Advanced Web Metrics

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used throughout organisations for defining success. They are particularly essential in web analytics due to the plethora of data collected. In fact without KPIs, it is easy to become overwhelmed. So once you have set your overall web site objectives, use KPIs as the metrics to benchmark your progress. By definition, these are a small subset of “key” information points taken from your web analytics reports.

A prerequisite for benchmarking is having KPIs that are in context and temporal. So for example, saying “we receive 10,500 visitors” is a piece of underlying data that raises more questions than answers. However saying “our new visitor acquisition was up 10% week on week” is a powerful KPI placing the metric in context (new visitors have increased) and is temporal (over the past 7 days).

While most KPIs will be averages, ratios or percentages for this very purpose, it is sometimes more insightful to use raw numbers. Why? Because the primary purpose of a KPI is to drive change. So if your KPI conveys the message more clearly and has more impact as a raw number, use it. A good example of this is when money is involved. Everyone understands $$$ and this is always a powerful rationale to change something. However, always keep your KPIs temporal.

Even if your web site is a non-transactional site i.e. you don’t directly sell anything from it, you should always monetise your goals. This enables you to estimate what your web site is worth but also put into context how much it costs you to maintain it.

Example raw number KPIs include:

• Our web site lost 15 orders yesterday because our e-commerce server was down for 34 minutes
• We lost $10,000 in potential revenue last week because our booking system does not work for visitors that use Firefox
• We spent $36,000 last month on PPC keywords that did not convert.

Clearly knowing if any of these numbers are increasing/decreasing as a percentage, or what fraction of the total they represent is important. However, the impact of these raw numbers, particularly when in monetary terms, is far greater at obtaining action and therefore should be the KPI.

What KPIs drive change in your business?

Beyond the obvious use of sales data, form submission and banner click throughs, most organisations struggle with defining their KPIs. Those listed are clearly imporant metrics but they are also very black and white - a visitor either converts or not and so this tells you nothing about how close that visitor came to converting or what level of engagement they achieved whilst on your web site. Therefore, what other KPIs do you consider the most effective at driving change within your organisation?

Just to let you know that I have finally gotten round to updating the combined tracking script hack I had for urchin.js to the new ga.js. If you know what I am referring to, the new script is listed here: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/ga-scripts/

Essentially the combined tracking script is a modification of the GATC so that it tracks:

• outbound links - Automatically
• file downloads - Automatically
• mailto links - Automatically

Therefore, instead of having to manually modify such links by adding an onClick event handler to your ‘a’ tags, this script will do it all for you.

Why is this necessary?

Outbound links (links to other websites from yours), file downloads (e.g. PDFs, exe, xls etc.) and mailto links (links to an email address) can be important indicators as to whether your site is engaging with visitors. If so, you will certainly want to track these and potentially define them as goals in your Google Analytics reports.

Normally you do this by creating a virtual pageview. However if you have hundreds/thousands of these, or even just a few dozen that constantly change, manually tagging them is an administrative nightmare.

This script uses the properties of the browser (Document Object Model, or DOM for short), to capture links that are non-standard pageviews and automatically create the event handler for you.

The result is that your outbound links, file downloads and mailto links are tracked for you and are always up to date. The default virutal locations for these in your Google Analytics reports are:

/ext/, /downloads/, /mailto/

respectively, though of course you can change these as you wish.

Related posts:

• Tracking links to direct downloads automatically
• Tracking banners and other outgoing links automatically

Are you using this or creating your own hacks for Google Analytics? Please post your comments and share your thoughts here.

My standard word of caution for all “GA Hacks” posts - This is a tech tip and requires you to have a knowledge of html and javascript to implement and use it…

Tracking error pages is something that page tag solutions cannot track out of the box - including Google Analytics. In Chapter 9 of the book I describe how to track all your error pages using Google Analytics. Essentially, you modify the server error template to include the GATC, then use an advanced filter to rewrite the URL string.

However, if you are a Wordpress user, there is a simpler method than tinkering with your web server…

Wordpress includes a template file called "404 template" (404.php). This is the file used to display an error message if a page is not found. By default it does not contain very much:

<?php get_header(); ?>
	<div id="content">
	  <h2>Error 404 - Not Found</h2>
	</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Modifying it to this (assuming you are using ga.js in your pages):

<?php get_header(); ?>
	<div id="content">
	  <h2>Error 404 - Not Found</h2>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	  pageTracker._trackPageview("/missing pages" _udl.pathname+_udl.search)
	  document.write("<p>The page: " +_udl.pathname+_udl.search+ " is not found</p>")
	</script>
	</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

allows you to to view the URLs of missing pages in the Google Analytics Content > Top Content report (see screenshot).

As a tip, use the inline filter as shown to bubble up these pages - otherwise they could be buried deep in your reports. Once you have identified the missing URLs, click through on the pages and then select "Navigation Summary". This tells you which links within your website point to these missing pages - that is, have broken links.

The code _udl.pathname and _udl.search are Google Analytics variables captured by the GATC, so it is important that the GATC is loaded first.

Tip: if you are still using the legacy urchin.js page tag (why?), subsitute the string urchinTracker for pageTracker._trackPageview in the above functions.

Obviously there is more than one way to skin a cat. Please let me know if you have used a different hack to acheive this by leaving a comment.

Many thanks to those who have provided feedback on the book so far. A couple of typo’s have slipped by me, so I wanted to post them here immediately. Please add if you find more. I will create a separate corrections page if needed.

• page 181/182:

The code pageTracker._addOrganic("images.google", "prev"); should be placed just before the line pageTracker._initData(); - Not after, as mentioned on page 178 (grey box, positioning of GATC hacks).

pageTracker._addOrganic("images.google", "prev");
pageTracker._initData();

• page 191, point a (referring to Figure 9.8a):

The regular expression pattern should be: (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*) as shown in Figure 9.8a. Note the change in position of *

Thanks to Bart Geerling, Amsterdam for these two.

As some of you may be aware, I was the first member of the EMEA analytics team to join Google back in October 2005. That feels like a decade ago, both in time, but also in terms of our positioning within the company - remember the GA invite code system?

Last Friday after two and a half years based at the London office, I hung up my Googlepex pass and switched off my environmentally un-friendly lava lamp for the last time. I leave behind a well established team of dedicated product experts and a third-party Partner network to help. As you may suspect following the recent book launch, I will very much remain in the industry and continue to discuss web analytics (with only a slight bias for Google as usual!) both here on the blog and at industry events/conferences.

So what’s next for Brian Clifton?

FACT: The vast majority of web content is made up of poorly optimised websites. By that I mean poorly optimised for visibility (visitors can’t find you via the search engines) and poorly optimised for the user experience (leading to low conversion rates). These two are closely related and web analytics is the key to unlock the potential of both.

Since my first days on the web in the early nineties, I have wanted to do something about that! In fact I have always been fanatical about ergonomics. Therefore I am happy to announce that I am now the Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media - a company specialising in search integration and conversion marketing and the company I originally founded back in 1997. They have been an official analytics partner for Google for many years (that’s how I got recruited by Google!), so the connection continues. I will be focusing my efforts on providing the service needed to help clients grow their business by making web analytics central to their strategy.

Also expect further publications from me (think Urchin - where my association with the product began in 2003), SEM research and conferences/events where you will hear me discussing ideas on web analytics, search integration and multi-variate testing.

Some analytics highs while at Google…

» Read the rest of this entry »