I run a monthly report which tracks session views by region, most popular knowledge articles, deflection rates, most popular product pages, software download stats, etc.
We have a new ELT member who is keen to get into the numbers around our contact centre. As I only look after the support site I need only concern myself with putting together a report which outlines what I feel will be useful information around web traffic. I want the report to be brief, and to highlight 4-5 key metrics.
Please can I have some suggestions for data you think would be useful given the target audience?
So far I am considering:
Deflection rates
Bounce rates.
Time on page
Most popular software downloads.
Global session views year to date.
Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks!
I think those metrics are great. Ideally, the value in the data comes from slicing your metrics with a dimension, ie pivoting. For example, bounce rate as an average means little whereas bounce rate by Content Group or Device Category would be more interesting.
Speaking of Device Category, consider completely isolating the metrics for Mobile vs Desktop+Tablet. Those experiences are so drastically different you'd be doing a disservice to average those metrics together.
Lastly, I'd say this new ETL member should get their own access to GA and learn how to pull the data need. GA now offers machine learning insights that quickly surface relevant drivers in metrics; a static approach to KPI reporting is becoming increasingly obsolete.
I'm currently researching a solution to monitor the performance of specific sections of a page. For example, you have a simple page with 2 images with links to other pages. You are driving lots of traffic to this page and you are experimenting with different contents on that page.
6 months after, you want to see which section of the page performed better with what kind of specific imges.
Let's imagine you require a report that should tell you the following: on average, the first spot performs better, but last week the image was bad and that's why you had less conversion from that spot.
I'd like to use such a system on a high-traffic homepage of an eCommerce website, in order to better monitor the usage of the selling spots.
I was thinking to use Google Analytics events with a positioning scheme (splitting the website in columns and rows, giving to each cell an identification ID such as a1 for column a, row 1) and keeping a local datawarehouse of creatives (images, promotions etc.), but apparently, after 10.000.000 hits per month, Analytics is recommending the premium version which is quite pricey (12k USD per month, 1 year upfront payment).
I was thinking about PIWIK as an alternative, but there is no event tracking there - or am I missing anything?
Looking forward to hearing your input on this matter.
You're better off with a provider like Optimizely for this use case. Still gonna be expensive, but it'll more quickly get you the information you need to make decisions.
We normally use multi variation tests or A/B tests to measure the success of user interfaces. Google Analytics have this feature and it is free.
This links maybe useful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDWTMOC_Dp4
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?hl=en
We have been asked to increase the performance of a clients site search. Before we start we would like to set benchmarks. I have asked the client if they are comfortable with enabling unanimous data sharing so we have access to industry benchmarks as I don't have control over this setting: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1011397 however it sounds like things have changed in the google analytics camp and these reports are only available via a newsletter now? Is this true?
Also, will these reports give me industry standards to compare my clients current search performance against? Or is there another service that has these baseline standards available?
Here's an example of the data we are interested in. This is our clients current search performance:
Visits with Search: 772
Total Unique Searches: 1,093
Results Page Views/Search: 1.36
% Search Exits: 56.45%
% Search Refinements: 24.78%
Time after Search: 00:01:40
Search Depth: 0.59
I work at large ecommerce site, and I asked our AdWords rep about this, having recently wanted access to this kind of data myself.
He said that benchmarking was removed 3/15/11, at which point they were experimenting with a monthly newsletter format to deliver the same kind of data.
From what I've seen they may have done one newsletter before (quietly) retiring it completely. I never saw the newsletter, but I think I remember reading reports of people who did receive one.
Disappointing to know they had access to all that data, but pulled the plug on the program. I wonder if they killed it due to data integrity concerns--they can't guarantee correct tracking-code installations on all these sites opting in, so what is the data worth if it's of questionable quality. iono... just a total guess.
We used to use coremetrics here, and they had an opt-in benchmarking program. So if you know any other webmasters using Coremetrics, you could probably ask them to pull some benchmarking info.
We were able to get some benchmarking data from fireclick.com, but none of it (that I've seen anyways) covers on-site search. Mainly just top line metrics. :-/
So the search for benchmark data continues...
It means I can't see traffic i got today. Also is it only specific to API or Overall Analytics System?
The reason Google recommends this is because for most of the data, there is about a 24 hour delay before you see it in reports or have it available for pulling with the API. The extra 24 hours on top of that is a buffer for insurance.
