Have you ever gone to segment the content detail of a page by source/medium, only to find that you can segment by source or medium, but not both? Well those days of frustration are over, thanks to a GreaseMonkey script I wrote just the other day.

Not only that, but you will also be able to segment by transaction, adgroup, and referral path anytime a segmenting opportunity comes up. Now you can see exactly which transactions are attributed to each source, medium, source/medium, keyword, campaign, new or returning visitors, and more. I'm sure everyone can think of some good uses for this.

To expand your segmenting abilities, first download the latest greasemonkey firefox add-on. Then download my script right here. You should be able to just click and install it if you already have the GreaseMonkey firefox add-on installed.

A couple notes here about the script:

1. If you segment by one of the fields, then try and segment by another field, you may find that your options are once again limited. To fix this, segment by "none" first and then you should get the additional fields back.
2. You can also segment by Product, Product SKU, and Product Category, but this may not work as well as anticipated. If that's the case, you can drill down into a product and segment by source/medium or whatever report you were looking at and see the data from the other direction.

If you've found this tool useful or if you have any suggestions for improvement, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Find The Secret To Solid, Sustainable Improvements To Your Website
Learn the insider secrets to making more money from your website than ever before – Guaranteed! Get started right away with the Google Analytics Training Course..

In Google Analytics, there are a couple different ways to match up the products you sell with the keywords that brought users to your site.

The first method is already built right in to Google Analytics. All you need to do is look under the Ecommerce section of your Google Analytics profile and expand the Product Performance section. There you'll find a report called Product Overview. In this report, you'll see a list of all the products that were sold for the given date range. You can click on an individual product and segment it by Keyword to see which keywords were responsible for the product sale.

But what about when you want to see things the other way around? In other words, for each keyword, can you see which products were sold? Well, if you use the above method, you'd have to segment each and every product. That's not very efficient.

Luckily, you can use filters to find this information pretty easily. Here's how:

Continue reading "Products and Keywords in Google Analytics" »

Last April, I posted a script that allowed paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors. This was essentially a free tool that gave website owners the ability to weed out ineffective keywords and put more money toward the precise phrases that were really driving their business.

Google Analytics doesn't do this out of the box. It will tell you exact search queries for visits from organic listings, but for paid search, you're stuck with the keywords that you're bidding on. With broad and phrase matching, these could vary pretty drastically from what the visitors typed into the search engine.

We've gotten a lot of requests to update the script for the new version of the Google Analytics JavaScript, ga.js. Always happy to oblige, we've been hard at work on our new version of the Google Analytics Keyword Sleuth. Call it a Valentine's Day gift from ROI Revolution to you.

Continue reading "Exact Keyword Tracking with ga.js" »

I was thinking the other day about the relationship between exit rate and bounce rate. It's often assumed that there's some type of mystical relationship between these two metrics, so I thought it would be worthwhile to dig deeper into this relationship to see what's actually going on.

First, we can define these measurements using rather simple equations.

exit rate = exits / pageviews
bounce rate = bounces / entrances

Now if we think about it, every visit to your site has an entrance. And unless you have visitors who stay active on your site 24/7, taking 15 minute power naps in lieu of actual sleep just to keep their current session alive, every visit to your site will also have an exit. Therefore, if we're talking about the exit rate and bounce rate of your site, we can say that entrances = visits = exits and make the appropriate substitutions in the above equations:

exit rate for the site = visits / pageviews
bounce rate for the site = bounces / visits

This would seem to indicate that if the number of visits increase then exit rate will increase while bounce rate will decrease, and alternatively, if the number of visits decrease then exit rate will decrease while bounce rate will increase. Of course, this assumes that visits are independent of both pageviews and bounces, which they aren't. So to understand this relationship, we have to think about the quality of visits that we're getting to the site.

Continue reading "Some Thoughts on Exit Rate and Bounce Rate" »

You've probably played around with the Default Page setting in Google Analytics. In many cases, this is definitely the way to go, as it will prevent your home page from showing up in different ways in your Google Analytics reports (as / and /index.html for example).

But you need to be careful when you set the default page, as it will not only affect your home page, but any page that ends with a forward slash ('/').

What do I mean by this? It's pretty simple - if you set the default page to index.html, it will not only change any future / entries into /index.html, but if you have another page ending in /, say /blog/, it will change that to /blog/index.html too. But what if your blog's default page is actually /blog/index.php? Well, then you have a problem.

If you have several such subdirectories or pages, then you have several problems. The good news is that there is a simple way to create a simple filter that only replaces the home page.

Continue reading "Default Page vs. Home Page" »

If you have used the ROI Calculator Spreadsheet tool that Shawn came out with before, you know that it takes several steps to get to the point where you can start entering in cost data and seeing that ROI. If your need for ROI data is only occasional, then this works great. In addition, if you click on the appropriate link below, you can download the latest version of this spreadsheet, which eliminates step 4 from Shawn's procedure.

