It has long been rumored that Google was going to start ranking pages based on page load time. Think about it, if your page takes longer to load then visitors won’t get to see as many pages. Less pages mean that Google doesn’t get to serve as many advertisements to those visitors and they end up making less revenue.

Google asynchronous tracking optimizes how browsers load the Google Analytics JavaScript, so its impact on the user experience is minimized. It also allows you to put your Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering. Visitors get to see your pages faster, and Google gets to serve more adds – everybody wins!

I put together a new Joomla 1.5 plugin so that you can easily add the new tracking code to your Joomla powered site. Read more…

Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking, Google Analytics, Joomla plugins

How to verify that Google Analytics is capturing data properly

With 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.

Read more…

Web Analytics debugging analytics, Google Analytics, proxy debugger

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. Read more…

Web Analytics analytics, corporate tracking, IP tracking, Network Location

As 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.

Marketing, Web Analytics Barack Obama, Google Analytics, Optimizer

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. Read more…

Web Analytics begining analytics, Web Analytics, what web stats to measure