Practical Analytics by DigiKnow

Events - tracking in-page interactions

When a visitor comes to your site, data is collected in many ways: visitor data via the browser header and IP address, click data from pages loading and campaign data from URL parameters, but what about actions that happen within a page?  That is where “events” come in.  An event is an in-page action that normally would not be tracked by analytics, but through custom code, they can be captured, measured and analyzed.

Google Analytics events allow for in-page actions to be tracked and monitored without affecting the overall page view count of the website. Unlike page views, events can be organized by three groupings: category, action and label. For purposes here, the fourth variable, value, is not being used. Events called through JavaScript code and can be part of a link, or other page actions.

A full guide to Google Analytics Events implementation can be found at: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html, but I wanted to run through some uses that I’ve found beneficial for our clients.

Content Rotators

More and more sites are including a large home page element that slides through images or news stories.  While traditional page view data can show you which image/link was the most popular, having this data nicely contained in an event is valuable, especially when you want to look at the data quickly.  Under traditional page view tracking, you would look at the traffic leaving the home page and see which pages were the most popular.  Generally you wouldn’t have any record of exactly which pages these were or which position they were in the rotator.  You could add in custom parameters like page.html?pos=1 for the first position in the rotator, but that makes your Content report messy with too many versions of a page.  This tracking could be done in Flash or in AJAX/HTML.

Video Playback

Another in-page interaction that is handy to track is video playback.  To keep from overwhelming the system with data, I’d recommend just tracking the video start and if the user reaches the end.  If you are using a standard player, you may or may not be able to add in that tracking, but some existing players (like Flowplayer) do allow for GA tracking.

AJAX content

Tracking usage of AJAX applications or interfaces fits ideally with events.  When interacting with an AJAX app, the page rarely refreshes, so traditional page view tracking doesn’t help.  Using events for adding/removing, filtering results, etc. is a great use of this tool.  In Google Analytics, there are some cases within AJAX where you want to “force” a page view to be logged, mostly for interactions that you want to be part of a Goal.

Filtered Search

A specific case of the AJAX-type tracking is a filtered search.  For search results that allow you to pick categories or ranges (say t-shirts under $20) and instantly update your keyword search results to those groups, using events to track the selection of “t-shirts” and “under $20” is very powerful.  This data then lets you see which criteria are the most popular and which drive sales or conversions.

Product Image Selection

For sites with a product catalog displaying multiple images per product, using event tracking can let you see which images are the most popular.  Knowing what is popular can inform your decisions on future photo selection or even content ordering.

 

Hopefully this has provided a nice overview of events.  In a future post, I’ll dive into the details of how to setup these events in Google Analytics.

Book Review: Web Analytics 2.0

Although it is only January 6th, I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence, that the analytics book of the year is Avinash Kaushik’s new book Web Analytics 2.0.  As a follow up to his first book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, I think Avinash out did himself with this book.  If you don’t know of Avinash Kaushik, among other things, he’s Google’s Analytics Evangelist and his blog, Occam’s Razor, is a great resource for anyone interested in analytics.

Web Analytics 2.0 is a nice balance of theory and practical tips, but more importantly, provides guidance for readers with a wide range of skill and experience.  Over the 14 chapters of the book, Kaushik covers almost every aspect of web analytics, from competitive analytics to optimization, even guides for picking a solution vendor and starting a career in the industry. 

By far my favorite part of the book was Chapter 3 (“The Awesome World of Clickstream Analysis: Metrics”).  This one chapter should used as a primer for anyone thinking about buying, selling, or using web analytics.  In the chapter Avinash covers all the basics including his eight standard metrics (visits, visitors, time on page, time on site, bounce rate, exit rate, conversion rate, and engagement) and also delves into how to define a great metric.  If every website owner, marketer and developer read this, the world might just be a better place. [Note to Avinash/Wiley Publishing: release Chapter 3 as a inexpensive white paper/eBook]

Overall the book is an easy read for anyone interested.  Avinash’s causal writing style and frequent examples makes the text engaging and entertaining.  For the most part, you can dive into any area of the book without missing too much context from the rest of the book.  Of course I recommend reading the whole thing, but even if you just read one chapter, say on social measurement, you’ll still get a lot out of it.

