eMetrics Summit: Day 2 of 3 - New Version of Google Analytics!
October 27, 2007 – 1:58 pm
I know I know, I’m a bit late on delivering the posts for the second and third day of the summit but I’ll be honest, after day 3 I was actually feeling pretty beat and being my first time in Washington D.C., I wanted to enjoy my stay a little too! Day 2 of the summit was another complete success and aroused some really interesting debate and discussion with colleagues and practitioners.
Keynote Address: Counting on Customers
Presented by Rachel Scotto, Executive Director at Sony Pictures Entertainment, this was a keynote that spoke right to my heart! A frustration I’ve lamented for a long time now is that the web analytics industry is seriously lacking a solid group of people who understand and know media inside and out.Rachel’s speech was great and really gave people an idea of practical examples of things that matter to a major media organization like Sony. Working for one of Canada’s largest media organizations it was obviously great for me to hear. Some interesting points of out Rachel’s presentation that I’ll try to summarize:
- Integrate your Various Marketing Metrics: it’s a common theme of what’s being called Web Analytics 2.0 but it makes sense. Rachel’s suggestions are to look at ways to include: Web Analytics, Primary and Secondary Market Research to get a 360 degree view of your media landscape.Primary Market Research - Online Surveys (check out Foresee Results and iPerceptions), Usability Testing, Focus GroupsSecondary Market Research - subscribe to analyst resarch services like Jupiter Research, Forrester and eMarketer as well as augmenting your competitive intelligence with Neilsen NetRatings, comScore and HitwiseTools that she’s used to achieve this view in the past have been: Hitlist (excellent competitive intelligence tool, but unfortunately no Canadian data yet), Accrue, WebTrends, SiteClarity by Cheetahmail
- Carefully Consider Analytics Vendors: make sure during your Request for Proposal (RFP) process to look at the level of customization that your web analytics vendor provides as well as the ease of being able to transfer knowledge to a new group of people. If your development department is showing some high turnover, this point becomes even more crucial
Use Search to Measure Buzz - as Sony releases a ton of great movies, it’s important for them to get a feel for which are going to be a hit or a flop at the box office. How do they do that? They check out the performance of movie title search terms in the weeks / months prior to the movie’s release.Mike’s Recommendation: Create a “buzz” index by measuring not just these search terms, but the amount of direct traffic coming into as direct traffic = brand awareness!- Create a Secondary Research Library: if you really get into secondary research then get organized! With a tool like Microsoft Sharepoint or something similar, create a content grouping structure like the one below and any time you or your group find something interesting, drop it in!
- Create and USE Report Formatting Guidelines: spend a single day with your team and work out what the conventions will be for all reports that anyone generates. Get descriptive and include things like allowed colour palletes, fonts, layout and suggestions of where to use visual displays to support analysis.
- Blown Away By Tagging With Web Analytics? Use A Phased Approach: Don’t try to get everything when you first tag your site, sometimes it’s completely acceptable to go with a phased approach.Phase 1 - Get the basics: Get the analytics tracking code on all pages of your site. Even if your site is completely Flash based (see my post on tracking Flash-based sites), isn’t it better to have some data rather than nothing to make decisions? After all, putting just that basic tag on would still accurately report on unique visitors and visits, data you can use to make some informed decisions with!Phase 2 - Get Advanced: try to track your Flash content, message boards and podcastsPhase 3 - Get REALLY Advanced: tracking some of the more complex features on your site like AJAX applications
NEW Version of Google Analytics to be Released!
