Advanced Web Metrics

Finally after 18 months I am excited to announce that the book has been published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc and is now available from Amazon and other outlets. The book started shipping on March 17th (coincidentally my birthday!) and just made the SES New York conference. Lucky for me as it sold out on the first day thanks to Sharon Preiss of Mobile Libris for her promotional work there.

Note, I will be hosting a launch party on Thursday April 24th in London. If you are interest in web analytics, and of course Google Analytics specifically, it would be great to meet my potential audience. If you would like to attend, please email me at: .

Why should I buy the book?

If you have an interest in measuring the success of your web site and you have heard of Google Analytics, then this book is aimed at you. The purpose is to help you drive your business and help you make money from your web site. The content covers the whole spectrum of web analytics using Google Analytics - from initial measurement planning considerations, to GA best practice implementation, advanced configuration, hacks (workarounds), KPIs and real world usage, including analyst tasks such as identifying poor performing pages and funnel optimisation.

Who is the book aimed at?

The book is aimed at a broad audience - essentially anyone with an interest in making their web site successful. That includes website owners, marketers, web designers, developers, content creators, PR departments and all the various intermediaries. It’s about measuring for success (the title of the first section) and applies best practice techniques on how to do so using Google Analytics.

It’s a jumpstart for any business to get up to speed on web measurement but is also for experienced marketers and webmasters to go deep into understanding how to track engagements and how to optimise a website using Google Analytics. There are approximately 178 images to illustrate ideas, analysis and to show example reports from real-world sites. Where possible I have been consistent with example images in order to maintain a coherent story for the reader to follow.

OK, so give me some details on the content…

Spanning over 353 pages across 11 chapters, the content of the book is written entirely for the latest Google Analytics tracking code (ga.js) and is split into four key sections:

• Part I - Measuring Success, is an overview of why understanding your web traffic is important to your business and covers different data collection methodologies (page tags and log analysers), data accuracy considerations and where exactly Google Analytics fits in.
• Part II - Using Google Analytics Reports, explains how to navigate and use the Google Analytics interface and includes 10 Top reports to whet your appetite and begin the analysis of your website.
• Part III - Implementing Google Analytics, is the best practice installation and configuration guide detailing how to track all online marketing channels, Flash events, banners, file downloads and more. There is also an advanced section entitled Google Analytics Hacks featuring implementation techniques not documented elsewhere.
• Part IV - Using Visitor Data to Drive Website Improvement, is the largest section of the book. It describes how to build a culture of measurement in your organisation from objectives and key results, to key performance indicators. This is followed by a chapter dedicated to real-world tasks that covers optimising checkout systems, pay-per-click campaigns (including AdWords), SEO, and e-mail marketing efforts. There is also an introduction to multi variate testing.

Downloads

You can download the Table of Contents, Chapter 1 and the book Index from here or order directly from Wiley (US and Canada only) or Amazon.com. If you use a different Amazon country, simply edit the .com part of the domain from the link accordingly.

Have you read the book?

If you have already had a chance to read the book, please share your own perspective via comments below. I would be deeply appreciative if you could consider writing a review for the book on Amazon. Books like this live and die by their Amazon reviews and I am prepared to take the risk - I hope I don’t regret saying that!

I have heard the notion of Google being analogous to a bank for a number of years. Recently, Jim Sterne also referred to this bank analogy while we were discussing online privacy at the Orion Analytics panel of SES London. So I wanted share and expand upon this discussion.

Please take a moment to read my disclaimer before continuing - that is, the views express on this site are entirely my own and do not represent those of my employer.

Is Google entering into online banking?

In this respect no (I am not considering Checkout here). What I mean by being analogous to a bank, is in the way that data itself has become “currency”. Information has always been valuable - no one likes to be the last to know, and being the first to know gives you a competitive advantage. So whether online or not, the storage and access of data, its security and privacy, is of paramount importance to anyone who hands over information to be stored by a third party.

That is pretty much everybody with Internet access and includes individuals, small businesses and corporations alike. Google occupying such a strong online position - the conduit for many people to find information, products, businesses etc. obviously has an important role to play when it come to data privacy and security.