So if you look at a report or pull data with the API from like 12 hours ago, and then wait an hour or whatever and pull the data with same ranges/metrics/etc... the numbers won't match up, because by then, more data will have become available. But it's data that was already there (people didn't take a time machine into the past and visit your site, obviously)...it was just not yet processed and available for looking at through the report/API.
A delay in data for reports (or through an API) is not unique to GA. Different reporting tools have different "lags" in data availability, depending on how their databases are setup, how they process the data, how much you are paying for the services, etc... for instance (these are the 4 major tools I've used):
Yahoo Web Analytics data is more or less real-time
Adobe/Omniture SiteCatalyst is..they say real-time but in practice I've seen it take anywhere from instant to an hour
WebTrends has a 24 hour delay
GA has a 24 hour delay
But this isn't as big a deal as you might think. Most companies look at reports by the week, month, quarter, year, so really the delay isn't a problem for the people that matter. The only people that really feel it are the code implementers who have to sit there and wait to see data come in when they are trying to QA an implementation or debug when there is a potential problem.
But even then there are a lot of tools out there that let you see in real-time what is physically being sent to the tool (like firebug, charles proxy, etc...), which greatly helps in QAing. It doesn't really help as far as QAing stuff that requires settings/alterations within the tool's interface, but still, it's a big help.
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I'm trying to determine why an enterprise wouldn't want to use Google Analytics.
Here are the main reasons I've seen mentioned:
Inability to track clients that have Javascript disabled.
Lack of ownership of the statistics - Google owns the data.
Most of the web clients with Javascript disabled will probably be bots/spiders. This data is interesting, but probably not very useful.
As for the ownership issue, this is a bit paranoid IMO.
What am I missing here? When is Google Analytics not good enough?
Here are my findings from additional research:
Google Analytics is limited to 5 million page views per month - source
If a web site generates more than 5 million pageviews per month it will need linked to an active AdWords account to avoid interruption of service.
Lack of / slow technical support
All Google support is handled through email and response times can take a week or more. Commercial analytics products often have much faster & personalized support.
Inability to track files (PDF's, Images, etc.)
GA relies on Javascript and files lack the ability to execute Javascript. The workaround to this problem is to tag the link, but this won't track requests that go directly to the file.
Limited ability to customize
This is a selling point that I see pushed by commercial analytics tools (WebTrends). However it's never explained what customizations are denied by GA but allowed by WebTrends.
The Google Analytics EULA does not allow you to track individual users by identifying them. So if you wanted to add a custom variable for username to track how many times each user logs in, then you would be in a gray zone if not outright violating the EULA.
I use Google Analytics on about 10 sites right now and it's a great tool. In addition to all the analytics stats, you can tie it in with AdSense and it becomes a marketing/revenue tool and not just "wow look at all these cool user stats". If there was a way to track by user ID in certain circumstances (e.g. if user's agreed to it, or if they work for the company that owns the site) then I would have no issues.
Besides, it's free and all you have to do is add JavaScript to the files, so give it a try and see what you think after a few months.
One reason that was, surprisingly, not posted:
timing / speed of reaction
It takes at least 4 hours (up to 24) for GA to update your data.
This is ok for me personally in most of the cases, but when reacting fast is crucial (news sites, one-off events, etc.) you may want to employ some other solution (Mint comes to mind, but it's not the only one out there of course).
Thought I'd add my two pence worth to this thread, as this a topic close to my heart and one I've debated with colleagues for years. We've used webtrends in house for as long as i can remember, back to version 4 of the log analyzer (how different things were back then!). Since Google Analytics came along, we've started to come under increasing pressure from certain parts of our business to switch, as 'it does everything we need form an analytics tool'
Well, true in many senses it does, especially these days. But I championed the integration of our CRM and web analytics tools back in 2006, and as our business isn't e-commerce (the 'conversion' happens offline, sometimes months after the visitor acquisition) we need to integrate in this way to get a true picture of campaign effectiveness, and notion of ROI.
All of this means, we need access to the raw data, need to be able to join visitor records on sessionID etc, without this access we'd be screwed. I'd love it if we could roll without it, but the current requirements mean we can't, so this alone is a HUGE reason why Google analytics is not good enough.
Over and out
For tracking desktop software or creating a whitelabel solution there are better solutions.
For white label an integration based analytics, i use MixPanel. For Desktop Software, i use Deskmetrics
Google Analytics does not work well with mobile phones. While the iPhone and the Palm may be supported, many of the existing handsets do not support the javascript that Google uses.
