Just last week, in addition to Google Analytics Premium, Google also launched their new beta of Google Analytics Real Time to a limited audience and will expand that audience over the next few weeks. This is a real-time analytics tool that shows what is happening on any site that is already using Google Analytics for tracking, without any additional setup required. Add one point in the “plus” column.
When… and Where… is Real Time?
For those of you who haven’t checked out Real Time yet, head into your Google Analytics account and click on your Dashboards tab (in the main orange nav bar). Real-Time (beta) will be the first item in your left nav now, with further options of aggregation once you open the Real-Time menu item. This is kind of hidden for to more novice users.
What Happens in Real Time?
Your first impression will be the spinning dial, labeled “Right now,” as it winds up. Once running, this number constantly changes along with your Pageviews charts to the right.
It may not be clear to you immediately without a bit of actual testing, but this is very fast. Demos and tests I have seen show 1-2 seconds of response time. Apply this across the segments available in the nav and, on the surface, this seems to be a powerful tool.
So, the real question is, how will you be using Real Time? Google demonstrates its usefulness in social media, but what other uses are there? Go live or site launches? What about smaller sites where a user may be the only user on the site at a time? That’s almost like real-time, real-user, anonymous, and remote usability testing all in one…
How valuable is real-time data? Is there something more useful here beyond its pure immediacy? Let us know what you think.
Have you heard the big news yet from Google? Today Google publicly announced Google Analytics Premium! For the official announcement, check out Google’s blog.
What is Google Analytics Premium?
Google Analytics Premium is the paid version of Google’s popular free analytics program – Google Analytics Standard Edition. The product is Google’s answer to Enterprise level analytics and according to Google is being used by some of the world’s best known organizations. We can help answer a lot of initial questions, being that we’re a Google Analytics Certified Partner. See Google’s snazzy marketing video below for an overview and introduction to the new product.
Is Google Analytics Premium Available Everywhere?
Although they are hoping to expand quickly into other regions, right now Google Analytics Premium is available for a fixed annual fee (billed monthly) in the United States, Canada, and the UK.
Why Pay, When You Can Get It For Free?
Google Analytics Standard Edition will continue to be supported and there are many exciting updates arriving in the near future. That said, Google Analytics Premium will be offering a level of service that is needed only by companies that feel limited within Google Analytics Standard Edition. Below is a summary of the additional features available with Google Analytics Premium.
Processing Power
Lifted hit limits – 1 billion hits per month
Download unsampled reports – export high data volumes and analyze all your data
Advanced Analysis Tools
Attribution modeling – perform attribution modeling on your campaigns to understand full value of all the channels in your media mix
More custom variables – 50 custom variables!
Dedicated Support
Custom training and support – you get your own account manager along with technical and business training
Real live technical support around the clock – 24/7 customer support!
Summary
While Premium may not be for everyone, here at Pure Visibility we are extremely excited about it! We believe this service can really benefit our clientele and are looking forward to digging into it and taking full advantage of the new features. For more information, visit Google Analytics Premium or contact Pure Visibility!
To all of those marketing directors looking for a way to measure social media – Google just gave you a gift this week. You can now track the behavior of your visitors that originate from one or more of the many social media channels all thanks to the new Google+1 reporting. For example, following the navigation patterns of people who originate from Facebook could uncover the fact that they are more engaged with your site and are actually looking for specific information – perhaps information that you may need to add more of but never thought relevant before. This offers an opportunity to engage more visitors, giving them what they want and potentially lead to more sales (which of course you can measure in Google Analytics). Understanding the origination of the visitors could impact how and where you place your budget in 2012.
Oh and of course, I am particularly excited about this because it takes some of the mystery out of social media traffic.
Have your marketing analyst read all about the technical details on Search Engine Land:
If you are a Fortune 1000 company, chances are you actively use attribution management to justify spend in the many marketing channels that are being used to drive leads or sales through your site. (And if you are not, its time to jump on this or you will be left behind.)
