Analytics programs are never going to be 100% accurate but you might not expect them to be over-reading by 2-4 times on your unique visitor numbers.
According to research this is exactly what’s going on. Scout Analytics has developed algorithms for tracking users across different devices using dozens of unique attributes and utilize patent-pending algorithms to derive a unique signature for the device, network, even the individual user (biometric). Their systems use things like typing patterns to identify people across different computers for example, you can read more on the blog.
During the past 6 months, Scout Analytics tracked hundreds of thousands of subscribers through a combination of patent-pending tracking technologies of device and biometric signatures. Scout Analytics discovered cookies have an inherent weakness that causes them to overstate the user counts on an average of two to four times.
“Virtually all measurement techniques have some rate of error, but online marketers who have a heavy reliance on cookies need to know this method has astonishingly low accuracy,†said John Lovett, senior partner for Web Analytics Demystified. “Because of this, we expect new innovations in measurement technology in the near future that will no doubt minimize marketers’ reliance on cookies and dramatically improve measurement accuracy.â€
I expect that some of the major analytics provided will be interested and worried about this. On the one hand they want their figures to be more accurate but on the other hand if they were to start using this technology all their customers unique visitor numbers would fall dramatically overnight.
With the huge amounts of long tail traffic websites get these days it’s very hard to analyse where sudden traffic increases and decreases come from. If you get 100,000 visitors one month and 80,000 the next month somebody is going to need a report detailing where that traffic went.
Google Analytics offers a fairly comparison of one months data over another and is also not too bad for comparing how traffic has risen (or fallen) for your top keywords.
For affiliates concerned that their hard work will be wasted by ‘leaky tracking’ of offline conversions, Jonathan Treiber’s offline tracking panel at Affiliate Summit East provided hope for a more accountable tomorrow. (I know, we’re already at Affiliate Summit West – the technology is still new and the tips Jon shared still valuable, so bite me .) Read more →
Google Analytics has been rolling out new features pretty fast recently so I thought it might be a good idea to create a wishlist of features people want.
Mine are below, add yours in the comments.
Real time reporting
Ability to “move” an account from one login to another (for those poor clients whose data is owned by the web design company)
An API that isn’t limited to 10,000 rows of data – why not give us all our data?
Make exact keywords show up without using a filter
Show average ranking data (the same as in webmaster tools) in the organic keywords report
Funnel analysis to show more than just the last click
One of the most exciting developments on the web in the last two years has been the increased ability to combine two or more technologies to create something new. We see this most in the Social space, of course, but overlaying data sets could lead to a dramatically increased understanding of the world we live in.
Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called Experian Hitwise) newsletter. It is one of the very very that I actually remember signing up to. The other 100 a day never seem to get to my in-box now. Hitwise always use the newsletter to focus on on me as a UK user and choose an industry to give us some insight about the market share (in terms of traffic) about that industry and today chose to focus on the UK’s online property websites. Read more →
With site speed apparently set to be a factor in the 2010 Google algorithm webmasters are looking for easy ways to speed up their sites and Google wants to help.
The latest Google Analytics code loads asynchronously allowing your page to load faster – download it here. Read more →
Most people at small to mid-size companies don’t think too much about analytics and are happy to let Google Analytics do all their day to day reporting. We think Google Analytics is a great product but it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.
Below are some innovative web analytics tools built with SEO, conversion rate optimisation & social media in mind for you to try.
BVLD Status
BLVD is somewhat of a revolution because not only does it offer real time conversion reports for social bookmarking buttons & sales, traffic data and configurable alerts for traffic spikes via social sites such as Digg but it’s Keyword Vitals feature shows show live web traffic data side-by-side with live & average keyword rankings. What we wouldn’t give for that in Google Analytics!
Google Analytics has been adding loads of new features recently and in the last few days the Intelligence feature has finally been made live.
This new feature allows you to see an overview of the major events happening on any particular day before segmenting the data to drill down further.
You can also create alerts to warn you if your search traffic for a particular keyword drops by more than a certain percentage compared to the previous day or the same day last week.
It doesn’t seem to be able to match against average daily search traffic which would be far better and without real time reporting I’m not sure how useful this is but it’s a start. You could also use the alerts feature to monitor Digg traffic spikes but again the data isn’t real time so it’s not that useful.
Yesterday Google added an Advanced Filters tool to the content reports allowing users to filter using a number of different parameters. The tool even supports regular expressions.
The filter can be seen at the bottom of the keyword or content reports and allows you to drill down into the information in a much more intuitive way than the previous filtering options allowed, mainly because it’s no longer hidden away in another section.
Below is an example where I drilled down into a keywords report to find all keywords containing the word “car” with an per visit value greater than £8 and a conversion rate higher than 20%.
Most people are in broad agreement that the brand update is about maximising satisfaction rates and making sure as many of your visitors find what they were looking for at your site rather than having to go to Google and search again.
However some people are looking at satisfaction rates and thinking about bounce rates but they are a totally different thing.
First of all lets look at how Google defines bounce rate:
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
To view the bounce rates for your website, go to the Bounce Rate report under Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.
My definition of satisfaction rate:
Satisfaction rate is the percentage of people who find the information or products they were searching for at your website without having to return to Google and perform any further searches.
So while on the surface it’s easy to think that the brand update is just about minimising bounce rate and maximising conversion rates we can see that bounce rate is quite a flawed metric when looking at satisfaction rates. Take Wikipedia for example, they probably have a huge bounce rate because every page gives pretty much the answer to every question somebody might have about the topic they were searching for. The visitor searches for a topic and arrives at a page giving a huge amount of information about that topic – they have no reason to click onto another page or to revisit Google and search again. Read more →
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