Hot answers tagged analytics
13
Everything I know about analytics, I learned from the following two posts:
Web Optimizer Case Study
Vanity Metrics vs Action Metrics
Biggest takeaway from these is that A/B testing is what the situation calls for 9/10. And for that, there's Google Website Optimizer.
8
There are a bunch of real time tools to track user activity; a few are:
Clicky
Chartbeat
Reinvigorate
Good Luck!
6
Two things I would recommend:
Visit the Occam's Razor blog by Avinash Kaushik.
Get yourself a copy of the book "Web Analytics An Hour A Day" also by Avinash
There is so much good information about analytics from these two sources. Avinash works at Google but he does a good job of writing about analytics without a particular toolset in mind.
4
I have read a few articles written by Juice Analytics. They seem pretty thoughtful. They also have an opensource framework. I haven't used it, so can't give you a personal review, but it may meet your needs.
On data visualization in general, Edward Tufte's website is a great resource. There are no toolkits there, but just ideas and concepts. He will talk ...
4
Excellent question!
Here's a few of my opinions on the topic:
Focus on conversion % (as Eric Ries explains: page views is simply a vanity metric - it's almost always going to increase and doesn't really provide you with any insights)
Segment Google Analytics information into at least three profiles: Organic, Referral and Search. This will allow you to ...
4
For running my company, I've found that web-based dashboards are overkill. We tried them, but they were not flexible enough for our fast-changing environment.
We use Excel instead. We've created an Excel worksheet with several tabs, each of which has a particular type of data (sales, revenue, expenses, and our various other key metrics). The first tab of ...
3
Performable has a great platform. With GA you wont be able to collect customer level specifics due to their privacy policy. They still allow for funelling.
As alternatives you can look at:
CrazyEgg.com - Expensive but neat heat maps of how your users interact
with each page
woopra.com - realtime analytics, plus chat which is a nice feature
...
3
I'd recommend picking up a copy of Avinash Kaushik's "Web Analytics 2.0". It's a great read and will definitely generate some ideas on how to convert a pile of data into actionable insights.
It's a bit of a "heavier" read than many marketing books (including mine) but well worth the effort.
3
It all depends on what you are looking to extract from your analytics, the right tool changes according to the metrics that are most important for you. I'll put some of my favorites and the reasons why and when I use each of them:
Google Analytics: Free, decent and gives you more than enough data if you are the average Joe, learning how to interpret this ...
3
Alexa measures how 'popular' your site is, mainly based on the number of page impressions (page views) you have.
So having a high position on Alexa's ranking roughly corresponds to having many visitors -- which is always a good thing. But you don't 'do things' that improve Alexa ranking in order to gain success. You 'do things' that gain you success, and ...
3
In many cases companies are acquired for their staff not necessarily their technology. Google and Microsoft often buy companies because they have a couple staff members that are brilliant and really understand their niche and business inside and out. The knowledge and benefits of having them part of their team over the next 3 - 5 years is often worth much ...
2
Google Analytics is good for traffic trends (pageviews) over time and compete with classic web site measurement suites like Omniture and WebTrends. They have Events (rather clunky implementation) and Funnels, but they are most for histrorical reporting rather than actionable metrics that you can use to tune your online business. Also, they are not ...
2
Everyone personal or business should be using search.twitter.com. Think about periphery keywords (curiosity keywords), locations, emotions, etc (see advanced options) that may not directly create "marks" for you to engage with but more pull you into conversations that build your knowledge of landscape and the people moving with in it.
Of course there are ...
2
I have not encountered a similar problem; but what has been done so far to track down possible root causes? Off the top of my head, I imagine the reason lies in "hits from clients capable of executing Javascript" (and hence be counted by GA etc) versus "HTTP hits on the server" based counting. Some thoughts:
Are the GA and Yahoo numbers consistent with ...
2
Lynda.com has a good series on Google Analytics Essential Training. I am sure you can find it somewhere on the web or purchase it from them for about $100.
