I don’t usually take much notice of Live search traffic to this blog because they usually don’t drive much if any traffic at all. But I decided to look today and noticed a few weird entries in Google Analytics. I had a bunch of referring keywords from live.com with 1 visit, 2 page views and [...]
Tracking and Web Analytics
There are many analytics packages available and my posts here relate to Google Analytics and other packages. On a daily basis I work with Smarterstats, AWstats, webalyzer, webtrends, nettracker and Google Analytics. They all have the strong and weak points, however, try not to get caught up in overanalyzing the nubmers. Looking for trends and patterns, is where web analytics is wonderful.
Posted Tuesday, November 13th, 2007.
Posted Friday, October 5th, 2007.
I was reading Bruce Clay’s September Newsletter and came across a couple of inaccuracies in Jim Sterne’s web analytics article, specifically this part:
Google won’t report on downloads of files like PDF’s, jpg’s of Flash. You want to know about server error messages? You have to look to the pay-to-play vendors.
Well Google Analytics may not give [...]
Posted Tuesday, June 19th, 2007.
Website Optimizer by Google AdWords is a multivariate testing tool, that is to say, it takes A/B testing one step further. Instead of testing 2 versions of a page, you can test multiple page elements and the various combinations.
When you create an experiment you can specify page elements that you want to test, for example, [...]
Posted Friday, May 11th, 2007.
I was looking through an overall keyword conversion report in Analytics and noticed some strange search phrases appearing. They looked like long strings of random numbers and characters. It turns out that AOL must be testing some new URL structure in the search results and changed the variable that identifies the search query. I took [...]
Posted Wednesday, April 11th, 2007.
Part 1 - Detecting http and https Mode Using Javascript
A while back I came across a scenario where a website (typically an ecommerce site) can serve part of their website in both http and https mode. These sites typically use the same template or footer include file for both browser modes. This causes a security [...]
Posted Thursday, March 15th, 2007.
If you have a dynamic website and want to set up conversion goals within Google Analytics, you may need to use regular expressions to define the goal page.
These are extremely useful because they can be used to match specific sequences of characters in a URL. They’re a huge expansion on the common wildcard characters * [...]
Posted Thursday, February 15th, 2007.
Since I wrote about tracking the full referrer in Google Analytics, I had feedback from some people saying that their content management system, forum software, etc doesn’t allow them to modify the HEAD section or BODY tag. Some other people are also hesitant to place the code in the HEAD section incase the Google Analytics [...]
