The Google Analytics team has announced an exciting new feature to both Google Analytics Standard and Google Analytics Premium. Flow Visualization is a new set of reports that will change how you visualize pathways throughout your site and as equally exciting, your goal funnels. It helps to answer the question: How do people reach my site and what do they do once they get there? The base of this feature is nothing new. SiteCatalyst, Yahoo Web Analytics, WebTrends, and many others have had pathing reports for a while now. Flow Visualization extends beyond traditional pathway analysis reports through the use of imagery and powerful segmentation that makes actionable insight discovery a breeze in comparison. We've been using this feature since an early beta and the GA team has done what they do best by creating a feature that is both easy to use and very powerful.
Continue reading...Thursday, October 6, 2011
One of Google Analytics Premium's most exciting features is the availability of unsampled reports. Many of you are likely familiar with the following message in the GA interface: "This report is generated in fast-access mode." This means that Google Analytics had to sample the data in order to return the results to you in a timely manner. In Google Analytics Premium however, you can download an unsampled report to receive fully unsampled data for your query. The result: increased confidence in your data analysis.
Continue reading...Tuesday, October 4, 2011
In Google Analytics Premium, the number of custom variables that are available has been dramatically increased from 5 (in Google Analytics Standard) to 50! We've helped many clients using custom variables, to both increase the depth of data that can be collected and to enhance the capabilities of segmentation in GA. On many sites, it is consistently a struggle to keep inside the 5 custom variable limit. The GA Premium 50 custom variable increase opens the door to richer data possibilities that will help you better target, optimize and convert your visitors.
Continue reading...Thursday, August 18, 2011
Are you violating the Google Analytics Terms of Service? If your website has more than 10 million hits per month then you are violating the Google Analytics Terms of Service. If you are substantially exceeding this traffic limit and desire to become compliant, then implementing the Google Analytics Sample Rate is a simple solution. Read this article to learn more about what is sample rate, why you would implement it and how you set a sample rate.
Continue reading...Monday, June 27, 2011
Did you know that if someone puts your Google Analytics tracking code on their site (the same UA-#), visits to their site will show up in your Google Analytics profiles? It is true, but thankfully, there is a way to fix this issue. We won't get into why someone would do this, but it generally stems from someone lifting your design or embedding your content within their site — both nefarious. The people that do this are often unaware or too lazy to remove the tracking code. Through the use of a custom report, we'll show you how to identify external sites and URLs that contain your own site's tracking code and most importantly, how to filter these visits so that they do not impact your data analysis.
Continue reading...Friday, April 29, 2011
Google Analytics uses client-side code (JavaScript) to record pageviews and other interactions (which are then sent as a tracking pixel request to Google's servers). This works great for html pages on your website (regardless of the programming language it was developed in) and it even works great for Flash, Silverlight, and other web technologies. Out of the box, Google Analytics will not track how many times people download PDFs or other file types, simply because those files do not have the ability to request a tracking pixel. In this blog post, we'll be covering the ways to properly track file downloads in Google Analytics.
Continue reading...Wednesday, April 27, 2011
When analyzing data on a site that has thousands of pages, it is often useful to group data by page type and measure the performance of those page types. As an example, let's say that you have an ecommerce site. A typical ecommerce site will have a home page, landing pages, regular content pages (you could segment these further), category pages, product pages, a cart page, a checkout page(s), and a receipt/confirmation page. If you have several thousand product skus, analysis on the performance of all of your product pages (in aggregate) is sometimes not easily accomplished. We will discuss two ways to easily accomplish this.
Continue reading...Tuesday, April 19, 2011
When a conversion takes place in Google Analytics, it is attributed (given credit) to the last session and source that brought the visitor to the site when that conversion took place. The problem with this is that this is not how it works in the real world for most websites. A visitor will take varying source paths across multiple visits before buying your product or filling out your lead form. Google is testing a new feature called Multi-Channel Funnels (as a limited pilot to trusted testers such as ourselves) that aims to solve this problem.
Continue reading...Sunday, April 10, 2011
In the public beta release of Google Analytics v5, Google has dramatically increased the power of Custom Reports. If you find yourself looking at multiple reports to draw insights or commonly filtering reports to get the right view of your data, then you'll want to use Custom Reports in Google Analytics. The latest version of Google Analytics (v5) offers custom report filters, a new table type and more.
Continue reading...Monday, March 21, 2011
Google Analytics Version 5 has been announced and it is full of exciting upgrades such as Navigation Changes, Events as Goals, Multiple Dashboards (and Widgets), Powerful Custom Reports, Term Cloud Visualization, Advanced Segment Changes and Interactive Help.
Continue reading...Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Cross domain tracking in Google Analytics is a common challenge. There are a number of complex scenarios and variables that can make this type of implementation difficult. In this blog post, we'll provide you with an understanding of the why and how to tackle the basic techniques of implementing cross domain tracking.
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 28, 2010
When you send out your monthly newsletter, how do you measure the performance of your campaign in Google Analytics? When you advertise in a magazine or air a television commercial that directs viewers to your website, how do you measure conversion of those visitors? When you engage users through your social media channels and promote your website, are you able to measure conversion of Twitter versus Facebook? If you are unclear about any of these scenarios, please read on.
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Google Analytics has an extremely valuable feature that allows you to add annotations to a specific day in your GA profile. This improves your analysis efficiency by providing a historical record within your reports of marketing efforts, code changes and a variety of other events.
Continue reading...Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Looking for Google Analytics Tips that will save you time by giving you faster access to saved reports? Check out this valuable time saving tip.
Continue reading...Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Google publicly announced the new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit conference in Washington, DC on October 20th. Google previously chose Blast Advanced Media’s Motivity CMS platform to test integration with the new Website Optimizer API and to provide feedback and suggestions. Below is a snippet from Google’s blog announcement [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Several Blast team members attended the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant Summit (GAAC) last week. The rollout of new Google Analytics features is one of my favorite take-aways - other than having a great time at the Googleplex. Google provided us with a glimpse of the new GA features, but we had to keep our lips [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, June 24, 2009
As pointed out on Google’s Research Blog, speed matters. Google ran a test on their search results to determine how page loading time affects user satisfaction. In Google’s experiment, they injected a delay of only 100 to 400 milliseconds. The decline in the number of searches is certainly measurable. While none of us have the [...]
Continue reading...
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
8 Comments