That’s right! A new version of Google Analytics is on its way (see their official announcement) and with it you can expect:
Internal Site Search Reporting
I should note before going on that Avinash has a great post on this.
 |
 |
 |
| What do you mean “Internal Site Search”? | “Internal Site Search” Report Example 1 | “Internal Site Search” Report Example 2 |
The new version of Google Analytics will offer a full report suite for optimizing internal site search. From the pictures above (sorry for the quality), you can see that with this new version of Google you’ll be able to get metrics like: Visits with Search, Total Unique Searches, Results Pageviews per Search, Search Exit Rate, Search Refinements, Time After Search, Search Depth and more! Although all of these metrics are really useful, I’m probably most excited about “Time After Search” - I see this metric as one of the most important for answering that question as to whether or not site search is really providing your visitors with value. Now granted, the argument can always be made that higher time on site could actually mean that internal search has only sent your visitors lost and searching (ha…ha…ha….).I’ve contacted Google and signed up for the beta release of the new version so with any luck, I’ll have some great screenshots up shortly and more information around this.
Web 2.0 Event Tracking
Google is (I think) the first vendor to really think Web 2.0 tracking out (or at least give it a first stab). With a lot of foresight, Google’s seen that in this Web 2.0 world, measuring everything against a fundamental unit like the “page view” just doesn’t make any sense. So instead in Google’s model we’ll measure: Objects, Actions and Labels.
With a few additional JavaScript calls in your Web 2.0 objects (be they AJAX, Flash or whatever), you’ll be able to measure these objects with much greater precision than before without incrementing your page view numbers!On any site this is incredibly important as with most analytics vendors right now any Web 2.0 tracking could end up in a greatly overly inflating your page view counts. Well when you go from 3.00 page views per visit to 10 page views per visit, how much of that activity is really true organic page views?!I really do commend Google on this one for at least taking a stab at this hierarchy and being the first vendor (that I’m aware of) to propose a complete Web 2.0 tracking model.
Outbound Link Tracking Without Tags
A feature that I’ve actually built into my Google Analytics Tag Generator tool (to be released shortly), the new version of Google analytics will offer the ability to track outbound links without adding to page view counts! A few other vendors have already implemented this type of thing but I’m really glad to see that Google has decided to do the same thing.And of course, on top of just tracking these outbound clicks differently, Google will provide a new report section around these activities.
 |
 |
| What do you mean “Outbound Links”? | Outbound Link Reporting |
New Optional JavaScript “ga.js” File
Of course the ability to track all of these wonderful new features requires an upgrade to the core JavaScript file that Google Analytics makes use of. So instead of updating the file that we all use (urchin.js), Google has opted to create their own JavaScript file (ga.js) which needs to be included in order to track the new features mentioned above: Outbound Links, Web 2.0 and Internal Search.If you choose not to upgrade your script, you will still be tracking your traffic, you just won’t have access to the new features. Also included with
Free Site Scans from Epic One
In a previous post, I provided a link to a tool developed by a young man that checks to ensure your site is properly tagged with Google Analytics. Google has now announced that with its new version, EpikOne will be providing a free tool that will validate your site for Google Analytics tags.The tool will crawl your entire site and search every single page looking for the Google Analytics tags in the source. At the end of the day you get a report that lets you know which pages aren’t tagged. Your site doesn’t use Google Analytics? No worries! The folks at Maxamine have a similar tool that does the trick of validating analytics tags and much, much more (it’ll validate your ad tags too!). Mike’s Suggestion: Make this tool a part of your process by including it in your QA process for every single site update. After all, what good is launching a single thing on your site if you can’t measure and assess its success?
Urchin Software From Google Now In Beta
Google has also announced that they’ll be offering Urchin Software from Google. An announcement that as I understand it many people have been waiting to hear from Google. Just a few points to summarize about the release:
- Software will be offered at $2,995 USD (sorry everyone, not free)
- Urchin Software will be provided free if you bought “advanced support”
- If you’ve paid for Urchin 5, every dollar that you’ve spent there can be applied to the new Urchin 6 offering
- The new offering will be sold and supported by Google Analytics Authorized Consultants
That’s it for now
There was a lot else that happened on day 2, but I’m going to break that down into separate posts over time…this one has taken a lot out of me!
