Home // Articles by: Tara Dunn

Location3 Team Named Google Tag Manager Specialists

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Tara Dunn

Google publicly announced Google Tag Manager, their newest product today at eMetrics in Boston. As Google Analytics Certified Partners, Location3 Media was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at this new product and become Google Tag Manager Specialists! Here’s our scoop on Google’s newest toy.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that fires marketing and measurement tags from within a single snippet of code. Once the snippet of code is placed, you can manage your tags whenever you want from the web interface, without the need to involve the IT staff every time you need another pixel placed.

What are the benefits?

This is a great boon to the client-agency relationship because it gives agencies like Location3 yet another tool to make it easier for clients to get found on the path to purchase. Now whenever an agency has an idea for a new remarketing list for a client, they don’t have to ask the client to get their IT team to place it and wait until it comes up in their queue, or possibly incur additional costs to the client if they rely on external IT support. Agencies can focus on managing the campaign, rather than managing the client’s IT staff’s expectation and understanding of what needs to be done.

Because Tag Manager is a Google product, it comes out-of-the-box with an easy system for adding AdWords conversion pixels, AdWords remarketing pixels, Google Analytics tracking code, and DoubleClick floodlight counter tags. This makes life easy for agencies that already have extensive experience with these types of marketing and measurement tags.

There is also a feature that enables you to add custom tags should the need arise (e.g. if you want to fire a tag after an action on a page has been executed). You can also use Macros, a user-defined set of variables, and Rules, conditions for the application of tags based on Macros, for more customization. At least one rule must be applied in order for a tag to fire, even if it is just an “all pages” rule, which Google has kindly set up for you by default.

How can I get started using Google Tag Manager?

Check it out on their website and sign up! You will need a willing client, the help of an IT team to place the container pixel (and possibly remove old pixels if you are migrating them to GTM) and someone dedicated to placing tags in the GTM interface. If you have questions or need help getting started, please feel free to reach out to us.

All About Estimated Traffic Sampling in Google Analytics

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Tara Dunn

What is sampling?

Sampling is when Google Analytics estimates your traffic in a specific way in order to get you larger or more complex reports in a shorter amount of time. For example, let’s say you ask Google Analytics for a report that looks at keywords by city for the past three months. You might be asking Google Analytics to pull data on quite a lot of visits (“sessions”), and in a way that isn’t already preconfigured by Google. This means that the report doesn’t already exist by default, you would have to use a secondary dimension dropdown or create a custom report in order to see it.

Normally this report could take a very long time to process in order for you to see it because of all the work that Google’s processors have to do in order to pull and organize the data correctly. Some web analytics tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst will have this delay – you might be staring at your screen for ten minutes waiting for a report to finish loading. Google doesn’t want users to have this kind of customer experience, so Google samples it instead.

When I think of sampling, I think of biological studies. No, really! Think of an ornithologist studying a flock of geese. He wouldn’t try to capture the entire flock to study them. Instead, he captures a sample of the flock, tags them, and then next season when they return he makes inferences about the entire flock based on what his sample has done. Sampling in Google Analytics is much the same – Google is taking a percentage of your visitors and extrapolating on their data to make patterns that represent your total visitors.

So, is sampling bad?

Not necessarily. Keep in mind that Google Analytics is already an imperfect measuring solution – it doesn’t track users who have cookies disabled via ad-block plugins, for example. So expecting to get absolutely 100% accurate data from Google Analytics (or any web analytics tool, in truth, although some come closer than others) is an unrealistic standard to have.

That being said, sampling can be harmful if Google Analytics is sampling too much. Think of the geese example – if you are guessing about what the entire flock does based on what 80% of the geese do, then it’s probably a pretty safe assumption. However if you are guessing what the entire flock does based on 30% of the geese, you might not have a good guess.

With this knowledge, be very careful when you are pulling automated reports from API tools like Excellent Analytics across many months at a time. This is a very easy way to pull highly sampled data and Excellent Analytics will not tell you when your data is sampled. Excellent Analytics Pro, the paid version, does actually have a great feature (in addition to a host of other nice features) that tells you if your data is sampled or not.

How will I know when Google Analytics is sampling, and by how much?

