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Using Google Analytics? Here's a tool that I find useful.

September 3, 2009 at 8:33 am by Brian Chiou

I recently started using a plugin for my browser (Mozilla Firefox 3.5), which allows me more control over the data that Google Analytics has collected for me. For more information about what enhancements are granted and where you can add this plugin, click the read more link.

This simple plugin is located at the following URL : http://www.vkistudios.com/tools/firefox/betterga/index.cfm.

You'll need to download Mozilla Firefox in order for this plugin to work : http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html.

What the plugin enhances?

When first visiting your Analytics account, the "extra step" of clicking the "Access Analytics" button is removed. Now, when visiting the Analytics page you're brought straight to the data set.
Allow you to expand the data set full-width so you can focus on analysis.
The ability to search for content pages becomes a sidebar item for you to quickly access.
Allows you to open multiple profiles in tabs quickly. (while viewing a profile)
Said to allow exportation to Google Spreadsheets, however I was unable to get this to work.
Said to convert percent values to absolute values, however I was unable to get this to work.
Ability to quickly compare a date range to a data set from the previous year.
I find this one of the most important tools this plugin adds. Allows you to sort a specific column within the frame of what you're looking at. i.e. You can show the top 100 most viewed pages and then sort by bounce rate.
You can see how many users used various Social Media tools per page. example shown below :

Screenshot of Social Media icons being shown.

Tags: tools google analytics, Better for Firefox plugin Google,

Google Analytics Individual Qualification

August 30, 2009 at 5:34 pm by Brian Chiou

"I am qualified?". Months of using Google Analytics and two weeks of studying "Google Conversion University" and "Google's Help Center", I've passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Exam.

What does it mean to be qualified though?

I'm still struggling to find out that answer as well. However, I now feel justified for taking the time while at work to study Google Analytics material and the time I spent studying while at the comfort of my own home.

(Thanks to Newfangled for always advocating personal growth and development even during work hours.)

The rest of the blog post will discuss preparation for the exam as well as what to expect before and after the exam.

Exam details
Length: 90 minutes
Passing score: 75% out of 90 questions. (67.5/90)
Your reward?: A snazzy "protected" certificate from Google, a sense of accomplishment, and enough Google knowledge to devise new ways to measure how successful your website can/will be.
Material covered?: Google Analytics.
Cost: $50.

How I studied for the exam?
(please note : I only got a 91% on the exam, so there is definitely room for improvement.)

Step 1:
Set up a test environment for yourself. Make sure to have a test Google Analytics account available while going through the study material. The best way to learn is to do it yourself.

Step 2:
Go through Conversion University videos. (yes, all of them!) Conversion University videos

Step 3:
Pay special attention to the following topics while going through Conversion University :

High

Types of Cookies

Autotagging vs. Manual Tagging (relates to Adwords)

E-commerce

Adwords, and the subtle differences it has from Analytics

Medium

Customizing Javascript to segment data

How to link Domains with Subdomains?

Setting up Goals

Regular Expressions

Filters

Low

User control and managing profiles

Various Google Reports

How do you know you're ready?
If/when you go through Conversion University and you understand the videos, and can actually set up what they're demo'ing yourself.

Step 4:
While taking the exam, understand that you can set questions as marked or simply leave it blank to address later. Therefore, my method was to answer as many questions as possible while keeping a note of which questions I skipped. In the end, I had finished 55-60 questions I was positive I had answered correctly. I then had 30-45 minutes left to go back and address all the questions I had left unanswered/marked. When I had finished the exam, there were only 5 minutes left to spare.

My score? ended up as 82/90 = 91%.

Unfortunately, even after you've completed the exam, Google refuses to tell you exactly what answers you had gotten incorrect. Here is a screenshot of the page you're brought to after completing the exam.

Resources to use while taking the exam:
Tool to build a regex to filter an IP range.
Google API, the various tracking options Google offers.
Cookies, what Google uses and how they use them.
Google, of course.

If you have any questions about the material, feel free to post it as a comment and I'll try to answer in a timely matter.

Tags: google proficiency analytics, GAIQ, qualification exam,

301 redirects, the Newfangled way.

July 27, 2009 at 9:46 am by Brian Chiou

This blog post will explore what a 301 redirect is, why we use them, and how to set them up with Newfangled CMS.

