Making the most of it

Anil Batra
Chief Analytics Officer, Ascentium

Loren Bast
Founder, Bellusi LLC
 Who this is for

 Medium to advanced users

 You’ve used or are using Google Analytics, but need it to
do more

 We’ve selected the top topics that trip users up

 Jump in with questions during the presentation
 Discuss larger questions in the Q&A
 Topics to be Covered

 Ensuring setup is correct

 Setting up profiles and filters
 Custom Reporting
 Goals & Ecommerce
 A/B testing
 “Hacking” Google Analytics
 Other analytics tools
 Other resources
 Q&A
Ensuring it’s correct, and gathering the right data
 Setup

 Use ga.js (new in late 2007) instead of urchin.js

 Urchin is being phased out; new GA features aren’t
available for it
 Are all your pages tagged?
 Check Traffic Sources/Referring Sites
 Are your own site pages coming up with high page counts?
You may have problems – untagged pages are linking to
tagged ones
 Tag not installed properly
 Page load issues – the tag doesn’t get called consistently
 Until this is fixed – your clickpath analysis, entrances/exits, etc.,
will be skewed
Referring Sites
 Profiles

 Profiles provide different views of data

 Have multiple distinct areas of the site? Use profiles to
make analysis easier
 Profile filters
 Filters discard incoming data you select (unhelpful
querystring parameters, visitors from your own company,
etc.)
 Data that is filtered out is PERMANENTLY deleted
 Therefore, create one completely unfiltered, raw profile to
keep complete data records
 Name it such that people know not to use it unless they
know what it’s for (ie, “Danger – Raw Data!”)
 Profiles
 Filters – what to filter out?
 Your own company IP ranges
 Unhelpful query string tags that make GA think one core page is really
many (random string tags used to prevent browser caching, etc.)
 http://www.companyX.com/search/results/?id=b495f4de321e7cfcf2a7
0a5be8339ae8
 Mobile vs. standard users of your site
 Profiles can be used for much more than analytics
 Example – to give your partners, customers, vendors reporting to only
“their” portion of your site
Filters

Setup
• To setup a filter, go to your “Profile Settings,” and then to “Filters Applied to Profile”
• In the upper right, you will find the option to “Add a Filter.”

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Filter Types
The 4 types of filters available in GA are:

• Exclude All Traffic from a Domain

• Exclude All Traffic from an IP address
• Include Only Traffic to a Subdirectory
• Custom Filter

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 Filters - Include Only Traffic to a Subdirectory
• The “Include Only Traffic to a Subdirectory” filter allows you to track specific areas
within your site while ignoring data from other pages and sections.

How to setup:

• Enter your subdirectory here, between ^/ & /

• If your site is www.example.com, and you want to see only traffic to the /food subdirectory
( URL -www.example.com/food) you would want to replace “mydir” with “food.” The final
result should appear as below.

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Filters - Exclude Traffic from a Domain
• Domains generally represent the ISP of your visitor.

• To discount traffic from mydomain.com

Enter mydomain\.com$

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Filters - Exclude Traffic from an IP Address
• Use this filter to exclude traffic from your reports. It’s particularly useful in eliminating internal
traffic (home, company intranet, etc.)
• If your IP address is 63.212.171, then you would enter:
• 63\.212\.171\.

• To exclude a range of IP addresses (for example: 192.169.1.1-25), enter:

• ^192\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$

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 Advanced/”Cascading” Filters
• Advanced filter allows you to create a filter with two fields. You can then “cascade” this advanced filter
with even more filter to get at GA data that otherwise might be difficult to string together, quickly and
easily.

• Their hypothetical situation is as follows:

• “…every day your boss wants a report that tells her what keywords people were searching on, what
was the source, which ad they clicked on, how many pages they looked at and did they convert?”

• We start by choosing a custom filter, then

adding that we want to get results for all
campaign keywords and all campaign
sources.

• Note the Output of “Custom Field 1” and then

the combination of the A and B fields.

