Google, why hast thou forsaken me?

October 24, 2008 by · Comment
Filed under: General 

I was pretty impressed when Google announced the addition of enterprise level features to Google Analytics.  Of course, I felt this was an obvious knee jerk reaction to my previous blog where I review Google Analytics and pointed out the segmentation shortcomings.  In response?  BOOM!  Google adds segmentation a couple weeks later.  If only I had that much pull…

Let’s try this…

Addendum to my review:

Challenges:

  • Another issue with Google Analytics is its inability to magically read dynamic ecommerce data from every shopping cart on the market.

I’m not holding my breath, but hopefully someone on the dev team comes across this at some point…

Anyway, the real problem I want to gripe about is…

WHERE ARE MY NEW FEATURES?!?!?!?

I’ve got more than a dozen GA accounts, and not one of them has these features available yet.  Brutal.  Please scale back the publicity if you’re going to have a phased rollout.  This is just not fair.

In a lame attempt to protest, here’s some PR4 link love comin’ atcha!

michigan search engine optimization

Take that, Google!

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Google Analytics: free web analytics tools, part 1

October 14, 2008 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Web Analytics 

Free web analytics.  They’re out there, now learn how to use them to your advantage.

By now you’re well aware of Google Analytics, a true trailblazer in bringing sophisticated analytics to the masses.  Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can provide important insights to improving your web presence, and it’s popularity is growing.  Lost in the (certainly justified) euphoria of Google Analytics is the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft have also launched free analytics tools, and they, too, bring a great amount to the table.

Ultimately, what I’ll aim to do here is give a brief rundown of each tool and supply some of the key points that make each one valuable, and worth instituting on your site (they’re all free, so what can it hurt?!?!)  I will focus today on Google, and will be following up with similar installments on Yahoo’s IndexTools and MSN’s Analytics Beta in the near future.

To my knowledge this is will be the first and only comparison of its kind.  So let’s proceed, shall we?

Google Analytics - The old guard

It’s almost humorous to put the “old guard” tag on GA, considering it seemed only a few months ago (albeit years in reality) that I began supplementing my Clicktracks reports with Google Analytics data.

How to setup Google Analytics

For those not in the know, you can get Google Analytics working on your site for the bargain basement price of nothing by simply:

1.       Having a website

2.       Signing up for a google email account

3.       Going to http://google.com/analytics

4.       Walk through the registration process.  You’ll need to know your URL, time zone, name, phone number, and country

5.       Then Google will supply you with a snippet of javascript code, you’ll need to copy and paste this into your site (this is actually quite easy to do - see below) find instructions here) and then go to your account and simply verify that it’s working (this may take a couple hours…so be patient).

Instructions for installing Google Analytics code:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55488

If you’re using Wordpress, simply Log into your dashboard and browse to Presentation > Theme Editor > footer.php and place the code directly before the close body </body>

Benefits of Google Analytics

Like the other analytics packages available, Google Analytics provides your standard baseline website tracking and reporting.  This means you can track all of the following:

  • Visits (counts each individual visit)
  • Unique Visits (only counts returning visitors once)
  • Bounce Rate (users who see one page and then exit immediately)
  • Page Views
  • Pages Per Visit
  • Average Time on Site
  • New vs. Returning Visitors
  • User geographic origins
  • Traffic origins (did users come from a search engine, bookmark, advertisement, etc.?)
  • Most visited pages
  • Points of entry (where users enter the site)
  • Exit pages (where are users abandoning the site)
  • Goal tracking (did users complete our contact form or buy a product?)
  • User paths through the site

Google Analytics provides the ability to track all of the above, and also provides some ability to track the above items for specific user segments.  For example, if you wanted to track how visitors from a certain area of the country behaved compared to visitors from another area, you would select the “Dimension” dropdown in a report and then select the segmentation you would like to explore.

Google Analytics Dimension Example

Google Analytics Segmentation Example

Advantages of Google

I use all of the analytics tools I mentioned earlier, and all of them have their advantages.  I feel that Google is the easiest to use for the most novice users.  Google has very straightforward reporting, and for the most part the interface is simple and uses terminology that people can understand.  Unlike the other solutions, I feel a complete novice could simply click around in Google Analytics and begin gaining some valuable insights from the data.  Some other elements of Google that I find superior to its contemporaries include:

  • Trending tools - GA offers really simple one click access to trending information. Want to see if your visitors are spending more time on your site this month? You are only two clicks away from seeing that information. Or you could add it to your…
  • Dashboard - Google allows you to take any report and add it to your dashboard. So if there are specific metrics you want to monitor regularly, you can simply add them to your dashboard for ready access whenever you login.
  • Overlay - One of the things I missed moving from Clicktracks (who now offer javascript as well) to javascript collection methods was the inability to visually track page clicks, or as some people refer to it, “click density analysis”. Here, GA provides a “site overlay” which shows you where users are clicking on each of your pages. This can quickly identify trends in how visitors are using your site, what content they are drawn to, and what they are missing. In our example below, you can see that Joe’s blog is just as popular as mine. I need to start writing better stuff, I guess.
Joe and I are tied at 18%

Joe and I are tied at 18%

  • Graphical interface - Google Analytics really is easy to use. The interface, true to form for Google, is extremely clean and doesn’t offer any unusual navigational items. Straightforward links and dropdowns rule the day. This contributes to the overall ease of use and is another reason I recommend Google Analytics to beginners.
  • Expandability
  • Integration with Google AdWords & Online Marketing
    • Probably the best part of Google Analytics, in my humble opinion, is its seamless integration with Google AdWords. If you’re running a campaign on AdWords (and who doesn’t these days?) you’re not doing your due diligence if you’re not doing analytics. With GA, it’s very simple to keep tabs on the effectiveness of your various keywords and ads. You can actually set this functionality up very easily through the AdWords interface, itself by going through the “Analytics” tab in the top navigation which will walk you through the process of setting up GA.
      • One pitfall that you can run into, if you’re an agency, is that you’ll want to setup a unique GA email account to correspond with each client’s campaign.  Otherwise, GA can struggle to clearly align data from one source to another.  This can be a bit tedious, but it’s worthwhile in terms of accuracy.
    • With a little extra work, you can also track any other Internet marketing campaigns you may have going.  By using the Google URL builder, you can create tracking for any other paid search marketing, banner ads, or other campaigns you may have going, and easily track them under Traffic Sources > Campaigns.  Here you can track how well your various campaigns and channels are converting to sales or leads, and how many visitors are “bouncing” off your site.  This gives you great information for tweaking your campaigns and assuring that you, or your client’s money is spent wisely.

Drawbacks to Google Analytics

  • Limitations on features
    • Unlike IndexTools, Google puts limits on some of its features. If you have an extremely complex site the four funnels and goals GA limits you too may not be enough to cover all of the elements you wish to track.
    • The dashboard is great, and it’s easy to use, so why only one of them? In many cases it’s worthwhile to segment out your dashboards into pockets of information that work best together. Unfortunately, that can’t be done within GA.
  • Tedious setup for tracking other campaigns
    • It would be unfair to only call out Google on this, as every tool I’ve used has some issue here, but if you’re running large PPC campaigns on Yahoo or MSN, it can be very time consuming to tag all of your keywords. I’ve put together a spreadsheet that helps speed the process through the concatenate function, but it’s still a pain.
  • No notes!
    • One of the most important elements of analytics is testing. If you change some pages as a test, it’s good to have easy access to a log of changes within the analytics tool. Google doesn’t provide this, fragmenting your workflow if you do frequent tests (and I do!)
  • More segmentation, please!
    • While I love the overlay tool, I was definitely spoiled by Clicktracks’ ability to combine this tool with segmentation. With Clicktracks, I was able to see the different click patterns of members vs. non-members or a new visitor vs. a return visitor for a given page. VERY valuable information I can only hope will be coming to Google soon. I suppose this is why Clicktracks is a paid service…
    • Even within some of the more basic reporting, it would be nice to be able to combine multiple “dimensions” to really slice and dice visitors. For example, if I wanted to view visitors from a certain location that entered at a certain page and did not bounce…I can’t do that. There are many occasions where I need to severely segment data and GA doesn’t offer me the ability to do so.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an awesome tool.  No ifs ands or buts about it.  It is a sophisticated, powerful tool that can support the needs of even Fortune 500 Companies.  However, it does have some limitations that prove rather troublesome for those in need of true high end analytics…but let’s be realistic.  This is a free tool, so considering how much you get for the NOTHING that you pay for it, not utilizing GA on your site just doesn’t make sense.

Further, in terms of ease of use and the overall support available within the Help Center is top notch.  In my experience, it is very rare that you will not find answers to your questions there.  If not, you can still get customer support from Google usually within 24 hours.  This, again, is remarkable given the price tag.  Particularly for people just acquainting themselves with web analytics, this would be my recommendation as a first step for a tool that is easy to use, powerful, and provides enough information and support as your needs and knowledge of the product evolve.

Next up - IndexTools.  Stay Tuned.

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