Web Analytics India

What are Goals?

In Google Analytics goals help you measure and report the fulfillment of specific objectives of your website.

Goals help you answer questions related to your websites’ conversions:

• How many orders did we receive last month?
• How many people signed up for the newsletter yesterday?

They also help measure other objectives related to your visitors’ interaction with your site and answer questions such as:

- Contributed by Anish Jacob

“Can you confirm that there is no overlap between the organic search traffic and the paidsearch traffic reported in Google Analytics?”
This was the question posed to me by a client recently…

I immediately turned to the Advanced Segmentation feature of the tool. I quickly set up three custom segments as follows:

1. Organic Search Traffic: The segment of visitors that originated from organic search sources
2. Paid Search Traffic: The segment of visitors that originated from paid search sources
3. All Search Traffic: The segment of visitors from all search sources i.e, paid and organic

My hypothesis was that if there is no overlap of traffic then the sum of visits form organic sources and paid sources should be equal to the visits reported by all sources. However if the numbers don’t add up then we need to investigate and see what is causing the overlap.

I applied the segmentation to the Visitors Overview and the numbers spoke for themselves… no overlap! Thanks to the Advanced Segmentation feature answers such questions from clients is quick and easy.

- Contributed by Gunjan Aggarwal

The best way to measure success of a blog is through RSS subscribers. Usually we get data about the RSS subscribers through feedburner. But we can also use Google Analytics to get that figure.

To Track the Clicks on RSS button, add following code within the :-

onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/rss/rsspic’);”

You can use any page name instead of ‘/rss/rsspic’.

Through OnClick function we are calling virtual page. We don’t have to create that page in our website.

This virtual page you can see in your top content list in Google Analytics. But if you want to analyze which post or category leads to more clicks on RSS button, then you have to set goal.

If you are using Blogger then to add the code go to Layout ->Edit

And if you are using WordPress, then go to Design->Theme Editor->Sidebar.php

To create a Goal in Google Analytics:-

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Click on Analytics settings
3. Under Conversion Goals and Funnels, click edit



4. Enter the information as shown in pic above. Goal URL should be same as given in code.Through this you will come to know only about number of clicks on RSS button. It doesn’t tell exactly about subscribers as someone might have clicked on RSS button but not have subscribed.

   It will be helpful to you to analyze the best performing post or category in terms of increasing subscribers.

   You can also use virtual pageview concept to track:-

   1. Clicks on banners
   2. Ajax-based activities
   3. File downloads
   4. Videos
   5. Dynamically generated pages – cgi, asp,php
   6. External Links

What more are the possibilities where you can use virtual pageview concept?

- Contributed by Robin Browne

At work, we constantly emphasise  on learning. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is not. Comparisons can be futile but I will risk my neck with one, Omniture has a large help section, but it is not always easy to find a solution to your problems. This may be due to the complexity of the entire Omniture ecosystem, but come on at least they can improve their search functionality.

Google Analytics on the other hand has a refreshingly useful help section. And now with their updated Conversion University, it has become even better. The video presentations are a must see for anybody dabbling in GA.

This they have coupled with an online certification program called GA Individual Qualification (honestly, never pick IQ as an acronym, too many stupid questions are asked). It’s been out since March of this year, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was only number 854 to pass this test. It costs 50 bucks USD, and you get a PDF certificate at the end of it. Would have really loved it if they gave us some sort of badge I could displayed on our website.

Far as the test was concerned, if you have used GA for a while you will find it pretty easy. I sat on it for a long time thinking it would be far more challenging. Just brush up on Goals and Adwords and you should be fine.

Certification is necessary step we all should look forward to, it may not tell apart the good from the great, but it does establish a baseline. And if we as an industry are to have more credibility these are steps all of us can take to reassure our potential customers.

- Contributed by Saagar Shinde

Most of the web-analyst in world does reporting-analysing on Daily & Weekly basis. Most of the time they have to go through the painful process – Visiting Google Analytics (GA), going to different profiles, selecting the required reports & then export or copy-past reports/data into the respective dashboards/reports. It’s becomes a hassle when your client asks for an ad-hoc, while you are busy with your weekly or monthly reporting. Seems more like, the web ‘analyst’ has become a clown in the office juggling between ‘n’ number of reports at the same time! It is important to manage time appropriately while using option called ‘Custom Reporting’ in GA. Custom Reporting means to ‘design, a kind of report which fits your need’ as defined by GA. Here, you can also create a report and use it the rest of your life. ‘Custom Reporting’ somewhat helps you to transform into ‘KING Analyst’ from being a ‘Reporting Slave’. Most people don’t use ‘Custom Reporting’, a perfect and thoughtful gift from Google Analytics to those who value time. They don’t use it because they proibably are ignorantor they love their old ways or they just prefer spending the day collecting data. Ok that is the theory bit, now miving to some real time reporting, Let’s make a Report which can be used weekly or monthly & then see how we can schedule it.

4 Steps / 4 minutes to save your precious time & effort:
(Ofcourse also to shed that shameful tag of being a Reporting Slave!!!)

