Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent

This is WAY... too exciting. :)

Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 | 11:00 AM

Today, we're announcing a new set of Google Analytics features which builds on last year's enterprise-class feature launch. Some add more power to existing capabilities. Others provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your enterprise. Finally, we'll introduce Analytics Intelligence. Resist the temptation to skip ahead. We wouldn't want you to miss anything. :-)

Powerful.

Power-users have asked us to add even more data manipulation and analysis features to Google Analytics. We've been listening, and are adding the latest power features to expand Google Analytics enterprise-class capabilities.

• Engagement Goals..and more of them! Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Watch this short video on goals to learn more.
  
  
  
  

• Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you're optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your regular website coming from high-end, Javascript enabled phones.
  
  iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Check out the SDKs and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you'll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!
  


• Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools you can use to perform advanced data analysis. Earlier this year we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. So, you could see how much revenue your site received from visitors in Boston who searched for "bean bag". You could then "pivot" by source and see revenue by search engine for each of these city+keyword combinations. Here's a quick tutorial video.
  

Now we're adding Advanced Table Filtering. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Watch the following video to see an example of how you could filter thousands of keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30% and that referred at least 25 visits.



Together, these three power features let you perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.

• Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment.

Flexible.

Every enterprise has unique web analytics tracking and reporting needs. Today, we're enhancing two of the tools that organizations use to adapt and customize Google Analytics. We're adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.

• Multiple Custom Variables: Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. If you've used the _setVar() function, the concept of custom variables will be familiar, but we've taken it a step further: you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. This powerful customization capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple custom variables will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks but you can start learning more about them now.
  

• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted Sales report template will automatically be imported. You can also now select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.
  

Intelligent.

Now, for the new feature you've been waiting for! Wouldn't it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Beginning today, it can.

• Analytics Intelligence: We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
  

• Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.
  
  Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then look for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!
  
  
  

That's the summary. We're excited to share more details about each of these features, so stay tuned! We'll discuss each feature in turn over the next few days.


Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

P.S. We're not the only ones with exciting news today! Google Website Optimizer also announced some big features - over time charts and a Website Optimizer API! Check out the Google Website Optimizer blog to learn more.

Bouncey Bouncey Bouncey...

My bounce rate sucks. What can I do? (A five step guide)

Published

byFlorian Pihs

on August 10, 2009

Bounce Baby Bounce (Source: Wikipedia

When I first started to learn the ropes of web analytics, I turned to Avinash Kaushik’s blog (Occam’s Razor) and book (Web Analytic’s: One hour a day) for a great deal of insight and actionable advice. One thing that stuck with me early, was Avinash’s emphasis on Bounce Rate as “The sexiest metric ever“. With all the caveats of generalizing metrics across different websites, bounce rate analysis is still a great place to start, when you plan to optimize your website.

Many companies and analyst have followed Avinash’s lead and are now prioritizing the reporting of Bounce Rate metrics. Talking to many clients in China I noticed a common question on everyone’s lips, tough: “My bounce rate sucks. What can I do?“.

Over time I developed a standard approach to address this question. Take a look at my 5 step guide:

Step 1: Does your bounce rate really suck? (Benchmarking)

Good or not? (Source: http://etc.usf.edu/)

In order to understand if you need to take immediate action to improve your bounce rate (as opposed to focusing on other KPIs), it is critical to benchmark your site’s performance.

Since user behavior and web design varies greatly among cultures, it is critical to find relevant local benchmarks for your site, ideally in your industry. In the US, services like compete.com provide valueable data. In China we have to do without any reliable 3rd party benchmark (what a shame). Even Google Analytic’s Benchmark function is not relevant, since it compares sites by industy, but does not provide country specific numbers.

A rule of thumb based on my experience in China (and please leave your ideas in the comments segment):

1. For micro sites for branding campaigns with mainly banner traffic: 85% to 90%
2. For landing pages of search marketing campaigns 25% to 40%
3. For landing pages of targeted direct marketing campaigns (20% – 30%)

If your numbers are higher, your bounce rate really sucks and you do need to take immediate action.

