Web Analytics Quickies
no, not that OTHER kind of quickie
From Brian:
Web Analytics is not an accounting system—it's the antithesis of an accounting system.
Web Analytics is more about measuring what didn't happen that what did (Enron excepted). Measuring what went wrong more than what went right.
Yes we want to know how many visitors were sent by a campaign and how many purchased but we are more interested in how many bounced or started but baled out.
--Sent from my iPhone--
Continued below…
This post is a series of quick thoughts on web Analytics from our staff and readers. You are cordially invited to contribute your thoughts to this single post with shoot-from-the-hip comments either through our comments section below, or by twittering them to @OrdinaryChap
In the office we've been discussing the difference between uniqueness, anonymity and privacy…
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Meanwhile a Google cookie that follows you around a site watching where you go and what you do...
The difference lies in the nature of the unique visitor. With no true way to track the exact movement of a single user, the only numbers left are the mass numbers - the data of the crowd. Thus Google assures anonymity, if not truly privacy.
Pages used only as the source of iframes (as in the src attribute) should never, ever be tagged! Or should they?
It might look a bit weird in the code, but it makes far more sense in the reports.
http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2009/5/12/Tip...
and
http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2009/5/26/Tip...
Search above for __utmv to find other posts on UDVs.
If, in court, 2 witnesses give precisely the same evidence, their credibility is questioned.
Be shocked if different systems, that gather different data, in different ways, for different purposes, within different parameters (eg dates) deliver the same results.
But even forgetting those little details, we as interpreters of the reports need to interpret those results correctly. Are we comparing Impressions to PageViews?
Or, should we be comparing Clicks to PageViews or to Unique Page Views or to Visits or to Unique Visitors?
When does AdWords count a conversion and when does Google Analytics or Omniture SiteCatalyst?
One has to compare apples to apples.
Keep a lookout for my next blog post this week which will indicate how our belief in AdWords conspiracies clouds our reading of reports.
Provide a specific example and we'll be happy to comment more specifically.
Brian
onmouseover=”this.href=this.href + ’?myQueryParam=myValue’;”
One often encounters "how to" requests for personal data in WA reports.
Privacy restrictions aside, this a bad idea.
In "Web analytics demystified", Eric Peterson described data of individual visitors as being the most valuable and important in Web Analytics.
However, this assumes that one has drilled down and gained insight from the "less valuable" data like visitor and unique visitor trends, site-search metrics, etc.
If one has identified a segment that requires further attention, one might want to look at individual visitors but for busy sites is that really practical.
For sites that are not busy enough, time is better spent in the Traffic Sources reports ;)
An example from the news:
President Sarkozy, 54 years old feels faint after 45 minutes of intense exercise in 84 degF!
Misinterpretation: He's in bad health and, like French presidents before him, is hiding it from the French people.
Perspective: Something very similar happened to Jimmy Carter in 79 and he's survived his presidency and many of his colleagues. Focus on the facts.
http://immeria.net/wamm/