Google Analytics 2.0 E-Book

Jerri L. Ledford

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Site statistics give you raw numbers, but Web analytics crunchthose numbers into meaningful metrics you can actually use.Here's what's new in Google Analytics 2.0, such ascross-segment reporting and drilldown content that enhanceanalysis. Learn to set up Analytics and choose filters, exploregoals and goal-setting, use customizable dashboards and dateranges, and master basic analytics and Web statistics concepts.Examine every aspect of available reports, learn to use those bestsuited for e-commerce sites, and more.BONUS: Each copy of Google Analytics 2.0includes a $25 Google AdWords gift card compliments of Google. Withthis $25 gift card , you can attract new customers to your websiteon Google's dime.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

About the Authors

Credits

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Overview of the Book and Technology

How This Book Is Organized

Who Should Read this Book

Tools You Will Need

Moving On

PART One - Basic Analytics

CHAPTER 1 - Why Analytics?

Short Answer (for underlings)

Slightly Longer Short Answer (for your boss)

Long Answer (for you)

What Analytics Is Not

CHAPTER 2 - Analytics and AWStats

AWStats

CHAPTER 3 - Yes! More AWStats!

Yes, There’s More

PART Two - Setting Up Google Analytics

CHAPTER 4 - Getting Started

First, You Need a Google Account

Signing Up for Google Analytics

Activating Tracking

Navigating Analytics

CHAPTER 5 - The Settings Dashboard

Analytics Settings

Website Profiles

Access Management

CHAPTER 6 - Filtering Your Data

What’s a Filter?

A Slightly Longer Lesson on Regular Expressions

Matching a Variable Name/Value Pair

Managing Filters

Advanced Filters

CHAPTER 7 - Using Analytics Goals

Understanding Goal Setting

Setting Up Goals

CHAPTER 8 - AdWords Integration

Why Google Analytics with AdWords?

Linking Analytics and AdWords

Tag, Your Link Is It!

Why Track AdWords Campaigns with Analytics?

CHAPTER 9 - Advanced Topics

Monetizing Goals

Google Analytics on Secure Pages (https)

PART Three - The Dashboards

CHAPTER 10 - The New Dashboard

A New Paradigm

Standard Traffic Reports

Adding Reports

Deleting Reports

Suggested Dashboards for Specific Roles

CHAPTER 11 - Setting Date Ranges

Using the Calendar

Comparing Ranges

Using the Timeline

PART Four - All Reports: Visitors

CHAPTER 12 - Visitors Overview

Visitors

Map Overlay

New vs. Returning

Languages

CHAPTER 13 - Visitor Trending

Visits

Absolute Unique Visitors

Page Views

Average Page Views

Time on Site

Bounce Rate

CHAPTER 14 - Visitor Loyalty

Loyalty

Recency

Length of Visit

Depth of Visit

CHAPTER 15 - Browser Capabilities

Browser

Operating System

Browser and Operating System

Screen Colors

Screen Resolution

Flash Version

Java Support

CHAPTER 16 - Network Properties

Network Location

Hostnames

Connection Speeds

CHAPTER 17 - User Defined

Segmentation That’s Customized

What to Segment

PART Five - All Reports: Traffic Sources

CHAPTER 18 - Traffic Sources

Traffic Sources Overview

Direct Traffic

Referring Sites

Search Engines

All Traffic Sources

Keywords

CHAPTER 19 - AdWords

AdWords Campaigns

Keyword Positions

CHAPTER 20 - Additional Traffic Reports

Campaigns

Ad Versions

PART Six - All Reports: Content

CHAPTER 21 - Content Overview

Content Overview

Top Content

Content by Title

Content Drilldown

Top Landing Pages

Top Exit Pages

Site Overlay

PART Seven - All Reports: Goals

CHAPTER 22 - Goals Overview

Goals Overview

Total Conversions

Conversion Rate

Goal Verification

Reverse Goal Path

Goal Value

Abandoned Funnels

Funnel Visualization

PART Eight - All Reports: E-Commerce

CHAPTER 23 - E-Commerce

E-Commerce Overview

Total Revenue

Conversion Rate

Average Order Value

CHAPTER 24 - Product Performance

Product Overview

Product SKUs

Categories

CHAPTER 25 - More E-Commerce Reports

Transactions

Visits to Purchase

Time to Purchase

Index

Google Analytics™ 2.0

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.10475 Crosspoint Boulevard Indianapolis, IN 46256 www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

eISBN : 978-0-470-54942-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ledford, Jerri L.

