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
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.
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 
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If you’ve looked closely enough at my site, you may have noticed the new section to the side - tools and tweaks.
To date, I have built a calculator for graphing and measuring statistical confidence on your tests (alongside the feedback tool and GA content targeting script). It’s the first of its kind to graph split test results freely on a website (at least that I know of).
Check out the split test calculator here - share it and bookmark it if you find it useful. 
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Update: There is a new and faster way of doing this through Google Docs. Plus GA broke my custom reports 
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Last week, Tim Leighton-Boyce shared a post about day-of-the-week reporting in Google Analytics V5. It reminded me of a cool little visualization Core Metrics uses to illustrate the best converting hour and day of the week, as well as how to construct it in Microsoft Excel.
Hour and day of week visualisation of conversion rates using Google Analytics and Excel 2007+
Yes. It’s really that simple to do, and gives you a visual indication of predicting sales and email sweet spots, and when to increase the PPC budgets. Read more →
One of the lesser known features of Google Analytics is that you can use it to target offers and content through JavaScript - much like the features of BTBuckets and many split testing software providers. Unlike these providers however, using Google Analytics can be a cleaner, tidier way that has less of an impact on page load times (since it only needs the GA script to be loaded). Read more →
Feedback is probably the best tool anyone can use to improve their website and guide conversion optimisation camapigns. Since Kampyle is a little on the expensive side for most blog owners, I built a little alternative for anyone looking for a great free option that also integrates with Google Analytics.
Before we get to it, I’d first like to apologise to my subscribers who are receiving this twice. Last week, I accidentally published an unfinished copy of the post from my phone. Yes, I’m embarrassed and yes, I plan to make it up to you… Let’s get into the post!
As I’ve written before, unique visitors and visits can be misleading when used under the wrong circumstances, so it’s important to understand both metrics and track and measure the one that matters most to your business. Chances are, conversion rates by unique visitors mean a lot for your business - but how do you measure it when Google Analytics only measures conversion rates by visits.
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Update 06 August 2012: Will not work with Google Analytics Content Experiments.
Update 30 June 2011: Just updated the code to detect if it’s on the page, in case you’re not running a sitewide test.
I’ve been setting up some crazy-complex experiment on my blog recently and I figured I would simplify things by using Yoast’s Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. This is such a well built plugin but my only concern was that there was no easy way to pull Google Website Optimizer experiments information into it - so I wrote a little work-around. Read more →
Update 24/11/2011: Now you don’t need to make the code updates for Site Speed Tracking - it is all controlled simply through _trackPageview(). In fact, now you can also control the sampling rate of site speed by calling _setSiteSpeedSampleRate() before the call to _trackPageview(). See the tracking reference here.
I’m not sure why, but I haven’t seen much coverage (none at all, in fact) about Google Analytics’ new Site Speed report. As you may have read on my blog, I covered Panalysis’ method to track page load times in GA once before and showed how page load times can be factored into insightful reporting. This time it’s different. Google has released an official product that measures page load times and I have to say, it looks great. Read more →
Ideas are powerful - you don’t need to watch Inception to know that, either. Results released by Microsoft, Amazon and App Sumo indicate most of their ideas to improve their websites have failed to improve the metrics they were designed to lift.
Here are the results: Read more →
I work as a Senior Analyst (Analytics) at Experian Hitwise to help clients turn their customer data into results. I also like to run, drink, eat and be merry. My girlfriend would say I play too many games and use my Androids too much.