Microsoft Excel 2007 Version
Microsoft Excel 97-2003 Version

If, however, you find yourself running through these steps again and again on a frequent basis with no shortcut in sight, there is hope!

Introducing...the ROI Calculation Macro.

Continue reading "Google Analytics ROI Calculation Macro" »

So, a few months back I posted on how to view the exact AdWords search queries your visitors use to reach your site (a feature that is, so far, unsupported out of the box with Google Analytics). My method involved grabbing that keyword phrase and storing it within Google Analytics' User Defined field. In the article, I said:

"There are lots of great applications for the User Defined variable... If you can get by without using it, you can then save the User Defined field for something else that might prove more powerful. Like tracking search terms. :)"

I'll be the first to admit that this statement is a little wishy-washy. What are these great applications? Why save it for tracking exact search queries? What precisely does the User Defined variable do?

In a nutshell, you use the User Defined variable to perform custom segmentation on your visitors. Google Analytics already provides a number of built-in segmentation features. It's so intuitive, most users probably aren't even aware that what they're doing is segmentation. From your Traffic Sources report, you see a specific group of visitors that came in from a specific source, and you click the hyperlink. Now, you're looking solely at the data for that source. Congratulations! You've sliced and diced your data down to a very specific segment of traffic.

So, you can segment your traffic by visitor type (new or returning), by source (where, how, why they came to your site), by organic search queries, by browsers or screen resolutions or Internet speed... but what if you want to get a little more specific?

Continue reading "Custom Segmentation: It Slices, It Dices (Your Data)" »

Click Here For Part 1 - Branding
Click Here For Part 2 - Tracking Emails

What do the topological feature of spacetime and the interesting little Google Analytics variable have in common?

Both deal with travel. One just happens to deal with matter traveling through spacetime, and one deals with visitors to your website. While I am not an expert on wormholes, I do understand how the utm_nooverride variable affects your visitors, and this post is about using the utm_nooverride for those websites that feature special paths which take the user through all sorts of intergalactic mayhem.

This includes websites that send the user to third party domains, even if just for a moment. This could be due to an autoresponder, a shopping cart, a form submission, a tool for visitors to use, credit card processing, and a whole host of other possibilities to consider.

A good example of a 'wormhole' is PayPal. When a user clicks on a PayPal link, they travel to a new domain. On top of that, it's a domain you can't control. You can't add any code to the PayPal pages or make the modifications that you would need to track things according to Google's official instructions. But you can control the URL that brings the user back to your site. And that's where the utm_nooverride comes in.

Continue reading "Using utm_nooverride Part 3 of 3 - Through the Wormhole" »

You may have read my previous article on the subject of combining Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics. With the new Google Analytics interface, of course, there are some changes I'd like to address.

First things first, the integration remains unchanged. You can refer back to my previous post for these instructions.

Finding the information, however, is now a little different. Since there is no more Dynamic Content report (*sniff*), finding the data takes a couple steps. But don't fret, it's not too bad.

Here's how:

Continue reading "Website Optimizer Integration in the New Analytics Interface" »

One of the great things about Google Analytics is the ability to view overall trends for your website. You can, for example, see how well all visitors who come from AdWords are reaching one of your goals. You can see how valuable the average visit from an email campaign is to your ecommerce business. You can see total transactions and revenue, and see what percentage of transactions are coming from a specific marketing source.

But what if you want to see where a specific transaction came from? What if you get a very large order and you want to see what the marketing source for that specific order is? Well, now you can, with a set of three custom filters that work together.

Here are the details:

Continue reading "Matching Specific Transactions to Specific Keywords" »

While the ROI team were out at Mountain View last month, enjoying our training session with the Google Analytics team, we got the chance to meet Michael Whitaker of Monitus, LLC for sushi. Michael is the brains behind the Monitus Yahoo! Store Tools, which includes a really cool Web Analytics Connector that actually makes Google Analytics possible with Yahoo! Stores.

It was great to actually put a face to Michael's great reputation in the Yahoo! Store development field.

Michael surprised us, though, with a sneak peek at his cool new VivAlytics Widget. This little tool allows you to track defined Key Performance Indicators for multiple Google Analytics accounts, profiles, reports, whatever. Find out whether a specific metric has increased or decreased over a given week or month. It's a really great resource for people who might be too busy to log into their Google Analytics account every day, but who still want to see how their websites are performing.

Not too long after we got back to Raleigh, Michael quietly made Vivalytics public over at www.vivalytics.com. It's a free download, it's cross-platform (Mac and PC), and just requires the (also free) Yahoo! Widget Engine. Do yourself a favor and take it for a test drive.

Updated June 14, 2007

Alright everyone, you may want to grab a drink and a comfy seat before we begin - this article's a whopper. So you may have heard about Google's new Website Optimizer tool that is available through Google AdWords. Google Website Optimizer uses a single metric, conversion rate, to determine which combination of variations is king.