Google Analytics 2.0 / Jerri Ledford and Mary E. Tyler.

p. cm.

1. Google Analytics. 2. Internet searching--Statistical services. 3. Web usage mining--Computer programs. 4. Internet users--Statistics--Data processing. I. Tyler, Mary E., 1970- II. Title.

TK5105.885.G66T95 2007

658.8’7202854678--dc22

2007026265

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

To all of my friends who think I’m famous, who are more excited abouteach new book than I am, and who support me in ways that few writers(or technologists) ever experience. I’m not famous, but without you, Icouldn’t do it. I love you all. Thank you!

— Jerri

To Jim Roberts of Carnegie Mellon University, who taught me to teach.To Lorrie Kim, who said, “This is too good to keep to yourself.” To JerriLedford, my coauthor and mentor, who said, “You can do this.” Again.And again. And again. And for Mom, because there aren’t enough words.

— Mary

About the Authors

Jerri Ledford has been a freelance business-technology writer for more than 10 years, with more than 750 articles, profiles, news stories, and reports online and in print. Her publishing credits include: Intelligent Enterprise, Network World, Information Security Magazine, DCM Magazine, CRM Magazine, and IT Manager’s Journal. She has also written a number of books. When not writing, she divides her time between Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, hiking, gardening, playing with electronic gadgets, and spending time with friends and family, who refer to her fondly as “tech support.”

Mary E. Tyler is a professional technology journalist and a former software and web developer. She specializes in open source, enterprise software, intellectual property, motorcycles, and anything Macintosh. Tyler has three daughters, four cats, one small, fluffy lapdog, and a spouse in the career military.

Credits

Acquisitions EditorKatie Mohr

Development EditorWilliam Bridges

Technical EditorTodd Meister

Production EditorElizabeth Ginns Britten

Copy EditorNancy E. Rapoport

Editorial ManagerMary Beth Wakefield

Production ManagerTim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group PublisherRichard Swadley

Vice President and PublisherJoseph B. Wikert

Project CoordinatorAdrienne Martinez

CompositorLaurie Stewart, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

ProofreadingSossity Smith

IndexingJack Lewis

Anniversary Logo DesignRichard Pacifico

Acknowledgments

From Mary: First, thanks to my stellar agent, Laura Lewin, who sold this book, and Neil Salkind, who negotiated the second edition, and to the staff at Studio B. They’re good folks. Thanks to Bill Bridges, our development editor; Katie Mohr, who acquired this book for the publisher; and everyone else at Wiley who made it printable. Thanks, also, to the engineers at Google who answered our questions and to the cool staff of Browsercam.

Endless gratitude to my fellow writers online, who gave me community, advice, and various kicks in the pants as needed. There are too many to name, but they all hang out at The Writing Mother and Jay’s Writers’ World. I’m sure there are others I should thank. Apologies to anyone I forgot.

From Jerri: Mary, your vision on the first edition turned into an amazing reality. It’s been a wild ride, girl! You’re a phenomenal writer, and I’ve learned much along the way. Thank you!

We couldn’t have created the book without the help of some very dedicated “Googlites.” To David Salinas, Brett Crosby, Christina Powell, Michael Mayzel, and Brandon McCormick, thanks for all your help and for pointing us in the right direction. And thanks to my very own “Google Guy,” Alex Ortiz. Your passion for and belief in Google Analytics comes through, my friend. I am more appreciative than you’ll ever know for your answers and your efforts in ensuring that there are great screenshots for our readers to see.

