by Joe Whyte

On an old episode of Penn & Teller, they addressed numbers, stating at one point, “Numbers don’t lie; the people who use them do.” This couldn’t be more true when interpreting web analytic data. My last post talked about errors matching PPC data with your analytics. This lesson concerns common misinterpretations of data within Google Analytics.

When I take on a new contract, I typically sit down with my client and talk with them about what useful data they need to see. Out of this discussion comes a custom report for analytics data. Typically, I have found that sending over a scheduled Google Analytics report is confusing to executives, since many do not understand it. Often it’s easier to simplify it based on what they’ve identified as their “useful data.”

I assume other people in the industry do this from time to time. When you are reporting daily and weekly numbers, it is easy to misinterpret data. Below are two examples of how this can happen.

New & repeat visitors
If you came to my site for the first time today, left, and then came back again in the same day, you would count as a new visit and a repeat visit. However, the total number of visits would only be one. In this case, if you added new plus repeat visitors together, this is not going to be an accurate total.

Unique visitors summed daily
When you work in an office environment, sometimes executives will look for daily reporting and then at the end of the week ask for a summary of performance. If you are using Excel to track unique visitors per day, you may wind up reporting inaccurate data. A great example of this is if you post a page that gets 2,000 unique visitors on Monday and the SAME visitors return each consecutive weekday — the total of unique visitors for the week would still be 2,000, NOT 10,000.

Be sure you understand the fundamental differences here to ensure you don’t fall into the trap of critical data misinterpretation on your job. In my next post, I will explore the steps you need to take in order to limit data misinterpretation and improve your web analytics setup to show you the most accurate numbers you can get.

By Chris Crum

Help Management Understand the Importance

You may recall Feras Alhlou, who chatted with WebProNews earlier this year after contributing a guest post to Google’s Analytics Blog about using advanced segments in Google Analytics. Alhlou is the president of E-Nor, and he presented at an analytics session at SES this week.

 Alhlou says there is a quote from Albert Einstein that C-level executives, marketing managers and analysts should keep in mind when it comes to establishing and nurturing a web analytics culture in their organizations. That quote is:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and, not everything that counts can be counted.”

With that in mind, Alhlou provides the following seven practical tips:

1. One size fits none

You need to understand and identify what is important to the organization. Time, money, and resources are limited, so you must use them wisely.

2.Know your audience

Don’t try to impress your boss with a radar map or a 5-dimentional motion chart. The following is an example of what not to start off with, unless your management is very “visually inclined.”

3. Help your audience understand

Try to help your audience understand the basics. Start off with some common web metrics, and then move into task completion/conversion concepts.

4. Plan to integrate cost data

This refers to click spend, banner ad costs, etc. Have a model for ROI (return-on-investment) calculations.

5. Don’t forget non-web Leads

Your site visitors are not all the same. Some of would buy online or submit a form online, while some just like to call and speak with someone. Bring phone data into the mix.

6. A CRM system

For lead generation sites, a CRM system is must. Classify your leads into categories (high quality leads, junk leads, etc.) and bring this insight back into your campaign conversion and ROI calculations. It’s one thing to get 10 leads @ $1000 from campaign A, it is a totally different picture when 7 of these leads are junk!

7. Tie it all together

Tie it all together into business metrics that C-levels and business owners/managers can relate to. At the end of the day, it is not about visits, pageviews, conversions! It is about revenue and net profits!

I would like to thank Feras Alhlou for sharing these tips with WebProNews readers. There’s no question that analytics can make a great impact on marketing, and if you work in a company that isn’t doing all it should be in this department, these are some good tips to help change that.

Analytics Software: Measuring Up
Internet professionals often turn to analytics software as the last piece of their Web success puzzle. Analytics software offers the ability to measure, collect and analyze website data for the purpose of understanding consumer use and intent. Web analytics is often broken down into on-site and off-site — an important distinction. The former measures website visitors’ activity, while off-site analytics refers to measurement and analysis of a potential audience as determined by visibility and buzz happening across the Web. On-site Web analytics is the focus herein.

Website analytics enables Internet professionals to formally dissect visitor activity — as they arrive on a site, how they move through a site, and where and when they leave the site. From tracking hits, page views and visits to determining new versus returning visitors, bounce rate and referral tracking, analytics software provides insights into a Web-based enterprise and becomes a valuable asset for any organization looking to understand potential roadblocks and opportunities. Being able to understand the psychology of consumers’ interactions offers an opportunity to exceed the status quo.

Log-file analyzers were the choice-du-jour many years ago, but as page tagging increased, so has the number of vendors in the market. Log-file analysis aids in reading Web server records and all its transactions, while page tagging uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered. Both models collect data that is presented in Web traffic reports. There are advantages to each of the models, but on today’s Web, most providers focus on the page-tagging model.

There are many popular vendors in the space outside Google Analytics that deserve attention. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst product and Lyris’ ClickTrack solution are two options. Omniture has recently released many tools to measure Web traffic and the social effect of participation in consumer generated media. For example, Omniture’s App Measurement for Facebook (part of its SiteCatalyst solutions) was released in early June 2009. ”With more than 200 million active users, marketers are intrigued by the potential of Facebook to help them connect with consumers in personalized and meaningful ways,” says Brett Error, CTO and executive vice president of products for Omniture. “Yet the relatively young phenomenon of social media has forced marketers to rely on experimentation to tap into that potential.” When an analytics solution can deliver actionable insight into social applications, you can bet your website that marketers will be able to develop data-driven social media marketing strategies that support and positively affect efforts across other online channels.

