This post was written by Quova, they sent it as a press release but I thought it was interesting enough to publish on the blog.

The 2008 Edition of the CyberSource Online Fraud Report highlights that out of 318 online sellers surveyed an average 1.4 % of their orders are lost to online fraud, often resulting from buyers who used credit card numbers later identified as stolen. The report estimates that in 2007 $3.6 billion in online revenues were lost in this way.

Though geolocation is just one of the risk monitoring tools used (the average e-merchant online uses at least four tools), it provides an important line of defense. The foundation for geolocation is the Internet protocol (IP) address – a numeric string assigned to every device attached to the Internet. When individual surfs the Web, their computer sends out this IP address to every Web site visited. Geolocation can provide much more than a geographic location. Many providers supply up to 30 data fields including country, region, state, city, ZIP code and Time zone for each IP address that can help to further determine if users really are where they say they are.

Equipped with this information, e-merchants can use geolocation to flag suspect transactions and address them individually.

Five key Ways to Detect Fraud using Geolocation include

Check for anonymous proxy servers and other location-masking systems

• While not all proxy servers are bad, the use of an anonymous proxy that hides or masks a unique IP address can be a fraud indicator. Lists of anonymous proxies that are abusing the system are provided by a select few geolocation vendors (including Quova) that notify the e-merchant when an order comes from one of the proxy servers

Check the distance between actual and expected user locations

• It’s a general rule of thumb that shoppers will be logging on the Internet within close proximity to their billing or shipping addresses. Many Quova customers report that orders coming from 500 miles or more away from the expected location have a higher probability of being fraudulent. With geolocation, e-merchants can elect to decline, or flag for review, orders falling X miles or more away from the shipping or billing address

Use domain information to assess risk

• With access to domain information gathered from the shopper’s ISP, it can be easier to determine whether an order should be declined, accepted or flagged. An e-merchant can track user sessions and know that the customer frequently connects from work and from home.

Build user profiles

• Once a profile is built, e-merchants can look for changes & differences between the observed behaviors they see online and what they have on file. Geolocation provides a simple way for merchants to expand their user profiles behind the scenes by assuming that most valid orders will follow the same pattern. If several different domain extensions or ISPs are used in one day, chance are those orders may be fraudulent.

Use time-zone information to track the transaction velocity

• If a user is connecting to a Web site in relatively short periods of time and the log-ins are more then 1,000 miles away from each other, this is a major red flag for an online merchant. For each shopper, e-merchants can use geolocation data to enable business rules that
  1) request the current local time at the shopper’s location;
  2) alert them to potential “time-zone hopping” within a short period of time, where the same account is accessed from multiple geographic locations; and
  3) alert them to orders placed at times of the day that aren’t consistent with previous orders stored in the user’s profile.

It’s not unusual for a Web site to keep track of user behavior, such as pages they have clicked on and the products they purchase. This is called behavioral targeting and due to the customer’s computer never being accessed, geolocation does not infringe on personal privacy. In a nutshell, geolocation is just one of many things you can check in the fraud cycle and protects both the consumer and the merchant from criminal activity.

One of the best ways to gather intelligence about websites is to see how much click traffic they send to the YouTube videos they embed.

The stats for this video are particularly telling – Engadget, the worlds biggest gadget blog with over 1 million RSS readers, has sent 800 visitors. The Times meanwhile has sent 75,000 visitors.

Next time you see a popular video have a look and see where the traffic is coming from, then get your site featured in the same place.

Today I’m pleased to welcome Compete Search Analytics as a new advertiser on BlogStorm.

For those of you who don’t know, Compete offer a competitive intelligence service allowing webmasters to find useful data about their competitors. Think along the lines of having access to your competitors stats package.

Here is how Compete gets data:

Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.

The information they can provide is as follows:

• Traffic & user engagement data for a domain
• A list of the popular keywords sending traffic to your competitors site
• A list of popular keywords in an industry
• Keyword comparisons between sites

The data is accurate too, the estimates for monthly traffic on BlogStorm are normally within 10% of real figures.

Quote from Aaron Wall

Compete.com Search Analytics is Amazing

Take the tour here to see how useful this service could be for your site.

Ian at Conversation Marketing has an interesting tutorial about integrating Google Analytics into your Google custom search engine.

In the past I have always tracked internal search data using a simple sql database and trawled through the queries every so often to check that users were able to navigate the site without resorting to search. If you see that users are always searching for certain pages or products its a good idea to add these to your primary navigation.

