• Increased conversions: iPad conversion rate was 30% higher than desktops and laptops rate, and orders originating from iPads had 10% higher value
• Improved ROI: Continuously tweaked ad copy, keywords, and bids based on performance by device
• Maximized successful sales model: Implemented the click-to-call feature to drive more leads into telephone service center, where hundreds of expert sales engineers nurture customer loyalty

Posted by Kevin Otsuka, Associate Product Marketing Manager

It all started out innocently enough: A fairly simple update to goals that before I knew it had morphed into something else entirely. 80% of the stuff in this update was never planned, all of these ideas just starting coming to me as I kept working on it. Hmmm this would be sweet, oh this too, oh and this… Within days my bullet point todo list for this update was ridiculously long and ended up taking almost 3 weeks to complete. But that’s the way it usually goes when I feel I’m on to something good.

New goal report

The main goal report still looks the same – until you click on a goal, that is. This new single goal report is awesome. Here’s an example of one goal we track for new users registering with Clicky:

Talking points:

• You can now graph all goal metrics (conversions, conversion rate, revenue [not shown], visits to goal, and time to goal), simply by clicking on any of those large-sized metrics at the top of the report. Previously you could only graph conversions. We’ve had a million requests to graph this other data – now you finally can. We considered graphing all of them at once but they all have vastly different scales and it simply did not work well.

• This visit and first visit – Like most non-enterprise level services, Clicky used to only give you this visit data, e.g. data from the current session where the visitor converted. While interesting, most visitors do not convert on their first visit to your web site, so this data doesn’t show the long term effects of your marketing efforts – example, which campaign they originally came in from when they bought something two weeks later, or what site they originally were referred by, if any.

  And that’s exactly what first visit is all about. When a visitor converts, we now look up both their current session and their very first session on your site (that we know about it) immediately and summarize it in a table that lets us generate this report really fast, even over large date ranges. I can pull up this new report for a 30 day date range for any of the goals we track in less than 1 second. Not bad!

  Going down these two new columns are five categories (only two are shown here to keep the size reasonable). These categories are campaigns, referring domains, searches, split tests, and goals, which we feel are the most relevant metrics to track in relation to tracking conversions. Previously you could see this data if you filtered your visitors by a goal then chose the appropriate segment, but we wanted to bring these important metrics front and center and make it load super fast.

  Trends are also shown for all data types in this/first visit columns, and you can of course click the red/green percentage next to any of them to graph historical data just like you can with any other report. Of note however is that we’ve only been tracking this data for 3 days, so there isn’t much history yet.

New visitor details page

The old visitor details page did the job, but I used to refer to it as Old Betty if that tells you anything about my feelings towards it. I wanted to make it look nice, and add way more details to it. So… I did!

• Jam packed with details – Click here to see what this report used to look like, for the same visitor. There used to be a lot of wasted white space, with things like one line for browser, one for OS, and one for screen resolution. These are all related, so why not group together? Same with hostname/org, IP + ARIN/RIPE lookups, etc.

• All time goals – Everytime a unique visitor completes a goal for the very first time, we’ve logged it to a table for over a year now I think. This was originally so we could calculate the time to goal and visits to goal metrics, making sure we were only counting each person once per goal. While making this new update, I realized how interesting this data could be. I can’t believe we’ve had it for as long as we have and never shown it to you like this. So, that’s what this is. Every unique goal that this unique and beautiful snowflake has ever completed is shown here, in chronological order, with the date shown next to each one. Clicking on that date will take you to the session where they completed this goal!
• This visit / first visit – Just like the new goal report, we also show this kind of information in the visitor details pain now. So now whenever you’re viewing the details for any of your visitors, you can immediately see interesting details from their first visit as well – including how long ago it was (in this example, 288 days and 15 hours ago). Want to see that first visit? Click on the date. Bam.

Oh, you thought we were done?