There are 4 common drivers for bounce rate.

Bounce Rate Causes

Lets take a look at each of them.

Step 2: Landing page segmentation

Bounce Rate is calculated by dividing the number of single page visits to a page (bounces) by the number of overall entires (visits that started on this page) to that same page. Bounces can only occur on landing pages (the first page a visitor sees on a visit to your site). So when your overall site shows a high bounce rate, you should first look at which landing page contributes most to your overall site bounce rate.

The most effective way to do that, is to calcualate the weighted bounce rate of all your landing pages. Stephane Hamel wrote the defining post about the methodology in 2007 on his Immeria blog. In effect you calculate the impact the bounce rate of each landing page has on the overall site bounce rate, by weighing it according to each pages importance (measured by the number of page views).

Use this formula

Bounce Rate * (Page Views/Total Page Views).

to calculate the Weighted Bounce rate of each landing page.

Take Action: Focus further analysis and optimization efforts on the landing pages with the highest weighted bounce rate. Check if your problem landing page is implementing best practices, usability test it, make changes, then A/B test the new version vs. the old version.

Step 3: Traffic Source Segmentation

Another driver for a high bounce rate on your site is low traffic quality. If your advertising efforts drive visitors to your site that are not interested in what your site has to offer, the best landing page cannot convert them. So before to start getting all excited about remodeling the landing experience, take a look at the traffic sources for your problem landing page. Many web analytics tools (regrettably not Omniture) allow you to easily segment your bounce rate by traffic source and / or type of traffic.

Bounce Rate by traffic source in Google Analytics

When doing this segmentation, look out for high volume traffic sources that drive traffic with a very high bounce rate. Very high is relative and a good benchmark is usually the bounce rate of your direct and search traffic. Visitors from these sources are usually highly targeted. If their bounce rate is high, your landing page likely has a problem. If these traffic sources have a low bounce rate whereas others, especially banner ads, partnership links etc have a very high bounce rate, don’t change your site, change your (paid) traffic sources.

Step 4: Creative Segmentation

When seeing high bounce rates for banners or SEM campaigns, it makes sense to dig one level deeper. Often these campaigns run with multiple creative executions of the banner or multiple copy executions for the text ad. Sometimes that creates a situation where one banner’s creative or call to action or one text ad is not relevant to offer made in the landing page. That is turn leads to a high bounce rate.

To understand if that happened to your campaign, you first need to make sure that your banners and text ads are comprehensively tagged (Google Analytics: UTM _content; Omniture SAINT tags) to differentiate between different creative versions. In the next step, A/B test your various creative version in multiple spots, to measure which one leads to the higher bounce rate.

Action: Run a creative A/B test before launching a campaign to ensure maximum performance.

Step 5: Loading time (Geo Segmentation)

Another very important factor for bounce rate performance is the loading time of your landing page. Especially rich landing experiences (often Flash based) require the download of large amount of data before they are ready for consumption. The longer visitors have to wait before the experience begins, the more likely they are to bounce. So far so easy.

The key challenge for web analysts is that loading time data is not available in any web analytics tool. In order to get reliable data, you need to buy the services of companies like Gomez, who specialize in web performance measurement (see last weeks Web Analytics Wednesday). This data is especially important in China, where loading times can vary widely across provinces and cities due to a unique network layout (see ChinaNetCloud’s presentation on SlideShare).

A good indicator for loading time challenges is a large variation of bounce rates across provinces in China. In order to get Google Analytics to show you the bounce rate by province in China, go to the map overlay report and click on China. This will go directly to the “by city” breakdown. Then go to the URL bar of your browser and replace the term “city” with the term “region” (** here magic happens **).

Bounce Rate by Province (China)

Action: If you see a large variation (especially between northern and southern provinces) you have a good indicator that your need to improve your hosting infrastructure to address your bounce rate problems.

