Up till now, the landing pages report was very limited, having only three metrics available on the report:

• Entrances: the absolute number of visits landing on this page
• Bounces:the absolute number of visits that bounced when landing on this page
• Bounce Rate: the percentage of bounces from entrances in this page

This is all we got. We could not drill down into landing page performance even when it came to simple actions like understanding time on page (for non-bounces), not to mention goal conversion and ecommerce transactions that were completed during a visit that was initiated on this page (there were some work arounds, but they required many clicks). As of this week we see the following on the same report:

As we can see in the screenshot above, we now have other metrics available in this report, such as Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits. This would already be a great improvement, as it allows us to instantly see engagement metrics for visits started from a specific landing page. However, if we look at the top of the pages, we see that, besides site usage, we can now view this report by goals and ecommerce. This means that we can now have an instant picture of landing page performance from this report.

This knowledge is very important in order to understand where to focus the optimization efforts. Once the landing pages can be analyzed, we are more free to segment landing pages, in a way that each audience receives the most matching landing page.

Last week, the Analytics team announced an official integration with social sharing services ShareThis and AddThis. According to their blog post:

To enable the integration for all of your AddThis buttons, you are now just one line of code away, and ShareThis users don’t have to do a thing. If you have Google Analytics installed, and you are using a ShareThis widget, simply login into Google Analytics and check out your new social reports!

While this is great news for many website owners, which can get the social analytics without getting into code implementation, there are still a few issues with these integrations. First, one of the characteristics of the Social Tracking is that it is not filterable. So, for example, if I have two websites under the same account and I use filters to separate the data, the social data will not be separated; if I have a profile for an agency that manages my PPC account that should include only CPC data (according to the filters), they will see all the social data, unrelated to what kind of filter is applied to the profile.

AddThis gets a +1, since it provides the option to choose to add the social method if their customers want to. ShareThis tracking is automatic, so if I have Analytics users who cannot see social data in my account, ShareThis would not be appropriate, unless it provides in the future an opt out from social analytics.

In addition, as we can see in the screenshot below, some calls are still not clear as to their meaning on ShareThis. We have reached their team for an explanation on what is “ShareThis_follow: Share” and “sharethis: sharethis” which, in Search Engine Land’s social reports, represent 6% of all social actions.

Post Script: According to ShareThis, the meaning of the two unknown calls are:

• ShareThis_follow : Share – This is twitter follow
• sharethis : sharethis – This is from publisher’s own logging.

Blocking Search Queries

Two weeks ago Google announced that it would start encrypting search sessions of anyone signed in to Google.com. In practice, this means that Google stopped passing the organic keywords that referred traffic to websites whenever users are logged in Google and conducting searches.

This change caused strong reactions, both in the web analytics industry (as this means that organic search becomes less trackable) and also in terms of whether Google was protecting privacy fully (since advertisers still receive this information).

Single Digit Impact Predicted

Google predicted that the change would impact 10% or less of searches:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.

In fact, the week the changes started rolling out, various reports put the “Not Provided” percentage — which is what those using Google Analytics see if terms are blocked — at around 2% to 3%.

High Single Digit To Above 10% Now Happening

However, as of October 31, we have seen a very significant increase on the Not Provided figure here on Search Engine Land. It’s not just us, either. Looking at data from several websites across industries, we see a range of 7% to 14% of total organic keywords now being blocked.

Below you see how the “Not Provided” figure has suddenly spiked for Search Engine Land:

Below you can see how the percentage of Not Provided for the total organic keywords for November 1st to the site is above 10%, 12.87% in all:

The figure is even more dramatic, however, when you consider it as a percentage of Google-driven keywords. In other words, the 12.87% figure above means that for ALL keywords from ANY search engine to Search Engine Land, 12.87% of them were blocked.

As this blocking is only happening by Google, what’s the percentage of only keyword traffic from Google? That works out to 14.2%.

Of course, one might expect Search Engine Land to have a higher percentage of search-driven traffic than other sites. But as said, we’ve also looked at sites beyond Search Engine Land.

