June 26, 2008

UPDATE: You can read about the most recent updates to the GAREnhancer here, but the same script is available from both this post and the new one.

A few weeks ago, Shawn wrote an article on true time on site and how you can calculate it. You may also know that for a while, Google Analytics actually calculated time on site using this method before reverting back to the calculation method used now.Several weeks ago I came out with an article on a GreaseMonkey script I'd written which added several segments to the usual segment drop down.

I'm about to tie all of these together.

Introducing, the Google Analytics Report Enhancer!

Clicking on the above image will reveal the new Goal Conversion tab, now with raw number of conversions for each goal as well as goal revenue. If seeing that image has convinced you that you need this script right now, you can get it right here. If for some reason you do not already have GreaseMonkey installed on your firefox browser, you should get that first right here.

Now next to Avg. Time on Site you have True Time on Site.

I've also modified the entrance sources and entrance keywords report to include a column for approximate visits. If you've ever looked as these reports, they are rather difficult to interpret. This column helps give them some additional context. Depending on the amount of interest this generates, I may modify some of the help texts to clarify what the columns of this report actually represent.

These columns are also sortable, though only within the displayed rows. If you play around with this a while, you'll get a feel for how it works.

This script also includes the latest version of the modified segment drop-down, complete with the following segments:

A. Source/Medium
B. Referral Path
C. Transaction
D. Affiliation
E. Ad Group
F. Search Term
G. Site Search Category
H. Second Page
I. Exit Page
J. Browser and OS
K. Browser Version
L. Operating System Version

I'd also like to mention John at Lunemetrics' script that automatically shows all profiles in the Analytics Settings interface. All credit for the idea goes to him, but I've included a version of the script that eliminates the redirects.

As noted in the Updates, there are some situations where my script is not able to automatically show all profiles. There is no conflict that I'm aware of between my script and John's, so I would recommend having both.

I'm looking to develop this script further, so if you have any suggestions for improvement, additional columns you might like to see added to a report, general Google Analytics Interface enhancements that this script has made you think, "Hey, I wonder if that's possible?" please leave a comment. You can report any bugs with the script here as well, even something as simple as, "That ought to be formatted differently," or "Seems a bit slow under such and such a conditions." I want this script to be as handy as possible.

Interested in learning more about Google Analytics?
Attend our LIVE Google Analytics Seminars for Success training in Chicago, IL Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 and Thursday, September 17th, 2009 or get the latest tips and tricks sent to you via our free, twice-monthly Google Analytics newsletter.

Posted by Jeremy Aube, Analytics and Optimization Specialist at 10:30 AM

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Comments

apples bananas dogs and eggs,
Jeremy's script is all the rage.

Posted by: John at June 26, 2008 12:34 PM

@John: I usually use single letters for variable names, but I was running into conflicts, so I had to be slightly more creative.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at June 26, 2008 12:40 PM

OMG, this is soooo great. THANK YOU! I didn't even have greasemonkey before. My world is different now. :)

Posted by: Rachel at June 26, 2008 1:57 PM

That's awesome, but I get an error saying "banana is undefined" when I try to use new segments or goal tab. I hope you'll be able to get it fixed!

Posted by: Alex at June 26, 2008 2:06 PM

@Alex: What version of firefox are you using? If it's firefox 3 then there may be some updates that I'll need to make to the script.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at June 26, 2008 3:14 PM

@Jeremy: correct, it's FF 3.

Posted by: Alex at June 26, 2008 3:34 PM

@Alex: Thanks! When I have the script working for FF3, I'll post an update. It may be a while since currently FF3 keeps crashing on me.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at June 26, 2008 3:45 PM

Nice add-ons, can't wait until it works in FF3. Maybe you can implement my column sorter in it as an extra enhancement?

http://andrescholten.nl/downloads/ga-sorter/ga-sorter.user.js

Posted by: Andr� Scholten at June 27, 2008 5:27 AM

@Andre: I do have a similar column sorter in my script, but yours looks like it's way more robust. I'll definitely consider working it into the script. Thanks!

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at June 27, 2008 8:20 AM

Thank you! That script rules.

Posted by: gahlord at June 27, 2008 11:46 AM

I just downloaded Firefox 3 and needed this. Thanks.