There’s also an entire team of people at Wiley who helped make the book possible. Mary has mentioned several, and I’ll add my thanks to Todd Meister, our amazing (and super-patient) tech editor, Katie Mohr, and Mary Beth Wakefield (wonderful, helpful people), and Bill Bridges, who deals with my writerly eccentricities as if they were normal! Thanks to all of you (and to anyone I may have overlooked).

Introduction

In late 2005, Internet behemoth Google purchased leading web analytics firm Urchin and began offering the service free of charge to certain well-placed technology publications’ web sites. Not long after that, Google launched the Google Analytics service based on the Urchin software, offering it to the general public as a completely free service. Response was incredible — overwhelming — and a quarter of a million new accounts were created overnight, with an estimated half to three-quarters of a million web sites tracked.

All of this caught Google unprepared, and people had to be turned away because there weren’t enough resources to support everyone who wanted an account. Google began taking e-mail addresses for interested webmasters who couldn’t be accommodated at launch.

How did this happen? How did Google so grossly underestimate the demand for Google Analytics? After all, at $200/month, Urchin did only well — it had good software and a relatively low price point for the industry, but it wasn’t exactly inundated with clamoring customers.

Apparently, assessments based on Urchin’s sales weren’t exactly accurate. The demand for real analytics is huge, and the price tag of “free” is exactly the price tag that draws in the masses.

But what are analytics? Most webmasters know enough to realize that they need analytics. But do they know how to read them? How to use them? Are analytics just “site stats on steroids,” or can they be used by the average webmaster, who is a layman and not a professional, to improve the performance of a web site?

The answer is that, with Google Analytics, the average webmaster can use analytics to improve the performance of a site. And well over a half-million users have figured this out, using Google Analytics. So many users have turned to Google Analytics and begun to make suggestions about the program that the design team at Google decided it was time to implement some new features and make the application easier to use. And that’s how the Google Analytics 2.0 application was born.

The purpose of this book, Google Analytics 2.0, is to explain the concepts behind analytics and to show how to set up Google Analytics, choose goals and filters, read Google Analytics reports and graphs, and use that information to improve your web site performance. Advanced information about topics such as filtering, goal setting, and e-commerce tracking, and more in-depth explanations of some of the theories of analytics, are among the new features added. We provide numerous examples of the ways companies use these reports to do business better to illustrate how some of the functions of Google Analytics work. We have even included examples (although sometimes not flattering) of our own sites and usage patterns to help you understand the value of the reports and capabilities available through Google Analytics 2.0.

Overview of the Book and Technology

Google Analytics 2.0 is a powerful tool for measuring the success of your web site, your marketing efforts, and your products and services. With that in mind, we strive to give you all of the tools you’ll need to begin using the program immediately if you’ve never used it before. That includes explanations of how to get started using Google Analytics, as well as chapters on how to find and use reports.

We’ve also tried to explain what each of the reports means, in the grand scope of your business. Where it’s appropriate, we tell you how these reports apply to our personal web sites; and where it’s not, you’ll find both fictional examples and examples of real companies that use Google Analytics.

What’s new in this book is the advanced material that you’ll find here. We include information that takes you beyond just getting into Google Analytics 2.0. Of course, you’ll learn all about what’s new with the program, but more important, you learn how to use the application for more in-depth analysis of your web site statistics. Using the advanced techniques and tips provided throughout the book, you’ll be able to drill down deeper, find more specific information, and use information in ways that you never have before when using Google Analytics. There’s even an entire chapter of advanced material to help you gain still more value from your Google Analytics application.

How This Book Is Organized

The book is divided into several parts. Each part corresponds with a section on the Google Analytics user interface. Here’s a quick map of what each part contains:

• Part One: Basic Analytics — This part contains three chapters. Chapter 1 introduces you to the concept of analytics and the reasons why you should use Google Analytics 2.0. And then, in Chapters 2 and 3, we compare Google Analytics to a program with which you may already be familiar — AWStats. The purpose of the comparison is to familiarize you with basic analytics and web statistics concepts you will need to understand Google Analytics 2.0.

