If you use Google Analytics as religiously as I use it then I’m sure that you know how to check traffic statistics about your website.  One area that is important for people to understand is the types of traffic that websites can generate hits from and how to apply this knowledge into growing your own website’s traffic.  After all, it’s all about traffic when it comes to a website.  The traffic sources that a website can have fall into 1 of 3 categories including traffic from search engines, referring sites and traffic that comes directly to your website.  The good thing is that Google Analytics tracks them all!

• Search Engines – This includes your standard search engine delivered traffic from Google, MSN, Bing, Yahoo! and all the others.  What defines search engine traffic is that it’s delivered by people searching keywords on a search engine to find web page on your website.
• Referring Sites – This includes traffic from any website that refers traffic to your website.  If your blog or website is in other people’s blogs or websites and they click on your link and come to your website Google Analytics will add these hits as referral traffic.
• Direct Traffic – Direct traffic, just like it sounds is traffic that is coming directly to your website by either typing in your website URL or clicking on a direct link going straight to your website.  As you build more trust with readers on your website or blog you may see the direct traffic statistics come up.

Ultimately, these are three ways of getting traffic and its best to not get them confused.  Understanding the key differences between them shows you insights into where you can improve your website’s traffic and keep people coming back for more!

Google Analytics is one of those applications that you can use for your web analytics data collection.  Understanding how to use the application for your own needs does present a learning curve for beginner users and the first thing to understand other then how to install the Google Analytics tracking code is understanding how to use the dashboard in your Google Analytics account.  So let’s explore the Dashboard in greater depth inside your Google Analytics account.  In this article I am going to cover the following areas of the dashboard…

• Site Usage
• Visitors Overview
• Content Overview
• Traffic Sources Overview
• Map Overlay
• Goals Overview

Site Usage

The Site Usage area in the Google Analytics dashboard contains a wealth of useful statistics that quickly allow you to check the latest happenings on your website.  The metrics included in this area are visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, percentage of new visits and average time on site.

Visitors Overview

The Visitors Overview area in your Google Analytics dashboard gives you a snapshot of the number of your visitors.  This is not the same metric as visits in the Site Usage area because this shows you the number of visitors who came to your site over a given period of time.

When you click on “View Report” this will take you to a more detailed page with details of your visitors, visitor segmentation and specifics about the browsers, connection speed, map overlay and other data related to your visitors and their visitors to your website.

Content Overview

Some websites like blogs, forums and for those of you publishing articles on your websites are all about content so it’s only fitting that it deserves its own place in the Google Analytics dashboard.  The focus of the content overview section is tracking hits and metrics related to how people are accessing and viewing your content and where they came from.  In here you can track the entrance keywords, entrance sources, entrance paths and more information about how people have viewed your content.

Traffic Sources Overview

Just as it sounds, the Traffic Sources Overview allows to you see various types of traffic that your website has coming into it from search engines, directly (meaning that people came in directly to your site by typing your domain name), referring sources and other traffic sources like Twitter and Feedburner to name a few.  You can check the top traffic sources for your website and see how it’s performing and the most popular keywords that people are using to find content on your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others.

Map Overlay

The Map Overlay section in the Google Analytics dashboard gives you an easy to use graphic representation of where your website’s visitors are coming from in the world.  Clicking “view report” gives you an enlarged version of a map of the world and when you hover over a country that recorded hits on your website you’ll see numbers associated to visitors from a country.  What you’ll also notice is that the countries that had traffic coming to your website are ranked in terms of who supplied the most amount of visitors to the least.

The Goals Overview

The Goals Overview section of the reporting that Google Analytics offers is dependent on the fact that you have setup goals for your website.  If you’ve never setup a goal in Google Analytics before then this will not come into play just yet.  I will not get into setting up goals in Google Analytics in this article but needless to say the Goals Overview section provides a snapshot of the success of current goals you are tracking in Google Analytics on your website.  Clicking on the “view report” link for the Goals Overview section provides you additional information about your goals including your goal conversion rate and Total goal value calculation.

There is a wealth of knowledge that you can learn about your website stored in web analytics platforms like Google Analytics.  It’s just a question of mastering the user interface and understanding information about your website and will help you to move around and do more advanced things in Google Analytics faster, easier and with greater confidence.