The main reason we use GA is to monitor traffic by different campaigns, cities, and check the popularity of different pages.
There are some features GA does not have.
Take a look at CrazyEgg.com for ...
2
Good question. I know of no such blog, so perhaps there's a niche for one ;-)
But in case you're actually looking for info & opinions on social media tools, and not sniffing out potential blog niches, here are a few blogs that are tangentially related and occasionally mention social media tools and their usefulness to social media marketers:
...
2
Some thing that are helping us:
We use MouseFlow to analyze how people use our site - in particular to find out things that Google Analytics would miss - like when they click on unlinked images, expecting them to do something
We monitor the IP addresses that people use to access our software, and if they come in from multiple IPs from what appear to be ...
2
Existing all-in-one answers for CMS with full analytics and split testing?
Dharmesh's HubSpot is the only more or less startup friendly CMS with deep analytics I can think of. Then there are tonnes of high-end CMS systems (Vignette etc), which can integrate with high-end analytics like Omniture. They all have a learning curve like a brick wall, a price ...
2
The short answer is, "yes." You can add anyone you want to an analytics account so that they can access the data. Also, you can set up automated reports to be emailed to them on a regular basis.
However, I think think there is a danger to listing this as a "free gift" because it is already free. If your customers gain access to this feature and realize that ...
2
The analytics and statistics package look at something called the HTTP_REFERRER, and that is passed from page to page as you click around a site or to other websites. Every page loaded there is a field passed HTTP_REFERRER of the page prior.
However, this field is not passed when the user is on a secure https site and goes to another website or goes to a ...
1
If you're doing the redirect with Apache rewrite rules, then look at the "RewriteLog" settings. You can log apache redirects to a file, which you would then later parse to get details on the redirects you served up.
The redirects should be almost instant, I don't know why they are taking 5 seconds.
If the above isn't helpful, tell me how exactly you are ...
1
In general, analytics does not give you too much knowledge about your market. Analytics is more to help you understand how users are using your site.
To understand how users are using your site, first of all you have to have goals like:
- Make accounts
- recommend to friends
- User feature x
Then you can use analytics to get a sense of how many people ...
1
Some of the dashboard objects I have seen and used include:
Project Status: All of the projects the company is working on and where they are at.
Sales Pipeline: Quotes, PO's, Shipped and paid are all critical sales metrics that are great to see on a dashboard.
The rest of the items you mentioned are great too. I think the real trick to a dashboard is to ...
1
Have you checked out the Hubspot.com blog? It's not strictly focused on social media tools, but it is a social media blog.
They also have a web analytics marketing hub that may be of interest to you.
1
I don't know about ClickTale (though JaC0b looks like he's got that answer), but for Google Analytics, they do have to crawl your site to make sure the JavaScript beacon is installed. However, this won't trigger a site-wide crawl. They'll look at just your homepage to check for the beacon, and that's about it.
There's a possibility they'll crawl more, but ...
1
I can't imagine Google employees will care looking at your site's content. Why get into the trouble look at a site that they know nothing about? Is not like the next apple.com beta site...
Let me ask: why all this secrecy?
If you afraid so much that someone will steal your idea don't enter the google code, until you move it to production.
I can't remember ...
1
First off, you can track what's being clicked on in just about any analytics package, you may just have to set it up manually. In Google Analytics I think it's called "event tracking".
In the past, may uISV's recommended Clicky. It is not strongly optimized towards cohort or funnel analysis. It is more of a general tool in the same way Google Analytics is, ...
1
Outside of traffic it depends what other metrics you're looking for. Unless you ask your users to register and fill out some date in their profile, it is probably a good idea to have a multiple sources, by comparing which, you will get a better idea of what your typical user looks like.
Google Analytics is a good start.
Compete is another tracking ...
1
Great question.
Lay out a short set of milestones tied to the key objectives of your business plan and then track and report your progress against these milestones.
For example, if your business plan says you'll achieve $1M in revenue from a product with a price of $1 and you'll need to sell 1M widgets, then lay out a plan for the ramp up in your sales ...
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