To See Navigation Before and After an Action, Use a Virtual Pageview Instead of an Event

June 18, 2013 by Eric Fettman

You can view the Navigation Summary for a virtual pageview.

To capture a user activity that does not generate a regular pageview, you can code either an event or a virtual pageview.

Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Since events don’t generate pageviews, they don’t increase your pageview count and therefore do not affect metrics such as pageviews/visit.

If, however, you want to analyze pages that were viewed before and after this action, you must opt for the virtual pageview, since you can view the Navigation Summary for a virtual page but not for an event.

To ensure that you can still view total pageviews and pageviews/visit without inflation due to virtual pageviews, you can create an additional profile and apply a filter that excludes the Request URI(s) corresponding to the virtual pageviews.

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Email Reports or Dashboards Monthly to Maintain Analytics Awareness

June 13, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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You can email reports and dashboards monthly or at another interval.

You can send out a dashboard or a report by email one time only or at regularly scheduled intervals: daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

In many cases, monthly is a suitable interval, especially for managers, executives, and any colleagues who do not need to closely review analytics very frequently but who should stay aware of the Google Analytics tracking data that is available.

In this way, an email report can serve not only to disseminate data, but also to raise consciousness and generate conversations that could lead to further analysis, insight, and action.

Please also see a related post on sharing dashboard configurations with other users.

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Generate Play and Complete Events for Wistia Video

June 11, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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Wisita provides short pieces of code for generating Play and Complete events from your videos.

Apart from a providing a great overall service for video hosting – including a slick and intuitive interface, a responsive support team, and a free option for lower monthly bandwidth – Wistia makes it very easy to generate Play and Complete events for videos embedded on your Web pages.

Just add two small pieces of JavaScript to your page to see how many visitors, on both desktop and mobile browsers, are starting your video and how many are watching through the end.

You can create advanced segments based on these Play and Complete actions and apply them to your Conversion and Ecommerce reports. If you see that visitors who view the video are more likely to convert or transact, you’ll probably want to feature the video prominently and also consider using it in landing pages, emails, and other marketing and sales initiatives.

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Share Dashboards with Other Users and Profiles

June 4, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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Click the Share button on the dashboard to share with other users and other profiles in your own account.

When you create a dashboard in Google Analytics, it appears only in the profile within which you created it, and only for you.

If you want to share this dashboard with another user, click Share > Share Template Link, and forward the provided URL to that user. The other user, after clicking the link, will be prompted to select the profile to which the dashboard should be copied.

Similarly, you can paste the link directly into your own browser to copy the dashboard into another of your own profiles.

Note that no data is copied in the process, only the configuration of widgets on the dashboard. To forward actual dashboard data, on a repeated schedule or one time only, click the Email button instead.

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Drill Down into a Referrer for Exact Referral Path that Drove Traffic

May 30, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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Referral paths are the specific pages on referrer sites that drove traffic.

Several utilities, such as Bing Webmaster Tools, list the backlinks to your website but cannot provide any data on the actual number of visits that those backlinks have driven.

If you drill down into any referrer listed in the Referral Traffic report, you can see how many clickthroughs originated from specific pages on other websites.

Although it would not be possible to know the clickthrough rate for each link, since you do not have access to pageview data for other websites, it is still useful to evaluate how other sites are linking to you. The type of site, and the context in which the link appears, could provide input for your marketing campaigns and even new ideas on positioning your products and services within your own site.

At a minimum, it’s very interesting and gratifying to review inbound links from other sites, and we can’t deny the importance of interest and gratification as motivations in our roles as Web developers, marketers, analysts.

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Verify New Goals Based on Last Seven Days of Data

May 28, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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Goal verification was recently added to goal setup.

Among the recent changes to the goal setup process, arguably the most helpful is goal verification.

After you define a goal, you can now validate it against the last seven days of data in your profile. If the conversion rate is 0%, you may have configured your goal incorrectly, or the conversion would perhaps occur too infrequently to be useful as a performance indicator.

Goal verification may be particularly useful for previewing Regular Expression goals, since the margin of error is greater than for Exact Match or Head Match.