• This will allow us to “cascade” this filter into

another in order to quickly get the multiple
data points we need so long as we chose the
correct output field.

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The following example walkthrough with original graphs and more detail can be found at:
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2007/06/14/filters-for-ga-part-4c-cascading-custom-advanced-filters
Advanced/Cascading Filters - continued
• Next we create a second advanced filter.
We attached this filter to the first by
choosing “Custom Field 1” and using (.*)
so we get all data from the first filter.

• Selecting “Campaign Content” and again

using (.*) so we get all campaign content.

• Next we choose to Output these results to

the “Visitor Language Settings” report.
Note: It’s important to consider what data
points you want as different reports will
automatically display different metrics for
your desired data.

• As the authors of the post note, the first

column in your report should read
something like:
• “product, search engine, keywords

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 Custom Reporting Overview
Step 1: Create Custom report
 One of GA’s newer features allows the user to create their own custom
reports using a predesigned set of metrics and dimensions. This feature
is ideal if you have a pre-defined set of KPI that you want to track on
your site and you want to avoid looking at several reports in GA. Now
you can create one report to get you an overview of what you need, and
quickly.

 To create a custom-report, simply go to the profile wherein you want the

report, and on the left side of the page, click on “custom reporting.”
Custom Reporting Overview
Step 1: Create Custom report

Next click on “Create new custom report.” From here, you’ll

be presented with what amounts to a “Build-your-own-
report” page.

Note that you can list the Metrics and Dimensions grouped
together under each category, and available to select via
drop-down or you can click on “list view” to see all metrics
and dimensions together.

Additionally, not all metrics and dimensions can be used

with one another, so selecting a specific metric might render
a dimension unusable (it will show up in your list, but will be
a faded white and you won’t be able to grab it) or vice versa.
Custom Reporting Overview
Step 1: Create Custom report
•For one example, let’s pretend you want a
report that quickly details what city is providing
you with the most number of visits as well as
what the Pageview count and bounce rate is for
each. Here’s how to create a quick report that
would detail this out for you:

•From the drop-down list of Metrics,

separately grab “Visits,” “Pageviews,” and
"Bounce Rate” and drag each to an empty
“metric” box.

•Next, go to dimensions. Next grab “city” and

drag this to the empty “Dimensions” box.

•When done, you should see what’s to the

left.
 Custom Reporting Overview
Step 2: Report Overview

•Next, let’s preview our report to make sure it’s getting at the data and metrics we actually want it to.
•From the preview screen that pops up, you’ll see the top cities in terms of their visit counts and pageviews, as well as the
bounce rate for each. You can also obviously sort to figure out what cities have the lowest and highest bounce rate. There
are a host of possibilities here, including e-commerce and campaign metrics. You can use each to quickly get at the data
you need, without having to sort through numerous reports for each piece of data.
Advanced Segments Overview
 Another new feature from GA, this feature allows the user to create segments of
data that can quickly be referenced.
Advanced Segments Overview
 Let’s create a custom segment. Go to the “advanced
segmentation” link under “settings” on the left side of
the screen.

 Alternatively, you can also link to the segment

creation screen in the previously mentioned drop-
down menu.
Segmentation - Continued
• Hypothetically, let’s say we wanted to track the visit trends for the blog pages of our site.
1. On the segment building page, under Dimensions we’ll select “Content” and then drag and drop the
“Page” dimension to the first open box titled “Dimension or Metric.”
2. Next, let’s selected “contains” from the drop down and type in “/blog”. In this case, we want all
visits to the blog homepage AS WELL AS the individual blog post pages. On the bottom of the page,
let’s name the segment “blog visits.” We can also test the segment, and as the screen capture
shows, of a total of 13,816 visits to our site, 5,199 fell within our segment parameters. We can
now create this segment and apply it to any of the reports we want.

