What are Visitors actually doing?

Top entry pages home pages are dead. Thanks to search and marketing campaigns,
people come directly deep into your website. identify the top 20 �home pages� of
your
website. mark these as important, educate your boss, and start to wean her or him
away from obsession with your website�s home page.

Top viewed pages This is a great way to know what content is being consumed, and it
will
probably be different from what you think should be consumed. The top viewed pages
can also help you, in conjunction with top entry pages, see why people end up
looking
at what they do.

Site overlay (click density) analysis for your top viewed pages, look at the site
overlay report,
and analyze the click patterns (only on the top 10 most viewed pages on your site,
to
keep it simple). it will help you understand navigational challenges on your
website, it
will help you understand visitor intent, and it will suggest optimization actions
you
can take.

Abandonment analysis you have surely created your first couple of funnels right now
(for
your order-taking process or for the steps it takes to submit a lead or take a
donation).
Check out the funnel steps where the highest abandonment is happening. Visitor
behavior there will identify big opportunities that will improve outcomes for you,
fast.

The keywords report is even more interesting. here you have intent. The customer
is telling you why they might be visiting, and keywords with high Bounce rates are
where you are not meeting that intent. you may be ranked for the wrong keywords, or
the pages these folks land on may not have the right calls to action. fix it.

What do you do next? i�ll discuss this in some detail in Chapter 7, but your real
friend here is
experimentation and Testing. start with simple A/B tests. start with a free tool
like Google
website optimizer; it can do 95 percent of what any paid tool can do. if you
already have a
paid tool like optimost, offermatica, or sitespect, then go for it with one of
those.
Pick pages you want to fix, create a couple versions of the pages, and put them
into a
test. Change copy, content, images, and calls to action�everything is fair game.
with testing, you improve the pages based on customer feedback.

Site overlay: What is it? Click density analysis.

you see the data visually represented. The site overlay report shows the number of
clicks on each link on a page (as in
figure 4.5). it also shows you other helpful information such as revenue from
clicks on
a link, Goal Conversions, and so on.
The site overlay report shows % Page Views, Time on Page, Time to the Page, %
exits,
and keywords that brought people to the page. in a nutshell, it�s everything you
would
ever want to know to judge the performance of a page.

What do you do next? identify improvements to your pages.

Consider merchandizing and cross-sell and up-sell opportunities now that you know
what people like. for example, no one is clicking your blinking promotion in the
middle of the page because it looks like an ad!

Visits to Purchase: what is it?

The Visits to Purchase report shows the distribution of the number of visits it
took for someone to purchase from your website.

The sister report of Visits to Purchase is days to Purchase

The intersection of these two reports helps you understand how many days pass
between visits.
for example, most people may make a purchase after three visits to your site. But
those
three visits could be more than fifteen days. or it could be that those three
visits were
on the same day.

The Best Web Analytics Report

There is one report that will work for any type of website, and it qualifies
as my nominee for the best web analytics report: Outcomes by All Traffic Sources.
direct Traffic represents
free traffic because it comes from people who arrive via using bookmarks, typing in
your url, or other such activities. direct Traffic is also traffic that is familiar
with
you, so it typically represents returning Visitors and most likely your existing
customers. in figure 4.8 i was happy that direct Traffic was so big�and notice that
it converts higher, which is very typical.

Importance of Segmentation
Different types of Visitors come to your website. And they all come with different
intentions, with different problems or solutions, and with different personas.
This unique phenomenon mandates that you have a very effective and persistent
segmentation strategy as part of your web analytics process.

Bounce Rate for site search. it is called % search exits. it measures the same
phenomenon as Bounce rate: the number of people who leave your website immediately
after
seeing the results provided by your internal site search engine.

marketleap provides two useful reports at http://sn.im/mktleap.

The search engine saturation report shows you the number of pages a given search
engine has in its index for your site, and the link Popularity Check report shows
the
total number of links that a search engine has found for your site. The nice thing
about
the marketleap reports is that you can trend the data over time.

The transient cookie is set when a Visitor visits the site, and it disappears when
he or she leaves. The persistent cookie is set the first time the Visitor visits
the website,
and it remains there for a duration determined by the website (18 months is common,
though some tools will set cookies for 50 years). Persistent cookies help identify
a unique browser to your website, inasmuch as they are the closest thing to
tracking
a person or unique visitor. The persistent cookie is on your browser until you
either
delete it, reinstall your browser, or perform similar actions.

