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Official blog for the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton

Measuring Success - the blog

If you have an interest in measuring the success of your website and you have heard of Google Analytics, then this blog, the Google Analytics book and the supporting services are aimed at you. Measuring Success - also the title of the first chapter in the book - is about using Google Analytics and other complementary tools, to measure the success (or not) of your website and how to optimise it.

Jul 09

The Google Chrome operating system

Categories: Google Analytics specific Comments (12) »

I rarely comment on news, preferring instead to trial, demonstrate and collect my thoughts before writing a blog article. However this piece of news from the official Google blog is potentially so big, I wanted to add my comments straight away (and I was a web developer in a previous life)…. Yesterday, Google announced it is developing a new computer operating system and I am sure that created quite a shockwave at Microsoft’s HQ in Seattle: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html Building a new operating system for the desk top market is a huge task – not so much from a technical point of view for a company such as Google (the company built its own operating system to run the Google infrastructure from day one – based on unix), rather the driving of user adoption where others have struggled for the past 20 years. Anyone remember OS/2…? The history of the Mac is Read the full article…

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Apr 16

Google Analytics – Four years on

Categories: Google Analytics specific, Urchin software specific Comments (18) »

Google Analytics has come along way since the acquisition of Urchin was announced in April 2005. In this article I wanted to summarise the achievements made to date and discuss my view as the future for the product. A brief history of Urchin Urchin analytics has been around for some time. In fact since 1997, Urchin software has been slowly and quietly building a strong reputation for its server-side web analytics software. I first came across it in 2003, where its lightening fast processing power, small resource footprint and good value for money caught my attention. Even on a moderately specified Linux box, Urchin’s number crunching performance far exceeded anything else on the market – and still does today. This has made it particularly attractive to ISPs and web hosting companies that remain its largest customer base. A differentiator for the Urchin product is its hybrid approach – combining data Read the full article…

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Mar 09

Creating the perfect (trackable) blog article

Categories: Metrics understanding, Plugins & Hacks Comments (15) »

Crafting your article to entice click-throughs to your site If you write the perfect blog article and publish the full content via RSS, there is a strong possibility that the visitor will read your content in their RSS reader, be entirely satisfied (strong engagement) and then move on i.e. not visit your web site. … This is a great way to track engaged RSS readers – casual readers of you headlines are screened out because they don’t click through (so are not tracked), while engaged visitors click through and therefore are tracked.

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Jan 25

Integrating Voice of Customer data with Google Analytics – Part I

Categories: Plugins & Hacks Comments (12) »

As I have written before, Voice of Customer techniques are your direct feedback mechanism from visitors to your web site. It provides invaluable qualitative data to your web design, development, marketing, PR and content creator teams. It compliments the quantitative data of web analytics by providing the “why” to the “what” and “when”. However it is often the case that this data remains in a separate silo within the organisation, never to be compared with the quantitative data of your web analytics platform. This post, the first part of two, is a How-to guide for integrating your voice of customer data with Google Analytics. I have chosen two popular VoC tools: , Clicktools and Kampyle, though it is not my intention to review the merits of the respective tools themselves. However I do use them both, which makes me a fan of them both. This is Part I – Integrating Read the full article…

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Dec 16

Google Analytics Accuracy – Comparing Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics and Nielsen SiteCensus

Categories: Metrics understanding, Privacy and Accuracy Comments (16) »

          Last year I wrote an whitepaper on web analytics accuracy. The intention of this was to be a reference guide to all the accuracy issues that on-site web measurement tools face, and how you can mitigate the error bars. Apart from updating the article recently, I wanted to illustrate how close (or not) different vendor tools on the same website can be when it comes to counting the basics – visits, pageviews, time on site and visitors. To do this, I have looked at two very different web sites with two tools collecting web visitor data side by side: Site A – This blog, running Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics. According to Google, there are 188 pages in the Google Index and traffic is approximately 10,000 visits/month Site B – A retail site that runs Nielsen SiteCensus and Google Analytics (site to remain anonymous). According to Google, Read the full article…

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