.222.333.44, you need to enter it in with slashes before each “dot” as follows: 11\.222\.333\.44, the reason being is that the slash keeps the dot from becoming a wildcard and will incorrectly filter other IP addresses (if you are interested in learning more about why you need the slash or other regular expressions you can view the Google Analytics topic page on Regular Expressions).
Google Analytics IP Filter Screen
- Select which websites you want to add the filters to
- Click the finish button and you are done.
The Longer Way (you will need to do the following for each individual Website Profile)
- In The Website Profiles view, select the edit link in the Settings column.
- Scroll down the page to the Filters Applied to Profile section and select the Add Filter link on the right hand side
- Make sure the Add new Filter for Profile radio button is selected
- Name your Filter (i.e Work IP, Home IP, etc.)
- Select your filter type, in this case select Exclude all traffic from an IP address
- Enter in your IP address in the same format as mentioned above.
- Click the finish button and you are done
It’s that easy and that quick and therefore there is no reason why you can’t make this happen right now!