If you're based in the UK, then theoretically you could be breaking the Data Protection Act by using Analytics.
If information about your users (like which web pages they're looking at) goes "outside the European Economic Area" and onto Google's servers in the US, then you're breaking the DPA.
Pretty obscure, but you did ask :)
Piwik avoids the problem because you host it on your own servers.
Lack of ownership of the statistics - Google owns the data.
... As for the ownership issue, this is a
bit paranoid IMO.
One problem with it is that we can't even access the raw data. We had a use case this week where we wanted a visitor map for an executive presentation. We needed to get more flexible with how the visitor map is displayed (wanted to view the map in Google Earth plug-in). In GA, you can't. You take what they give you. You can see a map of how many visits came from each city, but you can't export a data file of cities and number of visits, to run the data through other tools. So, paranoia aside, there are significant limitations on what you can accomplish with GA.
However this is not a problem if you use Urchin, the self-hosted version of GA: you can export the data and do what you want with it. (And the exported data is richer than the web server log's, as it includes some analysis already.)
Since Piwik is open source, and pluggable, I imagine you could enhance the visitor map plug-in any way you wanted to. And export whatever data you want.
Whether this limitation affects you depends on your needs, obviously.
Update: I've now looked at the GA Data Export API, and it turns out that things you cannot do through the UI (as you can with Urchin), you can do with this API. It does look like you can export the visit data I was talking about, via a feed (although there are daily traffic caps on those requests). So sprinkle salt heavily on what I wrote above.
A couple more points that I've come across:
GA doesn't let you dig beyond full-day statistics; I would often like the ability to investigate whether a traffic dip the previous day was caused by the design update I did at 1pm or the soccer match on TV at 8pm.
GA doesn't offer a workaround for traffic spikes caused by DDoS attacks, Slashdotting etc. When I'm looking at a GA visitor graph of 2009, all I can see is the 2-million-pageview-spike on October 16th, pushing the entire rest of the year down flat against the horizontal axis of the graph. To get a meaningful graph, GA should offer the ability to trim or exclude outlying data points, or the ability to limit/bracket the graph window itself
GA doesn't have an event monitoring client (think Reinvigorate's Snoop tool)
While GA is very user-friendly, I've found it's not as granular as some of the other stats programs (or maybe I'm not looking in the right places). Before the marketing monkeys I work with began pushing GA, we were very satisfied with AWStats. The sheer scope of the data helped us on several occasions hone sites to better suit their audience. While GA is very shiny and laid out well, I personally still prefer the raw numbers like I used to get through AWStats.
Slow data processing speed - Can be as low as 15-30 mins for page views, but may be up to 48 for eCommerce
EULA is limiting in some cases
You won't own or have any control of the data. Google's engineers might use it (anonymously) for testing
Anything more complex requires customization - Downloads and such care of no issue, but there are limits
Cross domain tracking by linker is faulty at best
Visit based - Proper tools are based on Visitor level, GA works on Visit based reporting mostly
Limited number of custom vars used at one time (5)
No tech support, if you're realistic
Usually when there is a downtime notice, it's already gone
API limitations (4 dimensions and 10 metrics at one time, not all can be used together in addition to that)
I have many more, but at the end of the day it is a good tool for it's price.
From the non-technical point, I think the most important is that some enterprise has the high level data security policy. All of the data should be controlled and managed by themselves.
If you use the Google analytics,the data is stored in google's server. For some special enterprise, like insurance, financial company. The policy should be followed.
I would NOT go with server logs. In fact I have them disabled on my server. Why you ask me?
For the simple reason that everytime you hit my server that stupid logging program makes an entry in the physical log file on my HDD. So if my server gets 100,000 hits in a day that's 100,000 time a HDD write operation happens.
You think that's cool? Well it's not. It's slowing your server down, specially if the log file is huge.
Why would someone even consider doing that to their server? Specially when we're working so hard to minify javascript, css and make image files 2 KB smaller!
Please do yourself a favor don't log directly on your server.
At least Google Analytics logs it on Google's server so my server's healthier.
I wouldn't use it for any of my sites, because you're forcing the user to accept your proprietary JavaScript code in their browser, which is bad. Also, giving your data is Google is a really bad idea.
See Piwiki for something you can run yourself as in free software, eliminating both of the problems.