Archive for Google Analytics – Page 2

Another way of achieving the Universal Tag concept for web analytics

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, July 21st, 2013 
· No Comments

At this link, Akin Arikan puts forth some great discussion of the Data Layer / Analytics Layer / Universal Variable concept for passing data between the web server and web analytics tags served through a Content Distribution Network (CDN) also known as a Tag Manager. Besides the paid Tag Manager tools such as Tealium, there is the free but proprietary Adobe Tag Manager (for Adobe customers only, so far) and the free Google Tag Manager offering open to anyone. Many installations have implemented Google Tag Manager with SiteCatalyst, Webtrends and other web analytics tags.

Anyway, the gist of Akin’s article is that there is some movement in the industry towards a standardization of the Data Layer data elements. The Data Layer is a key/value JavaScript Object variable. Some tools (such as GTM) have libraries to help developers make standard calls to get data into the data layer for the Tag Manager to pick up and inject the data elements into various tags as they ‘fire’.

Here’s a page at the W3C where the industry giants are building a draft standard for the web analytics data layer.

More to come on Tag Manager tools…. it’s an interesting time!

Graphical tools to help you configure Google Analytics and gain insights. And then there’s the invasion of the Tag Manager tools…

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, July 21st, 2013 
· No Comments

Raven offers the Google Analytics Configuration Tool, a little “sitelet” (focused microsite) which offers 8 tools to help folks jump start their Google Analytics setup. Most interesting are the complex setups such as sub-domains and multi-domain setups, as well as event tracking configuration and a URL builder for campaigns such as SEM links and email links.

In the middle of all this setup work, many advanced users hosting multiple tracking tags on their sites are using Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics and other top WA (er, should I say, DA?) tools. I just found this post from Lothaire, who related his experience implementing an updated Webtrends tag using Google Tag Manager. Brett Hale has integrated SiteCatalyst (now Adobe Analytics) tags using GTM as well. I’m working now myself with Adobe Tag Manager. I’ll keep you posted with my notes going forward. First note is that I haven’t found much info about using a Data Layer (a/k/a analytics layer or universal variable) with SiteCatalyst tags. Wonder why?

Mobile SEO

Posted by MitchellT 
· Monday, July 15th, 2013 
· No Comments

Sorry for the long dry spell – it’s been a busy time lately and I’ll soon have some new items up related to recent work and research into web analytics Tag Management using Adobe Tag Manager, SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, GTM and Google Analytics.

But first, here’s a great article about Mobile SEO recently posted on Search Engine Land. Enjoy these hot, slow, long summer days!

Tracking Image Search

Posted by MitchellT 
· Thursday, April 11th, 2013 
· No Comments

Depending on your site content, there may be a side of inbound search traffic you haven’t considered or quantified: image search. Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it, but after reading this blog post over at SEO blog BlindFiveYearOld.com, I’m interested in making this data a part of my normal rounds of site analysis. There is significant configuration required to get this analysis, and it is documented nicely in this post. It requires creating another profile within your existing Google Analytics setup, and also requires configuring filters, a worthy, but slightly intimidating tactic I first encountered when setting up cross-domain tracking with GA. Check out the post and open a new venue for search data to come into your purview!

PS – check out this simple Regex Cheat Sheet to help you configure filters and more in GA. (Side question: will SiteCatalyst ever support Regular Expressons?)

Still finalizing your KPIs? Try using these Custom Alerts for the time being…

Posted by MitchellT 
· Monday, March 25th, 2013 
· No Comments

Fleshing out all the relevant KPIs for your site may not be as easy as you might think! In the meantime, use Google Analytics Custom Alerts as an interim (and ongoing) way to keep a close eye on the health indicators of your website. LunaMetrics has posted a list of more than 55 alerts you can easily set today so you’ll get an email as these indicators change.

Universal Analytics marches onward

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, March 17th, 2013 
· No Comments

It is still in limited beta, but Google’s Universal Analytics continues to evolve. The more info I review, the more the tagging reminds me of Webtrends Source Data Collector tagging concepts. The new Javascript tag is called ‘analytics.js’ and it is documented at the Google Developers site, which includes links to the Universal Analytics Developer Preview Beta program as well. With the new tag is an extensive reference of methods, fields, limits/quotas and cookie specs.

Does ‘not provided’ plague Google Analytics Premium?

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, March 17th, 2013 
· No Comments

The question came up the other day whether or not ‘not provided’ keywords info was a problem which plagued Google Analytics Premium the way it does Google Analytics (free). According to this post at Cloudshapes.co.uk, it does. All this ‘not provided’ silliness comes from Google encrypting search query data if the user is ‘signed in’. To make things worse, Firefox begain defaulting Google searches to https within 8 months of Google’s change.

This lack of keywords info further complicates web analytics, so it is somewhat comforting to know that this not provided issue affects Google Analytics (paid and non-paid) equally.

There is some hope – SEO and WA pros have written various posts describing custom GA reports which can shed a little light on the missing keywords data.

Odd bedfellows: using SiteCatalyst code with Google Tag Manager

Posted by MitchellT 
· Saturday, March 2nd, 2013 
· No Comments

Brett Hale’s Straight from Hale WA blog has a detailed and interesting post which explains his efforts to make SiteCatalyst’s code work asynchronously with Google Tag Manager. What a concept! GTM is not the most robust tag manager, but the price point is always agreeable, as with most other Google offerings.

Capture search keywords on VPASP 6 into Google Analytics, logfiles, etc.

Posted by MitchellT 
· Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 
· No Comments

Amazingly I couldn’t find any writeups about how to modify VPASP to capture on site search keywords into Google Analytics or the http logfile, etc. So I decided to take a look at shopsearch.asp looking for opportunities for a quick mod. I quickly found the location to add one line of code so that I could pass the search term as a querystring parameter to the shopdisplayproducts.asp template (search results page).

On the system at hand, the location was on/about line 57:

Change line
responseredirect "shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes&sppp=" & howManyItems
to
responseredirect "shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes&sppp=" & howManyItems & "&kwd=" & allwordsString

So, what we’re doing here is passing the ‘allwordsString’ variable (the search term) as a query string parameter value to ‘kwd’. ‘kwd’ could be anything unique on your system, but you’ll need to add whatever you call ‘kwd’ to the Google Analytics Site Search query string parameter setup in order to capture the data. (Let me know if you need more help with that part.)

The next improvement on this mini-project will be to pass some data into Google Analytics so that failed searches (on site search where search term generates zero results) can be quantified. More on that later…..

Linear Conversion Reports in Google Analytics (horizontal funnel reports)

Posted by MitchellT 
· Sunday, February 10th, 2013 
· No Comments

I don’t see much written on linear conversion reports like you might think. They are a great way to monitor key metrics on a website, such as the steps in a site’s conversion funnel. While I have long known how to get these reports running in Adobe SiteCatalyst, I had never tried creating one in Google Analytics (tsk, tsk!!) until now. So, if you’re interested in learning how to get these reports for your own GA account, here’s a great how-to article from Tim Leighton-Boyce at CXFocus.com entitled Get an Instant Checkout Health Check with this one-stop Report. The important thing about this post I’m citing is that it has been revised multiple times with more relevant information and improvements.

Enjoy, and please share your results, time permitting!

PS – I haven’t tried creating a horizontal conversion funnel in Webtrends – has anyone else tried?

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