First Party vs. Third Party

Transient and persistent refer to the nature of cookies. First party and third
party refer
to the type of cookies.
A third-party cookie is set by, well, a third party when someone visits your
site. for example, when you visit www.omniture.com today, the tracking cookies are
not
set using the .omniture.com domain; they are actually set from .2o7.net domain.
That
makes the tracking methodology used by omniture third-party cookie tracking.

recency measures the gap between two Visits by the same Visitor. in other
words, it answers this question:

Unique Pageviews. A Unique Pageview is the first view of a page during a specific
Session. Since the Unique Pageviews metric counts only the first time the page is
viewed during each Session, it is equal to the number of Sessions during which the
page is viewed at least once. Google defines a page's Unique Pageviews as "the
number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times."

Event Tracking:

There are three levels of categorization for Events.

The top level, aptly named Event Category, represents the kind of thing the user is
trying to do.
The second level, called Event Action, tells what the user did in the CONTENTdm
user interface in order to accomplish the task specified in the Event Category:
click,
toggle, open, close, etc. The third level, called Event Label, provides additional
details.

Return on investment (ROI) Calculated as (revenue - cost) / cost and displayed as a

percentage.

Medium : In the context of campaign tracking, medium indicates the means by which a
visitor
to your site received the link to you, for example, �organic� and �cost-per-click�
for search
engine links, �email� and �PDF� in the case of newsletters, �referral� for sites
that link to you, and
�direct� for a visitor who types your web address directly into their browser.

For example, offsite tools are used to measure the size

of your potential audience (opportunity), your share of voice (visibility), and the
buzz
(comments/sentiment) that is happening on the Internet as a whole

Referrer The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site, that is, the
external page visitors
click on to bring them to your website
Onsite web analytics tools measure the actual visitor traffic arriving
on your website. They are capable of tracking the engagements and interactions
your visitors have, for example, whether they convert to a customer or lead, how
they
got to that point, or where they dropped out of the process altogether.

Multivariate testing is a technique for testing changes to many different elements

all at
the same time on one web page.

The time it takes for a visitor to be converted into a customer (latency) can have
a significant
effect on accuracy.

Maintain three views for each property

Raw: no view settings or filters applied at all

Test: use this view to test settings, filters, and goals before applying them to
your working
view(s)
Working: this view should have basic settings and filters applied. You can most
definitely
create more than one working view with different filters and goals, but each should
start
with the �baseline� settings and filters applied as described above.

What is Abandonment Rate?

Abandonment Rate strictly refers to the percentage of visits

during which the visitor entered your funnel (at the first step, if you specified
this as
required, or otherwise at any step) but did not reach the goal destination.

Page Value is actually very straightforward as a metric: it indicates how much a

page
drives towards a goal completion or Ecommerce transaction.

By default, Google Analytics recognizes three traffic mediums:

� Direct
� Referral
� Organic

Why does my own website appear as its own referrer?

After expiration of the current session, a clickthrough from one page on your site
to
another may be recorded as a referral, so a small number of self-referrals is to be
expected.
If you�re seeing a relatively high number of self-referrals, the Google Analytics
tracking
code is probably missing from one or more pages on your site. To verify, you can
drill
down into the Referral Path for the self-referrals as described above, access the
page,
and either check the page source or display Google Tag Assistant.
To quickly verify the presence of Google Analytics on any Web page, install the
Google Tag Assistant plugin for Chrome.

What�s the difference between advanced segments and view filters?

Advanced segments and view filters are quite comparable in purpose in that they
both
allow you to narrow your reporting focus to specific audience characteristics or
activity,
but advanced segments differ from view filters in significant ways:
� You can apply them dynamically to past time periods.
� They don�t alter underlying review data, so you can remove them at any time.
� They�re defined on a per-user basis.
� You don�t need Edit rights to use them, just Read & Analyze.

Should I choose events or virtual pageviews for these actions?

For each type of non-page-load interaction, you can choose to configure either a
virtual
pageview or an event. For an action that is more comparable to a regular pageview,
such as a PDF download, you may opt for a virtual pageview; for an action that is
less
comparable to a regular pageview, such as a video play, you may opt for an event.

The dashboard
is a selection of abridged reports from the main sections of Google Analytics.

Site overlay is a graphical way of looking at the popularity of links on your

pages.

