Measuring Success

Designing a web site for a mobile audience with a 3 inch screen and potentially slower data connection is clearly very different from other users. Therefore studying this segment of visitors can have important implications for your web development. Visits from older generations of Internet enabled mobile phones cannot be tracked by web analytics tools that use page tags – including Google Analytics – as they do not execute JavaScript or cookies. The traditional solution to this was to use a Log analyzer such as Urchin. However the lack of cookie and JavaScript support was precisely the reason so few people used their phone for web access. In many cases sites just failed to work, so tracking the few mobile visitors out there was never a priority – until now. The newer generation of Smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) have driven the recent proliferation of web usage via mobile devices by [...]

This is not really a hack – rather the application of a simple (yet powerful) filter that allows you to compare visits from social networks side by side next to other referral mediums. The result allows you to have a quick comparison of the significance of social networks to your site in your Google Analytics reports, rather than having to drill down into each referrer. For example: All Traffic report view after the filter has been applied Background on social networks and user generated content (taken from a recent Bowen & Craggs presentation) Social networks have exploded on the Internet. The vast numbers of people now participating in them has resulted in a huge influence over brand perception. Hence their importance when considering your digital strategy. Some companies such as Dell*, Harley Davison and Starbucks, to name a few, use social networks as a direct feedback mechanism to actively drive [...]

Just to let you know that I have finally gotten round to updating the combined tracking script hack I had for urchin.js to the new ga.js. If you know what I am referring to and simply wish to go straight to the script, the new file is listed here: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/ga-scripts/ Essentially the combined tracking script is a modification of the GATC so that it automatically tracks: outbound links – Automatically file downloads – Automatically mailto links – Automatically Therefore, instead of having to manually modify such links by adding an onClick event handler to your ‘a’ tags, this script will do it all for you. Why is this necessary? Outbound links (links to other websites from yours), file downloads (e.g. PDFs, exe, xls etc.) and mailto links (links to an email address) can be important indicators as to whether your site is engaging with visitors. If so, you will certainly [...]