Google ad clicks and ajax searches
Out of nowhere, everyone has been clambering for us to add support for google.com/aclk referrers. Something must have changed on Google’s end recently because these didn’t used to be that common but they are now. Many people have told us that the original search is included in the referrer string and sent us examples. So we finally just added support for this. However, based on our limited testing, when clicking on ads on google.com we don’t see the q variable (that contains the search) in the string. So, we’re guessing it’s only there sometimes. What would cause it to be there or not is beyond us. Anyways, if the q variable is there, the search will now be displayed, and either way, the visitor will always be classified as advertising now.
Also, a few months ago, we wrote a post about Google and Ajax searches. We said when we saw these referrers we were just going to ignore them, because otherwise they showed up as normal links from google.com and that was causing confusion – but you all hated that idea, so we disabled it. We’ve just updated it now so that it will no longer show up in your links report, and the visitor will be classified as a search in traffic sources. And the referrer will be manually changed to google.com/search with no query in your visitors report. We wanted to add some link to click on to explain why the search was blank but decided against that.
And finally, we’re frantically working to fix some outstanding bugs with the new Clicky that we were unable to fix last week because of travel plans, including the small site bug. We’ll keep you updated.
Next Week: Ad Tech New York
- Brand
- Social Media
- Digital Demographics
- Media Strategy
- Performance
Scrolling For the Vertically Challenged
The recent hype surrounding the Apple iPad, Galaxy Tab, HP Slate and netbooks has sparked the need to test screen size usability. These small screen gadgets are raising the average fold line for many online businesses. To understand the impact this is having on webpage design and usability, 
we at ClickTale decided to monitor the browsing behavior of our own vertically challenged visitors.
The Experiment
To run our usability experiment, we used the ClickTale Scroll Reach and Attention Heatmaps on a blog entry over 5000 pixels long. Our goal was threefold. We wanted to learn:
- How far up did the average fold line climb amongst smaller screen users?
- What content remained above the fold and, therefore, what did visitors see when opening up the page?
- How far down were visitors willing to scroll down our webpage?
First, we determined the screen resolutions of standard netbooks out on the market today. A typical netbook has a 1024 x 600 pixel screen resolution, with newer versions reaching 1366 x 768 pixels. Since the scroll reach is dependent upon the vertical height of a screen, we included all small screens with height less than 800 pixels. We then selected all screen dimensions that matched this requirement on our screen size filter.
Screen Height 1000 pixels
We then compared the results for this group with those visitors using larger screens. The most popular screen resolution on the market today for large screens is 1920 x 1080, so we selected all screens with height greater than 1000 pixels.
The Results
Of those visitors with a vertical screen resolution of less than 800 pixels:
- The initial fold was cut nearly in half!
- 58.1% of visitors made it down to the central section of the blog post with an attention time averaging only 13 seconds.
- 39.3% of visitors reached the “Recommendations” section of the post with an attention time averaging 19 seconds.
Screen Height 1000 pixels
Initial fold line of small screen users is cut in half when compared to larger screen users.
Screen Height 1000 pixels
20% more visitors continue to scroll when using larger screens!
We then compared these results to visitors viewing the same blog post with a larger screen, where:
- 78.9% of visitors made it down to the central section. That’s 20% more visitors! And their attention time more than DOUBLED over that of small screen browsers, averaging 32 seconds.
- 50.3% of visitors reached the “Recommendations” section (over 10% more than small screen browsers) with an attention time averaging 36 seconds, which also nearly DOUBLED that of small screen browsers.
Screen Height 1000 pixels
Large screen visitors’ attention time nearly DOUBLED over small screen users.
Bottom line: Small screen users don’t like to scroll. Despite the limited content the initial fold enables them to see, visitors using smaller screens are not inclined to scroll down on a webpage. This may be because, in addition to a smaller screen, netbooks also come with smaller mouse pads with which to scroll, making it quite a cumbersome task.
Recommendations
An expanding range of screen sizes does present difficult UI design choices. However, by implementing effective usability elements into your webpages, you can find a balanced solution that will ultimately benefit your bottom line.
