Today, Google announced new benchmarking functionality within Google Analytics. Combined with a new data-sharing option, this will allow Google Analytics users to compare their site's data against aggregate data from other sites in various industries. These two new features are in beta, but should begin to show up in all Google Analytics accounts throughout the day.

Click to enlarge

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.

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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've done research on excluding internal traffic from your Google Analytics reports, then you've probably heard words like "user defined variable", "dynamic or static IP address", and "orphaned web page." While you may want to become familiar with these terms someday, the truth is that not everyone is a webmaster.

What's my point? Well, I'm not sure if anyone's come up with this before, and quite frankly I wouldn't be surprised as this method is very easy, but here's a quick and easy way to exclude any kind of internal traffic from your reports, regardless of IP-whats-its. All you have to know is how to write an email.

Here's how:

Continue reading "Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way" »

Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. new Google Analytics features were announced, plus an updated version of Urchin software.

The super-cool new Google Analytics features that were announced all deal with allowing people to be better able to act on their Google Analytics report information, which is fantastic. I mean, that's the core reason why anybody has an analytics in the first place - to help them make improvements.

Site Search
Users can enable the new site search feature to identify keywords, categories, products, and trends across time and user segments.

The reason this is so cool is that is gives very down-to-earth, practical insight into your website visitors. What are they looking for, and did they find it? Why can't most people find this particular product?

The new site search feature aggregates data about how searches affect site usage, e-commerce activity, and conversion rates by tracking internal search patterns. The potential of this new tool is almost scary! Search patterns tell you what people are looking for, what they are interested in, and what they need right now.

In fact, Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog article titled "Kick Butt With Internal Site Search Analytics" (what a great title!) that talks about how cool site search data is and all the wonderful things that can be learned from it.

The word is that this feature will soon be available worldwide, and it works with Google Custom Search, GSA (Google Search Appliance), Google Mini and a ton of other non-Google site search products.

Event Tracking

Event tracking, which launches in a limited beta at the eMetrics Summit, enables Google Analytics users to measure visitor engagement with a site's interactive elements, such as Ajax, Javascript, Flash movies, page gadgets, downloads and other multimedia Web 2.0 experiences.

This new event tracking feature is going to be so handy, in so many different ways! I can't wait to hear some of the inventive ways people come up with to use this.

Google Analytics users who are attending the eMetrics Summit can sign up for event tracking at the Google Analytics booth (those lucky dogs!).

New Languages
Google Analytics has added six new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25. The new languages are Czech, Hungarian, Portuguese (Portugal), Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian.

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" »

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" »

This is a follow-up to my last post, Testing AdWords Ads in Google Analytics. In that post, I talked about how you can cross-segment by Content in the AdWords Analysis report to find out more information about your AdWords ads (along with the limitations in doing so).

However, there are some more things this can show you, depending on the report you are viewing:

Continue reading "The Many Faces of Content" »

It's easy to set up multiple ads for an Ad Group within Google AdWords, but how can you tell which ad is performing at a higher level? You may be using Conversion Tracker to make your decision, but that only tells a small part of the story using a single metric, cost per conversion.

Google Analytics allows you to get the entire story about the ads that you are testing, using multiple metrics. Here's how to get that story:

Continue reading "Testing AdWords Ads in Google Analytics" »

Click on the image to see the full report

*NOTE: This article is out of date. Please visit the updated article here.

One of the major problems with using Google Analytics is that it does not yet allow you to input cost data for your non-AdWords sources. While there are several ways to go about doing this manually, we've come up with a quick, simple tool you can use to help speed the process along.

Continue reading "Campaign ROI Calculation Spreadsheet" »

Robbin Steif details a pretty cool application that takes Google Analytics xml data and builds a set of PowerPoint slides detailing the reports of the profile. While Google Analytics has an easy-to-use Dashboard for Executive, Marketing, and Webmaster staff, this tool is great for presenting a dataset to folks who may not have access to GA itself. It's definitely worth checking out.

Via LunaMetrics

A few weeks ago ROI Revolution's Meredith Smith wrote about the importance of monetizing your non-ecommerce goals (i.e. lead generation or brand awareness goals) in order to get the fullest value from Google Analytics.

Meredith 'did the math' for you in her entry:

Assume that an average successful sale is worth $500 to you, and you know that about 1 in 10 submitted leads become a paying customer. Just divide the average sale by the total submitted leads, and you get the goal value: $50.

But what if there are multiple conversion opportunities on your website which are leading indicators of an eventual offline transaction?

Continue reading "Monetizing goals when there are multiple ways to convert" »

Google Analytics is so customizable it can sometimes be challenging to decide exactly what the best route to take for your situation would be. When you set up Google Analytics, the call on whether or not to monetize your goals can be one that is particularly baffling, but it doesn't have to be.

I'll spell it out: if you don't have a straight-up e-commerce site, monetize your goals. You'll be glad you did!

If you DO have e-commerce enabled, then there are a total of 81 reports available in Google Analytics, and 43 of those reports contain financial information. So 53% of the total number of reports offered use financial data to convey complete sets of data. Plus, this is data you really want - - what the return on investment is on a certain campaign or your revenue from that transaction, etc.

Ok, so far everybody out there is nodding their heads saying, "Yeah, that's common sense for an e-commerce site! Tell me something I don't know".

Continue reading "Getting the Full Value of Google Analytics: The Importance of Monetizing Your Goals" »

Jesper Rønn-Jensen of Capgemini Denmark who writes the JustAddWater blog wrote a very detailed, nicely illustrated blog entry entitled "Google Analytics trick: How to view referring URLs".

Google Analytics makes it easy to find the referring website by using the Referring Source report (located within the Marketing Optimization -> Visitor Segment Performance section) but some website marketing folks want to see the exact referring URL. This is also helpful for bloggers who use Google Analytics to track website traffic on their blog so they can thank the blogger who linked to them by viewing the exact blog entry which was responsible for the traffic.

Basically he shows how to do this using the very powerful Cross Segment Performance drill-down feature of Google Analytics.