Online Marketing Blog » Web Analytics

Using Google Analytics Does not Have Negative Effects on Rankings

George — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:37:22 +0000

Will Using Google Analytics Have A Negative Effect On My Ranking? This question have been asked a several times on many search forums and people were really feared if there is something that would affect their search ranking with the use of Google Analytics. In the latest Google Analytics Blog Post, Matt Cutts has answered this query and the answer is a big no. There is no way that Google Analytics usage would affect your search engine rankings.

People have always complained that the use of Google Analytics code on their web page increases the load time of their website. This makes their website appear to be slow and since Google takes the web site speed into account while ranking a website, many webmasters were left confused. But as per Matt Cutts Google Analytics’ new asynchronous Java script code avoids the issue of load time and it makes the website more faster. None of the data from Google Analytics is taken into account for determining the search engine ranking of a particular website and it is pretty safe to use Google Analytics to track your website.

Watch the Video by Matt Cutts regarding this.

Is Google Analytics Result Influenced by System Clock?

George — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:24:54 +0000

As we all know, Google Analytics is one of the most used free web analytics software around with a lot of features. Majority of the websites uses Google Analytics software to track its traffic and other user behaviors. Google Analytics has become one of the most integral tool of every online marketing activities.

One of the major disadvantage of Google analytics is that it does not show real time traffic data and always shows a time lag of few hours. There are many other analytic tools which show real time data, but Google overcome these with the depth of its traffic data reporting and a clean user interface.

One thing I came to notice is that to some extend Google Analytics results are influenced by our System clock time. I came to sense this when I tested my Analytics account from home and my office. The system clock in my home is Indian time and when I view Google Analytics data, I get data with few hour lags but I am able to see the data of that particular date. For eg. If I am viewing Google Analytics data on 7th July, I can see the data for that date except for few time lag.

Now the system clock in my office has a difference of almost 18 hours due to the nature of my work. When I access Google Analytics from my office I see a huge difference in the time lag and even the data that I see shows a difference of 1 day when compared with the analytics data that I see from home. For eg. if I access the analytics from my office on the same day (7th July), the analytics data shows report till 6th July only. This is almost making a difference of more than 24 hours.

This means that Google Analytics is also somewhat taking the system clock time into account while showing reports. I searched on the net regarding this issue, but could not find a proper answer for the same. If anybody knows more details about this, please let me know.

Track 404 Error Pages Effectively with Google Analytics

George — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:41:01 +0000

404 Error Pages are created inorder to notify visitors that they have landed on a page which does not exist. This can happen when either the visitor have typed the wrong URL or the user have reached a broken link from an external or internal link. Like we use Google Analytics to track traffic for different pages of a website by pasting the Google Analytics code on every pages of a website, we can also track the number of visitors coming to the 404 error page.

But 404 error page views are always a concern for webmaster, since they are not aware of what the user actually typed or what they were looking for when they landed on the 404 error page. By getting all these information, a webmaster would be able to either create a new page for a particular topic that the user searched and landed on an error page or fix the broken link.

These information can be gathered to some extend by adding a small piece of code to the regular Google Analytics code. The basic steps for getting this is mentioned below.

1) Make sure that the 404 error page has Google Analytics installed.
2) Now modify the existing Google Analytics code in the 404 error page as given below.

By adding this code a virtual page view of “/404.html?page=[pagename.html?queryparameter]&from=[referrer]” is send to your account, where [pagename.html?queryparameters] represents the missing page name and referrer is the URL of the page from where the user reached the 404 error page.

3) Now got to your Google Analytics dashboard and select the Top Content tab.

4) In the Top Content report look for /404.html page. Now you can see more detailed report regarding your 404 error page traffic and there by improve your site quality.

This has worked for me and hope you can also benefit from this code.

Creating Advanced Segment for a Geographical Region with Google Analytics

George — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:34:13 +0000

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful and free web analytics tool available and is much better than many other free web analytics softwares available. Google analytics is not a hosted web analytics tool, but is just a compatible javascript code which needs to be included between the tag of an HTML page.

Google Analytics is so flexible and user friendly Internet analytics tool and comes with a variety of customized report options. In this post I would like to write about how to create an Advanced Segment for a particular geographical region with Google website analytics tool.

