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

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

How to use both Google Analytics’ built in campaign tracking and your own custom campaign tracking variables.

If your campaign links already contains tracking variables you can map these variables to Google Analytics by modifying the Google tracking code. This works great unless some of your campaigns contain Google Analytics tracking variables and other campaigns contain your own custom variables. If you find yourself trying to track standard Google Analytics campaign links and your own modified campaign variables this is a simple solution using custom JavaScript. Read more…

Google Analytics campaign variables, custom analytics, custom campaigns, Google Analytics

How 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. Read more…

Web Analytics Google Analytics, internationalization, Key Performance Indicators, Web Analytics, web metrics