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Top-Ten-Analytics-Gotchas

1. recommend you to subscribe to that actually the analytics blogspot com Some of the people there Avinash Kaushik who works at Google He joined just after me A very good friend of mine An evangelist about everything digital and specifically everything digital measurement Written books himself on web analytics He s very much a sort of broad brush about building an ecosystem within an organization for data measurement and measuring success Doesn t really Although he works at 01 22 13 Page 20 of 25 Google doesn t really focus on GA per se But anyway great reading Really taught me how to blog I read his blog and I ve learned a lot from how I write on my own blog 1 09 45 BC Jim Sterne he s the chairman of the Digital Analytics Association I ve become friends with him over the years He s a very smart guy and talks some good stuff Stephane Hamel I ve mentioned him previously He s the guy that developed WASP Very smart guy Canadian guy I think now based in California Another great resource online behavior com by Daniel Waisberg So there s just a few places if you wanted to follow the top What have I got there The top five and just to dip your toe in this that s what I would suggest 1 10 18 BC And the last one there just to point out because I think it will be very interesting to your readers I did a post last year and lots of add ons lots of third party tools plug ins things like that you can do to really sort of pi
2. 12 05 BC And so my book is not trying to be the latest features or the latest syntax My book is very much about a step wise learning process So going from a basic understanding of measurement and web analytics and understanding the methodologies and the technologies and the processes that you need to go through in order to sort of analyze the data So it is all about analysis but obviously I want to be very specific so it s Google Analytics is my tool of choice But it is a step wise learning process of growing your knowledge rather than an online dictionary which is what now the Google Help Center is 1 12 42 AW That is a really good way to explain that and that s exactly what I found as well You try to go to help center it s just like okay they talk about this and this and this but it s not systematic at all And so anyway your book has been extremely helpful for that So thank you for that Okay so the next thing people want to know about is keyword not provide and there s a few questions on 01 22 13 Page 21 of 25 that I think I ll start with Look others can use this one and then you can say whatever you want to about it With some sites getting 30 40 50 keyword not provide suggesting a significant number of visitors are logged in and are probably logged in across devices are there any Google Analytics developments that may track users across devices rather than just across channels 1 13 28 BC That s a good question Yea
3. 6 PM might not get processed until 2 00 in the morning the following day And that s something the banks do They batch their process during quieter times on their network Other things like if an order comes through late on a Friday night it may not get processed until Monday morning So it could be the Saturday it could be the Monday So there s lots of data differences here and if you re looking at a particular window of data let s say Monday 9 AM until Friday midnight you may find that that in Google Analytics is slightly offset between what s actually happening in reality between your internal ecommerce processing system as well as what the bank is doing in terms of processing the visitor s credit card So time differences can be quite skewed 0 50 24 BC Of course with ecommerce data you re actually tracking Well let me just take a step back What you re attempting to do by tracking your ecommerce data is understand the performance of your marketing what works what doesn t and understand the performance of your website how good is it at persuading a visitor to buy and how good is it if the process of actually buying something how easy and quickly can that happen What it s not working on what it s not trying to do is be your ecommerce system to tell you exactly how much money you make So things like if I buy a pair of running shoes from a website and they arrive and it turns out they don t fit me very well I need extra supp
4. Head of Web Analytics for Google EMEA so Europe and East Africa They ve just gone through an acquisition Google had acquired a company called Urchin Urchin was both the technology and the people behind that technology that was its own web analytics tool in its own right and was acquired by Google and has become Google Analytics 0 04 32 BC So I was at Google for 2005 2008 If you guys have ever seen or taken the GAIQ which stands for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification that came from me and my team in those early days We built that internally as a training program for internal Googlers and we expanded that and made it available publicly One of the nice things about doing that was it s one of the rare occasions when the people in Europe actually gave something back to the people in Mountain View and on Google HQ types It s a little bit of a Yay for Europe there 0 05 10 BC I m director of Data Insights amp Analytics Advanced web metrics com is where you can find me I tend to work with very large brands typically sort of pan European or global where they have a lot of complexity Not that their website is particularly difficult but just that they work in multiple languages often have dozens even hundreds of different websites or the product websites or country specific websites And one of the difficulties that they find is a lack of resource They may have tens of thousands people in the company but actually when it com
5. like that And in order to stop the whole thing running to a halt you know if you have 100 million visits to your website if you re Youtube or Twitter or someone like that using Google analytics clearly going back and recalculating the reports is gonna take some time 0 57 22 BC So to avoid that to avoid the whole system running to a halt sampling takes place And just like any form of sampling that just means you know taking a random selection of the data processing that to produce the reports and then scaling the numbers back up So if you take a 10 sample of your data and you calculate the conversion rate and things like that then the actual report will take those numbers and multiply it by 10 so that you get back up to 100 0 57 51 BC Now the problem is if you are So you need to be aware of that and a little icon pops up on the top right hand comer of the screen when a report is sampled But you just need to be careful cause quite often I see people looking at standard reports and getting a real number that makes sense and they can identify with And then as they drill down into the reports by applying advanced segments for example when sampling kicks in then the numbers that they get there could look really odd and very very different to what they saw you know two reports up And it s just because one is sampled and one isn t 0 58 30 AW Got it 0 58 30 BC There s no real way around that Sampling is a function of
6. me only people that came into our support section and you know that the support section on your website the URL is in support And you can do this at a profile level so that all of the reports are just about that section or you can do it within let s say the top content table Literally what you re seeing is just the data that matches that filter criteria 1 04 55 BC So if you think about it if a visitor comes to your website and they view 10 pages of your normal content and then they go into the support section and they view two pages if you create a filter at the profile level in this particular case that says Only include visits who have gone into this support section of our website you ll only see two page views for that particular visitor You won t see anything that happened before that because the filter takes place at the page view level If it matches support you re in the report That s like if it matches support you re include in the report If it doesn t you re excluded 1 05 35 BC So clearly you re not capturing the entire visitor session What you re doing is you re just looking at a small fraction of it Potentially a small fraction and so all of the metrics that go with the visitor session time on site and things like that and all just get lost And also when Google Analytics is figuring out where the visitor has come from I talked about this with the campaign tracking I think number three not using campaign tr
7. not relevant You wouldn t want to modify your marketing campaign based on the fact that I returned my shoes because they were the wrong size or wrong color The marketing is working fine It got me to buy so you don t want to cancel that out of the system 0 52 49 BC So there s a number of things there s processing time returns errors obviously cancellations and people where the conversion actually takes place offline So perhaps you send them an invoice and that invoice just for whatever reason never gets paid So a number of reasons there But I just say don t worry about that as long as the data in terms of the transaction is correct 0 53 14 AW Are there exceptions to that Brian I mean what if you re running a campaign and you find that a particular segment has a really high return rate 0 53 25 BC Yeah but I think one of the Yeah that s a good point Of course there re exceptions One of them is for instance somebody wanted to buy I don t know 10 items of your product and by mistake left their finger on the zero while they I don t know were distracted and they end up ordering 1 000 That sort of big outliers which do really make a mess of your Google Analytics reports and that it s clearly wrong and it isn t It s gonna to modify your conversion rate It s gonna have a million dollar transaction in your account when the average order value is only 100 that type of thing Clearly you want to get those out of your d