• Part Two: Setting Up Google Analytics — Google Analytics can be a little intimidating when you first see the program. But when set up properly, it is a very powerful program that helps you improve your web site effectiveness. To that end, this section walks you through getting started in six quick chapters. Chapter 4 gives you the basics on signing up for Google Analytics and navigating the user interface. Chapter 5 gets you started setting the program up. In Chapter 6, we try to demystify filters and filtering, and then we take that a step further by explaining goals and goal setting in Chapter 7. The next chapter in this section, Chapter 8, covers integrating Google Analytics with Google’s AdWords. Finally, Chapter 9 provides guidance for some of the more advanced features of Google Analytics.

• Part Three: Dashboards — We begin to get into the meat of Google Analytics in the two chapters in Part Three. These chapters help you get control of Google Analytics 2.0. In Chapter 10, you learn how to access and customize the dashboards, and Chapter 11 covers everything you need to know about setting date ranges.

• Part Four: All Reports: Visitors — You’ll find most of the information on the reports in Google Analytics 2.0 in the “All Reports” sections of the book. Each of these chapters follows the structure of the reports. Part Four contains six chapters that cover all of the Visitor reports, including an overview, trending reports, loyalty reports, browser capabilities, network properties, and user-defined reports.

• Part Five: All Reports: Traffic Sources — This part includes three chapters that detail the Traffic Sources reports. The Traffic Sources overview, AdWords, and additional traffic reports are covered here.

• Part Six: All Reports: Content — Part Six contains only one chapter, but that chapter contains information on all the content reports in Google Analytics 2.0.

• Part Seven: All Reports: Goals — Like the previous part, Part Seven contains only one chapter. This chapter covers all of the goals-specific reports in Google Analytics 2.0.

• Part Eight: All Reports: E-Commerce — The e-commerce reports help you to better understand your e-commerce sales. This part of the book contains three chapters that detail the e-commerce reports available to you. Chapter 23 is an e-commerce overview. Chapter 24 includes product performance reports. And Chapter 25 explains additional e-commerce reports that are available.

We suggest that whether you’re interested in Google Analytics for marketing, content optimization, or e-commerce, you should skim through the whole book first. Even if you don’t want to know which of the pages on your site sells the most gadgets, there is value to be found in these reports, and we show you where to find it.

Once you’ve read through the book, keep it near your computer to use to refresh your memory on how to use a report or where to find it.

One thing you may notice is that each report is in a section of the book that corresponds with a section in Google Analytics 2.0. We’ve tried to maintain a structure similar to that of Google Analytics 2.0 to make it easier for you to find everything. If you don’t know where something is located in the program, look at the illustrations in the book. They’ll show you exactly where we found it.

One more note about the illustrations you’ll find here. You may notice that some of them have no data. We’ve done this on purpose. Chances are that there will be areas of Google Analytics where data is not yet being collected. This is because you have to set up your web site and some of the reports and then give them time to collect data. We’re leaving these blank figures just so you can see what they might look like before you have data in them. In the majority of illustrations, however, you’ll find varying amounts of data. In some cases, examples of micro-businesses are used, and in others we’ve included examples of larger businesses. Again, this is to help you understand the varying levels with which Google Analytics 2.0 can be used to improve the effectiveness of your site.

Who Should Read this Book

Do you have a web site or blog that you’d like to track? Can you edit the HTML on that site? Are you web savvy but not an analytics expert? If that’s you, you’ve got the right book. We tried to explain everything in the following pages in the context of how small-business owners and micro-business owners might need to use it. These concepts apply to home-business owners as well. There is a wide audience for Google Analytics 2.0. Our aim is to help the beginning and intermediate users become experts, so you’ll find information in these pages that runs the gamut from very basic to quite advanced.