Similar to site overlay, map overlay is a graphical way of presenting data that
reflects
where visitors are connecting from around the world when viewing your website.

Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay

attention to.

Pivot views are powerful when it can be difficult to get summarized

information from a flat table.

There are presently two versions of the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) in
existence: the original
legacy code called urchin.js, which is no longer updated but still functioning, and
the current ga.js code,
which is what you require in order to benefit from the latest Google Analytics
features, such as event tracking.

What Google Analytics Cannot Do

Data Reprocessing Google Analytics cannot go back in time and reprocess the data.
Google Analytics report are always appending information to a previous report. So
if there is an error in your implementation (for example, pages on your site
missing the GATC or an incorrectly set up filter), that error is carried through
into the reports.

Bid Management you can not update bid strategy, pricing, and ad creatives all from
within the same
interface? That is not possible at present;

Non-Real-Time Reporting reports are typically three to four hours in arrears.

Therefore,
viewing a report at midday will typically show data up to 9 A.M. that morning

Importing Third-Party Cost Data At present, only cost data from AdWords and
AdSense is imported, allowing ROI to be
reported. That means visitor acquisition costs from, for example, other pay-per-
click
networks, banner advertising, email marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and the
like cannot be taken into account,

Per-Visitor Tracking (against Google Policies) That is, all website visitor data is
reported within Google Analytics in an aggregate and anonymous form.

The AdWords Keyword Positions report tells you what position

your AdWords ad was in when the visitor clicked it. In addition, you can drill
down and view how your ad conversion rate, bounce rate, per-visit goal value,
number
of transactions, revenue, and other metrics vary by position, using the Position
Breakdown drop-down menu

The Site Overlay report loads a page from your website and then overlays it with
the
key metrics for each link on that page. It�s an excellent visual way to see which
links on
your website drive traffic, conversions, transactions, and revenue. The
default view is to display the number of clicks received for each link on a page
using
a small bar chart under the link�mouse over the bar chart to see the corresponding
pop-up metrics.

Understanding Page Value

$ Index is an incredibly useful per-page metric that you will see throughout the
Content reports section. As described earlier in this chapter, $ index is a measure
of the
value of a page and is defined as follows:
$ Index = (goal value + e-commerce revenue)
unique pageviews

The maximum number of profiles for a Google Analytics account is currently 50

Roll up reporting

The principle of roll-up reporting is straightforward�you create additional

Google Analytics accounts and add multiple GATCs to your web pages. One specifies
the individual account, and the other is for the roll-up account. For example,
if you transact in different time zones and currencies, you will want to keep these
You also overcome the limit of 50 profiles per account. Note that roll-up
reporting of accounts is a nonstandard feature of Google Analytics that requires
modification
of the GATC.

How many goals can I track? By default, you can track up to 20 goals in Google
Analytics
and group these into categories; by creating more profiles, you could also track
additional
goals. However, if you have numerous goals�for example, you have a PDF
library you wish to track�it is better to have a pseudo e-commerce configuration.

Both Fireclick and Coremetrics provide benchmarks related to Conversion

Rates, Cart Abandonment, time on site, and so forth.

A consequence of using virtual pageviews is that they will break the Site Overlay
reports as
well as the Visit This Page link in the Content reports because the page doesn�t
exist in the real world. If these features
are important to you, then don�t rewrite your URLs. However, you�ll likely find
that the greater clarity virtual
pageviews bring to the reporting of complex URLs far outweighs the loss of these
feature.

By default, Google Analytics tracks your viewed pages by calling the JavaScript
routine _trackPageview() in the GATC.

By default, Google Analytics will not track your file downloads (for example, PDF,
EXE, DOC, XLS, ZIP), because these pages cannot be tagged with the GATC.
However, it is easy to track these by modifying the download link on your web pages
using the virtual pageview technique just described.

Using virtual pageviews to track file downloads, or partial form completion,

inflates
your pageview count, because obviously these are not real pageviews. Therefore
consider
carefully your use of these.

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, it is important not to use campaign
tracking
for links that are visible to search engine robots. You do not want to have such
URLs indexed
by the search engines because such links are viewed as different URLs to the same
content and
therefore appear as duplicates to the search engines�a technique that is considered
search
engine spam.

Event Tracking reports are available by default in the Content section of Google
Analytics.