8. of code that are on there There s a number of tools out there I m a big fan of Screaming Frog a little software tool that anyone doing SEO will probably have come across Screaming Frog It s a UK company and it s just really a way of crawling a website and pulling out things like what are the title tags what are the meta description tags is there any duplicate content things like that 0 18 13 BC So it s a useful SEO tool in itself And one of the nice things you can do about it is set up a custom filter which just says Okay show me all the pages that do not contain the Google Analytics tracking code which would be for example ga js so the JavaScript file code ga js Clearly that file is not on your page and you can t see it when you passes the page then there s no 01 22 13 Page 6 of 25 Google Analytics tracking code on there and no data is gonna be sent to GA On a similar line there s a new tool and that s come out in last couple of months by a Spanish guy called David Vieiro He is working on this product called Analytics Debugger Similar sort of thing as Screaming Frog but focuses purely on Analytics tracking code So Screaming Frog does a lot of SEO stuff Analytics Debugger is use for tracking tags That same type of thing loads up a page on your website and goes through following links crawling your website and looking for the GATC WASP is the Web Analytics Sorry go ahead 0 19 24 AW Sorry just go ahead with WASP and the
9. probably will get your account shut down But this can actually happen quite often by mistake So an example where this happens by mistake is when you have a double opt in email list for example So you are saying to people Oh sign up to my newsletter and we will send you our latest offers every week or every month or whatever and people fill in their email address and then an email comes to their inbox and then they have to click on a confirmation link in order to say Yes I confirm This is my email address and I want to sign up Quite often in that confirmation link is a plain text link going back to the website to the processing program and within that link is also your email address 0 09 31 BC So collecting my email address brian advanced web metrics com and loading that webpage with that email address in the address bar means if you are tracking every time on Google Analytics that email address is gonna go into your reports So it s really important that you check this out that you check if you have this kind of opt in whether the email address of the user who is opting is in the URL and they go to a page that clearly you want to track that is perfectly acceptable But you need to be careful if you are collecting If the email address is visible as plain text And the way around this is actually quite simple so if you could encrypt the link in some way or obfuscate it in some way that would be perfect That does require o
10. s clicks on your internal campaigns and label it as such rather than trying to manipulate campaign tracking which as I d say is very much for external links Let me go to the next one then Sorry Andrea was there something you wanted to say 0 43 51 AW No that s great Keep going This is wonderful Thank you chuckle 0 43 54 BC The So number four here in the end user Gotchas it s just a sort of thing I see occasionally They tend to be People that haven t come from an analytical background or haven t come from a scientific background it s just to be careful when you re using averages and when you re summing summation adding up numbers together So for example unique visitors you can t just sum those up So what I mean by that is if you have a thousand unique visitors on a Monday and a thousand on Tuesday and Wednesday Thursday all the way through at the end of the week so you re getting a thousand unique visitors per day and a manager says Okay How many unique visitors did we have through the week You can t simply add those up together and say Oh it is 7 000 because we have 1000 each day 0 44 54 BC Clearly whether a visitor is unique or not it s gonna vary when you stitch those together So a unique visitor can come on a Monday and that same visitor can come back on Wednesday So you can t just add them together What you need to do is go back to your Google 01 22 13 Page 13 of 25 Analytics reports chan
11. sort of It can be set up with your AdWords tracking you can set up with ecommerce tracking You can set it up identical to your main analytical profile that you want to look at day to day but just with the exception that there are no filters applied And then alongside that obviously you have a testing profile Again it s a common copy of your main analytical profile that you want to use day to day but you use it to try out new filters Then you just leave the filter running for a couple of days Make sure the data looks well You do a sanity check Make sure there s no obvious mistake And then when you re happy with that filter you simply copy it from the testing profile and into your main analytical profile So pretty much for every website for every web property that you have you should think about setting up three profiles the main analytical profile you use day to day an unfiltered copy and then a testing profile to try new things out Alright Let me move on to number three if that s okay 0 14 12 AW Yeah Great 0 14 13 BC So setting up cross domain tracking this doesn t apply to everybody but some sites they have sub domains a domain website Some websites interact with third party domains So for 01 22 13 Page 5 of 25 example a shopping cart system perhaps you would outsource that development of the shopping cart and you would pass your orders into that shopping cart and then when the payment is complete that vis
12. success at the end of the day Everyone does sampling and it s scientifically solid The statistical techniques have been around for 50 60 years and are very solid But if you re looking for a very small needle in a very large hay stack you can get oddities like you know the needle isn t even in the hay stack because your sample hasn t identified it So something to be aware of You know one way to improve matters on this is to upgrade from the free product to the premium Google Analytics product which is a paid for service and it s 150 000 a year So it s a big step up A lot of the times you can live with sampling but you just need to be aware of some of those limits And there s a link there that I have to my own website which is a blog posted a few months ago about what the limits are in Google Analytics 0 59 26 AW I ll grab that and put it in the chat as well Number six Alright Great Thank you 0 59 34 BC So that s two then So just 0 59 35 DT By the way 0 59 37 be able to get to but you re kind of being forced to look at 01 22 13 Page 17 of 25 sample reports That might be one of those rare cases where there s a compelling business case to use something else where you re collecting and storing your own data Most of them for almost every application Google Analytics the free product is more than sufficient though 0 59 53 AW Can you repeat that last sentence 0 59 56 DT Well for almost every application
13. that s a very strong engagement point that you want to differentiate from other page views 0 34 41 BC Now subscription requests anyone that has contacted you basically anyone that s filled any kind of personal identifiable information so that you can contact them by email or telephone that s gold dust You really want to highlight those as being very important actions on your website and therefore goals A couple of other things just to add to that list if you have a very simple rating system on your site Did you like this article If it s a support article or a help guide you can say Did this answer your question Did it solve your problem Taking that one step further please relate how good this answer was Is it rubbish number 1 or was it helpful 5 out of 5 0 35 29 BC People Sharing your contents or clicking on one of these social love buttons like Like me on Facebook or Google Plus or Tweet Me people clicking on that taking the time to share your content and add their own comments or views great engagement points really something that you wanna highlight and focus on in your reports in addition obviously but more important than just regular page views So I spent quite a bit of time on that but I just wanted to emphasize how important it is of just making sure that as you re building metrics environment the data sort of in the metrics environment within your company that it s not just a whole ream and ream of page v