It’s important that privacy and security have no intrinsic value

A key factor that makes a good, secure and private data storage system, is the strict application of a one size fits all privacy and security policy. That is, regardless of whether you are one of the worlds largest brands spending millions of dollars on operations, manufacturing or marketing, or a small company selling your handicrafts locally - your data should be treated with equal importance.

As an example, imagine if a search engine or bank provided a greater level of security and privacy to large advertisers rather than smaller advertisers (or to those that saved more than others). Even the perception of such a practice would be disastrous for the organisation in charge of protecting your data “currency”. You of course want bullet proof controls whether you save $1 or $100 million dollars. That is how the banking system works and is also how Google operates with respect to handling all visitor and customer data.

» Read the rest of this entry »

On Weds 30th May, I had the pleasure of attending SES Milan for the first time. I started my career with web development and SEO back in 1997(!), so over the years I have been to many of the SES events. Its great to observe that the search market has evolved since those “smoke-n-mirror days” as well as discover country/regional differences around the world.

As a pan-EMEA manager I am ashamed to admit that my language abilities are poor - just English and a small amount of Russian (I am always amazed at how some people can simply switch between languages - both in thought and speech. Or do they always think in their native language I wonder?). Of course SES events are held in their local language and Milan was no exception. So many thanks to Sante Achille (SES moderator) who found the time to summarise the Measuring Search Marketing Campaigns presentations in English for me.

Summary of the Measuring Search Marketing Campaigns session:

• Over the past 12 months there has been an increased interest in web analytics in Italy
• There is a growing awareness of the importance and understanding of what is happening on your web site
• The different web analytics systems presented (ConversionLab, Imetrix, Atlas) all converged on the fact that there is a need for common standards. The lack of standards leads to macroscopic differences in results due to different interpretation of information - for example unique session ID, unique IP access, bounce rates, etc.
• Imetrix made the point that measuring conversions is often very black and white - the visitor either converts or does not. However, thought should also be given to measuring partial conversions e.g. add to cart page, even though the visitor may not go on to convert.
• Atlas showed some interesting data on keyword path tracking. That is, tracking all the search engine keywords that lead to a conversion - not just the last one, which is the industry standard at present. The conclusion was that generic keywords that are perceived to be poorly performing (if only the last keyword is tracked on conversion) are in fact driving repeat visits for more specific keywords.

  Very true - don’t chop off the head that feeds the tail. I will post on the options available for tracking keywords within Google Analytics in the near future.

During the Q&A discussion, the feeling was that Google Analytics is used by many web site owners in Italy and in fact its availability was catalysing interest for more detailed analysis. It would be interesting to see if a Google Analytics case study is presented at the next SES Milan event…

If you were at SES Milan, or have an opinion on any of these points, please share your thoughts by adding a comment.

(Grazie Mille to Laura Paxia and Giuseppe Fragola for a signed copy of their book - the first Italian book published on web analytics. Now where is my Italian dictionary…?)

As Jim Sterne completed the second and last leg of his European tour I attended eMetrics Dusseldorf last week. My German is a tad limited to say the least, so my colleague Timo took the lead on the vendor panel and managed the Google Analytics booth with Rene. Despite my lack of local language, two excellent presentations caught my eye:

• Rapheal Nolens from Pioneer Europe
• Mathias Blum from Lycos Europe

Of course I am slightly bias here as both of these included analysis work conducted using Google Analytics. However Rapheal made an excellent analogy which has stuck with me:

Conducting web analytics is like riding a bicycle. The tool you use in the bicycle, but in order to get anywhere you still need to pedal i.e. do some analysis.

That is very much where the web analytics industry is today - great tools, some with bigger bells and whistles than others, but essentially very similar tools attempting to do very similar things. That is, to help you understand the visitor traffic of your web site.

But what’s next for web analytics vendors?