Newfangled generally advises clients to use 301 redirects when transitioning from an old website to a new website.

What is a 301 redirect? A 301 redirect is when a URL :

http://www.oldsite.com/old_post_about_product

is redirected to

http://www.oldsite.com/old_post_new_URL

The value 301 indicates that this redirect is permanent. This tells Google that, the old_post_about_product URL is permanently redirecting to /old_post_new_URL

Here is a classic example of why you’d set up a 301 redirect. Imagine if you’re transitioning from an old site to a new one compliments of Newfangled.

More than likely, your site structure will not be a 1 to 1 correlation from your old site compared to your new site.

The old developer before Newfangled programmed his site in .asp, and the list of products for your company are found at the following URL.

A friend of Brian’s, sent him a link before the new site went live linking him to some fantastic product Newfangled offers. Brian, being not-so-diligent-at-email-checking pins this e-mail to review in a later date. Meanwhile, site.com asks Newfangled to go ahead and transition their old site to the new site.

Keep in mind, site.com will remain the same, but the product page is now located at http://www.site.com/products

Brian opens up his e-mail, and clicks on the link http://www.site.com/product.asp to check out his friends recommendation.

Great! The page doesn’t exist. Brian leaves the site, then berates his friend for giving him a link to the search page.

ASSUME a 301 redirect was set up, what would happen!?

*Sometime in the past, future? Fine Fine.. sometime before the site goes live on Newfangled’s staging server*

The admins at site.com take the advice of the “oh-so-wise words of Newfangled employees” in creating 301 redirects from their old site to the new one.

The admins visit the CMS, and pull down the Do Stuff Menu.

They then click on “Add 301 Redirect”

For original URL, they fill in the fields with the relative URL of the products page. (relative URL, is everything after site.com)

So, for Original URL, they put in the value /products.asp

The team gets together, and reviews the site Newfangled put together for them. Newfangled has placed the products page at the following location, http://www.site.com/products

Therefore, the Admins place /products within Redirect URL.

.... *skip ahead to the future where Brian opened his e-mail*

Brian clicks on the link http://www.site.com/product.asp... he is then redirected to http://www.site.com/products and sees the AWESOME product his friend suggested to him.

Tags: 301_redirects setting_up_301_redirects 301_redirect_CMS

Advanced Segmentation for Google Analytics - the why without the how

May 6, 2009 at 12:00 pm by Brian Chiou

This is purely an informational post about why you, the site administrator, should begin looking into advanced segmentation, a free and powerful tool that is offered to us lucky Google Analytics tinkerers. And how large fortune 100 retail companies who sell things on a day-to-day basis WISH they had the luxury we do with being able to segment our day-to-day customer traffic.

Retail stores have entire departments allocated to watching and evaluating metrics that come streaming in from their multitude of stores. The one chain in particular is Best Buy.

A good friend of mine recently got hired as a lead developer at Best Buy's corporate office, his one full-time year long job is to program new software that outputs all relevant metrics for a particular store. I sat there thinking, where do they get these metrics from?

Did you know, when you walk through the door of a Best Buy store a trigger goes off letting the store know that +1 person has entered the store. So, on any given day they know the total amount of visits to that store. Sound familiar? It should :

What else do they know? Best Buy knows how many items and what items were purchased in a day. Great! What does that have to do with segmentation within Google Analytics? What does this have to do with my website? Well, if we think of each call-to-action and each navigation item on your website as a product category within a retail store, you’ll get a better sense of this analogy. Talking to a sales representative can be considered visiting a FAQ, search, or even a product details page, Checkout can be considered making a purchase, etc. Each page visit is similar to Best Buy being able to know how many people have visited a specific area of the store. However, they have yet to gather that metric. But, what they can gather is the amount of purchases made from that section which gives them somewhat of an idea of how many people visited that area on a given day. (hardly accurate) For instance, they set up a fancy demo of a Nintendo Wii and they noticed a spike of Nintendo Wii purchases. What could you imply from that?

*each page visit is similar to Best Buy being able to know how many people have visited a specific area of the store.

Now that we have made a correlation between a retail store location and a website...