I hope most of you are familiar with GA, a boon to web those seeing analytical help in the online space, which comes free of cost & user friendly.
1. Click on “Create new custom report”

2. Let’s make a report for “Engagement by Medium”. You can use 10 metrics in a tab. If you need any more metrics then add into Second Tab.

Remember you can make the simplest report & also the most complex one. Simple Reports needs common sense & Complex reports needs some smartness. Also remember we are doing this for significant purposes i.e. to save time.

3. You can click on ‘Preview Report’ tab to view it before its actual report generation. This will help you to make any changes if required. If you have previewed the report and are satisfied then click on ‘Create Report’ & Boooom! You have created the custom report & now you can view it. Note that you can use different advanced segments also for the same and it further facilitates date comparison if needed.

4. You can export the report in the format as per your requirement or schedule it. You can schedule the reports to different members in your team.

It is so simple to create custom reports & schedule it. Next time make sure you don’t waste your time by visiting your GA account & downloading it. It will be in your Inbox. Also note that you can use a similar subject line for your report. This will help you to filter the reports from your Inbox. If you ever get suspicious about your data which you have received, you can always do a quick quality check for authenticity of numbers by logging in to your GA account.
This time gained can help you change yourself from being a mere ‘Reporting Slave’ to a ‘KING Analyst’! You can invest your time for analysing the data you have received, ultimately giving your outputs, suggestion, advice, etc. Hope you enjoyed ‘the Custom Reporting which is so common still uncommon with Web Analysts’. You can comment below about your experience with ‘Custom Reporting & Scheduling reports’.
Not sure about all the tools in the industry but Omniture also provides you with such privileges.

- contributed by Anish Jacob

A few days after the Official Google Analytics Blog announced a set of new functionalities added to Google Analytics, we spoke about our liking for Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reports in Google Analytics. Based on my experience of using Advanced Segmentation in the past few weeks, I’d say it’s one of the most useful features incorporated into Google Analytics.

Before I share with you why I think Advanced Segmentation is an awesome feature, let me discuss why segmenting data is important from an analyst’s perspective. The numbers churned out by my web analytics tool is not just data, they are key insights about my customers’ interaction with my website. The reasons why customers visit my website are very different. Reports based on non-segmented data treat all visitors to a website as members of collective unit, rather than as unique individuals. Data about visitors who came to browse for product information is summarized together with data of existing customers who came to place repeat orders. In this scenario, as data gets aggregated by the reporting tool, critical insights that are unique to different customer segments tend to get buried deep inside the averages.

In order to gain insights that are actionable within the context of the unique groups of people who visit my website, I need to segment my visitor data. Segmenting the data will allow me to understand if my website adequately caters to the specific needs of different customer groups. Till the Advanced Segmentation feature was added to Google Analytics, we did not have a simple way to separate the datasets of different customer segments.

A detailed introduction to segmenting web analytics data can be found in this presentation by Seby Kallarakkal.

So why do I think the Advanced Segmentation feature is really cool? Here is my list of reasons:

1. With the click and drag interface creating new segments is really simple



2. I can use Regular Expressions in addition to a set of standard conditions to create well defined segments for my analysis



3. The test-as-you-build functionality ensures that you are moving along the right path at each stage of creating a new segment. In other words you don’t have to create a new segment and apply it to a report to find out if the segmentation has been done correctly. Or start from square-one if you want to make some changes.



4. I can apply multiple segments to the same report and compare the performance of each segment



5. I can copy and tweak a segment that has already been created so I can work smart and save time (Hat Tip: Google Analytics Team)

If you are still to explore the Advanced Segmentation feature of Google Analytics you can start by watching this step-by-step video, listed as part of the Google Analytics New Enterprise Features playlist.

See the video below. To improve the quality of the video, click on the small triangle a the lower right corner of the video after the video starts playing, and select the option HQ. Hope this helps!

For some cool ideas on how you could benefit from this feature please see the post by Avinash Kaushik titled “Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja!”

If you need more information on advanced segmentation and how it is done, please leave your email id in a comment. And we will get in touch with you.

- contributed by Seby Kallarakkal

Web analytics world is going to be changed once again by Google Analytics. The sad part is that Yahoo was so close to take leadership position from GA, but got the timing wrong. From the time Yahoo acquired IndexTools, almost everyone was expecting Yahoo to launch it for free and beat Google at it’s game. For people who had used IndexTools and GA, getting IndexTools was a much awaited option. But Yahoo sat on this for too long. They also made the mistake of announcing without making it available to the public. And while Yahoo was preparing for the launch GA launched the revised version with the two killer features that differentiated it from Index Tools  – segmentation and custom reports.

I took a test drive of these two features in the beta mode and I must say that it seriously rocks. The UI is fabulous and the flexibility is amazing. Gone are the days when you had to create 50 profiles in GA because it didn’t allow advanced segmentation. So, GA has managed to shake up the web analytics tool industry once again. Now, customers would seriously think about their investments in the expensive web analytics tool. Granted, GA still doesn’t give real time data like the more expensive paid solutions. But I guess, it’s just a matter of time.