Search engines as bookmarks: An attribution problem

Posted on by Lary Stucker

I needed a new pair of shoes. While on my lunch break I happened to be reading an article at www.fastcompany.com and an ad for a pair of Tom’s caught my eye. I clicked the link, liked what I saw, but my lunch break just ended so I couldn’t buy just yet. The next day, instead of trying to remember the URL,I fired up my favorite search engine, types out “T-O-M-S-S-H-O-E-S” and the first result is Tom’s official website. I visited the site, made my purchase, and a couple days later I (and a child in need) get a new pair of shoes. My search engine usage is pretty common and yet it presents a special kind of problem for web analysis. People are using search engines as a pseudo bookmark tool. Continue reading →

Did you just break your Google Analytics Installation?

Posted on by Lary Stucker

How to verify that Google Analytics is capturing data properly

noCutWireWith 90+ standard reports, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and plenty of other amazing enterprise features, I’m not breaking any new ground here by saying that Google Analytics is a great web analytics solution. It has always bothered me though, that without live tracking it can be difficult to troubleshoot, diagnose problems, confirm that you properly set up your eCommerce conversion tracking or some other custom JavaScript implementation. Waiting 8-12 hours to see if data is still being collected, or if your “test transaction” is being reflected in your reports is no way to work in an enterprise environment.

Continue reading →

Which companies are visiting your website?

Posted on by Lary Stucker

who is visiting your website?If you have a website, you are more than likely quite interested in who is visiting that site. If you have a sales team, they are probably even more interested in which companies are visiting. It can help determine a prospects level of interest, whether they have responded to marketing collateral, and which products or services they are most interested in.

Problem

Unless you can get your visitors to identify themselves (fill out a form, sign up for a service, etc.), their visit is going to go completely undetected; however, it doesn’t have to. Continue reading →

Barack Obama uses Google Analytics

Posted on by Lary Stucker

obama analyticsAs someone who is intrinsically interested in pulling back the curtain and seeing what’s going on behind the scene, I was somewhat surprised by what I found while looking through the source code of the president elect’s web site www.barackobama.com. It seems that his campaign is making great use of Google Analytics and Google Web Optimizer.

You can see areas where they have changed code and stopped web site functions in order to improve website retension:

/* Commenting out to try to fix exit and bounce rates in Google Analytics */

What I find most encouraging is that our new president seems to have surrounded himself with smart people.¬† Including people who know how to leverage technology like Google’s Website Optimizer and Analytics¬†to¬†improve their campaign, while at the same time keeping down their overhead.

Getting Started with Web Analytics

Posted on by Lary Stucker

What metrics to measure?The decision to start measuring your website’s traffic can occur for many reasons. You may be the owner of a small business, or you may be a seasoned marketer who is just now getting into eMarketing (does anyone like that still exist?). Either way, you know that your web site’s statistics contain valuable information, but you don’t know what that information is or what you can do with it. The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of what web analytics can do and which metrics you should start tracking right away.

What Web Metrics should you start measuring today and why?

  • Visitors: What is the average number of visits to your website?
  • Conversions: Conversion can mean many different things depending on your business. A Free trial download, the sale of a product, and the completion of a contact form are all types of conversions that have value to your business. Continue reading →

Website Performance by Language

Posted on by Lary Stucker

helloHow well does your website perform based on the visitor’s language preferences? Is there a large portion of your traffic that is not being well served because of a language barrier? Do you have multiple language support on your website and want to know if it is effective?

Web analytics can answer all of those questions, and it can show you how effective your marketing efforts are by visitor language.

I will be using Google Analytics, but you can use most analytics tools to easily look at visits and purchases by the language setting of the visitor’s browsers. Continue reading →