14. you have and even when you drill down into sub reports that data is pre processed by Google So the data comes in it gets number crunched by Google reports get produced There is no sampling of those reports cause it s all processed by Google and it can take depending on how much data you have but you can be waiting typically three four hours for your reports to show the latest data 0 56 02 BC There is just to mention there is obviously real time reports they re typically five to 01 22 13 Page 16 of 25 10 seconds delay But real time is just a small subsection of everything that s in Google Analytics So for all of those other reports in Google Analytics it s typically three to four hours that we see as the delay And that s why because you know Google does some processing The good thing about that even though it s obviously a delay and everyone wants it as new real time as possible but the good thing is there s no sampling involved It doesn t matter how much data is being processed Google will show you the real numbers 0 56 39 BC Now when you start to drill down let s say for example apply an advanced segment or add a second re dimension to the tables in Google Analytics that last data that is not pre computed by Google So what happens is Google Analytics has to go back to the raw data and then regenerate these reports That obviously has an overhead in terms of resources and memory and processing time and things
15. Top Ten Analytics Gotchas Leslie Left Brain Rohde Seo BRAI NTRU ST Dan Right Brain Thies Top Ten Analytics Gotchas dan seobraintrust com 01 22 13 Page 1 of 25 0 00 01 Andrea Warner Hello everyone this is Andrea Warner with SEO Braintrust And I am honoured to have with us today Brian Clifton author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics Brian how are you today 0 00 13 Brian Clifton I m very good thank you I m speaking to you from south of Sweden It s a little bit cold outside but I m nice and toasty inside so looking forward to today 0 00 23 AW Fantastic And then we also have on the line Dan Thies He s one of the founders of SEO Braintrust Dan how are you doing this morning 0 00 31 Daniel 20Thies Thies I m doing great It s a little early for a webinar for me but chuckle it s Brian freaking Clifton so I m here laughter 0 00 42 AW Exactly exactly Alright so let me tell you how this came about At SEO Braintrust we do something that we call Action Team where we get people together into small groups to study specific topics and interests And for a while now Dan and Leslie the founders of SEO Braintrust have been telling us about Brian s book again it s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics And I just wanted to make sure you included this on the slide 0 01 07 AW Anyway so we got together with my action team it s kind of a study group and we ve been going through th
16. Yeah I will split it up into two types This first one being implementation Gotchas the sort of the things you have to be aware of if you are setting up and implementing Google Analytics And then the follow on slide from this is a bunch of Gotchas that are really in to end user So if you re looking at the report if you are trying to interpret the data there are just some things that I wanted to highlight 0 07 42 BC So let me start off with this list here of implementation Gotchas The first one and they are not in any particular order Maybe off the top of my head I would say these probably come up The ones at the top probably come up more often than the one s at the the bottom But there is not necessarily a ranking here They re all important So the first one I highlight here is collecting personal identifiable information by mistake It is a tricky subject collecting anyone s personal identifiable information in any context because you really need to be open and transparent about that on your website and of course you need to ask for permission to capture any PII But the thing is with Google Analytics that you should be aware of is that the terms of service clearly state that you cannot collect any personally identifiable information in Google Analytics 0 08 35 BC Now this it can be done obviously deliberately I mean people can say I don t care I need this information and that would be breaking the terms of service and
17. acking for internal campaigns Google identifies where a visitor has come from whether it s Google whether it s organic or AdWords or email or whatever it identifies that from the landing page So the cookies defining where the visitor came from are all set on the landing page 1 06 25 BC Now if in your filter you ve In my example 10 pages happen before the filter kicks 01 22 13 Page 19 of 25 in and only two pages after in that filter you ve just removed the landing page from that session So now Google Analytics in this particular profile cannot find where the visitor source was from You ve chopped it off you ve filtered it out So that s how filters work Now advance segments work very differently but they look very similar But the difference is with advanced segments is it takes place in the session level the digit level So if you were to say Only show me visits that went into the support section you would actually capture in that segment every page view and everything that the visitor did if they wen into the support section 1 07 14 BC So then you have the landing page information and you have all of those other pages that those visitors looked up either before or after they went into the support section So it becomes much more vivid or session centric rather than page view centric and it s actually a better way of doing it in that particular example But then people get a little bit confused because they look at
18. advanced segments and they say Oh I only wanted to see people in the support section and I ve got all of these other pages that are not in the support section How did they get in there Is my advanced segment not working Well it is It s just that those visitors that went into support also did other things as well and they re included which in that particular example you would want 1 07 56 BC So there s a big difference between how filtering works and profiles all within the data table itself is the same methodology The big difference between how filtering works and how advanced segments To put it in simple terms advanced segments are session based and filters are not Filters are all page view based 1 08 18 AW Okay very good Thank you 1 08 21 BC I m running out of steam here laughter 1 08 23 AW Okay 1 08 25 BC I m gonna finish on the If you don t mind I m just gonna finish on one last slide 1 08 29 AW Okay please And then I m hoping we can squeeze in just a couple of questions 1 08 33 BC Absolutely I m here That s really why I want to wrap up is to get feedback from people listening in and 1 08 39 AW Okay great 1 08 39 BC If you want to know more People ask me who do I follow who inspires me where am I learning from Just a few here that I list Obviously the official Google Analytics blog that allows you to get all the latest features and announcements of what s going on I certainly
19. ata So yes that s an exception and the one you caught as well is an exception where yes you need to get that out of your data Be aware though that when you What you do in order to In Google Analytics you don t actually cancel the transaction you can t remove the data What you actually do is you reverse it So you put through an inverse transaction a negative transaction So that you 0 54 29 AW Oh okay 0 54 31 BC So that the transaction you know is plus one minus one so it equals zero for the number of transactions for that specific customer And obviously the revenue is negated as well So if it was a million dollars then you have minus a million dollars to cancel that out So the key thing is if you re gonna do that you need to do it quickly Because if you only discover it a month later then you re gonna have a big spike let s say in January where the error took place and then when you reverse the error you re gonna have a big inverse spike in February because you ve only just realised that you want to cancel it And both of those scenarios are confusing If you re gonna do it the same day or the next day then that s perfect That s the best it s gonna get 0 55 15 AW Alright great Thank you 0 55 16 BC Since I m conscious of time let s just finish off on a last few here Careful sampling Now what I mean here is for the standard reports that Google Analytics produce all of the links the side menu links that
20. bout that or haven t bothered about thinking about putting in a process in place that makes sure anyone that s running any kind of marketing campaign is actually tracking those links And all campaign tracking means is that for your landing page for the page that you want to send visitors to you just add some extra parameters that mean nothing to your website but when Google Analytics is capturing all these URLs in the address bar it means something to it And so when it s trying to figure out where your visitors are coming from it takes those campaign tracking parameters out of the URLs and builds your reports from it 0 41 07 BC So really important if you re doing any kind of marketing that is not AdWords and is not organic that you think about campaign tracking And there s a whole chapter in my book about 01 22 13 Page 12 of 25 this and there s a whole section in the Google Analytics Help Center to sort of help you understand this and to start building your landing page URLs with these extra parameters There s five of them that Google Analytics can use and really help you with the ground analysis 0 41 37 of your reports 0 41 39 AW Great thank you 0 41 41 BC Forgive me I m just taking a glass of water there So just pulling on from that campaign tracking is What I see sometimes is people being confused about how to use campaign tracking So it s very much about tracking external campaigns so this is what come to your w