When Google Analytics samples, you’ll see a yellow “sticky note” at the top of your reports that looks like this:

In the example above, you can see that the sampling is based on 22.27% of my visits. I wouldn’t consider this to be very reliable data. This data should be OK for looking at really big increases or decreases, but I wouldn’t make any life or death decisions based on it. I prefer sampling to be based on 80% of visits or higher, but even then keep an eye out for anything that looks suspect. 95% or higher is ideal.

The weird icon with the black and white squares is an option that also appears, enabling you to control the sampling to an extent. If you click on this icon, you’ll be presented with a slider – if you slide the button all the way to the right, you will get more precise reports with less sampling! In some cases this slider can make the difference in allowing you to feel confident in your data.

Useful links & Info:

The best article from Google that I have found on sampling here.
Google Analytics Premium offers sample-free data, for downloaded reports only (not currently available in the Google Analytics User Interface, by logging in at google.com/analytics). Clients with a lot of visitors (over 500,000 a month) are more likely to run into sampling more often, so this might be something for them to consider.

Google Analytics Mobile Apps: A Review

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Tara Dunn

A little while ago, Google Analytics announced the release of an official mobile app for Google Analytics – finally! Although the app is currently only available on Android devices, it’s nice to see Google offering a Google-branded solution. I’m an iPhone user, so I’ll be waiting to see if they ever launch an iOS version – in the meantime I’ll have to stick to apps for iPhone that were developed by very talented third party developers, also reviewed below.

Google Analytics by Google (Android)

The new app has a slick, easy-to-use interface and has a fair amount of customization available, but still ultimately limited in what data you can see and what comes “out of the box.” Granted this is really an app meant for fast check-ins, to give users a quick, high-level overview of how their overall traffic is doing. With a fair amount of tweaking the settings you can still get something that gives you a quick update on specific campaigns, but who wants to fiddle around with settings for that long? It would be great to see dashboards already set up in the tool for site performance, organic trends, paid performance, etc.

Google Analytics real time in the official Google Android app is a nice feature, and could make for a fun gadget at conferences! You can monitor how many people at the conference check out your site after a day of handing out business cards.

Here’s the Google Analytics default dashboard in the Android app. This is where I feel the tool is really lacking – all you get out of the box is daily unique visitors and daily goal conversion rate. I added bounce rate for this screenshot, and I believe you can add more metrics and advanced segments/filters even to help customize (which is definitely a nice feature) but it would be nice to see more data without having to invest the time setting something up, like the traditional “out of the box” dashboard for Google Analytics.

Seeing automatic and custom alerts in the mobile app was a smart add, and unique to the Google branded app. This makes a lot of sense for doing those quick mobile check-ins!

Analytic by Applidium (iPhone)

Analytic has some definite advantages over the Google app for sheer amount of data available without additional setup, but is lacking in that the main dashboard allows for no real interaction (unlike the other reports in the app, which are impressive) and the app’s reports can only be customized by date range.

This is Analytic’s somewhat underwhelming dashboard. Although arguably better than Google’s default mobile dashboard, Google still wins overall because you can at least customize their app’s dashboard. The inability to click on trend lines and blue text (which I connote with links in normal browsing) is frustrating.

The visitors dashboard introduces a pretty sexy feature – see those top ten lists? You can actually scroll those lists individually to your heart’s content, you aren’t limited with just the top ten in the app. Smart!

Analytic’s traffic sources dashboard is extremely satisfying, this is really the depth of detail that I want from a Google Analytics app. A+, Applidium!

Fast Analytics by Fast Fwd Multimedia Ltd. (iPhone)

This one is my absolute favorite, my only wish for this app is that it had more visuals like the other two apps. This app is entirely data focused, which is great for my OCD brain but every good analyst knows you need to present data as text, numbers and visuals in order to translate to the widest range of audiences. There is also no real ability to customize the data that you see. That being said, I love this app, it has a great amount of information available at your finger tips!

The Fast Analytics dashboard. As I said earlier, trend lines or some visuals would be helpful on this report but it is at least clean and easy to read. Switching date ranges is a little finicky as well, you can’t set a custom date range but if you swipe the report left and right you can access pre-set reports for yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days and last year. This is true on all reports in Fast Analytics.