Did you know that Best Buy started segmenting their customer base on May 7, 2004? That means, they created set customer segments that acknowledged the differences of purchasing habits between groups of people. They then applied this knowledge by modifying several lab stores, so that their product line was relevant to the traffic that was coming into their stores. Each lab store conversion cost the company up to $1 million dollars. Spread that across 1,000 stores and that shows how much of an investment that ONE business made towards catering to the most popular segment that visited that one store. That comes close to $1 billion dollars!

The following quote from Wikipedia (I have highlighted the key points, but the entire quote has really great information) :

“Customer Centricity is the name of a business movement centered on catering to specific customer needs and behaviors. Best Buy's concept of customer centricity means configuring its stores to serve the needs of the particular customer segments that predominate in the area of that store. Some of the ways that the Best Buy company transforms its stores for a customer segmentation, is using different types of store signage, fixtures, lighting and even uniforms. One of the things the company has done for some segments is to create a personal shopping assistant, so that a customer can call and make an appointment for their shopping trip. The company has created "lab stores" (separate from regular segmented stores) to test the area's acceptance to the theme and segment products and services. While the renovations to its stores are expensive, sometimes nearing $1 million per store, CEO & Vice Chairman Brad Anderson claims that stores that have already been transformed have doubled their growth rate versus stores that have yet to be transformed. In 2006, Best Buy continued to expand on the customer centricity operating model by opening or converting 233 U.S. Best Buy stores to the customer centricity operating model. During that same year, Best Buy operated 300 segmented stores, or 40% of the U.S. Best Buy stores.”

How did they discern segments and how did they figure out which segments frequented a specific store the most? Unfortunately, I do not know the ins-and-outs of how Best Buy figures out their customer segments, but it is most likely based off of the types of purchases people are making at these respective stores and a whole lot of additional research. I am sure if I did know their “secret formula” it would probably be some form of corporate espionage if I divulged it in this blog. So, my guess could be way off. However, one thing I am sure of : they are dumping a whole lot of money into segmentation.

*phew, imagine a stack of $1 billion dollars?

I want segments AND I want content catered to me.

So, why shouldn’t we take FULL advantage of the FREE tool Google Analytics offers? Our “retail store” not only tracks purchases, but it can also track what pages are not working. I understand if you have a couple thousand visitors a month, the data will be extremely messy. However, with segments you can isolate your customer base and find out what pages are working for your site and which pages are not. You can even isolate your bad pages, to see just the traffic visiting these bad pages and what is happening to these users.

Based off of these customer segments, you can begin to mold your content into something more relevant. Doubling your websites effectiveness should make most people happy, so - why not follow what Best Buy did and find out what type of visitors you have and what pages THEY like. Based off of that information, you can find out which pages are not being utilized and try to apply elements of the pages they like to improve the traffic flow of the “bad pages”.

I could go through many types of segments that I would consider using, but it really depends on what type of business you own and your prioritization of value on your website. Like Best Buy, we want to avoid visits without purchases or in our case visits that result in a bounce.

*We're lucky. Imagine if only 80% of the people who visited Best Buy did not make a purchase. They would be right there, next to Circuit City.

One example of a segment that I find very effective

*Please note that All Visits : 3.97 is taking into consideration the 9.56 pages/visit for the one segment I have set up. Meaning, there are plenty below 3.97 that is pulling site average down.

I created a segment that allows us to know the actions of just the customers coming from a search engine who are NOT searching for our company name (consider that a referral vs. a true organic result) and time on site > 1 minute. Meaning, this user did not stumble across our site on accident. These people are viewing this site and attempting to digest the content.

My next step? Attempting to find out what worked for these people. What page did they land on? Where did they exit?

Advanced Segmentation is an extremely powerful tool. However, its effectiveness depends on you.

Note : Unlike Filters, Segmentation applies to HISTORICAL data and does not prevent incoming data from being stored. You can switch Segments on and off whenever you need to bring up “all” the results.

Tags: why_segmentation advanced_segmentation google_analytics_segmentation

How fast are we advancing?

March 30, 2009 at 10:36 pm by Brian Chiou

Excellent video I came across. It really makes you wonder how we ever got to where we are so quickly. If this video interests you, please also read Chris's blog about Digital Conservation which also has some eye-popping statistics.

Tags:

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