Consider that you have a website and have installed Google Analytics code to track the traffic details. You need to know the top landing pages or top content from the city “Kuala Lumpur”. In this case you can take the advantages of advanced segments in Google Analytics. The steps for setting up an advanced segment for a particular geographical region in this cases is given below.

1) On your Google Analytics Dashboard there is a link named “Advanced Segments” in a box named “My Customizations” on the left hand side. Click on the link named “Advanced Segments”.

2) After step 1 you will be taken to a new page and click on the link named “Create new custom segment” on the top right.

3) You can see a box named “Dimensions” on the left with several links. Click on the link named “Visitors”.

4) A new drop down will be displayed with several metrics. Drag the metric named “City” to the box named “dimension or metric” on the centre of the page.

5) Make the “Condition” as “Matches exactly”.

6) Type or select the city name “Kuala Lumpur” from the drop down menu.

7) Name the Segment as “Visits from Kuala Lumpur”.

8) Finally click the “Create Segment” button.

Now you have successfully set up Advanced Segment for the geographic location “Kuala Lumpur”. To see the segmented report go to “Content” and click on the “Top Content” link. Now you can see a section named “Advanced Segments: All Visits” above the top right of the graph. Click on the down arrow and check the box corresponding to “Visits from Kuala Lumpur” in Custom Segments and click on the Apply button.

Now the Google Analytics Graph will show the overall visits in blue and the “Visits from Kuala Lumpur” in orange. The statistical table below now shows Page views for each page containing All Visits and “Visits from Kuala Lumpur”. This type of segmentation would help you in effectively analyzing your traffic to your pages from a particular geographical location. Hope you will find it interesting and don’t forget to try this out on your Analytics account.

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. Is it good or bad?

George — Wed, 26 May 2010 09:33:52 +0000

Google Analytics is one of the most used and user friendly website analytics software around and it totally free of cost. Google has just released the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on for web browsers. The main objective of the add on is to tell Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js), not to send any information to Google Analytics. When this add on is enabled, data would not be sent from your computer to Google when you open a website which uses Google Analytics code in it.

By using this Add-on, you would be able to block data such as your IP address, browser information etc to Google Analytics Javascript. If you enable this Add-on your data will not be sent to the Google website analytics software and on the other hand if you disable this Add-on, data would be send to the Google Analytics software. Google has just released the beta version and is available for browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc and can be downloaded from here http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout .

Google has always tried to maintain the reputation of its web site analytics software to be trustworthy for its users. The online analytics tool by Google has alway to preserve the privacy of its users along with making the tool more transparent for both website users and site owners.

This has created heated response from users all over the world and many have raised serious concern over this. Many fears that they will see a drop in the traffic numbers as per the Google web site analytics tool as Google Analytics would not be able to track the traffic details coming from browsers which has Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on enabled. This add-on will surely make difficulties in generating accurate website traffic reports as they would not have any clue on the missing data.

This is certainly going to create issues to Internet marketing professionals such as SEOs, SMOs, SEMs, Web analytics professionals etc, who consider Google Analytics as their major source of online analytics. This might also prompt a few of them to turn to another website analytics software, but they might find it difficult to find a free tool as effective as Google Analytics.

In my opinion this Add-on will create some serious issues for those who are serious about their analytics stats and are in search of accurate data rather than relative data.

Get Social Media Stats on Google Analytics

George — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:30:00 +0000

While browsing the net for some information, I came across a useful addon and use script which helps to track your social media stats for individual pages. The addons and scripts are easy to use and it just get integrated with your Google Analytics to shown more specific social media traffic stats for your pages.

For this you need to have a Firefox browser and incase you are not having one, you can download it for free.
After downloading the Firefox browser you need to install the Greasemonkey Addon to your browser. You can install it by clicking on the below link.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

After installing the Greasemonkey addon, you would be prompted to restart your Firefox browser.
Now you need to install the Social Media Metrics user script for Google Analytics from this page. Click on the install button to install the user script.
Now logon to your Google Analytics and go to the Top Content part in the Content section. Now click on any of your pages displayed there and you would be able to see the additional social media traffic stats on that particular page.

