Measuring Success

Seriously – don’t buy Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (first edition)…. Why? Because there is a second edition just around the corner. In fact its due in March The first edition is nearly two years old – eons in Internet years (well probably equivalent to dog years). Those two years were a great success – both personally for me (reading reviews of your work form people you have never met before always brings a smile to my face and a glow to my cheeks – it’s a fantastic ego boost. So much so, I have to prick my head occasionally to prevent it getting oversized!) and for the publisher, who figured out the business of printing and distributing it was good enough to invite me to update the original. And that’s how it started out – an update. A few week’s work right, ten at tops. However, within 3 [...]

Google Analytics recognises 41 search engines by default. Although this is constantly being added to, there are of course a great many other search engines in the world – language and region specific, as well as price comparison and vertical portals. The purpose of this hack, is to be able to differentiate regional variations of search engines. For example, instead of just reporting search engines as their generic Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. (as Google Analytics will do by default), I want to be more regional specific in order to compare SEM efforts in different countries: [ Last update Dec 2009: Now 100+ additional SEs + GA defaults (140+ domains). You no longer need to re-define the default set of search engines that Google Analytics uses as this hack now prepends new search engines to GA's list. For details on new prepend revision see: code.google.com ] Google.com Google.co.uk MSN.co.uk MSN.fr eniro.se [...]

As anyone who has looked at the plethora of web metrics data available knows, even for a moderately active website, segmentation is the key to gaining insight. It allows you to group similar visitors e.g. customers, subscribers, contributors, engagers etc. together for comparison. Therefore instead of viewing metrics that are average of averages, the numbers actually mean something. For example, quoting the Average Order Value for all customers is pretty meaningless. Knowing that the Average Order Value for visitors that have downloaded your PDF catalogue is twice that as people who haven’t, is a KPI that values your digital collateral. It allows you to make informed decisions about its prominence, content, update frequency, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. [ After defining and configuring goals, I view segmentation as your next most important step for your best practice web analytics setup. ] Segmentation is important you – no, critical. So what options [...]

As you may know, I occasionally write articles elsewhere (journalism.co.uk, eConsultancy, DaveChaffey.com). In case you miss these, and because I like to keep my thoughts in one place I also reproduce here a little later. The following is from my September post at eConsultancy. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important to drive improvement for your website. Although it is obviously interesting and insightful to compare how your website is performing against your peers and competitors, it can be a mistake to place too much emphasis on external industry benchmarks. These external benchmarks can be misleading and often end up with you finding the benchmark that fits your story, giving a false impression of success. KPIs vary greatly by business sector, and even within subsectors there is wide variance: think “flights” versus “holidays” or “food retail” versus “clothing retail”. Even comparing against your competitors with identically defined goals is fraught with [...]

I wanted to put this out there to illustrate the type of crap competitors will go to to discredit Google Analytics. The link takes you to an article by clicktale which is a rehash of a previous discredited post by Brandt Dainow last year. Take a minute to read it and the two so called flaws of Google Analytics…