Archive for Web Analytics
Analytics Referrer Spam
Posted by: | CommentsRecently my associates and I have been seeing something in our Google Analytics reports we now know to call referrer spam. This post very neatly documents all the particulars of this latest ploy. In the article the author recommends not visiting the oddball referring sites, which is a rather irresistible thing to do as a web analyst. It is our very nature to visit new referring sites to see how our content is being referred to, etc. Bad news is, the way the perps are going about this, you won’t ever find any links to your site on these referring sites. I’m sure it will be only a matter of time before there is a clever response from the web analytics community or from the analytics providers themselves. Time for another game of cat and mouse, unfortunately; and, a good reason to frequently review your web analytics reporting!
Update: more information is available at this post, and includes other links you may find in your reports. I am not mentioning specific domains because they are listed in the posts I’m linking to, and I don’t want to give them any more attention since the attention they’ve earned was ill-gotten to begin with.
Responsive Design reading
Posted by: | CommentsNew topics around Responsive Design such as Responsive Content and Responsive Content Thinking are emerging, and this ClickZ article handles these in a Feb. 1 post titled Responsive Design, Nimble Architecture. The bottom line is that a lot of upfront preparation and thought go into achieving a responsive site and good information architecture is essential. Web analytics can play an essential part of migrating an existing site into a new information architecture and responsive design. On the other hand, implementing a new design/architecture is a great time for a web analytics implementation checkup.
Google Analytics Visitor Flow feature
Posted by: | Comments
It seems that forever one of the advantages paid web analytics tools had over Google Analytics was path analysis. Not anymore – for a few months now GA has had something called Visitors Flow and it is pretty cool. This “new” feature allows you to segment on the fly and visually view a chart of the different ways site visitors traverse your website. For me the best part is that the visitor flow feature works retroactively with your data, unlike some setup and configuration which works going forward from the time it was set up. More posts to come about this really nice feature addition – the pressure continues on paid web analytics vendors!
Excellent Analytics
Posted by: | CommentsNice post title, right? Excellent Analytics is something we all strive for, but this time the topic is actually the name of a plugin / add-in for Google Analytics which allows you to pull Google Analytics data directly into an Excel spreadsheet for further processing.
Excellent Analytics is free and open source, and has been around for a couple years now, so there’s no reason not to try it except for the fact that it relies on Windows and the Microsoft .NET framework. Click the link above to get the plugin, view the FAQ and a little gallery of sample results.
On the same topic of pulling GA data into other tools, this blog post explains how PBS has automated some of its web analytics reporting with other paid tools such as DataGrabber ($299 street).
The future of tagging
Posted by: | CommentsAn interesting whitepaper crossed through my email inbox today titled ‘The Future of Digital Measurement and Personalization’ by Gary Angel at Semphonic. I always enjoy the papers written by the fine folks there, and you may find this document insightful as well. Basically the concept put forth is that tagging websites for web analytics, functionality and interactivity is unweildy and worsening because governance (change control and stability) is a huge challenge as time goes on. I like the concept of a TMS (tag management system), and we’ve seen each web analytics vendor put forth the bones of TMS such as Webtrends Tag Builder. This document focuses on Celebrus and their tag management and data warehousing solutiuons and I plan to study their solutions in the coming days. Thanks for reading!
WATS plugin aids SiteCatalyst implementation and troubleshooting
Posted by: | CommentsI just read about the WATS tool, a Firefox plugin which helps users troubleshoot SiteCatalyst implementations. As always, any help working through Omniture tracking issues is welcome!
Web Analytics Tag Management
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve all tried all sorts of tricks to manage our web analytics tags: server-side include files, JavaScript include files, etc.
Here is a tidy little post which lists some online tools to manage web analytics code tags. It does not mention the Webtrends Tag Builder, probably because it is too specific. But I mention it again, because it is a valuable tool for those using Webtrends and the Source Data Collector (SDC). I am anxious to see the Adobe Tag Manager when it becomes available – I think it will be a huge help managing Site Catalyst installations.
Tracking Campaigns in Omniture SiteCatalyst
Posted by: | CommentsYes, I realize that Adobe bought Omniture more than a year ago. But you’ve got to admit, Omniture is a cooler product name than Adobe. Adobe is what desert houses are made of.
But I stray from the point of the post. (yes it is getting late)
This article nicely summarizes tracking campaigns with SiteCatalyst. I mention it for selfish reasons of helping me to remember how to find this article.
Enjoy!
Real-time analytics application
Posted by: | CommentsWow – how time flies. I’ve gone too long without posting!
New Relic appears to be an interesting performance and app monitoring package with a modern interface and great tools. I came across it the other day looking for some other web analytics information. A free trial is available, so I may give it a run and write about it here.
Until next time…!
What’s running that site?
Posted by: | CommentsIt isn’t pefect, but the Scritch CMS detector tool is very useful when you need to know what CMS is running on a certain website. If you need to know where the site is hosted and what https server responds for the site, Netcraft is excellent. Need to know what web analytics is in place for a particular site? The Vendor Discovery Tool at Web Analytics Demystified can help.