Danny Sullivan’s personal blog, Daggle, had 13.65% of its Google-driven keywords blocked. One non-tech site had 7.1% of its Google-driven queries reporting “Not Provided.” Another non-tech site we know of had 8.83% of all its keywords reporting as “Not Provided.”

We’d love to hear what others are finding — please comment below, if you’d like to share your figures.

Postscript: Conductor posted a few days after our report that it found 6.5% of Google-driven searches from high traffic sites they monitor had keywords blocked.

Rollout Still Happening; Percentage Could Get Higher

The rollout was supposed to take place over the course of several weeks. The process is still happening, and it seems as if it was suddenly enabled for more users on October 31.

Google wouldn’t confirm that, nor say how complete the rollout is at this point. In general, the company said:

As we noted, this change will occur over the next few weeks. Traffic figures will naturally vary depending on a website’s audience. What we provided was an estimate.

If there are significantly more people not yet being included in encrypted search, the percentage of Not Provided queries would likely grow over the coming weeks.

Path analysis has historically been a feature that provided little insights on user behavior, mainly because visitors behave in such non linear ways that it is hard to learn something from their paths, even when looking at aggregated data. The best option to path analysis has been to analyze micro conversions, i.e. looking at each page and trying to learn if the page has fulfilled its objective. However, the visualizations below bring some interesting approaches that will be very helpful for web analysts.

Flow Map Visualization

In terms of data visualization, this feature is probably the most advanced since Motion Charts, which is a highly advanced visualization that can be used to view five dimensions in one chart.

As some might recognize, the visualization used on this feature is very similar to the one created by Charles J. Mainard shown below. This image, created in a 1869 to describe Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, displays several variables in a single two-dimensional image (source: Wikipedia):

• The army’s location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined
• The declining size of the army (note e.g. the crossing of the Berezina river on the retreat)
• The low temperatures during the retreat.

Google has used this visualization to skillfully present website usage.

Visits Flow Report

This report shows the navigation flow for a specific segment of users, either a traffic source, country, browser, or any other segment that can be chosen from the drop down on the report (green box). We will see the pages that started the section for this segment and the following interactions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc). Interactions can be added and removed, and the circle with the arrows on the left of the chart can be used to navigate between the interactions.

The connections between the pages represent the number of visitors who went from one node to another. Larger connections represent a larger % of visitors; red connections mean visitors left the site; looping connections mean they navigated to another page in the same node. The number of connections shown can be controlled using the slider above the chart.

Goal Flow Report

This report is a representation of goal conversion per segment of visitors (segments can be chosen as mentioned above). This visualization is welcomed as it enables analysts and managers to see goal conversion per any segment in one centralized place and with a great UI. Any goal can be seen on the chart, although as of this first release, Flow Visualizer supports only URL Destination goals. You can find the Goal Flow visualizer in the Conversions > Goals section of the “Standard Reporting Tab.”

Flow Navigation Report

This report enables Google Analytics users to divide websites into sections and learn how visitors navigate between those sections. An interesting case would be for ecommerce sites to understand how visitors navigate between search, category, product and cart pages; this would bring an important understanding that could be applied to site navigation structure. Below is an image showing the setup page:

In this interview with Phil Mui and Paul Murret (Director of Engineering, Google) talk about Google Analytics developments and future

The new Google Analytics premium is not about features, as shown below there are few capabilities available on the premium version that are not available on the standard version. It is designed for organizations who value guaranteed availability, dedicated services and support; it is also critical for sites who want to process data more frequently and without sampling.

Below is a detailed description of the tool capabilities, availability, support and pricing.

Google Analytics Premium – Product Description

Processing Power

• Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month (vs. the 10 million a month for standard accounts).  This applies to a single business or enterprise, but can include multiple web properties. In other words, if a company owns several sites, but the combined volume is under the 1 billion limit, all can be part of one premium instance, but if each site may reach the 1 billion limit separately, then the company would need to pay separately for each site.
• Faster, intra-day processing
• Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing
• 99.9% on Collection up-time
• 99% on Reporting up-time
• 98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)

Advanced Analysis Tools

• Up to 50 Custom Variable slots (the standard version provides 5)
• Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests
• Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)

Dedicated Support

• Dedicated Account Management
• Phone & Email support 10 hours per day, 5 days per week (relevant to the time zone in which the contract was signed)
• Implementation Consultation & Tagging Audit
• Live & Webinar Training
• 24/7 Product Emergency Escalation Support, if the product is ever outside of the SLA

Pricing & Availability

At first, Google Analytics Premium is is available to companies based in the US, UK, and Canada, although the sites can be located globally. However, according to Google, it will expand into other regions as quickly as possible.