Posted by: sachin at June 28, 2008 6:05 AM

nice useful article.

Posted by: paresh at July 1, 2008 12:50 AM

The feature to show 100 profiles instead of 10 works well with profiles, but, unlike lunametrics' script, not with filters. Do you plan to add this feature in your script?

Posted by: Alex at July 1, 2008 3:46 PM

@Alex: I did not even realize that John's script did that. I can certainly see about adding that to the script. Thanks for pointing that out!

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 1, 2008 3:56 PM

hi,

How can we also export to pdf including your extra cols? exported pdf only includes the vanilla cols.

thanks

Posted by: kenan at July 7, 2008 8:41 AM

@Kenan: There's currently no way to get the extra columns in an exported pdf, but if I find a way I will add it to script.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 7, 2008 8:55 AM

This script rocks! a huge time saver :)
Unfortunately it does'nt seem to work with Site Search Terms and Site Search Categories.

Posted by: Soeren at July 7, 2008 9:07 AM

@Soeren: The script should work with both of those segments. What report are these not working for?

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 7, 2008 9:18 AM

A quick suggestion: it would be nice to see the metric "true time on site" in the drop down list from charts views (pie/bar/comparison)...

Posted by: Alex at July 8, 2008 4:57 PM

@Alex: Excellent suggestion. From looking at it, it looks like it'd be extremely difficult to pull off, but I'll see what I can do.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 8, 2008 5:09 PM

seems to me, i'm making it bugged, doesn't seem to be working here.

Posted by: gerben at July 14, 2008 2:23 PM

@Gerben: There have been some fairly recent changes made to the interface that have broken some of the script's functions. I will update the script once I get the chance. In the meantime, if there's anything in particular that you notice not working, please let me know. Thanks!

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 16, 2008 8:25 AM

Hey Alex. Awesome script! Thanks for doing this and letting us use it.

Would it ever be possible to explain in more detail what a few of these additional columns are and how they work? "Second Page" comes to mind...I'm not sure if I'm using that properly...not to mention 80% are listed as "not set." Also, "Affiliation?"

Thanks!

Posted by: Josh Chambers at July 29, 2008 9:07 AM

@Josh: Second page refers to the second page of the visit. For 1 page visits, this is "not set", so the percentage of "not set's" should be equal to the bounce rate. Affiliation refers to the optional field in ecommerce. For sites with multiple domains, you can put the domain name in the affiliation field and then see revenue by domain whenever you segment by affiliation. Note that segmenting by hostname often does not work for this purpose as many transactions are registered under a "not set" domain.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 29, 2008 2:18 PM

Another great tool - thanks for making this freely available.

I'm not sure if you're looking for feature requests, but if you are may I suggest adding a column next to "% New Visits" showing what this translates to in real numbers. I often find myself wanting to sort by this figure.

Posted by: Dave Cardwell at July 30, 2008 11:46 AM

@Dave: Excellent suggestion. I will certainly consider this for a future release.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at July 30, 2008 11:54 AM

Great tool. I've noticed that true time on site is not working anymore. Other improvements still work perfectly. Is it a problem on my side or has google done some changes recently?

Posted by: TimJ at August 3, 2008 10:58 AM

@TimJ: There have been some recent updates to the Google Analytics Interface, so there are some issues I will need to resolve. I will, hopefully, have this updated soon.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at August 4, 2008 8:30 AM

anyone experiencing problems with changing the date range?
i cant seem to change the date range with this thing on.

Posted by: Zvika Jerbi at August 5, 2008 1:48 PM

@Zvika: Thanks for the heads up! I have just made an update to the script which addresses this issue, among others. Everything should be good to go. Let me know if you notice anything else.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at August 5, 2008 2:48 PM

I also like to thank you for this script. I tried to tweak it to suit my language (Finnish) but my basic Java knowledge could not carry me that far.

Is it easily done? Support for other language interfaces? I found out that when I replaced one column name in the script I got the extra columns visible, but the numbers were all NaN.

