Archive for the ‘analytics’ Category

Event Tracking Reports without Beta Test Activation in Google Analytics

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Looking into Event Tracking through Google Analytics opens the doors for some very unique and very cool new features. However, Event Tracking is still in beta and only available through only a select few accounts. Making testing & implementation recommendations difficult. However there is a way around this by simply manually adjusting the url when viewing reports.

Tracking Code Implementation

Firstly, implement the event tracking code on events within you site. When deciding on what actions to track, the skys the limit. From tracking lightbox triggers, external links and actions within a flash file. Event tracking can be made to fit a number of required tracking metrics.

Now To view the reporting here’s what you need to do: 

  1.  Login to analytics and view the dashboard of the account that you want to view the event reports on
  2. View a specific report, such as the “traffic source” report
  3. Modifying the start of the url to: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/events followed by the string of variables. As below:

Event Tracking Report Url

now you can view all the tracked events…

Event Tracking Report

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Posted in analytics, Web | 6 Comments »

Online Archive, Not Just a Search Rank Checker

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Ok, after my previous post and looking at things a bit more. I’ve decided to make the search rank checking tool even more of a knowledge base to help track proceedings over time.

The aim now is to include archiving of:

  • Rankings in search results
  • Number of pages indexed in the different search engines
  • Google Page Rank
  • Back link numbers from Google and Yahoo!

Might also look at lower quality metrics such as alexa ranking.

Is there anything you’d recommend archiving?

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Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 3 Comments »

Second Page Search Result Traffic Tracking in Google Analytics

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Yesterday I came across this great post: Tracking Referrals from Second Page of Google in Google Analytics

Setup is basic:

  • Add a filter to identify if the referal contains page number information
    Setup details
    Filter Type: Custom Filter >Advanced
    Field A –> Extract A: Referral > (?|&)(start)=([^&]*)
    Output To-> Constructor: User Defined > $A3
    Field A Required: Yes
    Field B Required: No
    Override Output Field: Yes
    Case Sensitive: No
  • Create an advanced segment that selects the user defined information set by the filter above
    Dimension > Visitor > User Defined > Starts with > 10

From an SEO point of view, this information can be used to identify potential keywords that need a little boost to get to the first page of results and if acted on correctly could result in significant increases in traffic.

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Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 1 Comment »

Google Service Updates – Reviewed

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Google, Inc.Image via WikipediaA lot has happened with a number of Google services over last few weeks, i’ve summarised them below:

Google SearchWiki

To my frustration, Google launched SearchWiki. Allowing Google users to re-rank and comment on  search results. The frustration comes with automatically opting in everyone that is logged in when searching, with no ability to turn off the extra visual aspects now cluttering up the search results.

Google Analytics Update

Some great new Analytics features rolled out in this update. Personally I particularily like the advanced segmentation, allowing more detailed reports on specific areas of the site, specific referers and more. Love that! One thing that seems a bit buggy is the account screen when you just log in. I’ve got access to multiple accounts, navigating to additional account pages doesn’t seem work.

Google AdWords Update

A couple of interesting updates for AdWords.

  • Quality score improvements, where the quality score is calculated at time of the search. This for me have helped the accounts managed to get higher placement, higher click through rates and higher number of clicks. All this without increasing cost per clicks.
  • A new search based keyword tool was launched. This tool seems pretty sweet! and can help to identify additional keywords that is relevant to your sites content also allows running some competitor analysis.
  • Display ad builder allows you to create image ads online and run on the content network.

Ok, the floors all yours, go on…  leave a comment or two on your experience on these new changes.

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Posted in analytics, search, seo | No Comments »

At Last! Week and Month Views in Google Analytics

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Just launched in beta is week and month views on the data. So glad for this as it was something I had asked some of the Analytics team that I met with last year.

Here’s a screen shot

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Posted in analytics, Web | 1 Comment »

5 Things I Would Like To See In Google Analytics

Monday, February 4th, 2008

I use Google Analytics quite a bit over a number of sites. But there’s some things I would like to see:

  1. Weekly, monthly and yearly trends rather than the current daily trends.
  2. Site performance stats such as page load times and server uptime
  3. Multi path funnels
  4. Search bot stats
  5. Real time stats

I’m sure theres more, feel free to add any others in the comments

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Posted in analytics, search, seo, Web | 4 Comments »

Google Analytics Now With Site Search Tracking

Monday, November 5th, 2007

Google has just announced that the site search tracking is now available in analytics. See here

This new functionality adds more power to the free service and allows the ability to see:

  • When visitors use site search
  • How visitors who search compare with those that don’t
  • Which search terms get used
  • Which dragon city hack categories visitors search on
  • Where the visitors start there search
  • Which pages visitors find

I look forward to implementing and really investigating this feature as the more you track the more you can know about your site and your visitors

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Posted in analytics | Comments Off on Google Analytics Now With Site Search Tracking