Prices varies per region and will be as follows: $150,000 USD (US), $150,000 CAN (Canada), or GBP 90,000 (UK) per year (billed in monthly increments).

User Interface Changes

As mentioned above, Google Analytics Premium is not about a new set of features. The interface is almost identical to the standard interface we are used to. I believe this is an advantage for users, as most people are already acquainted with the tool and won’t have to get to know another interface.

The following differences can be seen in the tool (screenshots from Analytics Premium a website developed by Cardinal Path, a Google Analytics premium reseller):

• When you click the “Download” button on a report, you will have the option to request an “Unsampled Download”

• There will be an “Unsampled Downloads” section in the Custom Reports tab

• Up to 50 custom variables will be available in the Custom Report builder

Google’s also released this video about it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who Should Use Google Analytics Premium

One very important question that comes to mind is: does this mean that Google is not going to invest in the free version moving forward? According to Google:

We are more committed than ever to our standard version. With the release of Google Analytics v5 we are poised to release features faster than ever and are confident that measurement can keep up with the digital consumer journey at last. In the last 3 months alone we’ve released many great features to the new version of Google Analytics.

Another important question is: do I need Google Analytics Premium? That question is a bit trickier. Here are a few cases where you should certainly consider the premium version:

1. If you are currently using a paid tool: the advantage of GA Premium is that pricing is not based on pageviews or hits or visits. If your site generates 1 billion hits per month (in which case you are probably paying a very high amount), now you can use Google Analytics with a higher level of accuracy. In addition, you can feel safe that in case you lose your web analytics budget, you can downgrade to the standard Google Analytics without losing your data or needing to switch tags (and can upgrade again later).
2. If you are using standard Google Analytics and currently getting sampled data and unsampled data is important for you you. Some websites generate large amounts of data, which results in data sampling on Google Analytics. The premium version will power the collection and processing of this information, in addition to have higher data limits (1 billion hits a month). A plus is that the reports should load faster and data will be fresher, even at larger volumes.
3. If your website visitors need to be segmented in more ways. By offering 50 custom variables (the limit now is 5) Google will enable more segmentation options, usually needed on large and complex websites.

Closing Thoughts

This release comes as great news for the industry, as it shows how strategic is Analytics to Google and how much they are willing to invest in it. The unsampled reports and the SLA are great differentials (which were always used by Google’s competitors on the field). It means it will bring the market up and we will keep seeing advancements in this arena.

One single feature that is still not on the level of the competitors is user access management. As of today there are only two types of users on Google Analytics: Administrator and Viewer. For SMB and enterprises this is not enough in order to administer who sees what and who can change the tool settings. As mentioned in an article about Analytics User Management: “Everyone who has access to a web analytics tool needs to take responsibility for that access.”

To summarize, in an interview with Thomas Davenport he said that “it ain’t about the math, it is about the relationships”. Google’s strategy to first conquer the end user (i.e. analysts, SEMs, and more recently marketing managers) and then go for the enterprises looks very smart. Google Analytics is by far the most used tool, and this can only count in favor when an enterprise is choosing a tool, employees are already comfortable with it.

According to Google, full roll-out could take up to 1-2 weeks, but in order to get the new feature sooner than later you can signup for the beta by filling the form at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

Google Analytics Real Time will show the number of people coming to a site for every minute, and the number of visitors actively on the site at that moment. It enables monitoring the sources sending traffic to the website, the pages being viewed, the GEO location of visitors, and the keywords that brought the visitors (if from search, paid or organic).