New visitors report

• Reorganization – If you use goals or campaigns, icons for those were shown near the left for visitors who had either one attached to them. The problem with this is that most visitors don’t have campaigns or visitors attached, so this added a lot of empty white space in the middle of the report which always bothered me. So, we moved these icons to the very right hand side of the report. (This example is a bit cluttered because I filtered by visitors who had completed any goal, just to make sure there was lots of things to see).

  

• Direct Spy access – In the screenshot above, you’ll see a third icon as well next to some visitors. What is this? Oh, it’s only the best thing ever! If you’re old school, you’ll recognize this used to be the icon we had for the Spy report, before we removed the icons because we ran out of space. If you see this eye, that means that the visitor is online now, and you can click the icon to go straight to Spy with this visitor already pre-filtered! (If you don’t have a premium account, you don’t have Spy, so instead we just show a green dot icon indicating their online status).

  (My only problem here is that the eye icon is available as a choice to you when setting up goals and campaigns. So you might want to change that if you’re using it for anything, to prevent confusion. But there is no better icon to represent what this new function does, so I had to use it. Had to.)

• Quick access to visitor details – So those visitor details I was just telling you about before? Well, there’s no need to actually go to the visitor details page anymore, because they’re now available directly on the main visitors report. Next to the actions link (e.g. 3 actions), is a grey arrow pointing top right. Click this icon and you’ll immediately see the full visitor/session details page in a lightbox without having to go to a new page.

  

Bonus

The code that generates graphs when you click on a trend (those red/green percentages) was a mess and had been rewritten multiple times in several places for specific functionality. This is called horrible design. I took the time to rewrite it from scratch and it’s way smarter and centralized in one place now, as it should be. Previously this code was unable to graph anything that had a parent/child relationship – for example, the this/first visit columns in the new goal report, that data is stored as children of the parent goal. I wouldn’t have been able to let you graph this without rewriting this awful code. I really had no choice here.

So what’s the bonus? Well, if you use our Twitter keyword monitoring, of course we keep history for all of that data – but we never showed you the trend percentage because we didn’t want you to try to click it and have nothing happen (this data is stored with same parent/child relationship in the database). But since that mess is fixed, I have enabled the trends on the Twitter report, including the ability to graph any of them by clicking it. I use our Twitter monitoring a bit obsessively so, considering we released this feature almost 3 years ago, it’s about damn time is all I have to say.

One more thing

From a UX perspective, the fact that we graph both hourly and daily data using the same colors is confusing, because we only log some data as hourly, and we show hourly by default if we have it. The only solution I can think of is to have the two types be different colors, but I can’t find anything that works with our overall color scheme. We have a heavy emphasis on blue and orange. So I tried changing one of them to orange, and it looked horrible (screenshot). I’m just wondering if anyone has any ideas in this department, because I’m at a loss.

Ok, one more

In development for 2 months now is our path analysis feature. We’re still working out the wiggles but expect it to be out within a few weeks and it will make an excellent partner to goals (although of course you will be able to use it without goals).

HAPPY GROUNDHOG DAY!!!

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The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) faced precisely this challenge when it made the decision to use GA Data Grabber by AutomateAnalytics.com. GA Data Grabber works within Excel and uses the Google Analytics API. Users create or choose reports and GA Data Grabber automatically retrieves the Google Analytics data from any number of websites. And with multi-login capabilities, users can seamlessly combine data between Google Analytics profiles that reside under different Google Accounts.

Designed for non-technical users, GA Data Grabber generates great-looking visualizations and can automatically highlight important changes in key metrics over a date range. It’s also possible to use Excel’s visualization and data processing features. For example, formulas can be added to calculate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on any set of metrics.

