So you’ve built your killer website with great content and you’re getting some search rankings for your targeted keywords, but if you don’t have web analytics installed, you’re only really guessing.  Analytics are the best way to measure your traffic, from where people are coming from to where they’re going to, but they can be a little daunting at first.  Today, we’ll go over some of the basics of web analytics.

Installing web analytics

There are different types of web analytic software available, from free versions (like Google Analytics) to paid versions (like Omniture), but nearly all analytics software share one thing in common: tagging.  The first step to any analytics implementation will involve tagging your webpages with some form of script (usually JavaScript), and it can be simple or complex, depending on what you want to track, and how deep you want to understand your traffic.

Terminology

There are quite a number of elements to analytics, and the terminology can be a little daunting at first, but once you start to understand the subtle nuances, it makes a lot more sense.

Hits VS Visits

Once upon a time in the days of hit counters, web traffic was measured by “hits”, a hit to the webserver.  Often, websites would install a “hit counter” that usually lived on the bottom of the page.  Hits were not an accurate measure of traffic, as they could involve graphics, java applet, html file, etc.  So, if a site had 79 small graphics on the page, every visitor to the site registered as 80 hits on the server (79 graphics plus the html file).  80,000 hits could translate to just 1,000 visitors, not to mention the number of times the page was reloaded or visits from web spiders or other such bots.  Visits, is a more accurate measurement of website visits, as it often involves logging a single IP address, not multiple files being loaded.  To summarize, hits are a thing of the past.

Vists VS Visitors

Although they appear similar, Visits have a slightly different meaning than Visitors.  Simply put, Visitors are the measurement of users who visit the site, while the “visits” are the measurement of each individual visit.  Visitors can be categorized as “New” or “Returning”.  So, for example, a new user visits the site on Monday, during that visit they will be tracked as a New Visitor.  When they return on Tuesday, that during that visit they will be tracked as a Returning Visitor. It can be a little confusing, but the differentiation is important.

Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate is a measurement of users who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continuing on through your site.  A visitor can bounce by clicking a link to a different page, clicking the BACK button, closing the tab or window, typing in a new url, etc.  In simple terms, the bounce rate represents the number of users who didn’t like what they saw on whatever landing page they arrived at your site to.  This is different than an “exit rate”, which is the percent of users who exit from a page after navigating through a site.

Goals

More robust analytics packages will allow a user to set up what is known as “Goals”.  Goals are simply a path or funnel that you want to track how users navigate through.  For example, you have a receipt tracking subscription service that has three pages for the sign-up process: signup.html, payment.html, and success.html.  A goal will track all the users who navigate through these pages, and will tell you who did and didn’t complete the goal, along with other useful data like what page they navigated away to, the exit rates, etc.  This is especially useful for improving your sales pages or Pay-per-click campaigns.

Google Analytics is a powerful, and free, analytics tool, but in many ways very limited out-of-the-box.  Often, I find myself wanting to get a better understanding of how users find a website, and referral URLs are a good way to do that.  So, if you’ve ever seen a referral come up in Google Analytics and thought “I wish I had the full string”, here’s a filter you can add to do just that!

How To Get A Full Referral URL In Google Analytics

First, you need to add an advanced filter to your profile.  To do this, you need to go to the “Filter Manager” on the bottom right corner of your “Analytics Settings” page:

This will show you all of your current filters for your website profiles.  To add a new filter, simply click “Add Filter” in the top right hand corner:

Here is where the fun begins!  What we’re going to do now is build a filter that catches all of the referring URLs (query strings and all) and drop it into the often unused “User Defined” report.  Keep in mind, if you are using custom User variables, you may want to make a copy of your current profile to apply this filter to, as it will overwrite any current reports!

So, first off, you’ll want to name your filter in the “Filter Name:” field.  I used “Full Referral URL”.  Then, in the “Filter Type” click the “Custom Filter” radio button.  At the very bottom of the filter types is a radio button that says “Advanced”.  Choose this one.  Below these radio buttons, you will see “Field A -> Extract A”, a dropdown menu and an empty field.  Here, you want to choose “Referral” from the dropdown menu, and you want to add (.*) to the field.  (.*) is a regular expression term that is a wildcard, and will capture everything after the Referral URL (Google Analytics truncates this by default).

Leave the “Field B -> Extract B” blank.  We’re not constructing two fields here.. just one.  Next, our filter requires an output type.  So, in the dropdown menu next to “Output To -> Constructor” choose “User Defined” and add $A1 to the empty field.  What this does is takes the Field A extraction we just did and assigns it to the “User Defined” report.  All that’s left is to require Field A and Override Output Field in the options below the constructors.  When you are done, the filter should look as follows:

Last step is to assign this filter to an available profile, then wait…

After Google has updated your analytics data (I’d recommend waiting 24hrs), you can go to Vistors, and under the User Defined report, you’ll find a report that outputs the full referral URL.  It’ll look something like this:

This report is a quick and handy way to find out the exact links users are finding your site with!

For expert consultation, business intelligence and analytics installation, contact Thirdi!

It took a little longer than some people were hoping, but a new day has finally dawned. A shiny, new Google Analytics Export API is now publicly available for all Analytics users. It’s being called a beta but really, if you’ve been eagerly waiting for this for ages, who cares? The important thing is that it’s available now, and already has a couple of sexy (or at least very handy and practical) apps ready to make your Analytics life easier and more awesome.

According to an official blog post from Nick Mihailovski and the Google Analytics team, “The Data Export API is easy to use and provides read-only access to all your Analytics data. Any data that’s available through the standard Analytics web interface is available through the API…This is the same API Protocol for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster tools.”

Those sexy/handy/practical apps I mentioned? The first one is this Android Application from Actual Metrics that lets you access Google Analytics from your phone. Or if you’d prefer to leave your work at home, on your desktop, you can access Analytics from your desktop.

The post from Mihailovski and the team recommends the following three things to start developing on top of the Google Analytics API:

1) Go to the developer site at Google Code to find sample code, a developer guide, FAQ and the complete API reference.

2) Sign up for the Google Analytics API Notify email group to get all the latest on feature updates, etc. They even promise to keep the e-bombarding to a minimum, and only send out important info.

3) Be the first to know everything by joining the Google Analytics APIs Group.