Practical Analytics by DigiKnow

Verifying Google Webmaster Tools on a TypePad Blog

[UPDATE] Paul commented below that I went about this the hard way.  Apparently there is a simple file upload tool in Typepad, so you just need to download the HTML file from Google (or Yahoo) and upload it through the file manager.  This makes two things apparent 1) I’m not a Typepad expert and 2) the Typepad user interface does not make this very obvious (it’s hidden under “Library”).  I assumed this feature had to exist, but since I couldn’t find it, I solved my problem as outlined below.  Maybe Typepad needs to look at THEIR analytics data to better understand usability issues.  I guess that’s a post for another day.

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Website analytics can cover a wide variety of areas including media campaigns, email marketing and SEO.  Today’s how-to is a bit of an extension on the SEO front, and for anyone using TypePad , this will hopefully be a big help.  I was surprised that I wasn’t able to find any clear instructions on how to verify a TypePad blog in Google Webmaster tools. 

If you aren’t familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, it is a bit of a under-the-hood view of your search traffic, from the Google side of things.  I’ll write more about it later, but for now, if you aren’t familiar with it, check it out.

So my challenge was to verify this blog with Google so that I could submit a site map and see how people are searching on Google for this topics related to our blog.  I’ve verified lots of sites before with Google, but usually we have direct FTP/code access, making the process very easy.

For the Practical Analytics blog, we are using a standard TypePad template, with a minor modification(the logo in the banner).  Unfortunately, the standard template doesn’t let you access the necessary meta data and TypePad doesn’t let you upload your own HTML files (these are the two ways of verifying you are who you say you are with Google).  So here’s my work around:

1. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account and add in your domain.  In this case, I added http://digiknow.typepad.com/analytics/

2. In Webmaster Tools, on the Verify screen, I selected “Upload an HTML file”. 

Download the file and keep it handy for step #6.

3. Login to TypePad and go to your blog, then the Design tab. 

4. Click on Saved (on the left navigation) and create a new advanced design.  In this case, I’m calling it “Google Verification”

5. Apply this template to your blog and go to the “Current” design information in the left navigation area.

6. Create a new index template.

For this you will need grab the file you downloaded from Google.  Then cut/paste the contents of the file into the Template Body and the file name into Output File.  I named the template “Google Verification” but you can call it anything you’d like.

7. Now if you go back to Webmaster Tools and click the Verify link, Google should see this new page and verify your account.

8. Now you can go back to TypePad and turn your old design back on completing this process.

Once you’ve verified your account, you will be able to view the searches surrounding your blog and submit a sitemap directly to Google.

Google Analytics Goal's Expansion

This week Google made another expansion in Google Analytics allowing additional goals to be created within a profile.  This is a tremendous change because previously there were only 4 goals per profile, now you can set up to 20.  Before this week, if you had 5 goals you wanted to measure, you had to setup two profiles, which caused a lot of switching between profiles and created somewhat of a nightmare in keeping the filtering all the same, etc.

So now that you have 20 goals to play with, what should you be measuring?  Here’s my top 10 list of general purpose website goals to measure (in no particular order).

1. Newsletter registration
2. Contact Us form completion
3. Quote request
4. Online order submission (for Ecommerce)
5. Long visits [time] (over X minutes)
6. Long visits [pages] (over X pages per visit)
7. Content Upload/Submission
8. Printing a page (for PDFs or Printer-friendly HTML pages)
9. Downloading a Coupon
10. Visiting a target content page (product page, employee bio, etc.)

I’ve heard this feature is not rolled out to all accounts yet, so if you don’t see these expanded goals in your account today, keep checking and I’m sure they will appear in the next week or two.

Free Analytics for Enterprise?

Earlier this month, Forrester released a study (that Google funded) reviewing the merits of free web analytics products and discussing how and were they are used in enterprise.  This study, Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics, is available free from Google and is a very interesting read.

With this study as a backdrop, I figured I’d throw in my two cents about the good and bad of various analytics services.  Let me start by saying that I definitely subscribe to Avinash Kaushik’s 10/90 Rule.  In this “rule” Avinash proposes that you should spend 10% of your analytics dollars on technology (generally software or services) and 90% on people.  I will add to that rule by saying that some times that 10% of technology also comes from your development team writing a unique query or randomization script to help test or optimize some piece of the site.

So you can get Google Analytics ( and Yahoo! Web Analytics) for free or you can invest thousands of dollars in services from Ominture, Webtrends, Coremetrics and others.  What should you do… 

Of course it depends on your situation.  If you are a one-man marketing department at a small business, free is probably fine.  If you are part of an enterprise analytics team working on a ecommerce site, paid solutions are probably the way to go.  Then there is the rest of us in the middle. 

My recommendation is to start with free.  Get your feet wet, get an understanding of what is possible to measure.  Then move on to reading a book, attending a seminar or brining in a consultant to guide you a bit.  For some, the process will end there.  For others, you may find that the limitation of free solutions are big enough frustrations or time wasters that it is worth the investment into a for-pay commercial solution.

For DigiKnow, we live in the 39% overlap in the chart above.  For many of our clients, we use Google Analytics.  For a few we use for-pay solution from Omniture or ClickTracks (now Lyris HQ Web Analytics Software [catchy huh]) solely.  For others, we use a commercial solution as a primary and free solutions to handle small projects or specific tasks.  In the end, most of our clients want to pay for the analysis and insights, and don’t care about the technology used to get us there.

 

Technorati Tags: google Analytics,omniture,webtrends,free,avinash kaushik,enterprise

Google Analytics – Profile-specific Segmentation

From what I can tell, as of today, Google Analytics has added a new feature to Advanced Segments that allows users to associate individual segments with specific profiles.  In the past I’ve talked about my scheme of naming profiles as generic or as client specific, but this eliminates that need completely.

I must say that I have been waiting for this feature for quite a while and I was thrilled when it “appeared” for me today. 

Google has provided the ability to hide your existing segments from current profiles and whenever you add a new profile, you have the option to add it to multiple profiles. 

While this improvement is great for those of us running multiple profiles (or even multiple analytics accounts), the best feature of this upgrade is the Share feature for each segment.  When you click the “Share” link, it provides you a URL that when clicked automatically creates the segment in a new Google Analytics account.  This is great for sharing segments between co-workers or with clients.  It would be great if there was a true synchronization of segments (in case there are edits), but now I’m just being greedy.

Nice job Google.