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Segmentation - Continued
• Go to your report pages and apply this segment anywhere. For instance, going to the Traffic
Sources overview page you can then select the advanced segments drop down, and select our
“blog visits.” Let’s un-select the “all visits” segment that is automatically the GA’s segment of
choice. Now we can see details on the visits to our blog pages only; where these visitors are
arriving from, etc.

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 Goals
 Goals are conversions. When you drive site users to a specific page in
order to download, buy, signup, or simply read something, your goal is that
specific action.

 Google is able to track how often goals are completed.

 If you have a specific path you expect users to take on their way to
converting, Google can track this as a funnel.

 Examples of Goals
- Thank You Page (Newsletter Signups, Email Subscriptions, Job
Applications, Contact Forms)
- Purchase Confirmation Page/Receipt Page
- About Us page
- Particular News article
 Goals
•To set up Goals:
Go to your Profile Settings, Conversion Goals & Funnel
You can have up to 4 different Goals
Choose Edit
 Goals
In configuring Goals steps, there are three different match types:
 Goals
•Defining Funnels – URL and Name Fields
•Here you can create up to 10 different steps.
•If you choose these steps to be required, conversions will only be counted when
they go through this exact path.
•Goal URL & Name
•This URL is the very last page of your funnel process, such as a “Thank You”
page.
•The Goal Name is just for your reports, any name you will recognize (ex. Contact
Us)
 Goals
•Be sure to save changes
•Once completed, your Goals should look similar to the example below. Notice
the Goals are active (collecting data).
 Ecommerce

 Extends beyond “ecommerce” sites

 Use to assign a $$ value to any user behavior
 For example – a lead generation site
 A prospect submits your web form and gets a confirmation
page
 He/she has become a “lead” worth $15, even though he never
bought anything
 Track it using the ecommerce tags!
 “Goals” feature is similar, but –
 If user behaviors can have multiple values, you’d have to set
up a new goal for *each* value
 Ecommerce

 In this example, no airline

tickets were actually purchased
on this website; the user simply
indicated an intent to purchase
by clicking on each link

 We still wanted to track the

value of tickets that were
potentially sold later, so we
used the ecommerce feature of
GA (not goals)
Website Optimization
 What is Web Site Optimization
 It a continuous process to improve the conversions

 Why Do Web Site Optimization

 Spending time and money driving traffic to your site is
useless if your visitors do not convert
 Convert users effectively
What Can you Optimize?
 Headline
 Sub headings
 Images
 Offers
 Products
 Placements on Landing pages
 Color
 Font
 and list goes on
 A/B Testing

 When in doubt
 Choose A/B over multivariate testing
 Both give stats on combo “A” performs better than “B”
by x%, however
 A/B gives you insight into paths users take, because of the
different URL structure
 A/B – Uses multiple unique URLs
 http://www.xxx.com/?test=a

 http://www.xxx.com/?test=b

 Allows you to do Clickpath analysis

Testing
A/B Testing
A/B Testing - 50/50 Split
November 2007
Added a link and additional text to
the upper left quadrant.
The Results
statistically
significant
Summary
Other Insights
 Of the percentage increase (7.06% of visitors
viewing 1+ pages), there was a 49.11% conversion
rate
 2.72% click through rate for new link –
surprisingly less than the percentage increase of
visitors viewing 1+ pages
 Even though the new link is for visitors who
already had an account, its greatest impact was
on converting new visitors
Testing
 Optimize for Incremental Changes
 Do not get caught up in Path Optimization
 Test one page at a time
 Simplify it
 Start with A/B then move to MVT and Targeting
 Remember every site and their users are different
 What works on one site might not work on the other
 Event Tracking
Event Tracking is a method in Google Analytics which measures
specific User interactions with a website. This is made possible with
the new Google Analytics code (gs.js) which was not possible with the
legacy code (urchin.js).