Getting a Google Analytics Account:

First things first, if you haven’t signed up for a FREE Google Analytics account you will need to do this first.  Click here to do this now! Once you do this you can move onto the following steps.

Creating a Website Profile

The first step that you need to take once you have your Google Analytics account is creating a website profile.  A website profile allows you to define the domain name that you are going to be tracking and whether it’s an existing domain name from your Google Analytics account or a new one.  To create a website profile for the domain name you want to track you are going to need to take the following steps…

1.  Click the “Add Website Profile” link

2. Fill out the information for your website’s domain name

3. Click the “Finish” button

Getting the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code) from Google Analytics:

Now that you have an account open with Google Analytics and you created a website profile you are going to need to generate the Google Analytics tracking code that you will later add to your website and do get this you will need the Google Analytics Tracking Code.  To do this you will need to do the following…

1. Click “Edit” next to the website you’ve setup.

2. On the “Profile Settings” page for your website click the “Check Status” link which will take you to the “Tracking Code” page.

3.  The Google Analytics Tracking Code comes available in 3 options including Standard, Advanced and Custom

The Standard Google Analytics Tracking Code comes with the ability to be used on a single domain name (This is the option most beginners should choose), one domain name with will multiple subdomains or multiple top-level domain names.

The Advanced Google Analytics Tracking Code comes with the built in ability to be used on a single domain name (This is the option most beginners should choose), one domain name with will multiple sub domains or multiple top-level domain names or tracking websites built for mobile phones and devices that use either PHP, ASPX, JSP or Perl coded web pages.

The Custom Google Analytics Tracking Code comes with a copy and paste functionality so that you can use this however you see fit.  This option is more for the advanced user who is comfortable with coding so I personally would NOT recommend this option for beginners.

Implementing the Google Analytics Tracking Code

Google Analytics recommends that you copy and paste the snippet of code into the head section just before the end </head> HTML tag on the pages in your website.

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-#######-#']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {

var ga = document.createElement(’script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;

ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;

var s = document.getElementsByTagName(’script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

</script>

Once you’ve got this added you will need to go back into your Google Analytics account and click the “Save and Finish” button.  This will cause Google Analytics to verify the tracking code installed on your website and you’ll be able to capture the core metrics of your website.

Google Analytics uses a model that they refer to as the “scope of visitor engagement” that is comprised of 3 levels…

• Visitor – At this level, we are tracking the people visiting your website
• Session – At this level, we are tracking the period of time which people are on the website
• Page – At this level, we are tracking the pages that the visitors are looking at through either a page view or an event

Each visitor that comes to your website has these 3 levels of interaction with your website’s web pages when you are using Google Analytics to track visitors.  Another bonus to having 3 separate levels are that it allows you when using custom variables to focus on a specific level and depending on which level you are interested in the following custom variable are available…

• Visitor-level Custom Variables
• Session-level Custom Variables
• Page-level Custom Variables

So, now that we know this I am going to tie it all together for you.  Every visit made to your website generates a session and in this session the visitor visits various web pages on your website.  Using custom variables allows you to drill into specific levels of visitor interaction and gain a deeper appreciation of how customers access your website.

Being an avid lover of Google Analytics allows me the ability to stay on top of the latest changes to the web analytics platform.  They recently added the ability to add annotations to the web analytics data that you collect about your website which is now available on all Google Analytics accounts.  This is really a very useful improvement to Google Analytics and for anyone developing a website over a period of time it’s pretty valuable.

So what’s the big deal with Annotations?

Annotations give you a way to mark a specific day on your Google Analytics account to track and manage changes you are making to a website.  In the past I’ve found myself saying “How do I know that this change I am making to my website is a good change or a bad change?” and that answer largely went unanswered until now.

Now you can add annotations to days when you’ve made changes to your website and know exactly what day a change was made when you look at your web analytics.  It’s very useful if you are from the school of thought in web development that when you change your website it does have an effect on your visitors.

