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I rarely write tool specific posts on this blog but since I have recently been asked by a few people about this issue and it affects every web analytics tool, I decided to post it here. A few months ago, Google, the search engine, started encrypting searches for user who are logged into their Google account while conducting the search. As a result of this encryption, the keyword that the visitors search to arrive to your site is not passed in the referring URL. Web Analytics tools rely on the keywords passed in the referring URL to build the search engine traffic report and in the absence of the keywords there is nothing to report, though they still see that the visits came from Google search. So Google Analytics now marks those visits that do not have a keyword but come from Google with “(not provided)” keyword instead of the actual keyword . Finding those keywords Google still tracks all the keywords search by logged in users but just does not pass it in the referrer to the site that...

This morning, Web Analytics Association announced that it is changing its name from Web Analytics Association to Digital Analytics Association . Why the change? All of those who have been working in this industry for few years know that the term “Web Analytics” does not reflect the actual work we do. As I wrote in my last post “ Move Web Analytics Data Out Of Silo ”, “Web Analytics” purpose was to report on one channel “your website”. Nowadays the story is different, customers interact with your brand in so many way, your website is just one small part of the whole “web” ecosystem. The work most of the web analysts do today involve more than web. Web Analysts today analyze many “digital” channels such as social, mobile and email along with web. Many are starting to deal with other digital channels such as “Set top boxes”. So definitely “Digital” is a better term to describe the work that web analytics groups undertake. I like the evolution of “Web Analytics Association” to “Digital A...

Web Analytics tools are great for providing a good view of one channel i.e. your website (ok, maybe slightly more than one channel e.g. some email, some social media, some offline). They worked great in silo for first few years of the internet because the only way for customers to interact with your brand online was on your site and websites were not an integral part of the business. Nowadays the story is different, customers interact with your brand in so many way, your website is just one small part of the whole "web" ecosystem and "web" is just one part of the whole "customer" experience and buying cycle ecosystem. Customer’s don’t think and operate in one channel i.e. your website. However, many "web analytics" tools do not even provide you full view of a customer journey and interactions online let alone the offline journey. To understand today's customer and performance of your marketing efforts, web analytics data has to move out of it...

Not all display advertising is created equal, though when you look at your web analytics reports you are most likely not going to find the reasons that makes each campaign and each ad so unique. Web Analytics tools generally start tracking the performance of a display advertising campaign only after the visitors have clicked on an ad and landed on your site. What happens before a visitor clicks resides in an Ad Server or in a spreadsheet on someone’s desktop . In my last post I wrote 5 tips for Analyzing and Optimizing Display Advertising and one of those tips was to Improve Click-Through-Rate (CTR). In this post I am focusing on elements you should analyze and optimize to increase the CTR of your display advertising. (Note: I am not saying that you should solely focus on CTR, but assuming conversion rate remains the same, increase CTR on your ads will result in more visitors on top of the funnel causing higher number of conversions. ) 7 Things to Analyze for Improving CTR Publisher ...

This is part III of my post on Analyzing and Optimizing Campaigns. In part I I talked about why your campaign analysis is probably is wrong . In part II I showed an example of how obsessing over reducing bounce rate might not get you anywhere . In this post I am going to provide you 5 tips for analyzing and optimizing your campaign. Here those 5 tips: Optimize Cost of Advertising Cost is dependent on how much you pay per click or pay per 1000 impressions (CPC and CPM). You have control over these cost factors. Those who are running Paid Search campaigns should already be familiar with and should be working hard to reduce the cost (CPC). Those dealing with CPM display ads should know that those rates are highly negotiable. Do you research about pricing etc., play with these numbers and see what will yield the optimal result,. Take your analysis and recommendation to your media buying team. Improve Click-Through-Rate (CTR ) CTR depends on several factors such placement, creative, uniq...

This is part II of the series on Analyzing and Optimizing Campaigns . I wrote in my previous post that when analyzing campaigns many web analysts just focus on the web analytics data. Some venture to include the cost and impression data of the campaign but they still don’t have a complete view. In this post I will show you how their lack of complete view results in wrong analysis and wrong conclusions. Below is the data I used in my last post. This is the type of data most Web Analytics tools provide and hence “Web Analysts” tend to use. What is missing? Where is the cost of products and profit margin data? Without that information, you don’t know if this campaign is successful or not. Right? The sad reality is that many web analysts don’t have access to profit margin data and hence they look at what is available to them and start recommending A/B testing (see my post One Awesome Web Analytics Tip: Think Beyond Web Analytics ). And their first target generally is Bounce Rate. Oh… ...

I am going to start this series of post with few questions for you.  Here is some data pulled from a Web Analytics tool. This data is for a “Display Ad” campaign: Most of the web analysts today get the following view of display advertising from their Web Analytics tool.  Looking at this data and some publicly available information they will get started on the analysis and recommendation. Though some other analysts will say, Wait… I need more information.  Google Adwords has done such a great job in providing cost data and almost all of the analysts have dealt with some kind of paid search campaign, so they know that cost of campaign plays a role in the analysis of campaign.  So they demand it.  Well this is where most of the web analytics tools fell short, cost data generally resides in some other tool and it is not easy to get that data. But how said that Analytics was easy.   However, I am providing full data with cost so that we can continue with this po...