These previews are perhaps a glimpse into eventual goal retroactivity, which would be a very welcome change in Google Analytics. For now, however, as critical as goals are, they are not retroactive, so don’t wait to set them up.

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Hover over Report Metrics for Help Descriptions

May 23, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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You can hover over metric names in Google Analytics reports to display contextual help.

The report and metric names used in Google Analytics are generally straightforward, but some require further description. You can hover over metric names in any report to display concise and helpful popup descriptions. (This type of popup description is often referred to as “contextual” help, since it provides assistance directly within the context of the interface as opposed to a standalone help system.)

The popup descriptions can be particularly useful in reports such as Ecommerce, AdWords, and Site Search, all of which display specialized metrics.

So the next time you’re wondering how AdWords ROI is calculated, how Ecommerce Quantity and Unique Purchases differ, or what Search Depth means, hover for some quick assistance.

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Identify Broken Inbound Links with Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors

May 21, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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Google Webmaster Tools lists the external pages that contain broken inbound links.

Although Google Webmaster Tools analyzes your website from the perspective of the Google search engine rather that visitor activity that occurs directly on your site, it does provide critical information that can help you drive more traffic to the correct pages on your site, thereby improving visitor experience and possibly increasing conversions.

Within the Health > Crawl Errors report, you can view broken inbound links that the Google search engine spider (“Googlebot”) has encountered, and the external pages that contain the broken links. You could further assess the impact of the broken link by drilling down in the Referral Traffic report within Google Analytics for the number of visits that the external pages are driving. (This is possible only if you have included the Google Analytics tracking code on a custom page-not-found page, which is highly recommended as part of your Google Analytics implementation.)

Fixing the broken link can benefit you in two ways. For one, it can help direct more visitors to the correct pages on your site instead of an error page. Secondly, it can potentially improve your organic rankings within Google, thereby driving more traffic.

Read more about the ways that Google Webmaster Tools complements Google Analytics.

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Don’t Just Look at the Change – Look at the Change in the Degree of Change

May 16, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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Use date comparisons to identify not just a change, but a change in the change.

You updated your home page at the beginning of April 2013; otherwise, you made no other changes to your website. When you check Google Analytics a month later, you see that the conversion rate for your primary goal was 10% in April.

You know that this number is not very meaningful if not compared to another time period, but which time period should you compare it to?

Compare it to March 2013?

You see that the site had an 8% conversion rate in March, so the home page update was effective, right? Well, not necessarily. If conversion rate increased by 2% from March to April during previous years as well, 2013 would only be following the seasonal trend.

Compare it to April 2012?

You see that the site had a 9% conversion rate in April 2012, so the update to the home page must have driven those extra conversions, right? Well, again, not necessarily. Conversions could have already been trending up during the previous months, so the home page update could have had no effect or even a negative one.

What you really need to compare is conversion rate over the course of March and April 2013 vs. March and April 2012. In this way, you’re not just identifying a change relative to the previous month or the same month of the previous year – you’re identifying a change in the change.

	March	April
2012	8% CR	9% CR
2013	8% CR	10% CR

To complete the picture, we see that the conversion rate in March 2012 came in at 8%, just like March 2012. That means that the increase from March 2013 to April 2013 was 2% – 1% greater than the increase from March 2012 to April 2012.

Now you can celebrate – the home page update very likely increased conversion rate. (But next time, test the new home page in a Content Experiment to be sure!)

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Reconcile URL Variations with “Exclude URL Query Parameters”

May 14, 2013 by Eric Fettman

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You can exclude URL query parameters that are not relevant for analytics.

Many of the query parameters used in your URLs may not be relevant for analytics. For instance, an “orderid” parameter in your confirmation page URL may be needed from a Website programming standpoint, but it would probably be most useful to strip “orderid” out of the URL for consolidation in the Pages report and elsewhere in Google Analytics.

Does the query parameter affect page content? Will it be useful for analyzing traffic data? If the answer to either of these questions is no, you should exclude the parameter from your URLs to simplify reporting.

Also see Consolidating URL Variations: Google Search Engine vs. Google Analytics.

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