Dear readers - Long time, no see. For those of you who don’t know, I have recently become a freelance analytics and optimisation consultant. Fortunately I’ve been keeping busy :). Don’t you love working in digital right now?

Today’s guide covers an activity I perform almost daily: Measuring A/B and MVT split tests within Analytics (and other tools). Since I’m still not a fan of Google Analytics’ Content Experiments, this guide is focused squarely on integrations with awesome tools like Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, Cohorts.js and Adobe’s Test & Target.

OK, Yep - I hear you…:

Optimizely/Visual Website Optimizer/Test & Target already measures tests.

It does. But there are so many advantages to tracking tests in Google Analytics (or a second platform) that you mustn’t ignore it.

Here’s why… Read more →

Many believe unique browser fingerprinting is a silver bullet to single-handedly and anonymously identify users. Sadly or luckily (depending upon your perspective), browser fingerprints are far from unique. But as I’ll explore in this post, there are better ways to use browser fingerprinting to make it more unique/useful and there are also ways to hide amongst common fingerprints or at least make it difficult to be tracked (as a user).

This post tests which browsers are most susceptible to unique browser fingerprints and configurations you can hide behind.

Read more →

Warning: This is a fairly technical post (not for the faint of “technical heart”).

I was exploring creating my own split testing JavaScript the other week until I stumbled onto this amazing piece of work by James Yu, called Cohorts.js. With a couple of updates, I’m excited to start using this on my own sites and clients’ sites with a low budget.

To sum it up, this post details how to implement a poor man’s Optimizely. Read more →

Whenever people attempt to explain the meaning of direct visits, I always feel like it’s misleading or incomplete in some shape or form. You were probably told:

“Oh, it’s those people who type in your domain name. Yeah that’s it.”

Or:

“Umm… they’re the people who bookmarked your website.”

Sure they’re two possible sources of direct visits but as I’ll explore in this article, they aren’t always. This is kind of a shame because direct traffic usually has a strong intent which you’ll see in terms of behaviour and conversions. Unfortunately most people just don’t know the definition of a direct visit in GA.

The true definition of a direct visit is any visit that lands on your site without a referrer. A direct visits will not override an existing campaign (search, referral or others).
Read more →

As you might be able to tell, it’s important for me to know if people are copying scripts from my site. To me, if a high proportion of visitors are copying my code, I know I’ve done my job. It’s simply a fancy way for me to determine engagement… but it’s not a typical behaviour to track - especially not in GA.

A few years ago, you may have read my post about Tynt - a service that lets you track copy/paste in their interface. I liked it, but I didn’t love it because:

1. The hefty script added to my page load time
2. It saved all the metrics in its own interface (which I never logged into)
3. None of the metrics were visible within the context of all my other valuable analytics data

I just had to find a better solution… Read more →

Maybe one day it will look this good.

Update 09/01/13: Improved script to exclude MSIE 5-8 as they don’t play nice with the jQuery viewport stuff I’m using to calculate scroll depth. At least it’s possible to filter these out of your reports if you do get dodgy browsers with scroll depth >100%.

One of the most useful reports in tools like Mouseflow, ClickTale, Crazy Egg (?) and the like is the “Scroll Reach” report.

It tracks how far people scroll down a page - fancy that! As simple and useful as this metric is, it’s a forlorn metric as far as Google Analytics is concerned … but I hope I can cheer you up.

I popped together a little script which gives us a rough idea about the scroll depth of visitors as well as the height of their browser viewport in pixels. It’s free, easy to install and you can access all data from your cosy little Google Analytics account.

Win, win and win.
Read more →

Over the past 4-5 months or so, I’ve been watching SnowPlow Analytics develop into a sexy analytics platform. They’ve been sharing innovative ideas to make their platform as powerful as possible. Anyhow, something in particular caught my attention - track browser fingerprints in SnowPlow - and so, I decided to track this in Google Analytics.

WTH is a browser fingerprint?

Using information available from your browser configuration (through JavaScript and sometimes through Flash), we can get all sorts of interesting information, such as your user agent, fonts, browser plugins and other settings. There is so much information about your configuration that, when combined, creates a fingerprint that is unique to your browser (or in theory that’s how it works). Read more →

With the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer at the end of 2011, it’s not all doom and gloom for SEOs around the world. There are still plenty of great ways to find backlinks without breaking the bank or compromising on the quality of your data (at least when it comes to your own site, that is). Read more →

Update 5th January 2013: Regretfully, Google discontinued the API that Mikael’s excellent script is based upon - and therefore this approach is broken. You can still do it manually - it’s just as fast!

Read my original post on how to create a heatmaps of analytics data here.

Thanks to a smart Finn called Mikael Thuneberg, I’ve managed to whip up a quick and dirty little Google Docs template which builds these Google Analytics heatmaps in seconds (much easier and faster than the old method):

Hour and day of week heatmap of conversion rates using Google Analytics data

Read more →

Web analytics tools often only give you a limited understanding of your visitors. So when I recently ran a trial of Ethnio on my site to recruit people like you to interview, I was amazed with how much insight I gained.

What is Ethnio?

It’s a service that uses your website to recruit users for research purposes. Decide which visitors you want to target, prompt your users to participate in research for an incentive, screen out the ones you don’t want… and boom. You’ll be recruiting quality participants in next to no time.

Following is how I used it recently on Optimisation Beacon to conduct interviews. Read on for how I used Ethnio (and its features) in excruciating detail ;)… Read more →