Amy Sample, Director, Web Analytics, Public Broadcasting Service explains the challenges that PBS faced and how GA Data Grabber was able to help. “The PBS.org and PBSKIDS.org web sites are made up of hundreds of individual companion sites to broadcast programs.  From a business perspective, there is a need to evaluate performance of individual program sites relative to each other.” As is common for many large organizations, PBS has separate Google Analytics accounts for each program site. “While multiple accounts works well to evaluate the site content and performance, it makes it difficult to look at all of the sites side-by-side without a lot of manual effort.  Our previous attempts to create this type of report were time-consuming and often subject to data input errors.”

“Using Google Analytics, combined with GA Data Grabber, we were able to create a benchmark report for our program sites. The monthly report pulls a standard set of KPIs from each of the program accounts and ranks the programs by traffic. The report is used as a management tool by both the PBS.org and PBSKIDS.org teams to monitor monthly performance of programs. The teams have also used it to identify opportunities for programs that are no longer being broadcast but still getting significant online traffic.  Our program producers use the report to benchmark their performance against other sites of similar content or size and determine ways to improve audience engagement. As a result of using GA Data Grabber to pull the data, we can produce this report quickly and accurately on monthly basis.”

GA Data Grabber
Mikael Thuneberg, Founder & CEO of AutomateAnalytics.com has been using the Google Analytics API since its launch. “I’ve been very happy with the API. Having developed for several other APIs, I can say that the Google Analytics API is by far the easiest to develop for. It’s logically structured and flexible, the documentation is excellent, and it’s easy to get help through the forum. I’ll certainly continue developing for the Google Analytics API. I’ve expanded to other APIs as well, but Google Analytics is still by far the most important one for my business.”

GA Data Grabber can be found through the Google Analytics App Gallery and can be downloaded from the GA Data Grabber website.

If you’re interested in developing solutions for the Google Analytics platform, visit Google Analytics Developer Program.

Posted by Pete Frisella, Google Analytics API Team

Based on their research, the answer to the question “What is your rank in search results?” is the first position of a link to your site. Previously we reported the average position of all links to your site. Now your Google Analytics reports will be updated to reflect the first position.

An example calculation

We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported.

How will this affect my Google Analytics data?
This change will affect your Search Engine Optimization reports, when your data in Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization reports will be calculated using the new method. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, corresponding to the same or improved search ranking.

We look forward to providing you a more representative picture of your Google Search data. Please let us know any feedback you have.

Posted by Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team

In the right hands, technologies like Google Analytics can do great things, but unfortunately not every organization is able to hire resources to dedicate to web analytics. What’s more, there are thousands of talented individuals out there who would love to work in this field but don’t have the hands-on experience required to get their first web analytics job.

Two years ago Web Analytics Demystified looked at this problem from both angles and decided to create a solution – The Analysis Exchange. The Analysis Exchange pairs a non-profit organization with pair of web analysts — one a student wanting the experience and the other a mentor with years of direct work in the field.  The trio work together to have the student learn to use Google Analytics to “tell a story” with the data about how the non-profit can better meet their business goals.

Thanks to the generosity of all of our sponsors and participants, Analysis Exchange projects are completely free. Google Analytics is the standard analytics tool for Analysis Exchange for a few key reasons:

• No cost means it is accessible to all non-profits
• Nearly 100% of the non-profits we work with already have it installed
• Our students find Google Analytics incredibly easy to learn
• Our mentors, even if they don’t use Google Analytics day-to-day, pick it up immediately

Most importantly, Google Analytics attention to ease-of-use dramatically improves our non-profits likelihood to continue to use web analytics after Analysis Exchange projects.  Our mentors and students teach them to fish, and Google Analytics becomes the fishing pole.

Most Analysis Exchange projects take less than a few hours for non-profits and mentors.  Students spend more time, but students have the most to gain as they develop the types of “Analyst Ninja” skills that are required to get a great job in this field. We’re looking for more partners to sign up to the The Analysis Exchange – who are interested in supporting this initiative.

You can learn more about our effort at www.analysis-exchange.com or write our Executive Director Wendy Greco directly at wendy.greco@analysis-exchange.com.

Posted on behalf of Wendy Greco & Eric Peterson