Analytics solutions are much like life — you get out of it what you put into it. Even if you don’t invest in robust marketing analytics solutions like Omniture or Lyris, consider another product and use the insights it can provide within every business decision. Other noteworthy providers in the space include BLVD Status (free) that offers an excellent suite of features including RSS and form conversion tracking as well as a WordPress plugin. Woopra is a unique option because it is available as a desktop version, but also provides live tracking and Web statistics.

Let’s face it. The Web analytics process can quickly turn complex and frustrating. But a recent post at Marketing Jive suggests it doesn’t have to be that way—at least for organic search. “There are a number of simple ways to filter through the numbers each month when you are measuring the success of your natural search campaigns,” MJ says. Try taking these straightforward steps:

• Compare current-month data to previous-month data. This can provide a quick snapshot of how your site is doing from an organic-search perspective.
• Examine past-quarter data. These types of comparisons (1Q09 to 4Q08; 1Q09 to 1Q08) may provide greater insight than the normal month-to-month comparisons.
• Compare Year-over-Year (YOY) data. Doing YOY comparisons by month will bring to light any emerging trends your site is experiencing, whereas a full YOY comparison can highlight the longer-term impact of a new product or service.
• Review Year-to-Date (YTD) data to identify interesting and meaningful trends that are more recent.
• Look for discrepancies within trends. Identifying a weird spike or unlikely dip can help you adjust your online efforts.
• Pick a favorite metric, and do spot checks. Bounce rates for key pages, for instance, are a search stat that all marketers may not be tracking regularly.

The Po!nt: Relax and simplify. By identifying and monitoring simple but key metrics like these, you may carve out a more rewarding analytics process for yourself.

Source: Marketing Jive.

What are your most popular pages? Where does most of your traffic come from? Do you know? Do you know how you can find out? Keep reading to learn how you can discover your web site statistics, very useful information to know for just about anything you want to do with your site.

These are the questions every web master must face — at least, they must face it if they want to truly optimize their Web pages to gain more traffic from the search engines. If you don’t know why traffic is visiting your pages, how can you take advantage of everything they like about your site?

You should always know which pieces of content are the most popular, which pages are the most highly-visited and how to track where your visitors are coming from when they arrive. It’s time to learn more about Web site statistics…and everything they can tell you about your Web pages. 

Web Counters 

Lots of pages use Web counters to display the amount of hits (visitors) a single page has received over time. Sites which offer free Web pages often include counters free of charge; simply add the code or click the function to include the feature on your site. Other Web sites offer free codes that anyone can use to add a simple counter to their pages. Simply cut and paste the code and you’re ready to go. 

If you want to track how many times traffic has accessed a single page, you can easily make use of a free Web counter. But if you want to know how long your traffic is lingering on that page, how many visitors you get per week and how many first-time users are coming to your site, you’re going to need more than a simple Web counter. You need something that can provide you with in-depth, comprehensive Web site statistics. 

Google Analytics offers a very full service for those interested in Web site statistics. Google, being very keyword-focused, offers statistics which are also keyword-focused to help you achieve the best in site optimization. Google even provides a Web site optimizer which helps you decide which designs, titles and graphics to use to make your pages highly pleasing to traffic. Google’s Analytics is a free service for those who sign up with Google. All you need is an email address, and you’re ready to get started.

So far, the defacto standard in free analytics software installed on most websites to capture visitor behavior has been Google Analytics. I currently have it uninstalled on my web sites and have been not so quite happy with the data it produces about visitors, traffic sources, content, etc.

However, it seems Yahoo! is now joining in on the game and it could make Google run for it’s money! I previously wrote about Microsoft’s try at web site analytics, Microsoft Gatineau, which was pretty much a complete failure since no one really uses it at all. I also wrote about Clicky and Piwik, two more free web analytics and free web stats programs.

While browsing the new Yahoo Web Analytics website, I came across a couple of cool features that would make me want to use it in addition to Google Analytics.

The first thing that struck out at me was the word “real-time”. Apparently, you will be able to see detailed reports about visitors, traffic, etc within a few minutes of delay. Now to me, a “few minutes delay” is not really real-time, but I guess they mean you don’t have to wait a day before seeing updated data.

Google Analytics could also be considered “real-time” since it’s data is only delayed by 15  mins or so. What seems to make Yahoo! Analytics standout is the custom reports you can create.

From what’s written on the site, it seems like you can create reports similar to creating pivot tables in Excel! Now that would be cool! It has features like drag and drop data filters, custom report wizards, and a segmentation selector.

The custom reports also seem to be way more advanced than Google Analytics. For example, according to the site, you can add categories to the pre-defined reports so that the reports match the way your business is organized.

Also, you can use custom fields, so that if you have a travel website, for example, you can track according to travel destination, price range, ticket type, or length of stay. That’s pretty useful!

Of course, if has a customize dashboard where you can add or remove the metrics that matter most to your website.

Currently, Yahoo Web Analytics is only available to Index Tools customers (who they bought) and Yahoo! Small Business customers. Eventually over the course of the next few months, they will be opening it to more customers, so make sure to sign up to receive updates. Enjoy!