Included with the book is a CD-ROM containing presentations, audio/video, white papers and what maybe the best Easter-egg on the disk, an Excel spreadsheet with the 70 URLs reference in the book.  Although the book has handy short URLs for every site referenced (like http://sn.im/gifors) having them all in one place is extremely useful.  I’m tempted to publish them here, but that might violate copyright and I don’t want the folks at Wiley hunting me down.

If you are reading this blog, I 100% recommend buying this book.  On top of being a well-written resource, all of the profits from this book (and his previous one) go to two charities: The Smile Train and The Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation.  Get the book and start the new year off right with a quick education on the in’s and out’s of web analytics.

Website Optimization

Today, I want to spend a little time on what for some might be “the basics”, but is an often overlooked and always important part of analytics.  Generally when people think of analytics, they think of two things: reports or insights.  I’d like to place a third item on that list today: optimization.  While technically this is just another way to get insights, it is different enough that I think it deserves it’s own separate attention (and this blog post!). 

Website Optimization is the practice of letting the site visitors choose which version of a page or page element is best.  This isn’t by voting, but my their unbiased actions.  Website optimization comes in two basic forms: A/B testing and Multivariate testing.  In A/B testing you generally create two entire pages and randomly show one or the other to each visitor as they come to the site.  One design may have a big product photo and the other may have a chart showing how the product delivers value.  In A/B testing, the winner is determined by seeing which of these two designs produces more sales, leads or whatever other conversion you might have.

The second major optimization testing practice is multivariate testing.  In this scenario, individual elements within a single page are changed randomly.  Generally this is two or more elements, such as a headline, body text, photo/image, call-to-action or really anything else.  The chart on the right shows two elements (star and circle) being varied based on color, position and inclusion.  These test are more complicated to setup and also require a great deal more traffic to determine a winner. Fortunately tools like Google Website Optimizer or Ominture’s Test & Target take a lot of the leg-work out of configuring these tests.

Here are a few examples of where DigiKnow has used this recently, and the results we achieved.

Case #1

A manufacturer had been using their website to generate leads for their direct-sales product.  Over some time, they had continued to see their conversion rates from AdWords and other sources heading in the wrong direction.  The DigiKnow analytics team was brought in to review their process and help identify areas that could be improved.  After reviewing their Google Analytics and overall configuration, we recommended using Google Website Optimizer targeted at the paid search traffic.  Although we considered many optimization elements on the site, because of the desired turn around for answers and the volume of traffic running through the test, we limited the number of variables in each experiment.  In some cases we optimized headlines, in others image variations and on still others call-to-action/response mechanisms.

The result: over the course of 6 months, their paid search conversion rate was up 60% over the low and in certain cases, was even much higher.   The best example within their test set was in testing a customer testimonial against a product chart image, the winning configuration returned nearly twice the site average. This is just one example of the quick wins that were derived from this program.

Case #2

My second case is a little different from the first one in that we didn’t use an off-the-shelf optimizer tool.  Our client in this case had a small product information (not sales) website and wanted some insights into which products were the most popular.  When we reviewed their analytics, we weren’t too surprised when the popularity of the products matched the order of the products within the navigation.  The most popular item was first on the list, second most popular was second, etc. We recommended that we randomize the product order (within two product categories) to determine the true popularity.  Because the navigation appeared in three separate places on the site, we ended up implementing custom programming to handle the randomization, then used Google Analytics to assess the data.

The results: As expected, we found that in the first product group, the popularity of the products was directly dependant on their order in the list.  The first product got the most traffic, the second next, and the third the least.  What was more interesting was that in the second group (always listed after the first) this was not the case.  After people looked past the first group, they were just as likely to click the fourth link as the seventh (4 products in group #2).  We also looked at which individual products performed above or below the mean for their position and were able to determine which were truly most popular.  One interesting insight from this was a product in Group #2 that was below average in most positions, was actually the most popular in the last position.  Somehow the product image must have drawn the eye most when it was at the end of the list. 

To further this experiment, we are updating the product images of the underperforming products to see if we can increase their appeal relative to the other products or if they are ultimately just less interesting overall.

 

These are just two examples of how optimization can quickly answer some of the assumptions that companies (and agencies) make when we are building websites. 

Optimization lets you know what works, rather than just guessing.

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.