SpicyWebDesigners.com by Luc Arnold

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

I think that everyone that runs a website should know about web analytics and if you are reading this for the first time then perhaps this article will help shed some light on basic web analytics metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit and what visits, bounce rates and pages per visit are exactly.

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

There are many ways to track or not track information on your website.  Recently I wrote about tracking mobile visitors that come to your website and how you could go about doing this.  There are just so many ways to track what people are doing, how they are doing it and when they do it when you are working with web analytics in your daily online business operations.  The possibilities are endless when it comes to 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

In the last little bit I’ve managed to write a few articles about web analytics and more importantly Google Analytics. Like most web analytics tracking software, Google Analytics uses what is known as a “tracking pixel” also known as a “tracking code”. Recently they’ve added some functionality to help you with web page load times. Now you might ask “Why is this important to me?” and the truth is that it’s very important if you value gaining more and more visitors to your website. By and large, most people that are out there browsing the web don’t like to spend a lot of time finding your web page. On average most people will not wait that long for a website to load before they decide to leave.Back in 2006, Akamai and JupiterResearch said that the acceptable wait time for a web page to respond and load shouldn’t exceed 4 seconds.

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

I enjoy talking about the topic of web analytics and personally use Google Analytics to track the stats of websites including this one. In my last article I talked about 5 key tips for successfully tracking web analytics on your website and in this article I covered some of the important points that anyone looking to track web analytics on their website should become familiar with and use. One area of growing interest is tracking mobile visitors especially on websites specifically designed for mobile platforms.

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