Depending on where you are with your Google Analytics account, you might be able to skim over certain sections of the book. For example, if you’ve already set up a Google account and your Analytics account, you can glance at Chapter 1 without paying too much attention to detail. If you haven’t completed one or both of those actions, however, you probably shouldn’t skip that chapter.

We do recommend that everyone read Chapters 5-7. The information included in those chapters is relevant to nearly everyone who uses Google Analytics 2.0.

If you want, you can even skim through the whole book first and then come back and focus on only the sections that apply directly to your needs at this time. The great thing about Google Analytics 2.0 is that it’s designed to be a lasting resource. You can always pick the book up later if your needs change.

Tools You Will Need

As with any report that you create, there are a few supplies that you’ll need along the way. With Google Analytics, it’s fairly simple. First, you need a web site to track. It can be your own web site, your company web site, or even a blog site, so long as you have access to the HTML code for that site. You have to have access to the code because you need to alter the code so that Google can track your site.

In addition to your site, you’ll also need access to the Google Analytics program. Signing up for Google Analytics is easy; you’ll learn all about it in Chapter 4.

You may also want a Google AdWords account. It’s not essential to have, but part of the true power in Google Analytics lies in its integration with Google AdWords. If you don’t have an account and haven’t even considered using one, read through Chapter 8 and then go ahead and sign up for the account if you think it will be useful. It takes only a minute, and you can deactivate your AdWords campaigns at any time.

Finally, throughout the book you’ll find references to books on certain topics. These are not requirements, just suggestions that you may find useful if you want to know more about that specific topic. The books recommended here can be found through Amazon.com or any local bookstore. We’ve tried not to include anything obscure or hard to find.

Moving On

Enough. We’ve covered everything you’re likely to want to know about using the book, so it’s time to move on. Well, everything except the blog. If you have questions while you’re reading the book, or if you just want to learn what’s new or changed with Google Analytics, check out our blog at www.google.analytics-blog.com . You’ll find all kinds of up-to-date and extra information about the program there, and even some tutorials that include advanced information and uses for Google Analytics.

Now it’s time to get going. Have fun, and thanks for reading!

PART One

Basic Analytics

Having web site statistics is one thing. Understanding what they mean and what you should do with them is another thing altogether. If what you want is to get into the nitty-gritty, reams of information are available to you. If, however, what you’re really looking for is a quick, easy-to-understand explanation of analytics and why you should care, read on.

This part of the book gives you the working knowledge you need to understand the importance of analytics, all in three short chapters. When you’ve finished reading these first three chapters, you’ll understand basic web measurements, how they apply to your web site, and the difference between site statistics and analytics. Then you’ll be ready to tackle Google Analytics.

CHAPTER1

Why Analytics?

Short Answer (for underlings)

Because.

Slightly Longer Short Answer (for your boss)

Because it’s there and it’s free, and web-page counters are so 1997.

Long Answer (for you)

First there were log files and only people who bought really expensive software could figure out what the heck the half-million lines of incomprehensible gobbledygook really meant. The rest of us used web-page counters. Anyone could see how many people had come to a page. As long as the counter didn’t crash, or corrupt its storage, or overflow and start again at zero, there would be a nifty little graphic of numbers that looked like roller skates (or pool balls or stadium scoreboard numbers or whatnot).

Around 1998, the arbiters of taste on the Internet (i.e., everybody) decided that page counters were so 1997 and that there must be a better way.

And also about that time, web site statistics packages or “stats” came into common use — not common use by huge businesses that could afford thousands of dollars for software but common use by us peons who rent our web space from hosting companies for as little as $5 a month. Stats packages basically collect data but leave you to analyze that data. So they tell you what happens; they just don’t put what happens into any type of business context.

If you have Windows-based hosting, you may have a Windows-specific stats package, or your host may use the Windows version of one of the open source stats packages. If you have hosting on a Linux web server running Apache (and about 60 percent of web servers run Linux and Apache), you’ll most likely have Analog, Webalizer, or AWStats, and you may have all three. These software packages are open source under various versions of the GNU Public License (GPL). This neatly explains their ubiquity.