Using Google Analytics to trawl through this data is a much better idea, even if you use a non-Google search engine for your site. Just filter the results in your Analytics account by title or url and you should be able to see some valuable data from your sites search engine straight away.

Today is the last day that webmasters can use the old Google Analytics interface.

In case you haven’t quite found your way around the new interface I wanted to remind readers about the Google Analytics tutorial we released last month as well as the second part where we answered your questions.

If there are any more questions, now is the time to ask!

One of the common questions asked following my posts about Google Analytics was “How can I track the traffic to external links without adding the onClick code to each and every link?”

With a bit of searching I found a script that you can place in the header file at the top of each of your pages (you might need to edit the templates if you run Wordpress). The script tracks clicks to external links and reports them in Google Analytics. You need to filter the results in the “Top Content” tab to show page views for “outgoinglink” to get the pages to show.

You can find the script here.

Let me know how it works out for you.

The Advanced Google Analytics Tutorial raised more questions than it answered so I have spent this afternoon going through everybody’s comments and trying to answer them.

If you have any more questions please feel free to ask in the comments at the end of this post.

Google has just announced a few new features including the ability (finally) to click on referring url’s and be taken to the referring page.

Michael asked:

Is there a way to see stats based on a specific day? I’d love to be able to see which pages are more popular as I’ve changed my site over time. I might change link position or something for a week and it’d be nice to see stats for that time period only to be able to compare them.

Click on Content > Top Content and then scroll right down to the form that says Find url and type the page you want to view the stats for. In this case I wanted to view stats for users clicking on my outgoing (affiliate) links.

From the chart below we can see that the link outgoing/top (named because it was at the top of the page) has had 1060 clicks in the time period selected.

If you look to the top right of the screen you should see a drop down box containing a data range.

Click on the box and enter your desired date ranges in the boxes (hint: click on the box and then the name of the month at the top of the calendar to highlight the whole month) and then click the “Apply Range” button.

The result should be a graph comparing data from the two date ranges, one range has a blue line and one is shown with a green line.

Hunter asked:

How do we track flash movie plays with google analytics?

Tracking Flash events is the same as tracking JavaScript events, just call the urchinTracker function:

javascript:urchinTracker('/homepage/flashbuttons/button1');

Example Flash Code

on (release) {

// Track with no action

getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");

}

on (release) _

//Track with action

getURL(”javascript:urchinTracker(’/folder/file’);”);

_root.gotoAndPlay(3);

myVar = “Flash Track Test”

}
onClipEvent (enterFrame) {

getURL(”javascript:urchinTracker(’/folder/file’);”);

}

More details

LGR asked:

Is there anyway to attach the onclick event handler on a link I want to track without editing the html, perhaps at the bottom of the page? Just wondering if it is possible to separate the HTML from the javascript so it is easier to maintain.

Motorcycle Guy asked :

Surely there is javascript to add that javascript to every external link? it seems dumb to have to rewrite your whole application.

I don’t think there is an easy way to do this. The best way would be to make your site database driven and append some automatic variables to the events you want to track.

Another solution would be to give each of your links an id parameter and then to track clicks on each id and register the event that way.

If anybody has any better suggestions please post in the comments.

f4rrest commented:

There are some things still only available in the old UI though, such as graphing country-specific visitors.

Clicking on Visitors > Map Overlay and then the Country detail level and finally selecting the graph view I was able to create the chart below. Is this what you were looking for? I suspect you wanted to see how traffic from a certain country changed over time but this isn’t possible unfortunately.

Slides asked:

Can GA be used to track registered users and their activity on site?

I don’t think GA is the right solution to track individual user sessions and activity on a website. Depending on the data you want to track it sounds like a php application would be best.

darnit commented:

I would love to know how to view the pages sending traffic in the referring information statistics. Not just the domain but a link to the actual page sending traffic.

Clicking on Traffic Sources > Referring Sites and then clicking on del.icio.us (or any of the other sites on the list) you can see a list of the referring pages as well as build a pie chart to visualise the data. Click the “Views” icons to view the pie chart.

This method falls down on sites where the referring page is site.com/page.php?id=12345 as Google strips the id parameter off. It works fine for most blogs as they tend to use a folder structure rather than dynamic urls.

Any more questions feel free to ask below.

Update: following lots of peoples questions I have posted Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2

Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service. Read more >>