21. bviously some technical changes on your website 0 10 19 BC But if you can t then simply within Google Analytics set up a filter at just a search and replace Look for the string email or something similar to it if it s not an English website maybe it is e post or something like that look for that string and just replace it either with XXX or replace it with the words filter or something like that So simply do a search and replace filter to make sure that when Google Analytics is tracking those email addresses it can t be seen in your 01 22 13 Page 4 of 25 reports I hope that made sense I hope I explained that pretty well So if everyone is okay with that let me move onto number two 0 10 59 AW Yeah great that sounds really good 0 11 01 BC So don t collect the PII obviously that has lots of implications for you And number two here is make sure that you set up a raw unfiltered profile That s what I mean by raw basically untouched an unfiltered profile As well as a testing profile I will just do the unfiltered profile first When you collect your Google Analytics data by default when you do your set up you create your profile and your profile is just your collection of the 100 or so plus reports that you look in Google Analytics Now if you ever create a filter and hopefully you are filtering data so you are taking out perhaps your own internal staff visitors and things like that you may want to take out your agenc
22. certain of that 1 19 47 AW Okay I am really glad to hear about your LinkedIn group too because there s some people on the call that are not members specifically of our community and I want to make sure that everyone has a way to get their questions answered So alright I think with that I think we ll wrap it up Brian thank you so much for your time I know it s late in your day and we really appreciate this It s been very very informative 01 22 13 Page 23 of 25 1 20 07 BC Yeah thank you for you guys for giving me the opportunity lots of smart people out there lots and lots of people talking about Google Analytics So it s I don t take it lightly when people invite me to come along and speak and hear me and what I ve got to say So a big thank you for you for liking the stuff that I do and just spreading the word so thank you very much to both of you guys 1 20 28 AW Absolutely Okay so I recommend that if you haven t already 1 20 31 DT Thank you Brian 1 20 32 AW Looks like a bunch of you have but make sure you go to seobt co clifton to get Brian s book okay Or you can just go to Amazon that s fine too Brian thank you so much We hope to have you back again And everybody on the call thanks for joining us and have a great day Thank you very much 1 20 50 BC Thanks guys Take care Thank you Bye bye Seo B RAI NTRU oT Dan Right Brain Thies Leslie Left Brain Rohde
23. e I do too The thing is there s so many things you can do There are a lot of them that you don t do every day and so you kind of forget That s one of the reasons why we ve all got the highlighter and Post it notes and everything else sticking out of our copies of your book 0 02 52 AW Great Okay so we have some bonus Gotchas That s just great Okay So everybody 01 22 13 Page 2 of 25 on the call I d love it if you d open up that question box just say hello and let us know where you re from We d love to hear that And if you have questions for Brian we ll try to get to a few in the end Go ahead and put complete questions in there because we may not ask him right when you do okay So Brian let s go for it Let s hear about the Top 15 Google Analytics Gotchas Thank you 0 03 17 BC Okay Let me just And just please let me know that you can can see this slide the About 0 03 25 AW Perfect 0 03 25 DT Yes 0 03 25 BC Good I will try and keep this brief of course Just a little bit of background about me so you know who I am and what my experience is I ve been in the business now for The digital business that is since 97 So quite a long time in digital years I started off life as a developer web developer and SEO person and I was still doing that up until about 2005 I was also at that time really getting into my Analytics In 2005 I was hired by Google to basically head up a new team which was to be the
24. e important steps before it can be put in a funnel and you can measure how people drop down into that funnel And the idea is you ll have this nice triangular shaped wine glass it s like a gradual decay as the visitors that start off gradually qualify themselves because they need to find the right product of course and then you need to have it delivered to the right area and it needs to be the right price So they get more and more qualified and you end up with the sales at the bottom 0 33 34 BC If you just capture ecommerce data without defining it as a goal then you ll miss all of those micro conversions all those little steps that are taking that visitor on the way to becoming a conversion So ecommerce is pretty straightforward Once you ve got that set up defining that as a 01 22 13 Page 10 of 25 goal and as a funnel is very straightforward For all of those non ecommerce engagement points so this is effective whether you re ecommerce or not there are lots of things that are important touch points with your visitors PDF downloads if you have white papers if you have a product specification guide if you have a user manual or just your catalogue or your price list if you have these in PDF and you allow people to download then clearly knowing that they re being downloaded is a fantastic engagement Literally people are putting your brand permanently on their computer and possibly even printing out and having it on their desk So
25. e orders are physically packing the product in a box and shipping it out to the address doesn t match what Google Analytics is telling us And if it s within 5 I say don t worry about it cause there s always gonna to be inaccuracies that we could talk perhaps another 01 22 13 Page 14 of 25 time about But quite often it can be significant 20 30 40 difference even more and there can be several reasons for this 0 48 34 BC So obviously you need to do a sanity check and make sure that the tracking code for ecommerce transactions is being done correctly But let s assume that has and here s a number of things that I ve I ve come across The first one is processing time differences So when Google Analytics tracks a transaction it s done at the point that the visitor has loaded the thank you page where the ecommerce tracking code is for example So the date and the time of that happens at that point that they submit the order But it may not be that the company that processes the credit card information for you or even your own internal systems it may not process it at the same time And quite often certainly with the sort of banks that I ve worked with your credit cards are batched sorry orders and credit card orders and bank orders are batched 0 49 27 BC Quite often they happen towards the end of the day sort of 8 at night 9 at night Sometimes it can even happen the next day So all of your orders let s say between midday and
26. e to the data center and you re doing no business for an hour obviously that s gonna be reflected in your GA data Put that in there add a little a note double click on the data over time chart any data over time chart in Google Analytics and add that note And that note will be visible in all of the reports and you can either make it visible to anybody that has access to your account or you can make it private and visible only to you 1 03 17 BC So a real nice way if you re launching new products some changes to the website design usability scales or someone decided to turn that nice HTML menu system into JavaScript and things like that they affect usability they affect SEO visibility Put those little notes in there because you may remember it today and may feel like obviously you did that last week two three four months down the line you re gonna forget about it So just keep keep track of what s happening within the report just by adding Double clicking on the data point in the chart just adding a little note you have up to It s Twiter like you can have up to 160 characters 1 04 01 AW It s such an easy thing to do and it s kinda silly not to 1 04 06 BC Let me finish on the last one there So comparing filters with advance segments So there are two types of filters on Google Analytics One is you can filter a profile another one is you can filter tables of data Put that down at the page view level So if you say Show
27. e very beginning once you ve done a deployment to check it to verify it to see what the coverage is A 100 is where you want to be but sometimes you can t quite get that but certainly 90 coverage 90 of all your pages should have the Google analytics tracking code And do this regularly and regularly typically means once a quarter something like that maybe once a month depending on how often you decide updates 0 21 17 BC And we ve reached to number five as a non unique URLs And an example of what I mean by this is if you have a subscription form or even a payment form but if you just think about the subscription form somebody s signing up to a newsletter you ll be amazed how often when people view that page and when they submit that information they were signing up So a very key critical engagement a point that you want to measure you ll be amazed how often I see the URL doesn t change So in other words the URL when the page loads where the form is the fill in form when the subscription request loads is exactly the same even after you click Okay or Submit for the thank you receipt page 0 22 04 BC The problem with that is if it doesn t change the way Google analytics works is you cannot differentiate that the page is being viewed versus the pages actually being viewed and submitted And clearly that s a very strong engagement someone s giving you their name and address for example you really wanna be able to different
