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.
While I’ve said before that this does not fully conclude what websites actual traffic is, it does offer an indication and when comparing with Dec 2009 will show changes.
For example, Facebook.com is still the highest visited website with identical numbers to December, apart from page views which has now grown from 1.4B to 1.9B — has facebook become more sticky? the rise of younger members with their love of Farmville type applications would be a good indicator of this happening.
I’ve been asked a few times on what exactly is useful about the data extracted from Google, personally I’ve been using it as part of competitor analysis, selecting all websites in the industry I work in as a basis of understanding our place in the market. As a web only business — this is extremely important. I don’t reply solely on Google, but combine a number of sources and assumptions to deliver a more robust evaluation.
Has anyone discovered something or found a use for the Google traffic stats?
They ran a simple split test with 2 versions with over 2000 transactions in a 3 week period. Although they did not get a significant design winner, they did choose the above design as it achieved the following:
Variation A converted (GWO) 3.14% better than control variation
Visits with Variation A resulted in 12.54% less Bounce Rate
Overall site Conversion Rate was increased by 0.59%
Average Order Value was increased by 5.16%
They also calculated that revenue would increase by 5.78%. One of the great things about web analytics is that it can help remove the guesswork involved in website evolution & can automate testing which makes a real revenue improvement for ecommerce websites.
I asked last night from twitter for some estimates and most replies were in the 40,000 – 50,000 mark.
My estimate is 150,000 and here’s why…
Following on from from my post on Irish website usage, I’ve drilled down a little further to see how accurate or not the Google Ad Planner data is and to see if there’s any insight into how many users from Ireland twitter has.
Damien Mulley found stats that Ireland counts for 0.52% of total Twitter users, putting us 17th in the world. Although the report calculated location with “proprietary technology to infer geography based on user disclosed information which does not rely on Twitter’s geo-location API.” and may not be as useful as it appears, but it’s a good starting point and with the lack of anything else, let’s run with it.
The stats taken from Google Ad Planner show 200k Unique Visitors (UV) from Ireland in December, which is 6.9% reach of total web users (2.9M) — generating a mammoth 15M page views. Again from Ad Planner, taking the total twitter.com unique visitors and Irish specific traffic, we see around 0.27% of all twitter.com traffic originating from Ireland.
Of that 200k UV, you could assume that the total number of Irish twitter users to be as high as 400k because more than half of all users (55 percent) use a Twitter app, but I doubt if we’re looking at such a huge amount and the Ad Planner data covers the UV for the full month and I’d expect that users would use the web interface occasionally throughout a month.
So calculating total Irish twitter users is proving a little tricky, mainly due to Twitter not publishing total account numbers.The estimated twitter usage is at 18 mllion in the US, Interestingly Ad Planner shows 19 million UV from the US during December 2009. Again using the Sysomos report, the US contributed 50.88% of total twitter users. So assuming total twitter accounts in the 36 million region — would it be fair to say that Ireland has 184,000 users?
Let’s hit up Google for some more stats — this time using some search strings to see is <a target=“_blank” href=“http://www.google.ie/search?q=intext:” bio+*+”+intext:“location+*+“ireland””+site:twitter.com””>“Ireland” indexed in users bio’s which returns 128,00 results, although I’m not convinced of that relevance as the page listings end after about 900 results, something discussed at We are Social’s blog.
Time to go back and look at the initial 200k figure, this time using Google Trends for a daily breakdown. The profile below ties in with what I would expect a 200k monthly UV website to look like, running between 30-40k daily uniques.
Twitter.com usage during December 2009
And looking further back to see where we are in terms of growth, which is pretty steady from the start the year peaking in early June.
Twitter.com usage over last 12 months
So being fairly confident of the traffic stats from Google which ties in with the research from Sysomos, I’m going to estimate that there are 150,000 Irish twitter accounts, by comparison there are over 1.2M Facebook users in Ireland (source: Facebook advertising)
While the twitter.com website has 200k estimated UV from Ireland, I’m also considering that there is a duplication in that number. Also visitor numbers would never be equal to accounts as some of that may be search traffic as twitter status’s are now included in Google search results.
So am I over-estimating usage? or does the dormant accounts dwarf the active users resulting in skewed numbers, but that’s a whole other story, until then I’m going to run with 150,000
The lack of any meaningful competitive intelligence for Irish web usage has led me to delve a little closer into what the Ad Planner data can do. For a more robust method, I use a mixture of tools but still think that without a Hitwise equivalent, Google is the best source for figures — regardless if they are not accurate, they are at least will be consistently inaccuate
Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.
In addition, Google Ad Planner only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.
So let’s break it down, and see where exactly they’re pulling this from.
1. Aggregated Google search data: This can include a number of sources, but I’m guessing it’s mainly from Google.ie and probably also websites like Eircom.net (enhanced by Google search).
2. Opt-in Google Analytics: Unlikely to gain a huge amount from this, Most GA users I’ve spoke to have this disabled, probably an Irish thing of not wanting your neighbour to know what you’re doing.
3. Opt-in external consumer panel data: No idea what this would be, can’t see it being huge — possibly similar to the method Comescore use to collect data
4. other third-party market research: Which could be: Search, Reader, Feedburner, Adwords, Adsense, Checkout, Desktop, Earth, iGoogle, Maps, Toolbar, Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Orkut and anything Google can collect.
Data collected on Irish web usage
So, with the data collection being more comprehensive than anything else available here in Ireland, I’ve manipulated the tool to show all websites and dumped as much of what was available for December, which includes…
One thing to bear in mind when looking through the list, is that the Ad Planner tool is developed to help assist in selecting websites to advertise on, so the list throws up some anomalies such as no Google.ie (obviously), as well as some questions regarding the high usage of websites like live.com, yahoo.com microsoft.com & mozilla.com. I would consider these to be an amalgamation of the services they provide (including sub domains) and probably not users access the website directly, same goes for xtendmedia.com & mediaplex.com.
It’s no surprise to see Facebook absolutely hammering any other website, with 1.5m UV and 52% reach, in comparison bebo.com with 560KUV and 19.6% reach.
To get into the top 100, you’ll need more than 74,000 Unique visitors for the month — and it’s good to see websites like boards.ie&donedeal.ie making the list and with it being December — portablenorthpole.tv&met.ie have peak traffic as well.
Feel free to filter and play with the data here on Google Tables, One of the cool things you can quickly do, is filter all .ie websites as well filter for your own or competitor websites. I’ve left in all the Ad Planner data including the categories which might be of some use.
I’ll be following up with some extra insight on this over the next few days.