These are my five steps. What are yours? Did I miss anything important? Let me know in the comments.

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Therapeutic. :)

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Web Metrics Guru: Forrester Wave Web Analytics - Then and Now

I noticed a new Forrester Wave on Web Analytics came out (3Q09) and it’s an opportunity to compare how the major platforms have developed in the last two years (3Q07) according to the Forrester Wave methodology.

Google Analytics moved from lukewarm contender in 3Q07 to strong performer with a stronger offering than before. WebTrends seemed to stand still, holding it’s place, not performing much better, according to the FW. Omniture and Coremetrics both moved up as leaders both in offerings and strategy. Unica improved, to occupy a place right next to Omniture, WebTrends and near Coremetrics.

Over the last two years, Visual Sciences and HBX were acquired and absorbed while Clicktracks all but vanished; meanwhile Yahoo! Web Analytics and AT Internet appear on the Forrester Wave, for the first time.

To me, it looks like Google Analytics and Unica improved the most over the last two years.

While the Forrester Wave appears to cover 8 contenders this time, just as in 3Q07, it leaves out many others that ought to be considered, in my opinion, such as Tealium.

I wonder if there’s a Forrester Wave for Social Media Monitoring platforms?

Article from: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2009/07/forrester-wave-web-analytics-then-and-now/

Beyonce 100 Single Ladies Flash-Dance Piccadilly Circus, London for Trident Unwrapped

100 Single Ladies stop traffic with Beyonce's famous leggy dance in Piccadilly Circus, to celebrate the announcement by Trident of its free Beyonce gig in November. http://www.tridentunwrapped.co.uk

The Wireless Substitution Trend

I was reading a research paper done up by Nielsen on the trend of Wireless Substitution in the U.S. and I thought it would great to share it. We might be able to see that trend with an Asian context. 

Taking a step back to look at the people around me, I do realise that there are more friends who have snipped off their residential land lines over the years and are happy with relying on their mobile phones (or instant messaging/ email/ other communication technologies ) to communicate with their family and friends. 

The wireless substitution trend identified in the paper could very likely be seen here in Asia as well since mobile subscription costs get more competitive and users see the convenience of mobility without wires. And yes, mobile phones penetration rates has been rocketing in this region (esp. in Indonesia where even mobile usage is seen to be growing exponentially according to my ex colleagues at Yahoo! SEA). 

Now here's more hope for mobile marketing strategies! :)

Scrapblog - Digital Scrap Booking at its Best

Scrapbooking has always been a great way to collect and express beautiful memories that you gained through experiencing the beauty of life. I had a one on one sharing session with the folks at Ogilvy today and I thought it would be nice to show the people who work with me in the same vincity some little pranks I know of that happened in my ex-workplace - the Yahoo! SG office.

I used Scrapblog to create my presentation "slides" and populated with memories. :) Some of my colleagues thought that I've used Photoshop Elements to come out with the presentation but nope, I doubt I had the time to do so. Scrapblog was a much easier solution for me. It brings scrapbooking to another realm - the digital realm. No, digital scrapbooking can never replace the physical, texturised scrapbooking experience. But it brings the mental visuals, the designs, that has been residing in your head into images on screen before you go, "yea that looks good, I can translate that on physical paper." Well, you can always stop at the part where you print out the digital masterpiece if you are contented with that.

Being a SaaS, the Scrapblog is a mash up with practical API relations with many photo content sources like Flickr, Picasa, and even those pictures you've uploaded on Facebook can be imported over. Putting its feet in a user's shoe, the tool has a well thought out architecture that enhances a user's experience by providing so much ease and accessibility to the needed content. Kudos to the team behind it. They should be in the Techcrunch 50 list! I wonder how the site analytics is like. Would suppose that visitors have high pageviews/visit and long visit durations. It is a highly engaging site.

Well I shall cut the talking/ writing. Have fun if you're playing around with it.