Michael Whitaker's web analytics blog

Technorati data in Google Analytics

We have updated our Analytics Fox extension for Firefox, which can now query the Technorati API and return relevant blogs for your keywords. The Technorati data integrates into the Google Analytics Keywords report.

Find out which blogs use the same keywords that drive traffic to your site. I should add that you don't have to have a blog yourself. You can find out who is talking about your organization or mentioning your products.

The extension is free of course and you don't need a Yahoo! Store or a Monitus Tools account. You do need to get a free Technorati account and a free API key, which you can get here.

For more information and to install the extension, please visit analyticsindex.com.

New radio program for Yahoo! Store merchants

Shawna Fennell of 1Choice4YourStore.com has just started a new radio show and has kindly invited me to participate as a guest speaker. I will chime in regularly with web analytics tips and tricks.

Shawna sounds like a natural on radio and I wish her lots of success. The show is live every Monday at 3pm PT, but you can also get podcasts. Here is the link: wsradio.com

Cheers,
Michael

Visit history for latent transactions in Google Analytics

I have been wondering about latent sales for quite some time, and how giving credit to only the last referrer leading up to a transaction could hide valuable information. While many visitors will convert during the first visit there are many visitors that take much longer to convert, interacting with your site across many visits and days. If you only give credit to the last referrer you may oversee some earlier referrers that may have at least assisted in the sales cycle.

We have updated our Analytics Fox extension to allow Monitus Tools users to view the referrer information of the visits leading up to a transaction right inside the Google Analytics e-commerce transaction report. We are also launching a Transaction Assist email report that will give merchants this information on a daily basis.

Here is an actual example.

1) The is the Ecommerce > Product Performance > Product Overview report for a particular product, segmented by keyword. The Google search "Samsonite..." (full keyword hidden for privacy) got the credit for the sale.

2) The corresponding transaction can be seen in the transactions report.

3) The extension displays the number of visits (6) and a blue icon next to the transaction number. When you hover over the icon the visit history is displayed.

This yields real insight. Not only was this visitor initially referred from another site, but the visitor also went to a comparison shopping engine before making a number of different Google searches. The last visit corresponds to the keyword that gets the credit in GA.

This example also highlights the apparent disconnect between different tracking systems. You can be sure that the shopping comparison engine will show a sale in its own reporting tool.

Hours of endless fun! At least for me...

Cheers,
Michael

IndexTools and Yahoo! Store

Exciting times in the world of web analytics after the announcement of Yahoo!'s purchase of Index Tools and the subsequent news that Index Tools would be offered for free. It remains to be seen what the Yahoo! version of Index Tools will look like, but I am amazed as the pace of innovation and consolidation going on.

One group of people to benefit are Yahoo! Store merchants. As mentioned on the Yahoo! Store blog, we can expect Index Tools to be incorporated into the Yahoo! Store platform. Again, it remains to be seen how the tool will be rolled out, but it should be possible to push out the tracking code to all merchants automatically. In one go, have 100% adoption. That's pretty amazing and will certainly raise the level of awareness of web analytics among merchants. In and of itself that does not mean that merchants will use web analytics reports, but you have to start with a solid tool as a foundation.

I am very excited at the prospect of continuing to help merchants use all these cool web analytics tools!

Cheers,
Michael

EpikOne analytics seminar in San Francisco

I am going to Justin's Google Analytics seminar on March 26 in San Francisco. Not only is Justin one of the nicest and smartest guys in this business, but the cost of the seminar is tremendous value for money. (It's actually a 2-day seminar, but I can only make it on day 2)

I know that some of my friends are going too, so it should be a great event. Please say hi if you are going too.

Here are the details: http://www.epikone.com/seminars/

Benchmarking Web Analytics data

I am very excited about today's announcement from the Google Analytics team that there will be a benchmarking component built into Google Analytics. I certainly want that and I can't tell you how many times people have asked me whether a 40% bounce rate is good or bad. People just want to compare themselves to their peers even if the comparison may not lead to any actionable insight.

Since this is just hot off the press and in beta, we'll have to see how this functionality actually works in practice; for instance I didn't see a way to categorize my site, but I am sure it will be there.

In a very different sort of tool, we also looked at ways for people to get access to benchmarking data in our Analytics KPI gadget for iGoogle. Same sort of idea in terms of sharing data: anonymous, opt-in and you only get to see aggregate data if you share yourself. You sure need a lot of data though to get any kind of confidence, so aggregating at the top level is certainly better.

I would probably caution against taking benchmarking data too seriously. A site that seems to be selling exactly the same products may have completely different things going on - different keywords driving traffic, completely different campaigns, etc. And how can you ensure that the data itself is good? I.e. what prevents people from incorrectly installing the tracking code, thereby generating bad data?