How to add Annotations in your Google Analytics Account

So now that you understand how annotations can be used to help you and your website let’s talk about actually how you can set them up and use them in your Google Analytics account.  First of all, you’ll need a Google Analytics account.  Click here to get an account if you don’t already have one and once you’ve got one simply take these steps…

• Login to your Google Analytics account
• Click on your website’s website profile
• Click the down tab located in the main dashboard visits area
• Click the “+ Create new Annotation” link
• Enter the date of the annotation, add an annotation a.k.a. “a note”, select whether you want the annotation “Shared” or “Private” (You would select “Shared” if you had were sharing the annotation among other people who have access to the Google Analytics account and website profile you are setting annotations on specifically)
• Lastly, click “Save” and you are now done creating an annotation

Now that you’ve got it the annotation created you can view it by selecting the day you created the annotation on or a range of days that contain the annotation.  When it’s all said and done the ability to add annotations in Google Analytics can help you identify changes that you made to your website and the outcome of those changes giving you greater insight into what your website is doing and how it’s doing it.

Luc Arnold

If you are just beginning to understand what web analytics can do for your business then there’s a good chance that you are looking to understand what you are seeing when you open up your web analytics platform and are starting to analyze the data in order to apply it to your business.

There are a few things that are “universal” in web analytics and website traffic in general.  As long as there are websites there will be visitors, visits and unique visits and because there are people visiting websites they will always spend time on a website, look at pages in a website and leave a website.  These web metrics are universal and even though, how a web analytics platform chooses to view this elements the concepts remain similar but not the same.  So what web analytics come standard in web analytics platforms?  Well, just have a look at the following web metrics…

• Visits – This referrers to the number of times that some visits for website in a given timeframe.  From here the number of visits can tell you where the website traffic came from for certain posts, pages and content on your website.
• Pageviews – This website metric will tell you the number times that a web page is viewed.  This metric can pose some issues because users refreshing web pages over and over again and also robots that “crawl” your website have been known to inflate these numbers as well.
• Pages per visit – This metric shows you the number of web pages that are viewed during a visit on average over a given time period on your website.
• Bounce Rate – This is the rate at which people come to your website and leave after looking at only one page.  A sudden spike in a bounce rate can allow you to test your website’s usability to lower this number and keep your visitors coming back for more.
• Average Time on Site – This average tells you the average amount of time people spend surfing your website.  This tells you how long on average they will spend reading articles on your website.

I use these metrics on a daily basis when I analyze website traffic for SpicyWebDesigners.com.  The data from bounce rates to the number of visits that I am receiving help me to make decisions about how to change the usability, navigation and gain insights into why a particular article on my website was successful.  Naturally once you’ve mastered the core web analytics terminology you can start learning more advanced topics and applying them to your website analysis.

Pretty much any web analytics platform that you pick up today is going to have these metrics available.  The essence of web analytics is related to visitors and the pages that they visit on your website.  Without those two things you cannot begin to track meaningful website metrics to base your decision making on and because the study of web analytics is growing, advancing and changing rapidly it’s great to know that some things stay the same.

Luc Arnold

Teaching the basics of web analytics

When you are talking about web analytics you are talking about collecting data about your website “accurately”.  This brings me to the topic of excluding website traffic like the website traffic that you generate when updating your website and testing it.  Naturally this does present a problem because most people visit their own website when they make changes to it or if they are updating it.  By default, web analytics platforms will track website traffic regardless of who you are and you have to tell the web analytics software to exclude your traffic from the web analytics reports.

There are a few standard ways to exclude traffic from your web analytics platform.  You can exclude traffic by an IP Address or a range of IP addresses or by creating a custom cookie that can block your traffic.  I personally prefer using the custom cookie when I am working with the Google Analytics platform because I am only trying to exclude my specific traffic but if I ran a company with more than one employee I would be sure to use to exclude traffic based on an IP address or a range of IP addresses.  When I get into showing you how you can exclude traffic from your web analytics platform I am using Google Analytics as an example but depending on the web analytics platform there should be a way to exclude traffic using either of these methods.  So let’s get started with the Cookie Content Method and then move on to the IP Address Method.

Excluding Traffic from Google Analytics – The Cookie Content Method

Like I said, this is personally the way that I choose to exclude traffic from my web analytics reports.  It’s simple and straight forward.