What is attribution management? It’s the science of measuring and analyzing the marketing touch points that your target market produces before they turn into a true conversion. With this information intelligent decisions can be made by analysts on which specific channels, within your marketing strategy provides the best return on investment. For example, an email campaign then a newsletter and a specific paid search ad (in that order) may be the best plan for increasing leads for your specific product. You can prove it…your analytics says so!
Now Google Analytics v5 (still in beta) will be giving us more ways to slice your data and understand how your conversions come to be. Search Engine Land provides a great review of the main highlights of Cross-Media Funnels and the reports available. I am particularly excited about this because it offers a chance for marketing analysts to use Google Analytics to answer more questions around which channels are assisting to help make a conversion reality. In the video below Google does a nice job describing it like it is a basketball game with team members assisting each other to score. Go team!
Understanding how many marketing channels assist in your conversions will help you analyze conversion behavior. And at the end of the day if you can repeat what is working faster than your competition…guess who wins the game.
After some hands on experience using RegEx in Analytics, I could understand their usefulness, and wanted to make sure I was applying the expressions correctly. It can be tricky to test, because you may THINK you’ve correctly applied the result in GA if you’re seeing any results returned, but even if you see results, it’s possible that you’re not seeing the entire picture. Luckily, there is a great tool called TextWrangler, that makes it easy to test regular expressions, so you make sure you’re using the right expressions when searching in Analytics reports. TextWrangler is a free text editor available on Macs. TinyEdit has the same functionality needed for testing RegEx, and is available for Windows Users.
In my position as an analyst, I will mostly use RegEx in Google Analytics, to view groups of data based on sets of rules that I determine. For example:
Many people arrive at the Pure Visibility site after looking for information about QR codes. However, there are many variations of these terms: qr code, q r code, qr codes, qr-code, and so on. To really understand how many people arrive at the site after searching on these terms, I need to use regular expressions in my Analytics reports. But first, I want to make to make sure that I’m using the right regular expressions to bring up the appropriate results! So, I’ll test in TextWrangler using the following steps:
First, enter several variations of the terms you want to have returned, as well as some terms you do NOT want to be returned.
Next, hit Command/Apple + F to begin the process of returning results using RegEx.
Make sure your cursor is at the top of the screen, as you will only see results for terms below your cursor (this has happened to me more than once!).
Make sure you’ve selected ‘Grep’ under the matching option. Select any other fields appropriate to your search.
Use the appropriate regular expression/s in the ‘Find’ box. In this case, I want to find any terms containing the letters Q and R in the same search term, so I’ll use parenthesis to group, and the pipe, to include an ‘or’ statement. Using (qr|q r) means that I’ll find terms where Q and R appear directly next to each other OR with a space in between.
Hit ‘Next’ or ‘Find All’ to see which results are returned. Assuming you used the proper expression, you’re all set to plug into Analytics! If you didn’t get the results you expected, make sure your cursor was set to the top of the page, and review the article from the Google Analytics Help Center if needed.
Now, you’re ready for the real thing. After logging into your Google Analytics account, select the appropriate report, and apply the RegEx in the search field.
The online interface offered by Google Analytics offers a wealth of easily-accessible, business-oriented data and reporting about the usage of your website. But it has it’s limitations. Recently, when attempting to segment branded and non-branded keyword traffic for one of our larger clients (which, by the way, is a good idea for anyone who wants to understand whether their SEO efforts are gaining traction), we ran into one such limitation. Here’s the scenario: in order to capture all of the possible brand-related terms associated with our client, we created regular expressions matching variations of each (20 in all), and plugged them into two Advanced Segments in Google Analytics (one segment to exclude those terms, and one to match only those terms). After quite a bit of work (identifying the branded terms, writing the RegExes, creating the Advanced Segments, etc.), we clicked the Advanced Segments “on” with eager anticipation. And voila! Here’s the spiffy chart that appeared:
Hooray! Just what we wanted – visitor trends by branded and non-branded keyword traffic! But wait, what about that little yellow box of fine print? It reads: “This report is based on sampled data. Learn more.” So what exactly does that mean to us? Check out the data table that Analytics presented us with:
The numbers for branded and non-branded traffic *should* add-up to 100% of the visits… but they don’t. See those little yellow boxes next to the segmented data? Those depict the margin of error that Google’s data sampling resulted in. Basically, the statement “This report is based on sampled data” means that the numbers aren’t as precise as we might like them to be. In fact, the margin of error on some of our results was over 70%! Kind of a big deal…
After a little experimentation, it became clear that neither the size, nor the complexity, of my Advanced Segments were triggering the use of sampling. Instead, it turns out that the number of visits contained in the selected date range was the determining factor – specifically those instances where the total visits exceeded 500,000. In order to return reports for large data sets quickly, Google employs sampling whenever it generates a report through the online interface that isn’t automatically compiled.