For the lack of a better word, I would view benchmarking data as "fun". Or is there real actionable insight to be had?

Cheers,
Michael

A/B testing or Multivariate testing?

Isn't it cool to even have the choice to do A/B testing or Multivariate Testing courtesy of Google Website Optimizer?

I have been using both tools extensively over the past several months. I am surprised that many online merchants haven't tried doing website optimization this way, although once they "get it", they'll want to run experiments all the time.

And why wouldn't you? I find it very satisfying to let customers make the decision as to what works and what doesn't, instead of the personal preferences a website owner or opinionated web designer. Don't redesign your site just for the sake of it, or be told by someone that it's time to get a "fresh look". Some of the best converting sites are not pretty. At the very least, make sure you capture "before and after" data in your analytics solution.

A re-design by definition changes so many elements that you won't know what specific elements contribute to your conversion rate. Is it the Hackersafe logo in the left nav or the Free Shipping message in the top nav? This is akin to doing an A/B test: you compare one page vs another and see what converts better. However, you won't know what element contributes most.

For this reason, I prefer multivariate testing. Here, you essentially compare different elements on the same page. So you would test the Hackersafe element and Free Shipping element on the same page. The experiment will then show you what element contributes the most. You can even find out if a particular combination of elements converts better than another.

But there is another reason I prefer multivariate testing over AB testing, which I don't think gets talked about much. Perhaps it's not too huge an issue in practice, but as a heavy user of web analytics, I care a lot about getting good data all the time.

In an A/B test, if your A page is an important landing page, i.e. the first point of entry of your site visitors, consider this: the experiment will keep roughly 50% of visitors on A whereas the other 50% will get re-directed to the B page, as it should be. But, what happens to the referrer information? If the visitor sees page A the original referrer (e.g. Google organic) will be preserved. However, if the visitor lands on page B, analytics will think that the visitor came directly to the site. So, the original referrer information is lost.

Does this make sense? Anybody in the A/B camp disagree with me?

Good to Great and KPI

I recently read Good to Great by Jim Collins. The book profiles 11 companies that made the leap from "good to great" in terms of stock market performance over a 15 year period and various other criteria. This means that lots of companies that you might have expected to be called "great" are not included. In any case, it is not so much about who made the list, but what common traits these few companies share that allowed them to go from "good" to "great". I don't want to review or summarize the book, but what caught my attention (and the reason for this post) is the reference to Key Performance Indicators, even though Collins doesn't use this term in the book.

"...we did notice one particularly provocative form of economic insight that every good-to-great company attained, the notion of a single "economic denominator."

and

"If you could pick one and only one ratio - profit per x - to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact..."

As an example, Walgreens wants to have the most convenient stores, which may be in expensive locations. If they used profit per store, they might have favored cheaper locations, but that would have run against the convenience concept. As a result Walgreens switched its focus from profit per store to profit per customer visit. What I find remarkable is that Walgreens and other companies mentioned in the book are able to boil down their economic reality into a single KPI.

It is not suggested that it is easy to find such a single KPI. In fact, you may not accept that it is possible to find just one KPI for your company, but just having this sort of dialogue yields valuable insights.

Can you find such a KPI for your company that reflects your economic reality?

In an e-commerce setting, I dare say that conversion rate would not qualify. Conversion rate does not say much about your economic reality and is not an actionable metric. A higher conversion rate might follow when you find and improve "your" KPI, but not the other way round.

Google Analytics mashup with other data sources?

"I want to see important information about my online business in one place."

Sounds like what portals and dashboards are supposed to do, and good web analytics data should give me much of the important information I need to know.  So how about using web analytics as the basis of the dashboard and adding other useful data sources to it? That's essentially the idea behind our Analytics Fox extension for Google Analytics.

It's more of a proof of concept at this point as the extension is only useful if you have a Yahoo! Store. It  uses keywords as the integration point to pull data from the Monitus Tools Keyword Monkey service right into the Google Analytics interface. Color-coded dots indicate whether keywords are found on the site, and this information can then be used to make pages more relevant for those keywords.

Click image to see a 2 minute video.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this additional data is of course not really inside Google Analytics or sent to their servers. Firefox pulls the data and then updates the browser display.

There are several more integration points I can see besides keywords:

• referrers - e.g.competitive data
• transactions - e.g. CRM data
• campaigns - e.g. cost data

Please let me know if this is a path worth going down, and if that is the case, what kind of additional data you would like to see.

Google Analytics KPI gadget v2 released

We have just released v2 of our Google Analytics gadget and have added quite a few new features. I thought I'd try my hand at making a screencast that walks through some of these features. Please let me know what you think.