Entries Tagged as 'Web 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
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
Email is still one of the most widely used Internet tools and, as such, a great marketing tool not to overlook. Like other web marketing tools, email marketing has an advantage in that it is also highly measurable. That said, there remains much confusion among professionals on how to measure email marketing and what metrics are reliable. Recently the industry group the Email Experience Council finally defined standards for email marketing measurement, as the Web Analytics Association did in 2007 for websites.
The historical email marketing metrics
Before considering the new metrics definitions, its worth understanding what metrics have historically been used in order to better understand the rationale underlying the EEC standards.
| Metric | Definition | Considerations |
|---|
| Sent | The number of messages we sent from our server. | An accurate metric |
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Tags:digital media measurement·Email Experience Council·Email marketing·Web Analytics·Web Marketing·Web Statistics
Dear New York Times, I really do appreciate your attempt, day in, day out, to bring clarity to a complex world. I know it isn’t easy, especially with the disruptions the Internet has brought to your sector (and many others). While you may have enjoyed a historical role as a paper of record, the Internet has positioned agile alternatives just one click away from you. Identifying successful funding models in such an environment hasn’t been exactly easy, especially when it seems to easy to view your product/service as a commodity, at least when it comes to national and international news.
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Tags:digital media measurement·hits·new york times·social media measurement·statistics·Web Analytics·web analytics association
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!
Search engines offer web site owners a wide range of options to specify exactly what content in a website should be indexed and how, that content may be presented in search engine results. This is only fair, as it is the site owner who creates the content in the first place. Beyond the myriad existing options, site owners focusing on Google now have an additional search result presentation issue to consider: should they allow Google to display Google Instant Previews or not. Unfortunately, Google has made the choice to forgo site previews more difficult than it should be for site owners, but before I return to this point, a brief review of current search result presentation options is in order.
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Tags:Advertising·Ask·Bing·Directory·Google·Google Instant·Google Instant Preview·Meta Tags·nopreview·nosnippet·Open Directory·Robots·Search Engines·SEO·Web Analytics
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
I’m currently using an Italian hosting service, Webperte, for my Italian blog. The service is fine, except for one minor frustration: they don’t support ftp retrieval of the web server access logs used by log based web analytics systems such as Google’s Urchin.
The official solution is to log in to a hosting control panel, navigate a few screens and click on the log download links… a rather tedious process. Fortunately, the perl scripting language offers a relatively easy way to automate this process. I’ve hacked together a script, retrieve-hosting-logs.gz, which is designed to log in to a Parallels Business Automation control panel and download the two most recent access, error or ftp log files as desired. Feel free to use it at your own risk and don’t expect support you haven’t paid for 
.
Primary Features
- Hard code username and password or specify them on the command line
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Tags:hosting log files·perl·URL·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