While for some users this feature will not bring new insight into user behavior (e.g. small websites), this feature will be specially interesting for content websites. Publishers will get an instant insight into which content is attracting visitors and can adapt the website based on that. For example, if an article about a certain celebrity is receiving high engagement it could immediately be added as the featured post on the homepage or sidebar.

Other occasions where real time data could be helpful:

• Verifying the effectiveness of an ad just as a campaign goes live
• Measuring social media impact as it happens
• Watching the impact of a tv campaign when you know your commercial is on

Do you find it useful? Let us know in the comments how you use it and why you think real data is / is not important.

Below, I will describe why it is important and how this can affect some Google Analytics accounts (mostly companies that misuse Google Analytics campaign parameters), and what you can do to make sure you are on the right track.

What Is Changing & Why?

According to the official post, here is a summary of how Google Analytics has ended a session up till now:

• Greater than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single user
• At the end of a day
• When a user closes their browser

In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when:

• Greater than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single user
• At the end of a day
• When any campaign information for the user changes. Campaign information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign and auto-tagging from AdWords (gclid)

This change is an interesting move as it will provide more accurate data when it comes to Multi-Channel Attribution. This will happen because visitors that visit a website multiple times during a time period that would originally be considered as one single session, will now have their cookies updated to a new session in some specific situations.

For example, if someone visits a website from a PPC ad and then leaves the site and within 10 minutes get back to the website through an organic link would be considered as one long visit from PPC in the old model. In the new model, we would have two short visits, each attributed to its own source.

Do Not Use Campaign Parameters For In-Site Tracking

One of the mistakes I have seen when it comes to implementing Google Analytics is the usage of Campaign Parameters for in-site tracking (mostly tracking navigation usage or internal campaigns).

This practice produces inaccurate numbers for those analyzing in-site behavior and also heavily affects traffic sources accuracy and, therefore, should never be used. Now even more. With the current update to how sessions are defined, each time a visitor clicks on an internal link that uses campaign parameters, a new session starts; this will artificially increases the number of visits in addition to the issues I described above.

If you are currently using campaign parameters to track in-site behavior, here is what you should do:

1. Remove all campaign parameters from your links. For example, if you have a link on your site such as searchengineland.com?utm_source=story&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=launch , you should simply use searchengineland.com
2. If you are tracking navigation elements on the site. Using Event Tracking is the best way to go: add an onclick event to the “a” tag that would include the following: onclick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'navigation', 'link', 'launch']);”
3. If you are tracking internal campaigns. Using Custom Variables is the best way to go: add an onclick event to the “a” tag that would include the following: onclick=”_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 5, 'internal_campaign', 'banner', 2]);” . It is important to note that you should check with other people involved in setting Google Analytics to be sure spot 5 (the first value on the function above) is available for campaign tracking.

The above techniques will certainly provide you with accurate numbers in the best possible way without affecting your reports.

The new reports can be found in the Visitor section (make sure you are using the new Google Analytics) and are seeing the following:

• The Social Engagement report shows site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on any social sharing actions. +1 is added automatically, but other sharing buttons should be added through coding, see below how to define them. This allows website owners to understand whether there is a different behavior between visitors that share and visitors that do not share or between different types of “sharers”.



• The Social Actions report shows the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on the site. This can be helpful to prioritize which share buttons should be in the header of an article, for example:

The Social Pages report shows the pages on the site driving the highest the number of social actions. This is very useful to learn which content is viral and what your visitors really like to read to the point of sharing it with their friends.

This change is so meaningful that Google went the extra mile to create the Social Interaction Tracking, a new tracking function that will be used for social tracking only. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

_trackSocial(network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath)

1. Network: Name of the social network (google, facebook, twitter, digg, etc)
2. SocialAction: Type of action (like, tweet, send, stumble)
3. opt_target: Subject of the action being taken. Optional, defaults to the URL being shared (document.location.href). Can be manually set to anything: a different URL (if they’re sharing content that “points” to another URL), an entity (e.g, product name, article name), or content ID
4. opt_pagePath: The page on which the action occurred. Optional, defaults to the URI where the sharing took place (document.location.pathname). Can be manually set (like a virtual pagename).

For a more technical overview on how to implement this tag for facebook and Twitter visit the code site article.