URL Tagging for Better Traffic Analysis

George — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:41:58 +0000

URL tagging is a special way of tracking your different online marketing campaigns with Google Analytics. Consider that you are running a PPC and an SEO campaign for your website and you are not using any URL tagging. Here both the PPC and SEO results cannot be distinguished in the Analytics report and both may fall under the “organic” label.

So in this case if you are tagging the URLs for PPC and SEO campaigns you would be able to track and distinguish the traffic arriving to your site through PPC and SEO campaign. This will give a deeper insight into your marketing campaign and helps you in getting more precise figure.

To create URL tagging you can use Google’s URL Builder Tool, where you can input important details like “source”, “medium”, “term”, “content” and “campaign”. The “source” parameter will tell you the source or the referrer site through which you have got the visit.

The “medium” parameter is used to name or label your campaign and identify from which label the traffic is coming. The “term” parameter is used to identify the keywords for that particular ad or campaign. The parameter “content” is used for ad groups and the parameter “campaign” is used to identify the name of that particular campaign.

URL tagging can also be used to track other marketing campaigns and activities like social media campaigns, Article marketing campaigns etc and has been proved to provide a more accurate data and insights.

Exclude IP Address in Google Analytics

George — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:59:11 +0000

Google Analytics is one of the best free web analytics tool available and is the most used web analytics tool. Google Analytics (GA) has a lot of advanced features which makes the web analytics more interesting. Moreover it is simple to use and you don’t need to use any software to run this, instead you just need to paste a simple script on to you web pages. In this post, I would like to explain how we can exclude a particular IP address while using Google Analytics.

1) Log on to your Google Analytics account. If you use more than one websites for tracking, the list of those sites would be displayed on the first page you enter after logging in. This page is known as the account overview page and lists all the websites that are using Google Analytics code with this account.

2) Click on the name of the website account, of which you need to exclude a particular IP address.

3)Now You would be taken to the profile overview page for that particular website, where you can see a table in which the website that you need to filter the IP is seen.

4) There is an Edit link on the right side of the table, corresponding to the website name. Click on this link.

5) Now you will enter the Profile Settings page of that website. Here you can see a table with the title Filters Applied to Profile. Click on the “Add Filter” link on the top right of that table.

6) Now you will enter the page named Create New Filter. Select the Add new Filter for Profile radio button for new filters. Enter a suitable filter name under the Filter Name field.

7) Select the Exclude all traffic from an IP address drop down option from the Filter Type menu.

8 ) Enter the IP address to be excluded in the box provided below. e.g if you IP address is 123.249.21.162, then it should be typed as 123\.249\.21\.162.

9) Then click on the Save Changes button.

10) Now you have completed the process of filtering this particular IP address from tracking by the Google Analytics code.

Hope this would work for you better.

Site Overlay Feature in Google Analytics

George — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 05:01:14 +0000

Site overlay is another interesting feature of Google Analytics, which enables us to get a view of the overall visitor navigation stats on your site. It gives an idea on how the visitors interact and navigate once they enter your website. The site overlay option is available under the “Content” section of you Google Analytics dashboard. When you click on the the ‘Site Overlay’ link you would be taken to a new page which display the home page of your website. In this page you can see small progress bar over every link in your home page. The progress bar also shows the percentage of the number of clicks over that link. The more clicks a link recieves, the percentage on the progress bar increases and that percentage is reppresented by a blue shade. The more click a link receives, the more percentage on the link and hence a long blue shade would be seen on the progress bar.

This feature is an integral part in going forward with web analytics and optimizing the website for better traffic.

This feature is an integral part in going forward with web analytics and optimizing the website for better traffic. When you move you mouse over the progress bar, you can also know about the number of clicks that links have received. You can also get information on the goal value for the pages in your site. Goal value is the value of the conversions your site has received over time, and for this you must have to set the goals. With this feature you can determine the most popular page on your website and also the least popular link on your website. It helps you to figure out whether your text links are being clicked more than your image links and vice versa.

The one shortcoming of this site overlay feature is the inablity to show indivitual click ratio for 2 or more links which points to the same page on the website. For example if you have 2 links on your home page which points to your ‘Products’ page and they get 4% clicks and 9% clicks respectively, both will show 13%. Google Analytics cannot show the separete click for the links. Google is working on this issue to get it resolved, but till then we have to presist with the current version.