28. ebsite via some kind of external source Either clicking on a banner or an email link or following a banner to your URL in your offline marketing What it should not be used for is doing internal campaigns So if you run banners on your own website for your own products and then perhaps that varies day by day or week by week don t consider that as a campaign even though of course it is from your internal business point of view but don t think of that as a campaign for Google Analytics 0 42 34 BC If you do that if you apply the principles of campaign tracking to internal banners what happens is you reset the visitor cookie So Google Analytics thinks that a new visitor has just come to the website because there s a new referrer and the referrer that Google Analytics can find when a visitor is on your website is an indication Is one of the points one of the indicators that tell Google Analytics that there s a new visitor to your website So if you run campaign tracking internally you re resetting the tracking cookies and you re multiple counting basically 0 43 10 BC A way around this if that s important to you use event tracking I m not talking about event tracking today but there s a type of tracking that Google Analytics does which beyond page views allows you to track events like clicks on buttons and drag and drop items clicks on the play button of the video for example So you can use the same principle Use an event to track someone
29. es to digital finding a resource to look at the data it s quite often difficult for them to do 0 05 54 BC There s a few things there at the bottom end I m sure we ll send these slides out or they ll be made available at the end of this session there s some clickable links there My own blog for example there is a LinkedIn group that we have based upon a book on Google Analytics and you can get me on Twitter and Google Plus of course Just briefly to mention about the book thank you you guys for praising the book and I hope it really has been of value It has sold very well over the years It s been fantastic how that s taken off If you wanna have a look at this please obviously just go to Amazon and type my name it will come up there But I would ask you if you can use this link it s trackable of course as you might expect this SEO 0 06 41 AW Of course 01 22 13 Page 3 of 25 0 06 42 BC BT link Because we wanna get myself Andrew and Dan we want to get some feedback back on yes we have several hundred people signing up today and hopefully listening to this but I would like to know whether this The content that we are talking about actually has some tractions So if you are interested in looking at the book please just use that link and it gives us some anonymous feedback 0 07 05 BC Okay let me move on So I mean it is not a bells and whistles presentation It is just really a list here of different Gotchas
30. ge the view the data Sort of the date window that you re looking at and adjust that accordingly and then you will see Google Analytics did you bring unique visitors for you 0 45 24 DT But your boss might like the number better if you do it raw chuckle 0 45 28 BC If you just add them up yeah But the thing is when you get caught out all your credibility is gone and they ll never trust another number from you again So it s just one of those things to be careful with 0 45 41 DT Indeed Yeah This was actually The one of the things that I like the most about your book is that you take the time to explain what these measurements mean so that we can avoid some of those kinds of mistakes So that s not the only one but there are a lot of different ways that you could misinterpret your data 0 46 00 BC Yeah 0 46 03 AW Really quickly one of my favorite quotes in your book is this and I m gonna put it in the chat Plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average chuckle I thought that was funny So any ways I put that in the chat 0 46 17 BC Yeah That s a good one So it s just talking about averages here This is one of those things that I have to keep asking myself when I m looking at data It s very easy to fall into this trap unfortunately Averages include outliers so it s all of the data and if you have a very large traffic peak at one end of the spectrum of data and you have a very large peak at the other end
31. gital marketer who s looking at data to try and measure success basically Really what this means when I talk about goals in Google Analytics is just making sure that you can differentiate those key engagement points those things that when a visitor is on your website you know Hey this visitor really is having a good time They really are getting value from looking at this page They like it so much they want to subscribe to more and they like it so much they want to buy if you re a transactional site of course 0 30 47 BC And then once you have gone through the time effort and money of bringing in a new visitor to your brand you want them to come back of course So being able to define what are those key things on your website that indicate success and success can mean many things obviously if you re an ecommerce site selling something is the ultimate success but that s very black and white You either sell something or you don t What about all of those touch points all of those things on your website that are building up the engagement that are setting you up setting the visitor up ready so that they feel comfortable to buy from you And even if you re not an ecommerce site building and strengthening that relationship that s what the goals are being able to understand something that happens on your website that is just important and so different from a regular page view 0 31 35 BC So I talk about this in Chapter 8 and 10 and the
32. h they re not provided It came out October 2011 as a I wouldn t call it feature but sort of a Something that Google wants to do in order to protect I guess privacy of people who are on open network so that is the sort of reasoning behind this So in a way that is a good thing and in knowing what proportion is your visitors are actually logged in to Google is actually also a good thing because it tells you a lot about or something about any way who your audience is and what services they used Absolutely with people who have 20 30 40 not provided because you are losing a lot of really juicy keyword data that you want to optimize your website 1 14 14 BC Think about someone that writes about Google products like myself and all of my audience has logged in to Google probably all of the time Most of my audience is actually Probably be using Google Analytics to some extent I find 90 of my keywords actually they re not provided so it is very irritating to lose that data and there s not likely to be any 1 14 40 AW Yeah 1 14 42 BC There s really is not likely to be in any way back on this They ve made that decision laudable reasons in terms of privacy I don t quite agree with it I mean I m a big online privacy advocate but I m not quite sure where they re going with it but the decisions have been made But you are right to suspect I think I mean I have to be careful I can t I don t speak on behalf of Google a
33. he sort of main ones that I ve come across the ones where you call it low hanging fruit If you could tick all of these boxes and make sure that you re not doing What is it one two three and five you re not doing them and then at four and six you are doing them In other words you are creating labels and you are regularly checking your implementation deployment you really have covered probably 95 of all the issues So let me move on to end user Gotchas 0 29 08 AW Great That s a nice check list so thank you for that 0 29 12 BC Are you able to see the next slide 0 29 15 AW We are there 0 29 17 BC Okay So there s a few more in here Some of them are straightforward actually But these are for people who look at the data who have to try and understand it who try and get changes done on the website to make it better Either market it better or more visible from search engines or just processes more efficient so that people don t bail out of the shopping cart or don t bail out of contacting you because there s a pain point And often the people who are looking at this data also need to report up in the food chain of their organization and get more money more funding to improve things 01 22 13 Page 9 of 25 0 29 55 BC So I think with that thought in mind I would say number one here really is the number one I should have done this big and bold and in red or something It s really the big thing for any web analyst or web di
34. he video How many got to 20 50 75 90 Maybe 90 is the goal because the last 10 seconds or whatever is not so important you ve got your point across So you can do some really nice not just goal analysis but the funnel analysis and funnel visualization on video plays 0 37 53 AW Dan and I liked the analogy that you said too If you re not doing this you re just 01 22 13 Page 11 of 25 looking at a picture of analytics rather than analytics themselves Good way to put that 0 38 02 BC Yeah I like that Nice one Dan I like that chuckle 0 38 06 DT Thank you 0 38 06 AW You can use that in your next book Brian 0 38 09 BC Yeah I will do I like it It s Yeah Let me move on to campaign tracking then So by default Google Analytics will track four different types of referrals for you Search engines so if someone comes from a recognized search engine and Google does a pretty good job now of tracking so the Google Analytics does a pretty good job now of identifying and tracking all the different search engines that are in the world So from an SEO point of view tracking down a visitor who did a keyword search on a search engine and then clicked on the link to your website that can be pretty much tracked without any problems And not just the fact that they came from a search engine but also of course the keywords that they used on there 0 38 51 BC So search engines which is organic traffic AdWords is very st
