Is Web Analytics Easy Or Difficult?
Oct 30, 2009 at 6:00am ET by Evan LaPointe
Two rockstars have emerged in the web analytics field to date. We all know who they are: Eric Peterson has demystified analytics for us, while Avinash Kaushik has helped us take it one day, or dare I say, "an hour a day," at a time. And one of them says web analytics is easy while the other one says web analytics is very hard. So who is right?
Why web analytics is easy
Yes, it's true. Web analytics is easy, according to Avinash Kaushik. It's actually incredibly easy. Assuming that the desired outcomes of web analytics are changes that will positively impact your site and your bottom lin [...]
Filed in: Analyze This, SEM Tools: Web Analytics
A Primer On Website Testing
Sep 19, 2009 at 5:08pm ET by Daniel Waisberg
Search marketers can learn a lot from scientists. Scientists spend their life testing things, one after the other, incessantly trying to discover new interactions between atoms, molecules, viruses, bacteria, etc. One of the greatest scientists of all time, Albert Einstein, said, "A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it." Want everyone to believe in your website? "Experiment" with it—in other words, test it and tune it for optimal performance.
Websites are laboratories, not sculpt [...]
Filed in: How To: Analytics, SEM Tools: Web Analytics, Search Marketing: Landing Pages
How To Use Google Analytics Motion Charts To Maximize Results
Sep 3, 2009 at 5:24pm ET by Daniel Waisberg
Last year Google Analytics released a few new features, among them the Motion Charts. The feature is based on software developed by Gapminder, acquired by Google in 2007.
According to the Google Analytics blog, "Motion Charts provide a multi-dimensional, over-time analysis of the data in your report."
This feature provides a powerful way to visualize data in five dimensions: x-axis, y-axis, size of bubble, color of bubble, and time. In fact, if you choose metrics that are combinations of more than one metric, such as conversion rates (number of conversions divided by number of visits) [...]
Filed in: Google: Analytics, How To: Analytics, SEM Tools: Web Analytics
How To Choose A Web Analytics Solution
Aug 31, 2009 at 9:00am ET by Evan LaPointe
Choosing the analytics tool you will use to track what's happening on your web site can be a time-consuming, expensive, and incredibly frustrating experience. There are a number of good candidates to choose from and each touts an impressive feature set that promises to significantly improve everything about your web site. But while there's a lot of hype about what these tools will do to improve your life, it's important to remember that you're not actually choosing an analytics provider, you're choosing a reporting and data gathering system—in other words, a very pretty database. I ca [...]
Filed in: How To: Analytics, SEM Tools: Web Analytics
Is Twitter Sending You 500% To 1600% More Traffic Than You Might Think?
Jul 18, 2009 at 2:48pm ET by Danny Sullivan
Earlier I posted that Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based tracking tools might be undercounting visits from Twitter. I've done some more digging, which supports the case. In my test, Twitter seems to have sent 500% to 1600% more traffic than log files or hosted stats packages like Google Analytics might show.
How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think is my earlier article that explains how I'd often seen big gaps in how many people apparently clicked on a tweeted link as measured by Bit.ly versus how many page views that Google Analytics was showing.
To test th [...]
Filed in: Features: Analysis, SEM Tools: URL Shorteners, SEM Tools: Web Analytics, Top News, Twitter
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