Posted by: Antti Nylund at August 19, 2008 3:57 AM

@Antti: Thanks for the feedback. I will try to update the script so that it's easier to change it for other languages. As you've noticed, it's not very easy to do that right now. I will also look into potential solutions that will make this script compatible for all language interfaces.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at August 19, 2008 8:37 AM

My 'segment' menu enhancement seems to have stopped working.

I think Google have changed the interface and renamed that menu as 'dimension'. Maybe that's causing a problem?

Posted by: Tim Leighton-Boyce at August 28, 2008 5:20 AM

@Tim: Yes, there were some recent changes to the interface, so I will update the scripts as soon as I can.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at August 28, 2008 8:42 AM

It's stopped working for me too. Looking forward to the update! Thanks for coming up with this.

Posted by: Cole at September 9, 2008 12:24 AM

@Cole: It should be working fine now. Go ahead and re-download it.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at September 9, 2008 8:21 AM

Hi Jeremy
I've just read your GAAC post on this in the thread "Website URL under Profile Settings" and came here immediately.
This seems wicked.

And Andres - I think we should name you the 3M man because you're always making things better :)

Brian

Posted by: Brian Katgz, VKI at September 16, 2008 12:59 AM

@Jeremy Aube: Thanks for updating the segmenting problem!

Posted by: Jeremy at September 24, 2008 9:26 PM

Hi, I try to use in Google Analytics in Spanish but don't work.

Do you have a script for Google Analytics in Spanish?

Posted by: Diseno Web at October 23, 2008 11:43 PM

@Diseno: Currently English is the only supported language. I haven't found a good way yet to make the script work across all languages, so I probably have to build it out one language at a time. This is something I'll definitely be looking to do in the hopefully not too distant future.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at October 24, 2008 8:34 AM

Hi,
Just wondering if this script is still relevant now that Google Analytics has Custom Reporting / Advanced Segmentation available?

Also, I don't think the article mentioned the difference between average time on site and true time on site?

How is true time on site calculated?

Thanks alot.

Posted by: Gavin Doolan at November 7, 2008 11:21 AM

@Gavin: This script is still useful for a number of reasons:

1. There are currently a lot of restrictions on custom reports that will not allow you to combine certain dimensions and metrics. Using this script, you can see dimensions that otherwise wouldn't be available.
2. While you can create a custom report that has goal completions, and overall goal conversion rate, currently individual goal conversion rate is not available.
3. Advanced segments will let you see up to 4 segments simultaneously, which may or may not cover all the available segments that can be seen when segmenting normally, especially when that normal segmenting is enhanced with the script.
4. The latest version of the Google Analytics Report Enhancer takes care of a lot of other little annoyances in addition to what you see in this article.

Eventually, though, this script will probably be fairly worthless as Google Analytics continues to develop. Until then, I will continue to update this script as time allows to make the overall user experience better.

The true time on site concept comes from an earlier post by Shawn, linked to at the start of this post and right here in this comment.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Google Analytics Support Tech at November 7, 2008 1:25 PM

The Report Enhancer doesn't work for me. It still only gives percentages.

Does anybody know why? Or has the plugin stopped working?

Thanks in advance!

Posted by: Joeri Blok at May 22, 2009 5:57 AM

@Joeri: I checked it just now and it seems to work fine. You should try downloading the latest version and see if that resolves the issue.

Also note that you can now get raw conversion numbers using custom reports. You'll have to build out custom reports for all of your favorite dimensions to get the same data as the Report Enhancer, but it can be done.

Posted by: Jeremy Aube, Analytics and Optimization Specialist at May 22, 2009 7:56 AM

This is a great add-on.
The "True Time On Site" column is not persistent though, which causes havoc for deep dive analysis

So for instance if you toggle from the "site usage" tab to the "goal conversion" tab and back to the "site usage" tab you will lose the column. The only solution i have found is to click on "Referring Sites" and reload the report.

Wish this could be fixed!! True time on site should be shown anywhere, everywhere.

Posted by: Cindy Dadon at June 9, 2009 5:53 PM

@Cindy: I would try downloading the script again. The script tends to break fairly often due to frequent interface updates from Google, but when I checked just now, the True Time on Site column was seemed persistent, even after switching between Site Usage, Goal Conversion, and Ecommerce tabs multiple times.

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