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Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’
2009: A Look Back
- Track Google Sites with Google Analytics
- The integration of AdSense and Google Analytics
- The public launch of the Google Analytics API
- Google Analytics IQ – an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools
May
- Integration with Google Ad Planner so that you can replace traffic estimates with directly measured Google Analytics data
- Pivoting and Secondary dimensions become available in your reports
- Share custom reports and advanced segments
- Track YouTube brand channels with Google Analytics
- Import your Google Analytics goals into AdWords
- New homepage and website for Google Analytics
- Google Analytics Desktop Wallpapers!
- International blogs in German, UK & Ireland, Spanish, French and Japanese
- Getting started guides for the API
- Number and reach of Authorized Consultants breaks 100 global partners, with a presence on every continent except Antarctica
- More goals and new goal types
- Expanded mobile reporting
- Advanced Table Filtering
- Unique Visitor metric added to Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reports
- Multiple Custom Variables
- Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report templates
- Analytics Intelligence reports and Custom Alerts
- New asynchronous tracking code
- Annotations allows you to easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out “what happened”.
- Custom variables available in Advanced Segments and Custom Reports
- New tracking code setup wizard
- API new features, including support for Advanced Segments, more goals and goal types, and custom variables
- Urchin Software version 6.602 available in more languages
New Google Analytics API Features
Over the past few months we’ve received a lot of great feedback from our developers about what they wanted to see in the Google Analytics API, and it included adding access to Google Analytics newest and most powerful features, such as advanced segments, custom variables and more. Today we want to let you know about improvements to the Google Analytics Data Export API, including the following highlights (all the details of this release can be found on our public changelog and public notify group):
Support for Advanced Segments
With advanced segmentation, you can look beyond your aggregated data and peer into the nuances of traffic and visitor activity on your site. For example, the average time on site for all visits could be 60 seconds, but when you segment by country, you might learn that average time on site of visits from Germany is over 2 minutes.
We’ve added two new ways to use advanced segments through the API:
- Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query.
- Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API.
This video describes exactly what advanced segments do and how you can use them with the API.
Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data
With the recent Google Analytics launch enabling up to 20 goals, many of you asked for access to this valuable data. Good call! So now, you can access 48 new metrics around goal performance. We’ve also added all the goal configuration data, including name, type, and step names for each profile.
Take a look at this video describing how to work with goal configuration data in the API.
Custom Variables
Custom variables are powerful new ways to describe visitors, visits and pages within Google Analytics. In this new release, we’ve added 10 new dimensions to access custom variable data. In addition, every custom variable that you’ve used is now available through the Account Feed.
We’ve updated all our documentatation at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics. Please continue to give us feedback to improve our product through our public google group. We can’t wait to see the new apps that come from developers using this data. We’re hoping that you spend your holiday tinkering with it 
Enjoy!
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team
Webinar: Google Analytics’ Newest Features
As of this week, all the new Google Analytics features we recently announced should be available in all accounts! (And just yesterday, we announced one more – a new, asynchronous tracking code snippet.)
- Engagement Goals
- Expanded Mobile Reporting
- Advanced Table Filtering
- Unique Visitor Metric
- Multiple Custom Variables
- Sharing Advanced Segments & Custom Reports
- Analytics Intelligence
- Custom Alerts
When: Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Time: 10 – 11 am, PST
There will also be an opportunity for Q&A so please ask your questions beforehand through Google Moderator.
We hope you’ll come learn more about the latest features …. and we may even have a few extra surprises to share then, too! Hope to see you there.
Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team
What Google Analytics Can’t Tell You – Part 1
Time on Page and Engagement Time™
We love Google Analytics, we always have. Just like ClickTale it’s free, easy to set up, comes with a lot of helpful tools, and is a great way to collect analytical information about your site. However, there are several things Google Analytics just can’t tell you, and in this post we’re going to talk about two of them:
- Google Analytics cannot tell you anything about bounced visitors! These are visitors that come to your site, only look at the page they land on, and decide to leave. These are the potential customers you didn’t get, they are the lost sales, lost leads and lost profits.
- Google Analytics gives you no information about how long your visitors actually interact with your online content. All it can see is the amount of time a page was left open, which doesn’t tell you anything about how long your visitors were actually looking at your content.
And now we’re going to tell you why…
Like most traditional web analytics services, Google Analytics records a “Time on Page”, denoting the time a visitor spends looking at each page in your website. It does this in three stages:
- It records the time your visitor opens the first page.
- It records the time your visitor opens the next page.
