Archive for General – Page 2

Tag Management opens a new world for flexible web analytics

Wow – what a whirlwind couple months as I took the plunge using Adobe Tag Manager for a recent SiteCatalyst (now Adobe Analytics) implementation. First, I owe Kevin Rogers a big thanks for his help along the way. I’ll post more about my ATM experience going forward.

What I wanted to write about today was this writeup I found which explains how to verify a site for Google Webmaster Tools using Google Tag Manager. What a great idea… the fun part is we’re only getting started with Tag Managers – they’re rocking the web analytics world.

Tag on!

Best ever map of New York Penn Station

Quite by chance I found this map of New York Penn Station. Apparently it is the best map in existence, so I’m happy to share it. I can remember being overwhelmed at Penn Station myself back in 1987 when I first visited New York by train. As you can tell by the header image of this site I like trains, particularly passenger trains. Happy Travels!

Brian Clifton’s Measuring Success blog is full of good posts. The blog complements his book, now in its 3rd edition. The first post I spotted was a detailed listing of the limitations of the non-paid public version of Google Analytics. This kind of info is valuable for those who need to size a web analytics solution for a larger site. Most normal or low-traffic websites would never reach these limits. Sizing is a perfect segue into the next post I found interesting: “Should You Pay $150,000 for your web analytics tool?” This post provides some great guidelines, such as not paying for web analytics unless the site is generating $1million in annual revenue at minimum. I’d never heard a number like that before, but I’ve never claimed to be a P&L expert either.

These two posts are great for making you think about what you’re really trying to accomplish with your analytics; I hope you’ll take a few moments to read through them.

Quantifying website “friendliness” to mobile devices

Looking to determine if your site is mobile-friendly?  The W3C has a nice tool just for this purpose, their mobile validator.  Give it the URL of a page or site you’d like to check out, and it will provide a detailed report which can help you gauge how the mobile experience will be for that site.   Try it on a site you like – you may be surprised at the results returned!

Check out my feed – on the right sidebar

I’ve just added a feed subscribe widget to the blog. I welcome your subscription, it will be served by Feeedburner. Thanks for checking it out, and let me know what topics you’d like to see covered at onceinaweb.com!

Tuning Bounce Rate Metrics in Google Analytics

I just found this post so I haven’t tried the tactics explained, but the explanations of the mechanics of bounce rate are so useful I have to pass along the link. What the author is demonstrating is that Google Analytics out of the box has little way to calculate time on site without some tweaking. So if visitors stay on page for 15 minutes, GA may guess the visitor spent no time on the site at all because only one page view was logged. This could have big implications for news or blog sites where many visitors only view a single page, scanning headlines, etc. I hope to experiment with these tweaks soon – let me know if you do the same.

TwentyFeet for social stats monitoring

Need to monitor your social stats on major platforms such as Twitter and Facebook? Try TwentyFeet – it is free for personal use and pricing is nominal for larger accounts. Another social media monitoring tool to try out is Addict-o-matic. It works a lot like SocialMention, but I’m not sure how long SocialMention will last. Does anyone know what’s going on with it? It does continue to function, but Alerts which should have been working ‘last week’ have been down a couple years now, it seems. I’d love to know the back story on SocialMention.

This topic is a moving target, with new devices and browsers constantly entering into the wild. The User-Agent string is how well-behaved browser programs identify to the web server on each request for web content. This info is handled by the web application and is generally logged by the web server and/or web analytics system in place. If you’re doing web development, in particular mobile web development, you might find the User Agent String.com site handy to help you adapt your web application to handle the increasing number of web-enabled smartphones and other devices such as tablets, etc. The big thing I learned today was that “Fennec” is the nickname for Firefox in the mobile arena. I’m sure you’ll find something useful as well!

Five little-known factoids about Google Analytics

Here is a post at ClickZ which explains some facts about Google Analytics. They are indeed facts, but if you look carefully you’ll see the post was sponsored by Adobe. Pretty ironic, huh? That might be like vegetarians sponsoring an ad for meat or something, since Adobe owns SiteCatalyst, a major player in the paid web analytics arena. I think the point of the post is to make potential or existing users of Google Analytics think about the features they really need in a web analytics tool. Who knows how long Analytics will remain free of charge, but if I were a web analytics vendor, I’d be watching Google Analytics rather closely on an hourly basis because new features we only dreamed of are now available to virtually any web site owner.

I’ve been fortunate to have access to SiteCatalyst and Webtrends (but not Yahoo Analytics) and those paid tools still offer many features not yet available in Analytics such as reliable report scheduling, data export capability and customization. However, who can beat Google Analytics’ price and feature set for what it is? Have a look at the article and think it over.

Point number 5 in the article, “GA is no better than its implementation” really bugs me since the article was sponsored by Adobe. No one more than SiteCatalyst users know how true this is, and SiteCatalyst implementation is quite a handful. Just because you pay for the tool doesn’t make the implementation any better in many cases. Implementation is a complex task for any web analytics tool and so many organizations struggle with it. The good news is that it can be fixed even when it has been done incorrectly – given enough time and resources.

It happens often enough because most web site owners don’t get ownership of their Google Analytics assigned to an email account to which they have control. Most times the web developer sets up access under his or her own email and never shares access with anyone else. It isn’t easy to find (such as near the Forgot Userid/Password link, hint, hint Google), but there is a link where Google provides help for those who request to regain access to the Analytics account. I’ve had to look for this link many times, so I’m posting it here for myself and for others who might need it. Please comment with your experience using this link – I’m sure there will be interesting stories to tell!

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