Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Thought I’d try something new and interesting and throw a poll on my site just to see if anyone’s paying attention.  Anyhow, with all of the advancements made available by Google Analytics, I was wondering what people thought about the possible obsolescence of the long standing web analytics players.  Can Google push them out of the market?

Please share your thoughts…

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My next poll?  Do people like taking polls?  Keep your eyes peeled for that one!

Analytics superhero (and one of my five favorite people I’ve never met in person) Avinash Kaushik wrote a marvelous blog recently about reconciling conflicting data between different platforms.  Reading it, of course, would scare the bejesus out of the web analytics beginner, and rightfully so.  However, I was at odds when Avinash seemed to recommend taking one platform and running with it.

Now, who am I to question his advice?  Well, I think it depends on the audience.  There are an immense amount of small companies (trust me, I talk to them all the time) who are using analytics but don’t understand that the data is, and always has been “dirty”.  This isn’t an exact science yet folks.  Beginners and casual analytics users may not always get this, which is why I always recommend that people use a few different analytics packages, to understand that the data’s not perfect.

This of course, leads to inquiry, which the man himself is a huge champion of.  Understand how metrics are defined from one platform to the next (they’re rarely the same), and how each collects information.  You’d be surprised of the differences.  If you have huge discrepancies, go right to your vendor and ask!  It’s that simple.  Ultimately, I think it’s important to ask the right questions, and when you see the differences (by using multiple platforms), you’ll have a better idea what to ask.

If you haven’t done this before, let me show you a couple days worth of data from a very low volume site with MSN Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics and Google Analytics.  The metric of interest here is visitor origin.

First, Google:

I’m a big proponent of Google, and find myself working with GA as my primary tool more and more as they continue to make improvements.  I’ve found historically, particularly for geographic data, that they are more accurate when compared to other platforms (based on other available data).

Next, Yahoo over the same time frame:

Finally, MSN:

Quite the disparity, huh?  For people starting out in analytics, I think this is a necessary lesson.  One of the most difficult things in this business is to explain to people that the data’s not perfect.  There’s a confidence level that you must come to, communicate that (to your boss, client, or whomever) when you supply these reports.  Otherwise, you’re putting yourself, your company, or your client at risk.  None of those are good things if you’re scoring at home.

It’s been a while since I looked into the technical specifics for each platform (not sure if I’ve ever looked into Microsoft’s too closely, since I don’t use it very often), but Google’s method for calculating location is as follows (as found here):

Google Analytics uses your visitors’ IP address to determine where they are located geographically. Using a 3rd-party datasource, the IP address is translated to a physical location. In most cases, Google Analytics is able to determine where your visitors are coming from; however, if our 3rd party vendor does not have an accurate record of the IP address to determine the location, Google Analytics will display a “(not set)” entry.

So, my recommendation?  Try a few different platforms, get the feel for them and start to understand how to proceed with “dirty” data.  Trust me, it’s more fun than it sounds.

I know it’s been some time since my Google Analytics bit, where I promised the follow up with a review of Yahoo Web Analytics/IndexTools, and I just want everyone to know that it’s in the works!  Other things that I’ll have coming down the pipeline will be some very straightforward tips for setting up your Google Analytics correctly (I’m no programmer, and you won’t need to be to use them, either).

Things have been busy here at Netvantage, lots of new opportunities and we’ve added some new customers to our ranks (welcome aboard!)

In other news, Joe’s hockey season gets under way tonight (he coaches hockey, for those that don’t know), so make sure you wish him and his team luck on their coming season.

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 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%

• 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
  • Initially, I was somewhat put off by the perceived lack of high end features available on GA, but over time they have continued to make it a robust solution adding things like E-commerce tracking (check this out for all the details http://www.epikone.com/blog/2008/01/13/google-analytics-e-commerce-tracking-pt-1-how-it-works/) and goal funnels (gory details available at http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55515)
• 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.