1. Create a new web page and upload it to your website containing this code…

<body onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar(‘my_cookie_content_value’);”>

2. Than simply visit the web page containing the above mentioned code which will create a cookie with Google Analytics (Your web analytics platform may differ so refer to the documentation from your web analytics platform vendor)

3. Create a filter in your Google Analytics account to remove the data associated to users with this cookie.  Make sure the filter that you create includes the following…

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: my_cookie_content_value
Case Sensitive: No

It should look like this…

Excluding Traffic from Google Analytics – The IP Address Method

This method requires you to understand how to use regular expressions

1. Click “Filter Manager” from the “Analytics Settings” page in your Google Analytics account

2. Enter a “Filter Name”

3. Select the “Filter Type” equal to “Exclude all traffic from an IP Address”

4. Enter the “IP Address” field enter the IP address you want to exclude in your web analytics reports.  If you are entering an IP address 178.155.2.1 you would need to enter it similar to 178\.155\.2\.1 and if you wanted to exclude a range of IP address like 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14 it would look like this ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$. Now this method isn’t for everyone and given your situation it may or may not work for you.

So as you can the IP Address method for excluding traffic requires you to have knowledge of regular expressions because of how you have to enter the IP Addresses into Google Analytics.  I am not sure whether other web analytics platforms are different or if they too require you to use regular expressions as well when excluding by IP Address.  No matter how you choose to do this or whatever web analytics platform you currently use there is a solution out there that can and will work for you when you exclude your traffic from web analytics reports.

Happy “Accurate” Web Reporting!

Luc Arnold

Now keep in mind that this was three years ago and today, with advances with web technologies I am sure that 4 second wait time is way too long today. With the advent of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) it’s possible to optimize website to improve these wait times.

How AJAX works and why is it important to asynchronous web analytics tracking

The big point to understand about AJAX is that it uses JavaScript and XML to load the web page all at once, one time only. In classic HTML and CSS every time a web page is loaded because a call must be made to a web server to retrieve the web page. Think about any time you’ve refreshed a web page each one of those is a new instance of a web page created once the web page is reloaded. Using AJAX, only the information that has changed on the web page is reloaded not the web page itself. That is the important lesson here.

Source: Interakt

Now think, if you have the traditional GA.js tracking code from Google Analytics on your web page then that means that every time you load a new instance of a web page in your website the GA.js tracking code needs to be reloaded as well and this increases that web page load time. This is one reason why more and more people are using AJAX technology in their website today including the Google Analytics Development Team. Some of the big benefits of the asynchronous javascript tracking code as stated by the Google Analytics team are…

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

Source: Google Analytics Blog

How easy is it to add the Asynchronous Tracking Code to your website?

Now the part that you’ve all been waiting for… how easy is it to add this to your website? The answer, it’s really very easy! Let me show you just how easy it is:

1. Get this piece of code…

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(’script’);
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
ga.setAttribute(‘async’, ‘true’);
document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
})();

</script>

Click here to get it!

2. Replace the ‘UA-XXXXX-X’ with the web property ID from your Google Analytics account

3. Add it the same way you added the original GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Code)

4. You are all done!

Before you install: Now if you already have Google Analytics Tracking Code in place on your website you are going to need to remove it first and then add the Asynchronous Tracking Code to your website.

Even if you are a beginner with web analytics or you are trying to understand how to use it for your business incorporating AJAX technology into your website to improve the overall user experience will only help improve the performance of your website and understand how people use your website.

“Asynchronously” yours,

Luc Arnold

Now if you don’t share my passion for stats that is still okay because applications like Google Analytics exist today to help you track and monitor your website without a lot of work needed on your part. In fact, a basic install of the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) is a simple copy and paste into the source code of your website. Could that be any easier?

A lot of people and customers are searching for websites in new and different ways. All I need to do is look at my iPod Touch when I surf the web to realize this. This calls for a way to track people using mobile web browsers and one thing that I love about Google Analytics is all the development that they’ve done to anticipate changes in the web analytics field and market, sometimes before there is a need just so that their users have what is needed to be successful with their web analytics tracking and assistance to make informed business decisions about their web-based businesses.

How easy is it to track sites built for mobile phones with Google Analytics?