As mentioned in previous blog posts of ClickTale when discussing the fold, some recommendations we propose include:
- Dividing your layout into sections for easy scanning.
- Adding one continuous vertical element to your webpages, such as a vertical line or shadowing that indicates continuing page content.
- Reducing the amount of text and increasing the amount of images to pull eyes down towards lower content.
This is also suggested for blog entries as well. Strong images in blogs break up words and help generate curiosity for an otherwise uninterested visitor, such as this image we have conveniently placed above.
You may even want to consider creating an alternative URL dedicated to netbooks, as many online businesses have done to accommodate smartphone browsing.
Conclusion
It is essential to get a detailed understanding of visitor browsing behavior inside your webpages. Through the use of In-Page Analytics, website owners can get answers to specific online business questions, such as how to redesign a webpage for a small screen audience. Applying some best practices, as those mentioned above, can enhance your business performance and keep your website on top of growing tech trends.
PM POV: AdWords Reports Launch
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
Create Your Own QR Codes with Delivr. In our last post,…
Create Your Own QR Codes with Delivr.
In our last post, “QR Code Tracking for Everyone” we mentioned how easy it is to generate a QR Code using Delivr, a service of PercentMobile. This video produced for Ketchum by their intern shows how simple it is. Thank you unknown intern.
Delivr. Effortless sharing with a tricked-out, mobile-friendly URL.
mobileSQUARED Roadshow: USA The Essential guide to…
mobileSQUARED Roadshow: USA
The Essential guide to communicating with the mobile consumer.
New York Academy of Sciences, November 2nd, 2010
The mobileSQUARED Roadshow: USA is an innovative 1-day event covering the essential aspects of connecting with mobile consumers.
http://www.mobilesquared.co.uk/roadshow/roadshow-us
DM @davidharper that day if you are attending and want to meet up.
Web Analytics TV #13 – For the Ninjas
Well it’s another episode of Web Analytics TV. In this exciting 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 introduce our new ninja award program (and ninja chop to go with it). Going forward, we will pick our favourite question and award the person the Analysis Ninja of the Episode award! They will get an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.
Our first winner is Sushant from New York for his excellent question on tabbed browsing and it’s impact on session level data. Congrats and please keep the great questions coming (and win!).
Here is the list of last weeks questions.
In this action packed episode we discuss:
- (2:35) Combining (A AND B) OR (C AND D) in advanced segments
- (4:03) Is there a way to tell how many people have opted out of being tracked by GA
- (6:18) How does tracking Google Analytics and Urchin work together
- (7:53) How is tabbed browsing tracked in Google Analytics?
- (10:30) Do Website Optimizer A/B tests only track direct traffic?
- (11:27) Are there any survey/voice of customer tools that integrate with GA?
- (12:47) Does the async code execute faster than the traditional snippet?
- (14:40) You can’t track users who have opted out of GA
- (15:13) Why table report filters get removed when you navigate away from a page
- (16:30) Why are there differences between Unique visitor reports? Which to use.
- (18:00) Can Google Analytics track live chat forms?
Here are the links to the topics we discuss:
- How you can automate requesting multiple advanced segments with the API to get AND precedence with Advanced Segments.
- Kampyle – Google Analytics, Voice of Customer Integration
- Live Person – Google Analytics, Integration
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.
Post content Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team
Conversion Funnels Done Right!
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the ClickTale Conversion Funnels, helping thousands of online businesses become more profitable.
Conversion Funnels are used by businesses to monitor and optimize the performance of critical online processes. Website visitors go through these processes frequently, when checking out from an online store, 
booking a flight, or signing up for a newsletter, just to name a few. By applying the ClickTale Conversion Funnels, businesses can make these web experiences more successful, maximizing conversion rates and websites’ ROI.
Our revolutionary Conversion Funnels visually display the paths visitors take through a website, revealing how they successfully convert and where lost customers drop out. You learn which pages produce the highest conversion rates, and which cause the highest abandonment.