Event tracking measures:

Any Flash-driven element, like a Flash website, or a Flash Movie

player
Embedded AJAX page elements
Page gadgets
File downloads
Load times for data

Not available for all accounts

 If you don’t have it, try requesting it:
 http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/wiki/EventTrackingRequest
 Event Tracking
Event tracking for Video Tracking
Setup:
 Ga.js code on the webpage
 _trackEvent() method in the source code of Video object

_trackEvent() method parameters

_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

 category (required) The name you supply for the group of

objects you want to track.
 action (required) A string that is uniquely paired with each
category, and commonly used to define the type of user
interaction for the web object.
 label (optional) An optional string to provide additional
dimensions to the event data.
 value (optional) An integer that you can use to provide
numerical data about the user event.
 Event Tracking
Event tracking for Video Tracking

All events/methods in Google Analytics are called from the

pageTracker object. A Video event can be tracked by inserting
the _trackEvent method in the source code for the video.

E.g. The Video we want to track is ‘Obama’s victory speech’. It can

be tracked as mentioned below.

pageTracker._trackEvent("Videos", "Play", " Obama’s victory

speech"); where the category is ‘Videos’, action is ‘Play’ and the
label is ‘Obama’s victory speech’. Similarly we can track ‘Pause’ and
‘Stop’ events in place of ‘Play’ for the action parameter.
 Event Tracking
Reporting for Video Tracking

Once implemented, the Video results can be viewed under Event

Tracking present in the Content section of Google Analytics

For the previous example, the data will show up like:

Video -> Play -> Obama’s victory speech

 “Hacking” Analytics

 The primary analytics function is simple Javascript

 Can be used anywhere Javascript functions – on mouse clicks,
etc., not just on page loads
 Don’t be afraid to change the Javascript
 pageTracker._trackPageview();
 pageTracker_trackPageview(“MyFavoritePage”);
 Useful when the page URL doesn’t accurately represent what the page means to
you
 Use multiple accounts and tracking codes on your site
 Hey, they’re free!
 Make a new pageTracker variable for each tracking code
 var pageTrackerNEW = _gat._getTracker("UA-<2nd account>-x");
pageTrackerNEW._trackPageview();
 What a page means to you

 The page URL

 http://foodsite.com/Recipes/Meat-and-Poultry/Chicken/Main.aspx
 What it means to you
 http://foodsite.com/FoodCategoryPage
 Other tools
 Omniture or WebTrends instead?
 In Loren’s opinion, GA is much better and less
expensive
 Honorary mention: Clicktale
 Low cost usability analytics tool
 Tracks user mouse movement on your pages, gives you
“videos” of what they’re doing
 http://www.clicktale.com
 Other Resources
 Official Google Analytics Blog
 http://analytics.blogspot.com/

 Unofficial Google Analytics Blog

 http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/

 Google Analytics Knowledge base

 http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/

 Ask Anil Batra

 http://www.anilbatra.com/digitalmarketing/ask-expert.asp
 Questions??
 Anil Batra
 http://www.AnilBatra.com
 Blog: http://webanalysis.blogspot.com
 Twitter: @anilbatra

 Loren Bast
 lorenbast@gmail.com
Appendix
 Lots of random slides to follow
Motion Charts
Motion Charts
Motion Charts in Action
Custom Segment _utmSetVar
Custom Segment in Reports
Advanced Segmentation
Time toPurchase
Few Words about _utmsetvar
 Stored in the user’s __utmv cookie,
 Get picked when the visitor returns by default.
 If you don’t want that to happen you set it to Null at the
end of the session
 Visit Based
 Only one value allowed
 Value is overwritten
 Once Set the value remains for the visit, any changes
will only be reflected in next visit.
Few Parting Thoughts
 Web Analytics Tool Provides you Data
 Use other data points
 Feedback/Surveys
 Customer Experience Tools
 Data is as good as the learning and action that come out from it
 Before using tool figure out your business, site and customer goals.
 Do not just do Data Reporting, Do Data Analysis
 Learn from data
 Optimize Pages and Conversion Funnels
 Optimization is a continuous process