This is a pretty cool feature that is going to help you like no one’s business if a large part of your website traffic is coming from mobile phone visitors and let’s face it more and more sites and web applications are being developed for mobile phones these days. So what do you do next? Well, first sign into your Google Analytics account and then follow these steps…

1. Click “Edit” next to the website profile you created to track your website
2. Click on the “Check Status” link on the upper right hand side of the page and scroll to the “Instructions for adding tracking” section
3. Select the “Advanced” portion of the this section
4. Select the “A site built for a mobile phone” radio button option
5. Select the Server Side language that your website uses (There are currently only choices for PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX)
6. Lastly copy and paste this code into your website in the required areas of the website

I am personally hoping and I am sure that the Google Analytics team is going to release more support for other server side languages like RoR (Ruby on Rails), Python, etc. in the near future. They are pretty progressive this way. If you running a website specifically built for mobile phone visitors and you are looking to track your visitors try this out. It might be just what you are looking for in a tracking solution.

Luc Arnold

Web analytics data can tell you everything from the return on investment of a certain campaign to the number of visitors finding your website or a web page in your website with a specific keyword. In other words, it provides great insight into what your online business is doing and more importantly what it’s NOT doing. I’ve put together a list of 5 success tips for tracking your website metrics using analytics software that cover topics that you may or may not have previously been aware of.

1. Install your tracking pixel or code correctly

One of the biggest oversights when people start tracking using any web analytics software is having it installed correctly. If you haven’t managed to do this correctly the first time it can “skew” the data that you are collecting about your website. In reading the vendor documentation look for best practices to install and implement the software and you’ll be ready to start tracking your website effectively.

2. Filter out your IP addresses

There is no quicker way to ruin your data collection efforts, destroy your return on investment and piss off your marketing team then forgetting to filter out IP addresses from your company. By NOT doing this you open the door to inflated numbers diminished ROI and a whole host of reporting problems. Do it right the first time and let your web analytics application “sing”.

Depending on the web analytics software that you are using there should be a way to do this simply and effectively. Once you’ve got this taken care of you can officially start tracking your website metrics with less worry.

Here is something for you Google Analytics users out their looking to set a filter to traffic to your website based on IP address called “How do I exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses?”

3. Investigate Weird Occurrences

Web analytics is an “uphill battle” because ever so often you’ll notice anomalies in the data that you are viewing and as an analyst or marketing professional you’ll ask yourself “What caused that?” or “Should I be concerned about this?” Most times there are explanations for the data that you are seeing and sometimes there isn’t.

Some anomalies can be caused by social media tools like FaceBook and Twitter, removing a web page from your site, spiders and robots visiting your website and countless others. Understanding why traffic spiked gives you insight into how your visitors are finding you and shed light on new opportunities when it comes to your website.

4. Track goals that make your website successful

Many small and midsized business owners are coming to the realization that a web-based business has to have clearly defined goals like any physical business. When you are developing the website this should be one of the questions you ask yourself because in large part the success of your company’s website is tied to the fact that you’ve got goals clearly defined. Whether you are selling snowshoes on your ecommerce site or you are blogging about human resources on your consulting blog there is always a goal to having your website up and running. So ask yourself, “What is the goal of my website?” or “What do I want people to do when they come to my site?” and you may realize that your current website does nothing to help the goal of your business.

The reasons for tracking these goals are as specific as the business that you are operating and as you drill into it further you may realize that there are sub-goals that make an overall goal successful and make your website or web-based business more profitable. A good web analytics platform will allow you to successfully track and manage the goals of your business.

5. Segment your traffic

Once you’ve got the traffic you’ve got to form conclusions or “insights” as they are known in the web analytics field. Insights are what fuel creative ideas and can to some extent control where money is spent on your business’ marketing. By segmenting the data into actionable information you can accurate tell what is going on and take a “proactive” approach towards how you are running your business.

If you take the time to perfect your website’s tracking capabilities you’ll be able to make clearer decisions about where and how to spend money on your marketing campaigns, query your data in a way that increases your profits and being as accurate as possible. Just remember to install the tracking code correctly the first time and use these tips to hone your website’s metrics.

Luc Arnold

Self professed “Web Analytics Junkie”