35. iate that because that s a key goal that s a 01 22 13 Page 7 of 25 key KPI that differentiates it from other pages for example 0 22 30 BC Now there are several ways to do that I mean clearly if you could just modify the URL by adding query parameters at the end of it that will be fantastic So when you As you load submissionform php when a form is actually submitted and the person gets a thank you page you could just add a little parameter on the end so it still says submissionform php but then question mark and submit equals yes or submit equals success something like that So a little parameter at the end of the URL would be ideal Sometimes that can be difficult CMS may be a little bit locked down and you can t do that 0 23 11 BC An alternative is to use something called Virtual Pageviews I talk about this in Chapter 7 of the book and there s a link there also to the online resources at Google Essentially this means instead of asking Google Analytics to track what s in the address bar so in other words the URL by default what you do is you just give it a Virtual Pageview name and a Virtual Directory path as well So you can make up a whole web structure if you like and send that to Google Analytics rather than it taking the real URL that s been down on the page I don t suggest that you use Virtual Pageviews for your entire website but certainly where there is difficulty in being able to differentiate one page from anothe
36. iews and actually there are some very significant things that happen on your site which are called goals 0 36 18 DT So let me just pile along there real quick Brian For the folks that are in our group you heard us talking about instrumenting for Google Analytics But basically anything that you want people to do on your website you d like to know that that s happening and being able to track that as a goal And you can set up many different sets of goals you can even set up extra profiles if you need more goals But if you ve got a product video wouldn t you like to know how many people play that video And then wouldn t you like to know how many people who played the video buy compared to those that don t play the video So this is Then give you 0 36 55 __ If we go and look at somebody s analytics account for a particular time and there are no goals set up of being tracked then you re not really using analytics yet You are just kind of looking at pictures of analytics 0 37 08 BC That s a good point Dan and I think that one there that I missed which is video tracking That s a very good thing to highlight I mean playing the video obviously is a goal Also play to completion so they actually watch the end of it And what you can do if you re doing video tracking is you can be very smart and you can say Okay let s create a funnel out of this so show me how many visitors got 10 of the way through the content through t
37. ine helpful resources and there s a link there you can see that there are lots of different scenarios about whether it s sub domain tracking whether you re tracking to a third party or perhaps it s even a combination of both 0 16 26 BC There are things that you need to think about in terms of how the visitor moves around your site The idea is that as they move around your site they re treated as one visitor moving across domains and not multiple visitors as they would be by default So really important to think about some of those things and just make sure that if you have sub domains or multiple third top level domains that you think about the visitor journey and how you want to report on that Certainly we reach to number four There s a lot of technicality in that number three cross domain tracking So you know have a look otherwise talking about it would just bore you but have a look on either the book or the online resources 0 17 12 BC So at number 4 is where I come across quite often as a gotcha and something that I do every time when I get involved with a client it s one of those first steps How well is the Google Analytics tracking code deployed across the website Do you have ideally 100 coverage In other words every single page on your website is that tagged Does it have a Google Analytics tracking code Are you collecting data from it The only way really to do that is to scan your website looking for the little bits
38. is book and wow Brian is all I can say There is so much information here And I ve kind of always had this feeling that if I knew more about Analytics was able to manage the data better then it was gonna result in more money for me And this book is proof positive of that I ve learned so much from it And we thought it would be really fun to have you come speak with us today And so I thought we d talk about top 10 Google Analytics sites so it looks like you ve added some extras That s nice 0 01 42 BC Yeah I was sort of going through this just sort of the common Gotchas that sometimes catch me out catch clients out And as I started building the list I realized actually there s quite a few So I started off with 10 and it s grown into a bit and no doubt over time it will grow again But there are just a few that as I say catch everybody out sometimes myself included and other smart people Having a very powerful tool like Google Analytics is It s a bit of a double edged sword It s fantastic that you can get so much data but sometimes it can be overwhelming And so I just thought it would be good to have a sort of Gotchas list just the things or just people to look out for basically in terms of when they start looking at the data And maybe some of these your listeners have already seen and hopefully there s a few new ones there as well 0 02 34 AW Okay 0 02 36 DT I can imagine that you get caught up by these things becaus
39. itor comes back to your own website That s the example of a cross domain tracking The visitors come to your website gone away to a third party and then come back to your website 0 14 54 BC The sub domain tracking should be quite obvious You have a sub domain like dub dub dub these three Ws or maybe a main website Perhaps you also within that main website have support dots example com something like that Now the default is when you set up tracking with Google Analytics is all of your sub domains and all of your third party domains attract separately They re treated as separate websites And for some instances that s perfectly what you want You want them treated as separate websites But if you think about the support sub domain for example yes I want to see what happens in the support section but I also want to see how visitors move around between my sub domains 0 15 36 BC So how they go from the dub dub dub the main content if you like into the support section and then back again Without passing around a visitor information means there s a change of cookies And so if you want to group all of that and treat your sub domains as one website then you have to do something different with your setup with the way you deploy the code Now I m not gonna go through the details of that so and that was on call in itself but if you go to either the book Chapter 7 which is the Advanced Implementation Chapter or you go into the Google Onl
40. mp up your Google Analytics either to make it easier to manipulate data within the interface or in terms of how to automate some of the implementation stuff So if you just go to my site and type in Best Add ons at the end there you ll get to the article which is a bunch of tools and add ons that you can use And really I think that s We re all finished 1 10 57 AW Alright that s absolutely fantastic Alright So a couple of questions The second one is gonna be about keyword not provided The first one is from Bret He s asking a few questions about the book Bret wants to know what s the difference between buying the book or going to Google Help 1 11 15 BC Good question 1 11 16 AW So in other words why should we buy the book 1 11 19 BC Yeah why bother Yeah The Help Center it s a fantastic resource Over the last couple of years they ve Particularly a guy called Alden DeSoto If you ever watch any Google Analytics videos produced by the Google team he is the voice over those videos So Alden s a really smart guy and still works at Google based in Seattle They ve done a lot of work in the last couple of years at making the Online Help Center much much better If you know what you re looking for if you know exactly what you re looking for Oh I need to just check the syntax of the code when I create a custom variable for example If you know exactly what to look for the Online Help Center Google is perfect for that 1
41. n But I was just wondering if we need both Screaming Frog and Analytics Debugger 0 19 32 BC No I would say one or the other whichever one suits you 0 19 36 AW Okay I have to take a look at that I ve actually got Screaming Frog on deck for an interview as well and so I ll dig out Analytics Debugger too so thank you for that 0 19 45 BC Cool WASP is Web Analytics Solution Profiler developed by a guy who s a friend of mine Actually Stephane Hamel He is a Canadian guy who ve been in the industry long time He focuses on detecting web analytics tools and there s a scanner attached to that as well Well slightly differently rather than just scanning for text on your page for the tracking beacons it s actually looking for the setting of cookies So if it notices the Google Analytics tracking cookies then that s a better indication that not only is the code written on the pages but it s actually also working in other words it s setting cookies So it s a little bit more I guess fancy you could say And ObservePoint is a much more sort of commercial level tool costs relatively quite a bit of money compared to the others anyway in terms of automatically scanning it works only for Google Analytics and for it for on the job 0 20 40 BC A number of tools I would simply say try one of the first three Screaming Frog Analytics Debugger and WASP and then if they don t fit your needs have a look at ObservePoint Obviously do this at th