As concluded on the Google Analytics launch post (link above):

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the Web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

I have previously discussed Google Analytics integrations with Webmaster Tools, with Website Optimizer, and with Feedburner at Search Engine Land. In this post, I will discuss how to best integrate Google Analytics and YouTube Branded Channels.

Who Can Benefit From It?

Recently, I created the Online Behavior Channel on YouTube, and considered the choice of investing in a branded channel or not. The main factors that led my decision to invest in it were the option to add a customized header with links to my content and the possibility of adding Google Analytics to it.

Therefore, if you are not a branded channel, you do not have the option to track it with Google Analytics (see all branded channel features in this pdf).

Below is a screenshot showing where to find the Google Analytics option and how easy it is to add the code.

Setting Up Google Analytics

As it is clear from the screenshot above, it is very simple to add the Google Analytics tracking code to a YouTube branded channel.

However, I recommend the configuration below to your Google Analytics profiles in order to keep the data clean and analizable.

Use the same Account ID (UA)

The first decision to be made is the account that will be used: will you use the same account you used for your website or a different account?

I believe you should always use the same account, this will enable you to see the stats for your YouTube channel together with those of your website or separately (see below the configuration you needed).

Create YouTube & Non-YouTube Profiles

In order to be able to analyze your YouTube traffic separately or together with your website traffic, you should create two new profiles on your account:

1. Only YouTube Traffic: this profile shows only the behavior of visitors to the YouTube channel.

2. NO YouTube Traffic: this profile shows only the behavior of visitors to the website.

In addition to the profiles above, the overall profile that includes all domains (which is the default profile) should be kept for analyzing the aggregate traffic to the website.

Wishes For A Better Integration

A few months ago I wrote a Google Analytics Wishlist, which included the main items that I felt were missing in the tool, including a more powerful integration with Adsense, with Website Optimizer and with Webmaster Tools.

Following my experience with YouTube and Google Analytics, I feel the integration is far from what companies need. Here is what I would like to see further detailed in Google Analytics on YouTube:

• Subscribes as Pageviews. In order to enable the tracking of YouTube conversions on Google Analytics, the YouTube team should add a trackPageview call every time someone subscribes to the channel. This is fundamental as one of the main objectives of the YouTube Channels is to get people to subscribe to it. Today, this cannot be measured using Google Analytics.
• Video interaction as Events. As part of YouTube insights, they offer Hotspots stats, a report showing which parts of the video are “hotter”. If this type of information was available on Google Analytics (as Event Tracking) that would be a great tool to analyze video interaction.

As I believe Google is always looking into ways to integrate their tools, I am looking forward to improvements to this integration.

But now, with the addition of Site Speed to Google Analytics*, we will be able to understand how load times affect not only search ranking (or ppc quality score), but also how it affects user experience and ultimately, the conversion rates of specific pages and the site as a whole.

The big value of these new metrics is that it enables us to correlate page success and load times.

This is especially important when it comes to landing page optimization, but also when optimizing pages with and without rich media, pages that query a database before loading, and others.

According to this article* in the Google Analytics help section:

The Site Speed report measures the page load time (latency) for a sample of pageviews on your website pages. It appears in the Content section of the Analytics reports. With this report, you can see which pages load the fastest and which ones are slower. You can also analyze your overall site speed along other important dimensions in order to learn how your site speed relates to a variety of factors. For example, you can view your site speed across the following categories:

• Content—which landing pages are slowest?
• Traffic sources—which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall?
• Visitor—how does latency compare by visitor type or geographic region?
• Technology—does browser, operating system or screen resolution impact latency metrics?

Finally —and most importantly— you can take action to improve page load speed for slower pages and then track latency along these other dimensions to see if your actions resulted in desired improvements.

This release follows two very important launches last month: Google Analytics v5 and the Multi-Channel Funnels. It shows that with the new and improved version of Google Analytics, the development team there has opened new horizons when it comes to adding new features at a very fast pace.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*Note: In order to view Site Speed Reports, your Google Analytics tracking code will need a slight modification; the Google Analytics Help article (referenced above) provides instructions on adding this tracking to your website.