They’re free as in freedom, but more important to this particular purpose, they’re free as in beer. Free as in beer is a large attractant to bottom line-conscious ISPs and web hosts. While a good site-stats package will provide numerous important metrics to help you measure traffic and fine-tune your web site’s performance, there are a few key things that site stats just won’t tell you. We’ll get into that later.

Where stats packages leave off is where analytics come in. Comparing what a good analytics package does to what a good site-stats package does is like having Mark McGwire bat right before the Little League’s MVP. One could be kind and say it’s a Major League to Little League comparison, or like putting a man next to a boy, but the truth is that analytics are like site stats on steroids. The long answer to “Why analytics?” is almost as short as the slightly longer short answer: web analytics are site stats on steroids (and page counters are so 1997). Stats give you numbers. Analytics give you information.

If Analytics Are So Great, Why Don’t We Have Them?

The short and simple answer to this is that medium and large companies that can afford analytics do have them. There are many analytics software packages that cost money, among them WebTrends, HitBox Professional, and Manticore Technology’s Virtual Touchstone. The low-end price for web analytics is $200 per month. The high-end price? A couple grand a month is not unusual. To the microsite, the small site, the web merchant on a shoestring, the mom-and-pop site, the struggling e-zine, the blogger who aspires to be Wonkette but isn’t yet — that is, to most of the sites on the web — two hundred bucks a month sounds like a lot of money!

Then, in mid-2005, Google rocked the boat, buying a small company called Urchin. Urchin was no Oliver Twist. It was, in fact, a runner-up for the 2004 ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award for Best Small Business Analytics Tool. Its product, Urchin Analytics, had a monthly cost on the low end of the market — about $200 a month — and was designed for small businesses.

Six months later, Google did something completely unprecedented. It rebranded Urchin’s service as Google Analytics with the intention of releasing it as a free application. Google prelaunched it to a number of large web publications (among them NewsForge.com, where Mary Tyler is a contributing editor). And shortly after that, Google opened it to the public, apparently completely underestimating the rush of people who would sign up — a quarter of a million in two days.

Google quickly limited the number of sites that registrants could manage to three, although if you knew HTML at all, the limitation was pathetically easy to bypass. Google also initiated a sign-up list for people who were interested, which eventually morphed into an invitation system reminiscent of the controlled launch of Google’s Gmail. The moral of this story is, “Don’t underestimate the attraction of free.”

Now That We Have Analytics, What Do We Do With Them?

What do you want your web site to do better?

Analytics is software that generates metrics. Metrics are measurements. There are all sorts of possible web site metrics — measurements you can take — about how many times files are accessed, how many unique IP addresses access the site, how many pages are served, and so on. Analytics can calculate the most popular pages, how long the typical person stays on the typical page, the percentage of people who “bounce” or leave the site from a particular page, and thus the percentage of people who explore the site more deeply.

Ad nauseam.

Yes, you can look at a zillion different metrics until it makes you dizzy, sick, and hopeless. Fortunately, some metrics have more impact on your site than others. Which metrics matter? That depends on what your site is. If your site is content, there’s one set of metrics that matters. If your site sells things, a whole different set of metrics matters.

The point here is that you have to figure out your web site’s purpose. For content businesses, it might be how much time the visitors spend, how deep visitors dig, and how often visitors return. For a business concerned mainly with selling things, it might be average time to sale, rate of shopping-cart abandonment, and profit, profit, profit. Once you know what metrics are meaningful for your web site, you can use those metrics to improve the site’s performance. What do you do with analytics?

You improve your bottom line.

Here’s a scenario for you. Mark owns a small rug store. It’s nothing fancy, but the store does have the best prices in a three-state area, so it stays pretty busy.

Mark’s wife, Anna, is his official webmaster. Anna doesn’t have any formal training in web site design, but through trial and error she has managed to put up an attractive site. The problem is, attractive doesn’t necessarily translate into effective, and Mark and Anna want to know how effective the site is.

