The ROI Revolution BlogTracking SubdomainsMarch 27, 2008
That being said, there is a silent enemy threatening to destroy the harmony of your Google Analytics data: the self-referral. You may first see it rear its ugly in head in the All Traffic Sources report. Not only is it rather disconcerting to see your own site as a visitor's referrer, but this entry in your reports represents irrevocably lost data. What's worse, you may even notice that the conversion rate for this segment of traffic is actually quite good. You may be putting lots of time and money in SEO, paid online adversing, e-mail campaigns and print ads, but when someone asks which of these was responsible for the conversion, you really don't know. Some of those sources may be getting overwritten by your self-referrals. If your site has subdomains (domain.com and blog.domain.com, for instance), this might be causing the self-referrals to show up in your reports. The standard Google Analytics Tracking code is only good for sites with a single domain and no other structural complications. Anything beyond this and you'll need to make some kind of modification to the script. Subdomains are one such complication. Whenever a visitor comes to your site, the Google Analytics Tracking Code on your pages asks the visitor's browser a question: Permalink | Comments ( 69 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Analytics Posted by Jeremy Aube, Web Analytics Engineer at 1:30 PM Google Analytics Keyword Sleuth vs Search Query Performance ReportMarch 24, 2008
For a long time, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others would not reveal exact search queries, and still don't for the most part. They'll tell you the bid keyword, but not the exact search query. In May 2007, Google stepped up and created the Search Query Performance Report (SQPR), which now shows this data within the Adwords reporting tab. There was a wave of excitement when Google released the SQPR, and it's become a popular report for Adwords users. Both the Keyword Sleuth and the SQPR were developed to do essentially the same thing, but in reality, they can be worlds apart for the PPC manager. In explaining the Keyword Sleuth to other PPC professionals, I'm often asked how it's different than the Adwords SQPR. There is a lot that is different. A side-by-side comparison between these two tools is long overdue. Speed The results... Permalink | Comments ( 6 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Mark Curtis, Paid Search Team Leader at 10:23 AM Some Basic Information About Lowercase FiltersMarch 20, 2008
Lowercase filters change the selected field to all lowercase letters. If duplicate entries of the same page are appearing in your reports, one that contains uppercase letters and one that does not, you probably should set your lowercase filter. For example, if you have a page on your site that can be accessed by going to www.mysite.com/Products.htm but you could also access the same page by typing www.mysite.com/products.htm Google Analytics would track these as two separate pages.
Obviously, if these are the same page they should be tracked as a single entry in Google Analytics. Therefore, creating a lowercase filter will change the former URI to all lowercase letters. This can greatly affect your Google Analytics reports and prevent duplicate entries from appearing. So how do you set up a lowercase filter?
Within Google Analytics on the Add Filter to Profile page select the filter type Custom. Then Click the radio button next to the lowercase filter. Select the filter field that you want to apply the lowercase filter to and click Finish. Your new lowercase filter has been applied! NOTE: This will only affect the data from this point forward, not the historical data that has already been collected. Your filtered results will begin to show up in the reports from this point forward. So in the above example the lowercase filter was applied to the request URI but you can apply the lowercase filter to other fields. If you apply the filter to the Campaign Term field it will prevent, for example Cars, cars, and CARS from showing up as different fields within the keyword reports. You can also apply the lowercase filter to the User Defined Value to prevent duplicate entries with those as well. Hopefully this has given you a quick insight into lowercase filters and how useful they can be for your site.
Permalink | Comments ( 8 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Analytics Posted by Matt Siesing, PPC Specialist at 10:12 AM Google Analytics Benchmarking in BetaMarch 5, 2008
Also briefly mentioned was the unveiling of the Audio Ads integration, with an official blog post to come tomorrow. For more information, check out the official announcement at the Google Analytics blog, the benchmarking FAQs, and the data-sharing FAQs.
Permalink | Comments ( 3 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Analytics, Analytics Posted by Mark Curtis, Paid Search Team Leader at 4:24 PM |
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One of the most important things to consider when trying to set up Google Analytics for your site is the integrity of your visitors' source/medium data. Keeping this data as accurate as possible will go a long way to helping you make useful decisions about your marketing efforts.
If you've been following this blog, you've likely heard several references to the 
Google Analytics allows you to create numerous filters. So how do you know which ones you need to implement for your site? Well, one you might want to explore is a lowercase filter. So what is a lowercase filter and what precisely does it do? 
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