Here is the traffic report in Fast Analytics. Like Analytic, you can scroll forever in this report, so there is a nice breadth of data. I also like that it includes the raw number as well as the percent of total traffic. Clicking on the arrows to the right takes you to the referring site.

And finally, the keywords report in Fast Analytics. You can scroll forever here too. Clicking the arrows on the right takes you to a Google search for that keyword so you can get a feel for its rank, however since ranking algorithms on mobile devices differ from rank on desktops I’m not sure how accurate it is to be looking at rank this way. Still, could be handy as a starting point.

Fast Analytics also gives you a similar dashboard for browsers (including a slick dropdown for browser versions) and a Countries report, although you can’t break it down by region/state.

Do you have a favorite Google Analytics app? Let us know!

Yahoo! Web Analytics Dies on Halloween

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Tara Dunn

A couple weeks ago we got the notice that Yahoo! Web Analytics is going the way of the quagga, the thylacine, and the auroch. Oddly enough, the last day that anyone can possibly access their Yahoo! Web Analytics reports is on October 31, 2012. Accounts will freeze starting on August 31st, but users will still be able to download reports for a final month. The exception to this is if you are using Yahoo! Stores, but I’m guessing the product will change significantly for that scenario.

We are truly saddened by the loss of this great web analytics tool. Yahoo! was a pioneer on many aspects of free web analytics tools that are now commonplace, such as real time data, path visualizations and true demographic data, such as age and gender (some free analytics tools have yet to catch up to that last part, I might add).

On the plus side, our team is having a lot of fun thinking up Y!WA related Halloween costumes… maybe a purple and yellow zombie?

Google Analytics New Social Reports: An Update

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Tara Dunn

Google Analytics released an update this morning providing more details on use-cases for their new suite of social reports. In my last update on the social reporting suite, I primarily discussed the pending Activity Stream report as the most robust and exciting of the reports (which I still haven’t seen in person), but I have to say I’m starting to see a real benefit to some of the reports that I initially found underwhelming.

Social Sources

I’m finding this new report to be the most helpful. This helps to identify all of your social traffic sources in a way that not even a really thorough advanced segment could. In the below screenshot, you can see traffic from a wide array of sources, some of which I may not have thought to include in an advanced segment. What a great way to find new social opportunities!

Social Pages

Although this report is not as thorough as the social pages report already provided by Google Analytics in an older update, it is a very nice, more succinct snapshot of which pages have the most interaction with social networks.

Old Social Pages Report

While this report is an oldie at this point, I still feel it is worth reviewing in the context of these other new reports. This is very similar to the new social pages report, except that it breaks down the social interaction by the actions you are tracking on your website, which to me is a little more insightful.

The new social pages report is also including social interactions with other social sites it is partnering with even if you don’t have their button installed on your site (i.e. if it is being shared on Blogger even though users aren’t clicking on Blogger share buttons on your site), but at the moment I don’t see a great way to break it down by which social source is interacting with which page. It would be great to see a “Secondary dimension” drop-down option in these reports just like you can do with 99% of the other reports in Google Analytics, so that you can view sources for these interactions. We are submitting this suggestion to Google and hopefully will see a solution in the next round of updates.

Any other features you’d like to see in these new reports?

Google Analytics: New Social Reports

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Tara Dunn

Earlier this week Google announced the imminent release of a new set of social monitoring reports in Google Analytics. This is very exciting news for analysts and social media marketers alike, as these reports help paint a clearer picture of the full impact of social media.

There are a plethora of ways that the new Google Analytics reports aim to improve your social media measurement, but the one I am the most excited about is the Activity Stream. This report is unique to Google Analytics in that it actually pulls in a feed of posts where your content was shared on social networks. For example, if someone publicly shares a link to your website on their Blogger blog with the message, “Hey guys, check out this awesome site I found!” you would then be able to see that in your Activity Stream, similar to the stream below.

The big caveats with Activity Stream include:

Activity Stream will only pull in posts that are absolutely public, if a user has any privacy settings turned on in their social site then Activity Stream can’t pull in any of their posts. Period.
In order for a social site to get included in Activity Stream reports, they need to join Google Analytics’ Social Data Hub. Right now many major players like Facebook and Twitter are not included in this data hub, so we won’t be getting feeds from them in Activity Stream for a little while. Hopefully they will sign on in the near future.