To collect event-driven data and populate the reports, do this, follow these two
steps:
1. Define your event reporting structure.
2. For each event, call the _trackEvent() function in your web page or application
source code.

Tracking Flash Events

The method for tracking Flash events differs depending on whether you are coding in
the legacy
ActionScript 2 or the latest ActionScript 3. ActionScript was first included in
Flash Player 5, with
version 3 introduced in 2006 as part of Flash Player 9 and upward. If you are
developing your
Flash applications in Flash CS3 or higher, you are using ActionScript 3.
I recommend you use ActionScript 3 wherever possible because it is better designed
to handle
Flash-browser communications and is therefore more robust for Event Tracking.

Event Tracking Virtual Pageview

Bounce Rate Reduced Bounce Rate Reduced Bounce Rate
Page Views No increase on total pageviews Artificial increase
on total pageviews
Detailed Tracking Tracks more details correlated to actions Limited
information
Goals Not supported Supported
Limitations Up to 500 GATC requests per session Up to 500 GATC
requests per session

Predefined filters are a quick and easy way to accomplish some of the most common
filtering tasks,

Include and exclude Traffic from a specific domain, such as an ISP or company
network.
Include and exclude Traffic from the IP address You can enter a single IP address
or a range of addresses.
Include and exclude Traffic to the visitors viewing only a particular

How to check how your website is performing under differen browsers :

Audience > Technology > Browser

Are visitors less engaged

Audience > Mobile > Overview > Bounce Rate

Audience > Mobile > Overview > Avg Session Duration

Which social network drives most traffic

Acquistion > All traffice > Channels > Social

Which social network drives best traffic

Acquistion > All traffice > Channels > Social Select the goal. See the
conversion rate

What phrases are we ranking for ?

Acquisition > SEO > Queries

Four types of goals defined in Google Analytics

Destination,Event,Duration,Pages/Screen per duration

What is the Reverse Goal Path Report?

As the name implies, the Reverse Goal Path Report retraces the user journeys to a
goal destination page: specifically, the last three steps that the user took in
completing a goal. Also if the user can follow multiple paths to convert or
complete a goal this report is even more useful in answering:

How did my customers navigate to purchase a product, fill out a form, subscribe
to a newsletter, or any action that you have configured as a goal?
What was the most popular route they took and which path led to more
conversions?
What other pages did they visit just before conversion?

By choosing fasrer response in sampling pull down we can reduce google analytics
compilation time.

The Solutions Gallery lets you share and import custom reporting tools and assets,
like dashboards and segments, into your Analytics accounts.Only configuration data
is shared through the Solutions Gallery. When you create and share an asset, your
personal information and Analytics data stays private in your account.

Plot rows can be used to show two rows of data on the same graph.

Display Social Direct Organic are the part of Default Channel Grouping.

You can find the Google URL Builder in the Help Center.

Google Analytics Intelligence Events offers daily, weekly, automatic, and custom
alerts

Add the tracking code to your website. Copy the tracking code and paste it into the
HTML of your web page just before the closing head tag.

If you delete a view, account administrators can recover the view using the "trash
can" function within how many days? 35 days

How many reporting widgets can you save to a dashboard? 12

How do you increase the sampling rate for reports in Google Analytics?
choose greater precision in the sampling pull down menu

What channels are included by default in the channels report?

Organic
Direct
Display

What setting must you enable to see data in demographics and interests reports?
Advertising Features

Which report can show you how well particular sections of your website content
performed?
content drill down

What are the four scopes available for dimensions and metrics?
hit level
session level
product level
user level

Custom Metrics can have which of the following scopes?

hit or product ONLY

What four parameters can you include with an event hit for reporting
category
action
label
value

GA data is organized into 4 scope-types:

User data
Session data
Hit data
Product data (ecommerce)
How many segments does Google Analytics allow you to compare at once?
4

If you wanted to quickly view users that initiated sessions on your website over 1-
day, 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day periods, which report should you use?
active user report

What is the maximum duration that a user can be included in a remarketing audience
that you've defined?
540 days

If you wish to see if report data is performing above or below the website average,
which Google Analytics visualization should you use?
comparison view

A single page visit is called a bounce, but when this visit is accompanied by
interactions such as form completions or downloads in the same page, automatically
turns into a non bounce visit. Therefore the implementation of the Event Tracking
or Visual Pageview decreases the bounce rate of that page.