Tracking social buttons

July 8, 2011

In general you should be particularly concerned with tracking elements on your site where your visitors (hopefully) take action, such as adding an item to cart or filling out a form. Same thing with social buttons – you want to know if visitors click your Like button. These are mini-goals and should be tracked. So it’s [...]

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Site Speed analysis in Google Analytics

June 7, 2011

The Site Speed report in Google Analytics was announced about a month ago, so how about doing some analysis now that we have gathered some data? First off some background. Load times are still only collected for Internet Explorer and Chrome, and the data is sampled to the tune of about 3% of pageviews for [...]

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Comparing future date ranges in Google Analytics

May 31, 2011

Date comparisons are great and allow you to see trends over time. As web analytics we care about trends rather than absolute values, right? However in Google Analytics, by default you are comparing your selected date range to a date range in the past, but there are cases where you’d want to compare the data [...]

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New Google Analytics

April 6, 2011

It may be a bit premature to write about one’s impressions of the new Google Analytics because features that one is used to from the current version could be added back gradually rather than officially removed. For example, I miss weighted sort and I hope it’s just a temporary omission. GA also recently updated in-page Analytics [...]

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Speaker diversity at conferences

March 24, 2011

I enjoyed going to the Conversion Conference recently in San Francisco and picked up a few great nuggets to try out on my sites. I especially like it when speakers approach conversion rate optimization from a different perspective than AB or Multivariate testing. Michael Summers‘ presentation on eye tracking was quite literally an eye-opener for [...]

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Adwords keywords and matched search queries in Google Analytics

February 25, 2011

There is a wealth of data in the dedicated Adwords report section in Google Analytics. One of the key additions is the ability to see the matched search queries for your keywords. Remember that the paid keywords you see in your normal Keywords report in the Traffic Sources section do not show the matched search [...]

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Landing Pages and what people actually buy

February 15, 2011

Of course you know what your top landing pages are But if you haven’t already done so, create an advanced segment for each of your main landing pages, including the homepage. Then apply each segment in turn and make a note of what products visitors actually bought in the Ecommerce section. It can be quite [...]

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Top Content and Top Landing Pages reports in Google Analytics

February 10, 2011

The Top Content and Top Landing Pages reports are super important, but I sometimes wish I could see some of the data from both reports in one place. But first, let’s take a look at the standard Top Content report: Pageviews. I am not a huge fan of just pageviews (who cares if people view [...]

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Top Landing Pages and outcomes

January 6, 2011

What is missing from the Top Landing Pages report in Google Analytics? Answer: Apart from bounces there are no outcomes or goals in this report. Better to start in Traffic Sources > Search Engines: Then use the first dropdown and select Landing Page: And you get: Good: Top Landing Pages that are now tied to [...]

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Item page segmentation

December 20, 2010

If you have an e-commerce site with section and item pages, you’ll want to be able to tell those page types apart in your web analytics. Unless you have a URL structure where you can tell directly what type of page it is (e.g. www.yoursite.com/?item=xyz or /?section=abc), you must tell your web analytics tool what [...]

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