Updated 8 April 2013: Google Analytics changed the way reports are shared and therefore invalidated the links I previously shared. The links are now updated and should work with the latest version of GA. Enjoy!

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.
Read more →

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 →

The trouble with blogs and other sites that offer up quick and pointed content to visitors, is that often times, readers arrive and spend minutes worth of engaged time reading your posts, but they bounce from your site after a single pageview. One potential way of solving this is by changing how your bouncerate is calculated.

Normal definition of bounce rate:

Any visit that only views one page in a session.

Proposed definition of bounce rate:

Any visit that spends less than 10 seconds on the one page they view in a session.
Read more →

I’ve been tracking page load times on my blog for quite some time now. So it’s about time that I published my findings with my setup (now that I have enough data and all). I’ve dug up the key insights for my site after looking at some reports unfortunately I still don’t have enough data to make certain observations (increasing subscriptions, comments, Twitter clickers etc) so I stuck to pages per visit as my engagement metric.

Let’s investigate… Read more →

What good are your Analytics if you can’t make sense of the data and suit it to better your needs? Sometimes, you can get more meningful information out of the reports by customising the data to suit your needs. For instance, have you ever wondered what the value of comments are on your pages? How about determining the longevity of posts? Or seeing which author rocks up the higher number of pageviews per month? Read more →

The problem with most lead generation sites is that while most of them track leads converting on the website, they do not marry them up with the conversion rate of those leads on the backend.

This creates a problem - For instance, you might serve a major accounting practice which attracts 50 leads per month - while the original variation may be sending you more leads, most of those may be rubbish compared to the fewer quality leads converting on Variation 1 in your test. If you just tracked the number of leads, you may be making the wrong decision. Read more →

Normally, cross domain tracking is a nightmare in Google Analytics. Transferring the cookie data from one domain to another can create nightmares for companies, especially as they have to use things like:

• _getLinkerURL on iframes
• _linkByPost on all forms posting users cross domain
• _link on URLs sending users cross domain

Citricle seems to have come up with a solution (at least for sites that have their carts on a 3rd party domain name like Netsuite - but it looks simple enough to work on more complex setups). The idea is simple. To help, I’ve drawn a little diagram to explain it (seriously whipped this up in 5 minutes, certainly not winning any awards for this!): Read more →

Update August 2011: Have made available publicly, the code for my simple feedback form with Google Analytics integration.

Update November 2010: Made a note about tracking visitor comments in Analytics and how I’m testing it.

Update: Removed “Maybe” response with 0.5 score as Analytics only supports passing integers.

Sometimes your goal is not to optimise for revenue, but for the ability of your website to solve people’s problems. The issue is, there’s no website metric which tells you how much a page fulfills this goal. There’s no “Solve Rate” for your content in Google Analytics.

That is why I built a feedback tool into Google Analytics (OK, OK, I’m no web designer):
Read more →

Did you know page load times have been shown to impact conversion rates, revenue and other metrics on your site? Here’s some stats:

• Increasing the size of search results pages from 10 to 30 results increased page load by 500 milliseconds and decreased Google’s revenue by 20%
• Every 100 milliseconds of extra load time impacts Amazon’s revenue by 1%

For more information on how much load times can cost you, read my article over at Experian Hitwise.

Want to measure page load times on your site to see the impact it has on revenue, conversion rates and other metrics? Well I’ve found a way to do it based on a great article from Panalysis, along with my own tweaks (mostly to suit it to my purposes and modify the code for the updated tracking). Read more →