That’s where Google Analytics comes in. When Anna first activates her Google Analytics account, she just watches it for a few weeks to see how much traffic the site gets, where it comes from, and what pages visitors spend the most time on.

After a few weeks, Google Analytics has given Anna enough information that she knows the planning pages of the web site are the ones that customers spend the most time on. She can also see that the majority of her visitors come from a link on their local Better Business Bureau site.

These facts help Anna and Mark make some decisions about their marketing budget. Being small means that marketing needs to be effective because there’s less budget for it than a larger company might have.

Based on what they’ve learned from Google Analytics, Anna decides to create a monthly newsletter for the company, which includes tips for planning where and how to place a rug and effective decorating tips for using rugs. They also agree to try AdWords for a few months to see how an AdWords campaign would improve the business.

To track all of this, Anna sets up filters and goals in Google Analytics. Using the metrics returned by these filters and goals, she’ll be able to see if her decision to build on the strengths of the web site actually turns into more sales.

Anna and Mark aren’t real. They’re (unpaid) performers in this little skit, but their story illustrates how you can use Google Analytics to improve your marketing, which in turn will improve your business. Your specifics might be different. But if you use Google Analytics as a tool to monitor and build marketing efforts, you’ll find there are many benefits to knowing the who, what, when, why, and where of web site traffic.

What Analytics Is Not

The short answer is: Google Analytics is not magic. It’s not some mystical force that will automatically generate traffic to your web site. Nor is it the flashing neon sign that says, “Hey, you really should be doing this instead of that.” And it’s most certainly not the answer to all your web site traffic problems. No, analytics is none of those things.

What analytics is is a tool for you to use to understand how visitors behave when they visit your web site. What you do with that information is up to you. If you simply look at it and keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’re getting.

You wouldn’t place a screw driver on the hood of a car and expect it to fix the engine. So don’t enable Google Analytics on your site and expect the application to create miracles. Use it as the tool that helps you figure out how to achieve those goals.

CHAPTER2

Analytics and AWStats

AWStats

AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics) is an open source log analyzer written in Perl that can use a variety of log formats and runs on a variety of operating systems. The official documentation of AWStats is mostly targeted to system administrators rather than to owners of web site businesses. In short, it’s not much help in figuring out what the statistics mean.

Wait a minute!

This is a book about Google Analytics, so why the heck are we talking about some open source stats program? Because the thing about analytics is that to make any sense, there needs to be some data. It’s going to take at least a couple days to get any data into Google Analytics. It’ll be months before there’s enough data to make any sense. But you may already have a wealth of historical data right there in AWStats. Never looked at it, you say?

Thought so.

That data you’ve probably got in AWStats, which maybe you never really understood because there’s no in-depth documentation on it, are still valuable. This is your past. For some things, bigger and newer isn’t necessarily better. Google Analytics and AWStats have different features with different strengths and weaknesses. For some things — many things — Google Analytics blows AWStats out of the water. For other things, Google Analytics uses a different methodology, with its own limitations.

There are two main differences between Google Analytics and AWStats. First, AWStats is primarily a site statistics program. AWStats counts more than it calculates. It has far fewer metrics and capabilities than Google Analytics. It’s intended to be a simpler sort of program — nothing wrong with that. Google Analytics is intended from the get-go to be a business strength program. It calculates as much as counts and gives you metrics that, as a business person, you’ll want.

Second, AWStats is a log analyzer. Google Analytics relies on cookies and JavaScript (referred to as “scripting” from here on out). This has several far-ranging implications.

For example, to a log analyzer, all traffic coming from a single IP address is one “user.” When using scripting, you set a cookie on an individual user’s machine, or even in a particular account profile. Then, if five computers share an outside IP on a local area network, and there are three user accounts on each computer, you “see” 15 users, not one.

On the other hand, if users turn off cookies, or don’t allow “third-party” cookies, you may not be able to track them at all with Google Analytics. At best, you may be able to track them for a particular session, but a half-hour later (or the next day), they will look like brand-new visitors.

