Entries Tagged as 'Google Analytics'
A year has already passed since search engine blekko launched and while Google and Bing aren’t trembling yet, others have shown significant confidence in blekko’s prospects. For marketers who keep an eye on keyword driven web traffic, a significant question arises: where’s the blekko keyword data?
By default, web analytics measurement systems like Google Analytics aren’t able to correctly recognize blekko as a search engine, but it is possible to configure digital media measurement tools to properly attribute site visitors to the keyword searches they performed using blekko. My new Search Engine Land article shows how and explains why the data isn’t available by default. Happy measuring!
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Tags:Blekko·Google Analytics·SEO·Web Analytics
Google Analytics offers a wide range of advanced features and reports, one of the newest being the Site Speed report, introduced in May 2011. Upon first glance many marketing professionals might want to dismiss Site Speed as just another technical report by engineers, for engineers.
Yet users do prefer fast sites: numerous studies (e.g slide 4) have demonstrated site page load time to be a determining factor in the success of a site.
Web marketing practitioners should also bear in mind that Google introduced landing page loading time as an AdWords quality score factor in 2008 and as a SEO ranking factor in 2010.
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Tags:AdWords·Google Analytics·Search Engine Ranking·SEO
When Google Analytics added event tracking in June 2009, you could almost hear the cheers – it was now possible to track non-page “things”, such as site errors and zip file downloads, without artificially inflating page view statistics. Yet it wasn’t too long before a fine reading of the documentation pricked the balloon: by default Google Analytics events are treated as user engagement, thus if a user visits a single page on a site, proceeds to trigger an event in that page, such as viewing a video or downloading a file, then leaves the site, the single page visit won’t count as a bounce.
Perhaps this outcome is a logical consequence of the increased user interaction yet it isn’t always the most intuitive nor desired result, as students of my Google Analytics course have reminded me all too often.
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Tags:Event Tracking·Google Analytics
So many digital communications channels, yet so little time. As more and more channels emerge for website traffic acquisition, it becomes ever more important to accurately measure a channel’s effectiveness. That means asking and answering difficult, if sometimes awkward, questions of the type “Does anyone really engage with the monthly newsletter?”. If readers are engaging, where exactly does the engagement occur, i.e. which links get clicked? In the case of social media marketing, does anyone really care enough about Facebook page posts or twitter tweets to click through to the company website?
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Tags:AdWords·Best practice·campaign tracking·Canonical·digital media measurement·Duplicate Content·Email marketing·Google Analytics·Open Web Analytics·Openstats·Piwik·Search Engine Optimization·SEO·social media measurement·Twitter·Urchin·URL·Web Analytics·web analytics association·Yahoo Web Analytics·Yandex.Metrica
All web users encounter it sooner or later, the infamous 404 not found error page. Over time pages are removed from sites; incoming links from external sites break, a concept known as link rot, or may be wrong in the first place.
errare humanum est (to err is human) – Augustinus Hipponensis
Errors are pretty much inevitable, what is important is that they be managed well. There are some excellent resources on how to make a perfect 404 page (note: if a page is removed, the error should be 410 gone, not 404 not found, but there are few sites that get this right) and server error pages as well. Google even offers some code, along with styling options, to provide users with alternative page suggestions from a site.
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Tags:Event Tracking·Google Analytics·Page not found·web analytics association
Like many digital measurement aficionados, I’ve been taking the new Google Analytics version 5 through its paces, and mostly love what I see. Google nicely provides documentation on what’s new and a map to find specific reports which may have been renamed.
What does seems to be missing is a comprehensive list of what’s missing, so here’s a start with some of what I’ve discovered so far:
Figure 1: Visit external linking webpage with just a click Links to referring sites are gone, making it much more difficult to visit external pages which link to you. This was a feature added at one point to Google Analytics, so I’m hoping it will return soon, I miss it.
Figure 2: Navigation Bread Crumbs Breadcrumb navigation to return to the previous view of a report is gone, another useful feature I already miss.
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Tags:Google Analytics
There is a wonderful saying that one hears in big companies, particularly when discussing Knowledge Management – KM initiatives, “if only we knew what we know“. It is unlikely that Google is exempt from this problem, but their data-driven culture has launched several information dashboards which aim to overcome this problem by facilitating internal and external communication of data, from Google service statuses to internet statistics.
Search engines are great in helping us find something when we suspect that there is an answer out there somewhere, to borrow a phrase from X-File’s Fox Mulder. Yet search engines aren’t very helpful when you don’t even know or imagine a resource exists. This article aims to help insure these mostly lessor known Google tools and resources get the visibility they deserve.
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Tags:AdSense·AdWords·Blog·China·competitive intelligence·Danny Sullivan·dashboards·data·Facebook·Google·Google Analytics·google apps·Google Trends·internet statistics·KM·Knowledge Management·Page Rank·Privacy·Quantcast·RSS·Search Engines·Twitter·URL·Web Analytics·Yahoo!
Google has announced that a defective version of their chrome browser has inflated Google Analytics data from September 7th until users update their browser with a version released on Wednesday September 22nd.
The less than perfect work-around is to filter out ALL traffic from the specific browser version involved, using an advanced segment Google has shared (you must be logged in to Google Analytics).
Reading Google’s admission, several issues remain unclear:
- Was the JavaScript bug miraculously limited to issues in executing Google Analytics code, or were there potential issues with code execution from other Web Analytics Vendors such as Omniture or Coremetrics? What about the execution of JavaScript code in other areas, such as AdWords? In other words, what does wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case mean, exactly?
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Tags:data·Google·Google Analytics·Google Chrome·JavaScript·Web Analytics
So now that most of the uninformed hype surrounding Google Instant has been written, let’s take a hard look at what Google Instant really means for most companies and organizations.
Google Instant is an interface change
First of all, it is important to understand what Google Instant is and what it is not. Google Instant is a user interface change, it changes the way Google presents search results to Google users.
How Google Instant works
As the user types a query, Google refreshes the displayed search results which, according to Google, best respond to the query typed so far or what Google predicts the query will be based on past queries.
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Tags:Alice·Branding·Domains·Flash·Google·Google Analytics·Google Instant·Google Suggest·HTTP·Italy·JavaScript·keywords·PPC·Ranking·Search Engines·SEO·URL·Usability·Web Analytics
A web marketing professional naturally thinks a lot about the incredible diversity of a site’s visitor demographics. Old and young, male and female, well educated and not, affluent and not… but how much thought has been given to the right-clickers? No, not the right-handed, the right-clickers. Right-clickers are those who right-click on a link to open a page in a new tab, to save a file in a specific location or to copy the link.
Sure, right-clickers are probably more technically advanced users representing a minority of a site’s web visitors, yet still, tracking right-clickers has been gnawing at me for a while. The summer “break” was just what I needed to bring focus to an issue potentially impacting many Web Analytics data collection scripts. These are scripts are used by JavaScript based systems like Google Analytics to track website activities not already included in basic page tracking, such as file downloads and outgoing link clicks.
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Tags:data·Flash·Google·Google Analytics·HTML·JavaScript·links·Urchin·W3C·Web Analytics·Web Marketing
