Using Google Analytics to track Social Media

02.17.10 Posted in Google Analytics, Social Media, Web Analytics by Barry

Not all traf­fic is equal, and the abil­ity to seg­ment and under­stand vis­i­tors helps us eval­u­ate web­sites even better.

Advanced seg­ments in Google Ana­lyt­ics is not new, and has been around since back in 2008, here’s a quick one sim­i­lar to a setup I’ve used to jusify ROI on Social Networks.

Advanced Seg­ments

Fire up Google Ana­lyt­ics and look for the Advanced Seg­ments on the left hand side.

Cre­ate a new seg­ment with the Source dimen­sion and the Reg­u­lar Expres­sion condition.

Here’s what I’m using but you can eas­ily add any social net­work you want into this pipe: twitter|technorati|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibes|bloglines|linkedin|facebook

Report­ing on this seg­ment allows you to analy­sis based on key met­rics like bounce rate and time on site (both sur­pris­ingly good)

Intel­li­gence

Report­ing is one thing, but how about an alert — sent to you. While not real time, and per­haps not as good as BLVD Sta­tus — Google Ana­lyt­ics does allow you to setup some trig­gers. Here’s how…

Reuse the same pipe from above

Here I’m using a really basic vis­i­tor trig­ger, but you can use any avail­able met­ric from Google Ana­lyt­ics, like rev­enue, bounce rates etc.

Google Ana­lyt­ics is extremely pop­u­lar, but shiny reports and graphs are no replace­ment for know­ing what data is actu­ally use­ful. Set­ting up a few sim­ple seg­ments is a good what to under­stand what makes vis­i­tors tick.

Do you have any good Google Ana­lytic tips? why not share them below.

Using Google Analytics custom reporting to visualise Google AdWords

02.15.09 Posted in Google Analytics by Barry

Google Ana­lyt­ics cus­tom report­ing allows you to do some cool things, espe­cially with the Motion Chart tool which lets you “Visu­alise” a report.

AdWords key­words visualisation

Here’s a quick and easy one for an account with AdWords data.

create-custom-report-google-analytics_1234568338045

Using “Key­words” as the base Dimen­sion, add the met­rics “Cost”, “Clicks” & “CTR” and cre­ate the report.

Now click “Visu­alise” and set the size drop down to “CTR” this will increase the size of the dot based on CTR. Now click play.

custom-report-google-analytics_1234568484689

This is really use­ful to quickly see pat­terns in your cost, clicks and ctr over a period of time, this kind of visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion can help you opti­mise your AdWords account.

Cus­tom report­ing video

YouTube Preview Image

More videos are avail­able in the Google Busi­ness youtube chan­nel.

More info on cus­tom reporting

Speeding up your website when using Google Analytics

02.13.09 Posted in Google Analytics by Barry

With Google Ana­lytic improv­ing and embrac­ing on page download/action track­ing, it is increas­ingly pop­u­lar to insert the Google Ana­lytic code before the page loads, inside the tag and call it OnLoad.

With that comes the prob­lem of exe­cut­ing a piece of script which will make your page load slowly if there’s a delay in load­ing the exter­nal ga.js file.

0.3 sec­onds aver­age load time

Regard­less if you place the code in the or just before the tag, some inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion is avail­able from Ping­dom on the aver­age load times of the exter­nal Google Ana­lyt­ics code.

Loads 97% slower at peak hours – in Europe


google-analytics-loading-time

On aver­age the load time across Europe is 0.3 sec­onds, which may not seem large, but with the pop­u­lar­ity increas­ing and the rel­e­vantly poor inter­net con­nec­tions in Ire­land — this can be an issue.

Installing it locally

Host­ing the JavaScript file locally is easy, with advise by Google themselves.

First, you’ll need to down­load this file http://​www​.google​-ana​lyt​ics​.com/​g​a​.js and upload it to your web server. (note: this is the newer Google Ana­lyt­ics code)

Now replace the fol­low­ing piece of code on your web page or blog

document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

and replace it with

document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "your-website.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

Once com­plete, you can ver­ify that the code is track­ing by check­ing the track­ing sta­tus in Google Ana­lyt­ics.

More read­ing

New Google Analytics Interface Tweaks

10.22.08 Posted in Google Analytics by Barry

Logged in this morn­ing to notice a few tweaks to the GA inter­face, looks good and makes some of the report­ing options eas­ier to find.

From the Google Ana­lyt­ics Blog

Today, you may have noticed a lit­tle pol­ish in your Google Ana­lyt­ics report inter­face . The lay­out is a lit­tle cleaner because we added some color con­sis­tency and con­trast between sec­tions in the inter­face so that it’s eas­ier to dis­tin­guish between the nav­i­ga­tion on the upper left, the help areas below that, and the report itself. We also made the con­trols at the top of the report (email, export, etc.) a lit­tle eas­ier to see and identify.

Over­all, the appear­ance is a lit­tle less busy, the lines are a lit­tle cleaner, and the impor­tant areas hope­fully stick out a lit­tle more, mak­ing Google Ana­lyt­ics even more appeal­ing to use.

More good work from Jeff Veen and the UI team.

Hourly Goal Analysis — New Graphing Option

04.09.08 Posted in Google Analytics by Barry

Fol­low­ing on from the new beta graph­ing options, Google has also added hourly analy­sis of some key metrics.

The most impor­tant one being ‘Goals’, this now allows analy­sers to now view goal con­ver­sion rates on an hourly basis.

Hourly Goal Analysis

For those that also use Google Adwords, this is some­thing which is hugely impor­tant, as Adwords does not show the hourly level of ‘con­ver­sions’, and makes it an no brainer to repli­cate the con­ver­sion process using Goals.

Visitors by Hour

This option isn’t avail­able on all met­rics, but will prove very use­ful for doing any day part­ing adver­tis­ing on PPC/Affiliate networks.

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