In this issue

How is your site doing- check with Google Analytics

Last month I gave an overview of the way in which you can analyse you web site’s performance, and the basic figures you are looking for.  This month I will cover the analytics tool that is in my opinion going to become the standard for web site analysis – Google Analytics.  I think it will become the standard for two very simple reasons

1. It is a great product – based on the Urchin service that used to retail for about $100 per month per site.
2. It is free.

Why Google are giving this away is beyond me. But who am I to argue. 

Register now

First you need to register.  Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and register.  You will be invited onto the program after a couple of months. This has been the time it has been taking, but of course your mileage may vary.

Then when the registration details come through you can log in and start setting up your sites.  They allow a maximum of five sites.  You will probably want to ask your web site clients to register on their own account, firstly because of the limit on the number of sites, and secondly because you want each customer to have access to their own data only. 

Setup

Setup is in two stages.  First you need to set the site up in the in the analytics system.  Secondly you need to add some HTML to every page on your web site at the end of the page. The analytics web site tells you what to add, it will incorporate your analytics account code.

If you are using our content management system we can set up a parameter to automatically include the correct code.  Otherwise if you don’t have a content management system you will need to find a way of editing every page to include the code. I can’t help feeling there must be a program around to do this but so far I haven’t found it.  We may end up writing one as we have at least one client with hundreds of hand-coded pages.

Then you wait.

Results

You should start seeing results the next day.  Log into the site, select your web site from a list of sites you have set up, and you go to the overview page.

The initial page follows the ‘dashboard’ layout that is so popular these days.  You get a choice of dashboards:

• executive
• marketer
• webmaster

Actually the charts you see are the same but the menu options are a bit different.  The executive overview only uses words of two syllables (only kidding).

The charts you see are

• Visits and pageviews over the past week (see last months newsletter for a description of what these two figures mean.
• Visits by new and returning visitors (pie chart)
• A map of the world with dots showing where visitors have come from
• Visits by source (Google, MSN, Yahoo etc) as a pie chart.

This is all very nice, but just the tip of the iceberg.  Once you start exploring the menus there are all sorts of graphs and tables.  A nice feature is that you can export all of them as an Excel file (CSV), an XML file (I will explain what that is in a future newsletter) or just a text file.

The one thing I miss, which I can’t find is a graph showing the source of visitors changing over time.  But there are lots of goodies to compensate.

Funnels and goals

You can define goals that you want your web site to achieve. For example, request a brochure, or purchase a product.  Once you understand what these goals are then you define a funnel which is the set of web pages that lead up to the goal.  For example of your goal is to make a sale then the funnel might be:

1. Add to shopping cart
2. Enter address and delivery details
3. Make payment
4. Receive acknowledgement

You set this funnel and goal up in the system and then Google analytics will tell you how well your funnel is working. It shows how many people go through the funnel, where they came from, how many drop out, and where they go to (assuming it is on the site).

Visitor analysis

This section analyses visits by

• new vs returning
• referring source
• location
• language
• Domain
• And finally user-defined.  The user-defined characteristic can be set by a selection by the visitor in a drop-down list for example.

Each of these is related back to each of the goals you have set.  So you can compare conversion rates by any of these variables.

Site overlay

The site overlay starts with an exact picture of your home page, except that each link has a box on it with information about how many people took the link – and for that matter how many of them subsequently satisfied each of your goals. 

Each link is clickable, and if you take the link it shows you the appropriate page with the links instrumented as before. 

Note that the program can only analyse links that go to other pages on the site.  No-one can possibly know that a visitor clicked on a link that took them to another web site. 

Referring source

The referring source lists the places that people came from. For each source of visitors the program gives you not just the raw numbers, but the numbers who eventually satisfied each of your goals.  So you can find out if particular sources give you a higher conversion rate than others. 

If the source was a search engine, then the program gives you the figures for each keyword people used to find the site.  Again this is related back to conversion rate, so you can see if particular keywords are more important than others in terms of conversion.   This is vital information for your Search Engine Optimisation campaign.

CPC analysis

As you would expect, the system excels when it comes to pay per click advertising (i.e. Google adwords).

It helps you determine which adverts give the best conversion rate – essential for planning your CPC.

Web design data

Have you ever wanted to know what your site visitors have their screen resolution set to? Well here it is. 

You get:

• Screen resolution
• Browser versions
• Screen colours
• Languages
• Flash version
• Connection speed

Conclusion

This is a very advanced analytics tool that everyone should use.  I love the way the whole set of results is orientated around the goals you set for your web site.  

What! You don’t have any goals you can think of, you just have a web site because you think you ought to?  Shame on you.

Business intelligence

BigDaddy

Google works on its software from time to time, but a big change is coming.  They have reworked the software and the new system is called BigDaddy.  Expect your ranking on Google to change – up or down.  If you want to try it out – click here. http://66.249.93.104/

We don’t know exactly what the changes are, but one area they are looking at is the situation where the same web site has more than one domain name. For example our web site is www.textor.com and www.textor.co.uk.  At present Google seems to look at them as two separate sites, but as one of them duplicates the other one gets ignored.  It sounds as if they will be changing this in future. 

Technical tips - Look out for IE7

IE 7
We have just downloaded a beta copy of Internet explorer 7 and it looks good. We like the tabs and the radically simplified controls.  Detailed report next month.

You should think about downloading a beta copy so you can check your clients' sites for compatability.  No time like the present. 

News from the web

A thin month for news this month,but here are the major items.

Yahoo and AOL are offering a guarantee to firms that their mail will bypass spam filter and get delivered – for a price.

If you are a Euro-enthusiast you can now get your .eu domain name.

Microsoft is going into the virus protection business.  Bad news for Symantec and McAfee.  

They are also saying their search engine will be better than Google in six months.  I certainly isn't now.