Some vendors are specialising on data warehouse solutions - bringing all you business metrics (offline and online) into one platform. Others are focusing development on tracking the challenges of Web 2.0 - such as social media, blogging and visitor engagement metrics. Bid management, real time visitor survey tools, integrating off-site metrics e.g. search engine rankings, server uptime, download speed etc. are cool features that I have seen.

These are all great developments, but for me the biggest opportunity for the web analytics industry is not an arms race of new features, but simplification. By this, I don’t just mean making a more easy to use menu navigation system, though of course that is also important. What I refer to is two fold:

1. Simplify the setup process:
   Make it suitable for the average web developer/webmaster to implement. In that way, web analytics will become apart of the design process - rather than an afterthought as it is now.
2. Simplify the user/analyst experience:
   Make gaining an understanding of visitor behaviour more accessible. The buzz words on this are accessibility and discoverability. At-a-glance reports that are structured in an intuitive manner so that you can quickly drill into the audience segment you want and ascertain “is this data good or bad for my business” i.e. what action should be taken?

Is this simply KPI reporting? No I think not. KPIs are a double distil of information from your web analytics package. Although great for messaging an easy to digest story to senior management, KPIs leave out so much they are not suitable for the strategist. But viewing all the data all of the time is overwhelming, so an intermediate level is what I propose.

What do you think? Are you looking for features that are not yet available in your vendor’s tool or is there something else? Please share your thoughts via comments.

An important series of events for anyone interested in web analytics is Jim Sterne’s eMetrics Summit. There are currently 4 of these per year with the London event held last Thurs and Fri (29/30 March) at the Russell Square Hotel. Unfortunately, due to illness I was unable to attend in person, though Avinash Kaushik stood in for me on the vendor panel and I hear did a great job…

Some questions directed to the vendor panel and from the Google Analytics booth:

• Q: What features differentiate your product from others?
• Quick Answer: Ignore feature lists!

That’s always a good question that regularly comes up. I don’t know other tools in detail, but essentially as far as features go there is very little to differentiate any of the vendors. For example, they all have site overlay, geo-overlay, marketing analysis, eCommerce analysis, x-segmentation etc. Of course there are many ways to skin a cat, but essentially there is a great deal of feature parity out there - so my advice is ignore feature lists!

What is more important if you are selecting a vendor, is to consider what key metrics your organisation needs to know. Look at how easy it is for each vendor to collect and display that information to you. Then how easy is it for you to manipulate it i.e. x-segment, compare against another date range, filter etc.

• Q: Why pay for a service when GA is free?
• Quick Answer: Exactly - invest in understanding the data.

Firstly lets clarify what is meant by GA being free. Google Analytics is a free tool - that’s it. It is a data collection and reporting tool, but it will not analyse or optimise your web site or search engine marketing for you (no tool can!). For that you need intelligent people i.e. expertise. Also some web sites are complicated and require a bespoke implementation. Again that requires expertise.

Some vendors include that expertise as part of their package. The unique approach of Google is it makes its tools as simple as possible to use and understand (I taught myself!) and it has separated the provision of its tool from professional services such as consulting and training.

If you require professional services, buy these separately from independent Google Analytics Authorised Consultants.

• Q: How long does it tale to implement GA?
• Quick Answer: How quickly can you get the tracking code on your pages?

That is always going to depend on how complicated your web site is to track. Similar to search engine optimisation (SEO) principals, web sites can be built that are easy or hard to track - think of the difficulties of Flash only sites. That said, getting initial pageview data is very easy to setup because Google Analytics uses the same page tag (javascript snippet) on every page. So as soon as you can tag your pages, you will start to receive data.

• Q: Can you customise GA reports?
• Quick Answer: At present there is limited customisation of Google Analytics but that will not always be the case…

A key principal of working for Google is what we never discuss future developments - for any product. I can be pain when working in such an exciting fast moving company, but Google likes its ability to surprise its users (and its competition!). All I can say is watch this space…

• Q: In GA can you email reports out?
• Quick Answer: At present no, but that will not always be the case…

Many thanks to Estela Oliver and Philip Walford for helping out on the GA booth.