But what about other metrics that may be just as valuable, like Page Value, Avg. Time, Conversion Rates for multiple goals, Bounce Rate, Exit %, and Full Navigation Analysis? What if you want to segment your traffic or filter out internal hits? Well, now you can find out just about everything you want to know about combinations by using Google Analytics! We're still just starting to understand how powerful this method is, but I can say that I'm extremely excited about it (hopefully not just because I developed it).

So kick back and read on to find out how...

Continue reading "Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics: A Perfect Marriage" »

Yesterday, I wrote about tracking your website's visits to both Google Analytics and Urchin. Today, I'll answer a different question: can you track visits from a single website in multiple Google Analytics accounts? Certainly not as popular of a question, but still one that we're asked from time to time.

First things first, you'll need to understand the difference between a Google Analytics account and a Google Analytics profile.

Your GA account is tied into your Google Account, which is a single-entry login point that gives you access to most of Google's free services (Personalized Homepage, Personalized Search, Google Groups, etc.) If you're logging into Google Analytics, then you already have a Google account (but, contrary to popular belief, this does not necessarily mean that you have a Gmail account).

Continue reading "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" »

A lot of our Google Analytics clients are Urchin Software users of old. Many of them hopped on the script-based bandwagon when Urchin introduced its UTM method, which combined traditional log-based tracking with a snippet of JavaScript that wrote and parsed cookies for greater accuracy over multiple sessions.

The natural progression was then to Urchin On Demand, which was entirely hosted and exclusively dependant on JavaScript. When UOD was rebranded as Google Analytics, we helped many of these clients migrate over. Because many had purchased Urchin, or had an Urchin installation through their hosting provider, they wished to track their sites on both the new Google Analytics service, as well as via tried-and-true Urchin.

If you're analyzing logfile traffic in Urchin using the "IP + User Agent" tracking method, you're fine. The standard Google Analytics tracking code will integrate seamlessly with your website. If, however, you are using the UTM method, you will need to make a few minor modifications on your site.

Continue reading "Your Choice: Urchin, Google Analytics... or Both?" »

During our recent training series, we received a lot of questions concerning how to add the Google Analytics tracking code to a site. Now there are lots of different things to think about before doing this, but a very important and basic one is the security level of your domain. If you have a shopping cart or some kind of secure lead collector, then there's a good chance that part of your site resides on a secure server, which you may recognize as https:// instead of the normal http://

Why is this important? Because the regular Google Analytics script can cause errors on secure servers, that's why! Now there are long ways to make sure you don't run into this problem, and there are easy ways. Well, unless you're trying to build character or torture yourself (like all of you who aren't using a separate include for your Google Analytics script), then the easy way is the way to go. Let me share the two easy ways with you...

Continue reading "Secure vs. Nonsecure Pages in Google Analytics" »

For home repairs and odd jobs, I pretty much just need a hammer and a screwdriver. Yup, that's it. I can make those two tools do just about everything I need. Maybe that hammer isn't supposed to be used to make that stubborn jigsaw puzzle piece fit, but by golly it's GOING to fit in that spot!

Google Analytics is kind of similar. If you know what you are doing, you can wring pretty much any piece of information you could ever want or need out of it.

One of the main aspects that allow you such a wide range of flexibility is the Analysis Options feature. Sadly, this super-cool feature is normally underused. To access the Analysis Options, just click on the little purple icon (shown here) next to the information you want to know more about.

Continue reading "Google Analytics: Get More Out of It" »

In this article, I'd like to take a look at how to choose the best language for your tagging efforts. With manual tagging you pick variables to help you tag: Source, Medium, Campaign, and if you're tracking paid keywords, Term.

You might want to reference the previous article that Michael Harrison wrote on how to tag, Google Analytics Link Tagging 101.

How do you choose what to call these variables? Whatever you choose, it is imperative that you are consistent. When you are tagging a banner ad, do not list the Medium as 'banner' for one ad and 'bannerad' for another. This will prevent you from being able to make the comparisons that really make tagging worthwhile in the first place.

Continue reading "Google Analytics Link Tagging 102" »

ROI Revolution has worked with a lot of different clients over time, and we often get people with Yahoo! Stores who call us up because they have noticed some problems.

See, the way Google Analytics interacts with a Yahoo! Store prevents referral data from the Yahoo! Store from correctly flowing into Google Analytics.

You may have been using Google Analytics on your Yahoo! Store for some time and not noticed anything wrong right away. As it turns out, there are a few holes that need to be filled in. It just so happens that those 'holes' represent some of the most important information that Google Analytics can provide for you: referral data that is associated with actual products and transaction amounts.

Continue reading "Yahoo! Stores and Google Analytics: Huh, That's Funny" »