- It subtracts these two times and calls the result “Time on Page”.
This method has been used by Google since it started it’s analytics service back in 2006, and while it is a simple way to gauge user interaction, Google Analytics’ method for calculating “Time on Page” and “Bounced Visitors” is woefully inaccurate!
If the visitor doesn’t move through your site, Google Analytics can’t record a second page being opened, so it has no way of knowing how long a bounced visitor, who only visits one page, spent on your website. Finding out what these visitors do on your landing page and converting them into happy, paying customers is essential for your business growth, and Google Analytics just can’t tell you that.
Additionally, Google Analytics has no idea what happens after the page is opened. For example, if the user minimizes the browser, changes tabs or leaves their computer on overnight, the “Time on Page” could be hours, when in reality the user only looked at the page for a couple of seconds.
That’s where ClickTale comes in. We use our unique analytics tools to solve both these problems and show you EXACTLY how long your visitors spend on each page. More importantly, we’ll show you how long they’re actually engaging with your online content. As well as recording when your visitors land on the page, we record absolutely everything they do when they get there: Mouse moves, clicks, scrolls, keystrokes and even the exact time they close the page!
The Experiment
So that’s the theory. But is this really true in practice? Obviously we don’t want you to take our word for it, so we thought we do a little “field research”.
We created a simple website with a single page, and set up both Google Analytics and ClickTale’s own analytics suite to monitor it. Then we simulated a typical Bounce Visitor by opening the page in our browser, looking at it for a few minutes, then minimizing the browser for about half an hour before moving on to another site.
These are the results from our two analytics suites:
A single Bouncing Visitor shown with Google Analytics
Google Analytics noted our visit, but could not give us any qualitative or quantitative data about our time on the site.
A single Bouncing Visitor shown with ClickTale
ClickTale, on the other hand, was able to show us the bounce, the time spent on the page and the exact time spent engaging with the content. What’s more by clicking on the “Play” button, we were able to watch a video of our entire browsing session.
Now you can re-live your Bounced Visitor’s actual browsing experiences! See what they looked at and what they didn’t, what they read and what they skimmed. Find what failed to catch their eye and why they fell out of the funnel. There is no better way to know exactly what your visitors do on your site, empowering you to minimize bounce rates, optimize conversion rates and maximize profits!
Want to see for yourself? Both “Time on Page” and “Engagement Time” are available to all our subscribers, even on the Free Plan, so you can sign up and try it out today! We believe these features, as well as our visual heatmaps, conversion analytics and full video playback of your visitors browsing sessions make ClickTale the perfect complement to your traditional web analytics suite.
Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent
Today, we’re announcing a new set of Google Analytics features which builds on last year’s enterprise-class feature launch. Some add more power to existing capabilities. Others provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your enterprise. Finally, we’ll introduce Analytics Intelligence. Resist the temptation to skip ahead. We wouldn’t want you to miss anything.
Powerful.
Power-users have asked us to add even more data manipulation and analysis features to Google Analytics. We’ve been listening, and are adding the latest power features to expand Google Analytics enterprise-class capabilities.
- Engagement Goals..and more of them! Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Watch this short video on goals to learn more.
- Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you’re optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your regular website coming from high-end, Javascript enabled phones.
iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What’s more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Check out the SDKs and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you’ll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!
- Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools you can use to perform advanced data analysis. Earlier this year we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. So, you could see how much revenue your site received from visitors in Boston who searched for “bean bag”. You could then “pivot” by source and see revenue by search engine for each of these city+keyword combinations. Here’s a quick tutorial video.
Together, these three power features let you perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.
- Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment.
Flexible.
Every enterprise has unique web analytics tracking and reporting needs. Today, we’re enhancing two of the tools that organizations use to adapt and customize Google Analytics. We’re adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.
- Multiple Custom Variables: Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. If you’ve used the _setVar() function, the concept of custom variables will be familiar, but we’ve taken it a step further: you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. This powerful customization capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple custom variables will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks but you can start learning more about them now.
- Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted Sales report template will automatically be imported. You can also now select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.
Intelligent.
Now, for the new feature you’ve been waiting for! Wouldn’t it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Beginning today, it can.
- Analytics Intelligence: We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
- Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.
Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then look for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!
That’s the summary. We’re excited to share more details about each of these features, so stay tuned! We’ll discuss each feature in turn over the next few days.
Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team
P.S. We’re not the only ones with exciting news today! Google Website Optimizer also announced some big features – over time charts and a Website Optimizer API! Check out the Google Website Optimizer blog to learn more.