The way Conversion Funnels should be done
Unlike existing funnel reports which often require an expert to set up and are complex to use, the ClickTale Conversion Funnels have a friendly interface that handles the complexities of funnels for you, so you can get down to business!
Conversion Funnels join our suite of Customer Experience Analytics, including heatmaps, session playback, Form Analytics and more. The unique benefits of the ClickTale Conversion Funnels include:
- No Setup Required – The funnels are calculated using previously collected data and your default funnel is automatically generated. All you need to do is log in!
- No More Waiting – Unlike other funnel reports which can take days or even weeks to produce results, the ClickTale Conversion Funnels are calculated as soon as they are created and recalculated immediately with any change.
- Fully Customizable – Test any of your conversion processes by editing, adding or deleting any funnel step on the fly.
- Discover Paths - Map out the most popular paths visitors use to navigate through your website by regenerating the entire funnel based on different starting pages.
Click on the above image to see the full Conversion Funnel Report
Stay Tuned…
“The fun is just getting started here at ClickTale!” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO of ClickTale. “Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be enhancing our funnels and giving you even more tools to maximize your website’s ROI. So be sure to stay tuned for more!”
The new ClickTale Conversion Funnels are live today, so you can login to your account now to see them in action. The Conversion Funnels are available to all our customers, even on our free plan!
If you are not already a ClickTale customer, Sign up to optimize your website based on your customers’ actual behavior and start having fun with Conversion Funnels today!
Harvard University And A Geo Analytics App
(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.
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
Reasoning and motivation for change
Hi. Regarding our new interface. We’ve been blogging and tweeting about it and had it publicly available to all users for over a month, because we value your feedback and we care about you. If you care about Clicky, we feel it is your responsibility to monitor these communication channels that we use on a very regular basis. We are very open and transparent about everything we do. Some would say too transparent, although I would disagree.
During the beta period, we had many thousands of people use it and the vast majority of the feedback was very positive. Just go look at the old blog posts yourself to see the comments people were leaving. The only consistent complaint we got was that it’s not centered, but otherwise most people loved it. Based on that much feedback from that many people, we knew we were going in the right direction.
I have a theory regarding why the beta testers were so much more positive compared to the comments that have been left here. If you’re willing to test beta software, you are open to change already. You know things will be new and different and hence you will more accepting of them, especially because the old Clicky was still available. But even with thousands of testers, I would guess that only 5-10% of our users at the very most saw the beta. The rest of you had no idea it was coming, so it was a shock. But again, we tried to be as open about this as possible and got a ton of feedback before making it live. (So please, if you’re not already, subscribe to our blog or follow us on Twitter).
People are resistant to change. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, Clicky wasn’t broken per se, but it was starting to feel dated. Sexy competitors like Chartbeat and Woopra have popped up and while we feel that our product is much more feature complete than either of them, people rave about their interfaces all the time. We get plenty of compliments on our (old) interface too, because of its simplicity and ease of use, but the difference is that Clicky felt like a web site, while the others feel like web apps. (And in the case of Woopra, it is literally a desktop app, although they offer a web version now as well).
We wanted to feel like an app too. It’s the way the web is moving and we were feeling left out. Hence, the navigational changes – fixed sidebar navigation, everything loading via Ajax, page loading animations, auto-updating reports, etc.
This isn’t change just for the sake of change. The new Clicky has been floating around in my head for close to a year, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted it to do. Over the summer my vision became clear and in mid-August I decided it was time to act. Two months later, here we are. This is the longest I’ve ever spent on developing a new feature for Clicky. I’m very proud of it, but that makes the negative comments hurt that much more.
Please give the new Clicky a chance to grow on you. I promise that it will for most of you, once the initial shock wears off. I’m a huge believer in UI and UX, and believe this is one of the major reasons for our success. I’d like to think I know what I’m doing, so please place your trust in me to deliver you the best analytics experience possible.
One last thing. Please keep your criticisms constructive. If you don’t like, don’t just say it sucks. That doesn’t help. Tell us specifically why you don’t like it. We will adjust things based on your feedback over the coming weeks and months. We are listening to what you have to say.
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