42. nd I do have access to private you know privileged information and I m not allowed to discuss with others but you are right to suspect that because there is a universal log in from multiple devices your phone your tablet your laptop your home computer as is your work computer there is a great opportunity here for Google to be able to tie those together Because the way things are found at the moment today basically if I log in on my laptop and then I use a desktop computer and then I visit the same website and then I use my phone to go back to the website that s three separate different cookies that Google Analytics sees It has no idea I m the same person 1 15 54 BC But you re right to suspect if I log in to Google every time because effectively I am on my laptop and my phone I use an Android phone so effectively I am logged in there s a great opportunity to stitch that together and for Google Analytics instead of double counting because I use a different device actually know I m the same visitor So kind of what Amazon does at the moment Amazon There s a great reason to have an account with Amazon and every time you go there you are automatically logged in so they can tell if you use different devices Kind of how that works is potentially I choose my words carefully a great way for Google to overcome a very long standing problem in the industry I say long standing but certainly since the growth of smartphones has come about
43. of the spectrum and nothing in the middle then the average is gonna be the value in the middle So clearly the average there is not what the average visitor does I think it s just something you should take a moment to think about that What the average visitor does on your site is not the same as just adding up all the numbers and divided by the frequency 0 47 05 BC So I mean you just think about that They do include the outliers they do include traffic spikes It s very common in all analytics tools to quote averages but just treat them with a pinch of salt and actually look at the distribution of data which does involve looking at data overtime and charts It does involve segmenting as well so really drilling down so that all the things that are happening below the surface now bubble up and you could see them So averages is something that every time I look at it I keep reminding myself Okay What exactly are we looking at here and how can we make sure that we re not just papering over the cracks because that s what averages do 0 47 47 BC So moving to number five then This is very common for transactional sites is people look at the ecommerce data and obviously I m assuming the ecommerce implementation is being done correctly but people look the data and they look at the number of transactions and look at the revenue and they say Hold on a minute Our backend system which actually processes the orders and someone s fulfilling th
44. oogle So that means you do your own sampling on your website that says Hey only send 50 of my traffic to Google for example That s one way to do it 1 01 37 DT But anybody on the call if you re getting 10 million page views a month consistently and you just can t figure out how to pay for the real premium Analytics just call us and we ll help you figure that out chuckle 1 01 53 AW Right 1 01 53 BC Nice bloke 1 01 58 __ 1 01 55 AW Alright Keep going 1 01 57 BC Let me jump to number seven then if we re okay 1 02 01 AW Great 1 02 03 BC So chart annotation So this are little notes little keeping track of what s happening with your website that is embedded in the charts of Google Analytics Basically if you haven t done this before the data points on the data over time chart if you just double click on one of those data points a little drop down window appears below the chart and it s just a way that you can for a 01 22 13 Page 18 of 25 particular day add a note about what s happening So if you ve seen a big spike in traffic and you know it s because you ve just lost an AdWords campaign and connected that to your Google Analytics account and that s not blindingly obvious to everybody else in your organization of course why would it be just add that note Just say AdWords launched today and link to GA 1 02 48 BC If your website went down for an hour for whatever reason someone cut the cabl
45. ort in the heel perhaps or maybe they re just not the color that I was expecting maybe the photograph wasn t quite as accurate as reality and I send those shoes back 0 51 19 BC Now of course from a financial systems point of view that order has to be cancelled the customer has to be refunded and that shoe is possibly added back to the stock that you have in your warehouse Now there s an argument to say well if it s a return transaction shouldn t we back out that transaction from Google Analytics Shouldn t we cancel the transaction And I would say no don t do that We need to avoid doing any kind of cancellations in Google Analytics And the reason is is that what we re trying to do with goal conversions or with transaction conversions is understand as I was just saying how good is your marketing how to get good marketing and invest in that and drop the poor marketing and how to improve your website to make a purchase more viable and easier to happen 0 52 09 BC Now if someone returns a pair of shoes because they re faulty or because of whatever reason that has no reflection on your website s ability to convert a visitor into a customer and it has no reflection on the marketing So it doesn t need to match is what I m saying So returns errors 01 22 13 Page 15 of 25 cancellations yes in the real world in your real backend system that has to be taken into account But from the Google Analytics point of view it s just
46. out a 40 billion dollar a year company and almost all of that business is built on trust They have good products but people trust them to do good things and not screw with their data So that business could very easily collapse if they did something stupid with data That can happen but just to give you an insight from working there they just don t think that way People make mistakes but it s not in their sort of blood stream to think about doing something kind of like devious like that They don t 1 18 38 DT Well somebody on the side of the house that engineered a solution to protect that private data would have to then agree to open that right You got to decrypt that key to somebody else I don t know why they would do that Everybody was talking about it but it just didn t make much sense 1 19 01 BC No no 1 19 01 AW Alright great Okay so Brian if people want to follow you they can find you on Twitter and you re brianclifton right 1 19 10 BC Yeah Twitter or Google Plus is something I m investing a lot more time in recently LinkedIn group is really for people that are passionate about Google Analytics and perhaps read the book and want to ask not specifically questions to me but to a community of I think have about 4 500 maybe 5 000 people there and it s actively moderated so I would say pretty much zero spam But if you put a lot of effort into my SEO so if you type Brian Clifton you can find me online I m
47. r think about how you can trigger the Google Analytics tracking code separately so that you can give it your own meaningful name to differentiate the submission versus the loading of the form 0 24 09 AW Okay I put that link in the chat so that you can all grab it You don t have to worry about copying it down there 0 24 17 BC Yup These are all When people download these slides these links will be clickable so you ll be able to follow these as well 0 24 26 AW Great That s great Thank you 0 24 30 BC So sail on to number six then which sort of wraps up the implementation Gotchas Labelling visitor types Visitor labels is the terminology I use in the book It s in Chapter 9 Google Analytics Customizations The actual terminology the more technical terminology if you re sort of looking around for help online or within the Google Analytics Help Center is Custom Variables Same thing though I just prefer the name labelling visitors It sort of resonates better when you re talking with non specialists 0 25 06 BC Now this is a way where if you can identify a visitor and when I mean identify I don t mean personally identify I just mean a visitor type So visitors that come to your website that are existing customers are clearly very different to visitors that come to your website that have never done business with you before Visitors that have come to your website and have actually commented on your blog or rated a blog po
