Privacy, Cookies, and Tracking

People frequently complain about cookies. They don’t like the idea that their actions are being tracked and watched, so they disable cookies outright. The thing is that cookies are really the least of your problems.

Cookies may be a good way to track people, but they are at least a known way. You can clear your cookies, disable them, manage them—and if you know enough, edit them.

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New VKI Courses: (Really) Understanding Google Analytics

If you've been wondering where BrianK and his series of Google Analytics Tips Tricks and Traps has been, wonder no more! Coming this February we're launching the newest of our seminar sessions: (REALLY) Understanding Google Analytics, planned and taught by none other than BrianK.

This two seminar session covers a host of Google analytics concepts and issues beginning with understanding the specifics of Google Analytics and how it tracks data (including solutions for  subdomains, cross domain tracking, eCommerce, etc.), and following up with analysis and interpretation.

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Visualizing Your Keywords

While writing our next newsletter—a summation of our advanced Google Analytics tips and tricks—I came across Wordle. The premise of Wordle is pretty simple, it looks at your RSS feed and does some voodoo to decide what words you're using the most. Not sure if it gives precedence to H tags or anything SEO related (I doubt it) but it's kinda fun. Here's what it gave us:

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Google Analytics Holiday Bonus Features: Annotations, MCV Updates and More

It seems like every other week, Google announces some new feature or improvement for Google Analytics. In late October, they announced a slew of new features including Multiple Custom Variables, Analytics Intelligence, and Engagement Goals. Barely a week ago, they announced asynchoronous tracking to improve your analytics data. And as a Holiday Bonus, they have just released a set of new features at SES in Chicago! This bonus feature set includes: Annotations, new features for Custom Variables, and a new Analytics setup wizard.

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An Update to the Erik Vasilik's "Poor Man's GWO/Analytics Integration": Using Custom Variables


GWO and GA, together at last

Here's an update to Erik Vasilik's "Poor Man's GWO/Analytics Integration" technique. The latest iteration of the technique used GA's user-defined variable to store the combination the visitor saw. Here's an update to that technique, but leveraging the new Custom Variables just released by Google.

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Use new Google Analytics features to enhance Tracking Error 404 Pages and Broken Links

John Hossack wrote a great post back in April "Tracking Error 404 Pages and Broken Links in Google Analytics: Google Analytics Power User 11". Since then, GA has added one of many new powerful features - Secondary Dimensions.

This week's post is written with thanks to Dave Klein (Public and Media Relations) who posted the following question on John's post: "I've gotten so far as the Navigation Summary. My 404's are appearing in the report but my nav. summary appears blank." which lead to this blog post for the week.

Here's the quick answer, followed by some consequences:

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The Anti Hippo

The Google Website Optimization seminar in October 2009 featured a t-shirt giveaway depicting "The Anti HiPPO": a hippo head in a universal "NO" symbol. We attended the seminar in order to touch up our GAACiness and WOACness and being that we also have a hippo as a logo, felt that the t-shirt fell into a special kind swag category.

"What is this?" we demanded of Trevor Claiborne, "What are you doing? You're killing our brand here!"

"What? Oh this has nothing to do with you guys," he said, "we're referencing the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. That's why our hippo wears a business suit, while yours wears a tutu."

"&hellip"

Thanks Trevor.

Playing with this theme, and his animation kit, Brian T decided that it was time for cold blue revenge. So alright Trevor, this one's for you.


Video after the link…

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Web Analytics: What's The Question?

Ever glazed over staring at web analytics graphs and tables?

Ever asked "Where do I start?"

Ever had to help someone suffering from over glazing?

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Google Analytics - No longer Free


The Google Analytics Team announced more High Level capabilities that have been built into Google's Web Analytics solution.

These build on already powerful capabilities like Advanced Segmentation, Event Tracking and Custom Reporting.

A loosely connected but collaborative group of talented, committed volunteers can produce good free software; but a corporation, even one as innovatively structured as Google, cannot build powerful software, continuously upgrade it in material ways and provide it for free indefinitely.

But is 'free' the 4-letter ' f ' word?

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VKI sees Awesome Insights in Google Analytics' newly announced Features

Google announced at eMetrics today that it will be adding a number of new features to Google Analytics, it's free web analytics software. With these new features this web analytics application is becoming so powerful that it is hard to understand why it is free. Let's not ask why, but just thank Google for making such a powerful web analytics tool available for free.

The features are, in Google's words, POWERFUL, FLEXIBLE and INTELLIGENT and we'll be discussing them in more detail in the coming weeks as Google phases them out to all the Google Analytics accounts, giving you ideas on how to use these new features to derive actionable insights and formulate strategies supported by analytic data.

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