We know that Google has been investing heavily to take Google Analytics from being the best free analytics product to the best enterprise product and the first of the new features are being announced this week.
Fantastic features such as engagement goals, improved custom variables, intelligence to alert you to sudden changes in traffic & configurable alerts when you get traffic spikes from certain sites are now included.
Choosing a decent analytics solution is a tricky business and it’s often hard for non-experts to understand the different options offered by vendors let alone the implications for actually setting up the software.
Perhaps this is the reason so many companies choose to use a free service such as Google Analytics rather than a more complex and powerful paid system.
Google has commissioned Forrester Research to help understand the key trends in enterprise web analytics. The “Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics” study shows what large companies want from an enterprise solution and how they are thinking about their web analytics decisions.
Key findings
53% currently use a free solution as their primary Web analytics tool
66% of people who pay for analytics would consider switching to free
52% fail to effectively use more than half of the capabilities offered by their tools
RE:Making Money to Support your £1Billion Valuation
I have money. Not a lot of it. And I don’t want to give it all away. But I do have some. I would like to reach out from my pocket and give you a few quid if it makes a difference. However, unlike you, I don’t want to give anything away free, so please find below some things I want to pay you for. Read more →
Today I want to share an interesting tip which allows you to turn off the “last click” behaviour of Google Analytics and ensure that the first campaign gets credit for the sale. For example if somebody finds your site using a long tail keyword and decides the next day to return and make a purchase they may search directly for your brand and click on a PPC advert. This means all the credit goes to the brand PPC advert and not to the SEO campaign.
This situation can be solved by adding a simple parameter to the end of your branded PPC ad URL’s and also (if you are clever) to the end of your homepage URL if the referrer keyword matches a brand driven search. Read more →
Google Analytics has one major drawback for ecommerce sites – it only gives credit to the keyword or referring source a visitor clicked on the last time they visited the site.
This “last click” approach is what makes a lot of large ecommerce sites choose multi touch attribution analysis products such as Omniture and Coremetrics over the more user friendly and easy to use Analytics interface.
The main problem with “last click analytics” is that a large number of sales are credited to direct traffic & brand keywords (organic or PPC) simply because they were the last method used to find the site before a purchase was made.
In truth users often carry out a number of long tail product searches and generic keyword type queries as they research a purchase and then visit the brand site by searching for it directly after they have made the decision to buy. By not tracking the research phase of the transaction a lot of credit is taken away from the SEO campaign when in fact it’s often SEO that drives branded search. Read more →
Recently we’ve been expanding our service range to include a lot more in the way of conversion rate optimisation and usability testing, as part of this we spent a lot of time investigating various tools that allow us to conduct usability tests without the expense of panel testing.
One of the tools we’ve started to use is ClickTale which (rather amazingly) produces a video of how your visitors browse through the website including mouse movement, mouse clicks, scrolling, data entry in forms and pretty much everything they do in a particular session.
WordPress is fast becoming the best CMS in the world thanks to the range of fantastic plugins that are available to do anything you like. I don’t normally blog about plugins but the new Analytics360 plugin from MailChimp is fantastic.
As you can see in the screenshot below it brings Google Analytics data into your WordPress dashboard and overlays your blog posts on top of the data. Clicking on the orange dot brings up details of the blog post and number of page views that day.
Google ranking data is passed to logfiles via the referrer string, but this data can also be captured by Google Analytics using Advanced Filters to segment Google Search traffic.
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.