48. raightforward it s just a couple of tick boxes in order to get your AdWords data in And the referral links so any website that links to you can be picked up their web address as well as the fact that they are a referrer So those are the three key ones The last one is direct which is supposed to mean that people type in your web address directly on their keyboard because you have such a strong brand and they can remember you The problem is of course when you re running any kind of campaign strategy the number of campaigns you have out there is much much broader than the ones I ve just mentioned 0 39 31 BC So if you re doing something like email marketing if you are running banner campaigns display marketing if you re doing job advertisements on LinkedIn any of these things where you re placing an ad or a campaign out there you can track Even to some degree you can even track your offline marketing So if you have let s say a print ad in a magazine if you re smart about thinking about your vanity URL for example you can have that redirect with campaign tracking when the visitor clicks on it then you can actually identify exactly not just that they came from print or they came from offline but you could even identify the exact magazine what page your ad was on what the article was about that you are advertising next to So you can get very very granular 0 40 26 BC What I often see though is people just either don t know a
49. re s a lot of information in there about building goals and KPIs which are key performance indicators Very often they are similar The way I differentiate goals and KPIs is I simply say that goals are very specific to your website and the things that happen on your website which I ll talk about in the second Key performance indicators are much more about what the business wants from the website So one is more business orientated and one is very web orientated And I talk about both of those scenarios in Chapter 8 which is about goals and Chapter 10 which is about key performance indicators 0 32 14 BC Let s just think about some examples of goals Well an obvious one is someone buys something from your website that s a clear goal As well as it being a transaction it s also a goal that you want them to do So if you define making the transaction is an implementation that you do at three commoners the reason why I say also define it as a goal is because if you do that then the steps before that action you can put it to a funnel and you can track how people qualify themselves before they make that purchase So a typical sales funnel for an ecommerce site will be look at the product page Sorry look at the category page decide on what product you want look at the product page add to cart go through the steps that will enable them to make the purchase 0 33 04 BC If you have now the actual purchase defined as a goal then all of thos
50. so it s a long winded answer and I can t say for definite but you re right to suspect that this a great way to solve that problem 1 16 51 AW Alright great Okay so Brian I know it s really late for you and I m gonna be respectful of that Dan do you have anything that you d like to add 01 22 13 Page 22 of 25 1 16 59 DT I got one last question for you Brian So there was a rumor going on at MozCon last year that if I just go and buy that premium version of Google Analytics all those not provided keywords are suddenly gonna reappear Have you heard anything about this rumor 1 17 06 BC Yeah I hear those type of rumors No that s a Again I m not speaking for Google but I just That just can t And that would do so much damage to Google not just Google Analytics but to Google as a brand it would be unthinkable Two things Google doesn t think in those type of ways One because of the type of people they hire That s the one thing that you know I ve been there The other thing is from a They don t need the money Let s put it that way It s a 150 000 1 17 46 DT But not for Analytics they don t That s for 1 17 47 BC No Exactly 1 17 47 DT What people is searching is what they need 1 17 47 BC Yeah And that maybe it s a 150 000 for Analytics and maybe they ll make a few hundred million extra dollars because I don t know the advertising is smarter if they were to give that data out but we re talking ab
51. st or given you some kind of feedback or perhaps are subscribers to your newsletter clearly they are another type of visitor another segment of visitors that is different from the anonymous visitors which most websites get and is also different from the customers And there may be some overlap of there of course visitors that are subscribers can also be customers 0 25 55 BC So when I m talking about labelling visitors I m not talking about individual personal identifiable information for all the reasons I talked about at the beginning but I m just talking about 01 22 13 Page 8 of 25 types sort of segmenting a visitor So that can be very powerful when you want to compare for example what is the behaviour of customers on our website versus the behaviour of people that have never done business with us before or subscribers or people that have commented or rated or submitted feedback These are all potentially very different types of visitors different personas if you will And being able to label them and follow those can be extremely powerful 0 26 41 BC Now with custom variables there s It s a technical error and that s why I point to these links and to the book But you can define different scopes you can say that this custom variable is only available on this particular page You can alternatively say it s available for the entire session the entire visit that the visitor is on your site for And really what I m talking abo
52. that we deal with the free Google Analytics is more than sufficient to give you the answers 1 00 03 BC And if you look You re good to raise that Dan and the limits guide I think highlights the difference between premium and then free The free product allows you to collect up to 10 million data points You can call them pages but of course they re events and the transactions and they are custom variables that can that add to that But essentially think of it as 10 million page views per month And that s if you have a great website with lots of engagement that s easily a million probably two or three million visitors to your website every month So that s a fairly substantial website The vast majority of our clients as I said I deal with some very large corporate brands that fall within 10 million or around about that sort of order of magnitude 10 million visits 10 million sorry page views per month 1 00 59 BC And Google they are very pragmatic I have worked there that s why I know that the guys and the people there pretty well they re very pragmatic about this If it s 10 million and one or even 11 million and 12 million page views per month they re not really too bothered about that as long as you re not hitting 50 million 60 million or 100 million page views per month and you re safe really The worst that s gonna happen is you re gonna get a phone call that says Hey look can you please throttle how much data you send to G
53. ut here is the last example which is whether scope is at the visitor level which means even when the visitor goes away when they come back that label still remains with them And that s what I mean about existing customers for example So someone does business with you on your website you ve identified them as a customer you define the custom variable that says that 0 27 27 BC The custom variable is stored as a cookie a persistent cookie on their machine so even if they come back the next day or the next week or six months later as long as of course they haven t deleted their cookies or using a different machine Google Analytics can identify that person even if they don t do any business with you on the next website visit or any of the subsequent website visits Google Analytics can identify that these are in fact a customer so you can look at how these types of visitors move around your website and clear for things like customers or engage visitors you have the opportunity of cross selling or upselling things like that something which is a very different approach to new visitors that have not done business with you 0 28 12 AW This too is another big takeaway from my action team just It s thinking about in these terms and knowing that we can segment the data was quite an eye opener for us 0 28 25 BC Cool So that wraps up sort of the implementation Gotchas As I say this list can go on and on and it will grow but those are t
54. y or your development team who are obviously playing around with the website you may want to filter them out or maybe you are doing some geographic filtering so only show me people from the US in your reports or only show me people from Europe So filters are very common to use your data 0 12 00 BC The problem is if you make a mistake when you ve applied that to your filter and let s say for example instead of you including visitors from the US you end up excluding them you just I don t know made a mistake a little typo if you like there s not a lot you can do about that The data has been lost or it s been modified or damaged in some way You can t go back to Google and say Hey sorry I made a mistake I ve now corrected that filter Can you please reprocess the data You simply can t do that So what I m saying here is to avoid that by having an unfiltered profile so one that never has any filters on it So if you do make a mistake when you re creating a filter on your main analytical profile something goes wrong you can always go back to the rule on filtered data So it s a back up You know what I m saying 0 12 54 AW I think that was kind of the first big takeaway for me and my action team when we re reading your book I mean it just makes such perfect sense and I don t I m not sure if any of us had thought of that chuckle So thank you This is a big one 0 13 07 BC Yeah it is a big one I mean the unfiltered profile

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