The take home message? If you’ve got large volumes of Analytics data that you want to slice-and-dice, you might be better served to pull the raw data from Google using the Analytics API and perform the calculations on your own!
We love the Google Analytics e-commerce system, in no small part because it is so “simple”: what you see is what you get, and it can basically be used to reflect your shopping cart system’s understanding of any given transaction.
The most essential double-check comes from the fact that any given sale is made up of two independent measures: The Transaction report and the Product report.
Interested in learning the ins and outs of Google Analytics? Then our Google Analytics course is the place for you. This class translates Analytics to help you achieve your business goals.
Course Overview
Google Analytics is free to all advertisers and site owners, and has been re-designed for increased effectiveness. Installing Analytics code on your site is only the first step in the process of making this powerful tool work for your organization.
Regardless of familiarity with their website goals, users are faced with the same questions:
How do I know what Analytics reports and features to use?
How can I measure success for my site?
What metrics are most important, and what do they really mean?
Do I know the latest techniques for leveraging these metrics to increase my site’s traffic and sales?
How do I get the most out of my limited management time while still getting the most out of my account?
Our course, on Friday February 19th, is an all-day workshop that provides a foundation of proven principles that will help you succeed in using Google Analytics to improve your site’s performance. Regardless of whether you’re a beginner just setting up your account, or a web analyst with years of experience this class will help you optimize your site.
Course Highlights
You will learn how to:
Translate Analytics metrics and reports for real success on your site
Find out who your best customers are
Narrow in on which of your marketing channels are not working
Maximize leads or sales through focus on landing pages
Track your goals the RIGHT way
Efficiently manage an account
Learn how to apply your skills to all web analytic tools
Hands-on experience using proven methods to analyze your own Analytics account
Who: Anyone who is currently using Google Analytics or interested in learning more about it.
When: Friday, February 19th 9:00 – 4:00 (lunch break from Noon – 1:30)
If you’re like most marketing managers we talk to, chances are you’re using Google Analytics and learning some good stuff! Chances are you’ve also got some nagging feeling that there’s more to learn if only you had time to fully explore Google Analytics and discover all the truly great stuff hidden inside.
However, given the world shortage on time, and given Google’s propensity to add new features to Analytics every time you log in, we’re sorry to say the odds aren’t exactly in your favor. That was, until you found Pure Visibility. (Wink. Wink.)
Seriously though, we hear this conundrum repeated every day. You are not alone! And since we are an organization full of problem solvers, we have a couple ideas that may help:
1) A “Drivers Ed for Google Analytics” course, designed to help you get to all the good stuff faster. We know you’re busy so we’ve boiled it down to one day, with a nice long lunch so you don’t have to fall too far behind on email – or you can check out an awesome restaurant while you’re downtown Ann Arbor. We’re sure you’ll come away with something that changes the way you think about your business; and you’ll be armed with data to make decisions like never before.
2) We also provide analysis as a service. Most often it’s bundled with our other internet marketing services that together, are designed to increase your sales. The magic in that analysis is worth a post of its own so we’ll tackle that another day.
In the meantime, we hope to see you at a class someday soon!
Pure Visibility was recently selected to join the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network. As part of the thorough application process we had to demonstrate our expertise in applying analytics data to online marketing campaigns. Andy Chapelle of Crain’s Detroit Business interviewed Linda Girard in Crain’s Detroit Business to find out what this means for Pure Visibility and why this endorsement is so important.
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