Introduction to Google Analytics
Google Analytics Overview
Google Analytics is a free, web analytics tool that is hosted by Google.
Google Analytics shows you how visitors actually find and use your site, so you’ll be able to
- make informed site design and content decisions
- improve your site to convert more visitors into customers
- track the performance of your keywords, banner ads, and other marketing campaigns
- and track metrics such as revenue, average order value, and ecommerce conversion rates
Providing Answers to Difficult Questions
Google Analytics can help you answer important questions about your site and your marketing initiatives, such as
- How are visitors using my site?
- How can I make my marketing campaigns more effective and accountable?
- Is my content effective?
- Where are visitors abandoning their shopping carts and where do they go afterwards?
- How can I improve my site navigation and help my visitors get more out of the site?
A Few Feqtures
Google Analytics has been designed to meet the needs of novice users as well as web analytics experts.
Some of the features include:
- Map Overlay which can help you understand how to best target campaigns by geographic region
- AdWords Integration which makes it easy to track AdWords campaigns and allows you to use Google Analytics from your AdWords interface
- Internal Site Search which allows you to track how people use the search box on your site
- Benchmarking so that you can see whether your site usage metrics underperform or outperform those of your industry vertical
- Funnel Visualization so that you can optimize your checkout and conversion click-paths
How Google Analytics works
When a visitor accesses a page on your site, a request is made to the webserver to display the page.
The page is served and the Google Analytics Tracking Code JavaScript is executed.
The Google Analytics Tracking Code, which is a snippet of code that you place on each page of your site, calls the trackPageView() method.
At this point, the Google Analytics first-party cookies are read and/or written.
The webpage then sends an invisible gif request containing all the data to the secure Google Analytics reporting server, where the data is captured and processed.
Data is processed regularly throughout the day and you can see the results in your reports.
What Happens If…
Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies, which are considered safe and non-intrusive by most internet users today.
Although many people block third-party cookies from being set by their web browsers, this won’t affect Google Analytics.
Someone who blocks all cookies, however, won’t be tracked by Google Analytics since all the data is passed to the Google Analytics servers via the first-party cookies.
Someone who deletes their cookies will still be tracked, but they’ll be identified as a new visitor to the site and Google Analytics won’t be able to attribute their conversions to a prior referring campaign.
People delete cookies for many reasons, one of which is to prevent personal data from being captured or reported. But, note that Google Analytics does not report on personally identifiable information. You’ll learn more about cookies as they relate to Google Analytics in a later module.
A much less common scenario is that a visitor to your site has disabled JavaScript on his or her browser. A visitor who disables JavaScript won’t be tracked since the Google Analytics Tracking Code cannot be executed.
Cached pages are saved on a visitor’s local machine and so they’re not served by the webserver. Google Analytics will still track visits to cached pages as long as the visitor is connected to the internet.
JavaScript errors occur when an element of a web page’s script contains an error or fails to execute correctly. If an error occurs before the Google Analytics Tracking Code is executed, the visit to the page won’t be tracked. This is because the error will prevent the remainder of the JavaScript on the page from running. Since we recommend that in most cases you place your Google Analytics Tracking Code at the bottom of the page, JavaScript errors are always a possible cause for data not appearing in your reports.
Google Analytics can track visits from a mobile device as long as the device is capable of executing JavaScript and storing cookies. You can see which devices have been used to access your site by looking at the Browsers report in the Visitor section.
In general, no reporting tool can ever be 100% accurate. You’ll get the most out of web analytics if you focus on trends. Knowing that 20% more visitors converted following a marketing campaign is more powerful than knowing that exactly 10 people visited your site today.
Data Confidentiality
All data collected by Google Analytics is anonymous, including where visitors comes from, how the visitors navigate through the site, and other actions they may perform.
No personally identifiable information is collected.
Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.
Furthermore, Google optimization, support, and sales staff may only access a client’s data with the client’s permission. You can give permission verbally, over email or through a support ticket that asks for help with a problem or asks a question about your data.
You may elect to share your Google Analytics data “with other Google products”, and Google will use the data to improve the products and services we provide you. Electing to share your data “Anonymously with Google and others” allows you to use benchmarking. To provide benchmarking, Google removes all identifiable information about your website, then combines the data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and reports them in an aggregate form.
If you select “do not share my Google Analytics data”, you will not be able to use benchmarking and may not have access to specific ads-related features such as Conversion Optimizer.
Again, regardless of your Data Sharing selections, Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.