In other random news, Shatner is 81! Can you believe it?! He’ll always be this young in my eyes. Happy belated, Captain!

Google Analytics Calculation Controls: Fast Access Begone?

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Tara Dunn

Google Analytics officially announced yesterday a new feature that has been in public beta for a while now. The new feature is a slider that helps you control the amount of “sampling” that Google Analytics performs on your reports. The update also includes features such as a bar showing the progress for reports that take longer to download and automatic caching of reports so you don’t have to wait for the reports to load each time. This feature has long been a staple of larger, more expensive tools like Adobe’s Omniture SiteCatalyst and Google’s integration of it is a strong indicator of the company’s move towards offering Google Analytics as a more enterprise-driven solution. Google does offer a paid version, Google Analytics Premium, but unlike Adobe, Google continues to offer a free analytics tool that boasts many of these enterprise features at no additional cost.

And now, feast your eyes on some juicy screenshots! As Google Analytics Certified Partners, we have had the pleasure of enjoying this beta for a little while now and have found it extremely useful in providing our clients with reports both faster and with higher data integrity.

Note how tiny the message stating a report is cached appears at the bottom of your reports (“The report was generated on 2/28/12 at 4:08 PM – Refresh Report”) – you have to really look for it!

Have you been able to access the public beta? What do you think?

Web Analytics: Capturing Valuable User Data

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Tara Dunn

Anybody and their mom can copy and paste Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics tracking code onto their site. It takes someone special to be able to really drive insightful data with their implementation. Below are some steps you can take to help insure that your implementation is capturing the most valuable user data possible.

Define your audience. If you have a travel site, who would want to buy your plane tickets? Maybe some of your travel packages are better suited to the elderly and retired, who can travel in the middle of the week. Identifying these audiences helps you think about how you might want to track them.
Determine your signals of intent. What are the desired actions on your site? Form fills and phone calls have been the obvious conversion metrics for years, but don’t underestimate the value of “non-converting” web users. Say you are trying to drive a special vacation package to Florida, which comes at a discounted rate for AARP members. Some signals of intent might be viewing the deal, sharing it on Facebook (although this may be slightly less likely with AARP members), searching for flights and hotels within the package deal, using an online chat to ask questions, and so on.
Track away! Now that you know who you’re looking for and what you want them to do, implement away! Here are some tips for the above scenario:
- If the travel site has a registration or signup page which asks for gender, age range, ethnicity, religion, etc. you can set up custom events to “tag” your web users. You can then segment your data to look at your users that are 50 or older, Caucasian, Christian, or whatever your target audience is.
- Yahoo! Web Analytics also offers valuable demographic data, which they capture via users who use Yahoo! products such as Yahoo! mail or Flickr.
- Implement social analytics tracking for Google Analytics to measure who on your site is socially engaged with your content. You can monitor engagement of your travel deals pages over time to ensure your campaigns are encouraging organic promotion on social media networks.
- Set up e-commerce tracking for your travel deal purchases, but also implement tracking to determine if users are even searching for a travel deals and packages – many web users will begin the signup process in order to compare prices, leave the site, then come back later to actually convert.
- Some online chat services offer integration with web analytics tools so that you can get a little deeper info about chat usage (duration of chat) but if nothing else make sure to track clicks on the chat button or link.
- When monitoring your web analytics, look at the full path to conversion and not just the last click. It may be that 70% of your conversions came from paid search, but there’s a good chance that display advertising influenced over 90% of them. Keep an eye on your conversion influencers is really key in determining how conversions are driven and, more importantly, how to allocate your budget and drive your web marketing strategy.

Any other favorite tips? Drop ‘em in the comments below!

May the Force be With Your Holiday Office Decorations

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Tara Dunn

Our office is breaking out it’s holiday decorations, and with the typical nerddom that you would expect an internet marketing company to have, we are finding unique ways to incorporate elements one of our favorite science fiction series into the festoons.

These are some snowflakes that our handy Operations Manager created (can you name them all?):