Another excellent example is tracking search engine visits (see the section “Robots and Spiders” in Chapter 3). A log analyzer has to identify search engines from lists of known spiders, by the spider’s identifying itself, or by a wild guess. Some small percentage of a log analyzer’s traffic may be misidentified as a real person when it’s not.

On the other hand, most spiders, robots, and search engines, by default, don’t execute JavaScript code. Google Analytics won’t misidentify these sorts of false visitors. Of course, Google Analytics won’t pick up real visitors who have JavaScript turned off, either.

Just as you can argue Mac vs. PC or football vs. figure skating, you can argue script-based tracking vs. log analysis. I’m not going to say one is intrinsically better than the other. There are tradeoffs with either methodology. As long as you know what those tradeoffs are, and what effect they may have on your metrics, you can allow for any ambiguity that might arise.

At some point, no matter how you gather data, you’re going to have to plow into the nit-picky little boring stuff: log analysis vs. scripts, nobodies vs. people, pages that are pages vs. pages that really aren’t. So because we work hard and play hard — and you note which comes first — we’re going to dig in and go through some of the details, the basic concepts that will make what you see in Google Analytics mean something.

That is why we’re here, after all.

CASE STUDY: SKATEFIC.COM

SkateFic.comis Mary’s web site. Mary’s company, Private Ice, publishes figure-skating fiction, humor, essays, and poetry both as free online content and for sale as both a paperback and an e-book. The site is relatively simple in structure and execution and does not require any special intervention to force the metrics to make sense. There is content for the sake of content, content for the sake of advertising, and products for sale, without any of those things being overly complex. It makes a good overview, and we’ll refer toSkateFic.comfrom time to time to compare and contrast both Google Analytics and other case studies.

We’re starting out with AWStats for a couple of reasons. First, if you have a web site, you‘re very likely to have AWStats already. Rather than trying to extrapolate from our case study to your web site’s likely results, you’ll be able to look at your own web site’s information populating the AWStats reports. AWStats is also a bit less complex a tool than Google Analytics. It’s easier to explain basic concepts without having to deal with all the complexity.

AWStats Browser

We’re going to get under way by taking a look at the AWStats window (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1: AWStats browser window in Firefox

The AWStats window has a left-hand and a right-hand frame. The right-hand frame shows the reports. The left-hand frame shows the domain name for the site statistics you’re viewing followed by a text link navigation list. You can go directly to sections of the main report from any flush-left link. Secondary reports, left-indented with a tiny AWStats icon, replace the main report in the right-hand frame when you click the navigation link.

AWStats Dashboard

AWStats doesn’t have many controls on the dashboard (shown in Figure 2-2). Much of what can be configured is set by your web host at install time. The dashboard appears at the top of the main report. AWStats notes the time of the last update. Most web hosts update in the middle of the night. The time listed is on the server’s time zone and is not necessarily your time zone. You can force an update by clicking the Update Now link.

Figure 2-2: AWStats dashboard at top of main report

If you need up-to-the-minute results, or if your site is very busy during a specific part of the day, it’s probably smart to force an update before you look at the stats. If you’re updating results for a couple days, the update can take some serious time — upwards of a half-hour — depending on how busy your web site is. If your site is not very busy, or if it has been only a couple of hours since the last update, you might have the same overhead as a normal page reload.

Use the drop-down menus to change the month and year. To view a whole year, choose Year from the month menu and then the year from the year menu. Click the globe to go to AWStats home page at SourceForge.net. Click the flags below the globe to change the reporting language. Available languages depend on which ones your web host has installed. In this screenshot, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish are installed, as well as the English default.

Summary

In Figure 2-3, the first three lines of the summary tell you what period the summary covers and the first and last visits during that period.

Figure 2-3: AWStats summary showing reporting period

The rest of the summary is a two-line table. One would think the captions are pretty self-explanatory. Nope. No such luck.

People and Not People

First off, there’s the difference between Traffic Viewed and Traffic Not Viewed. In general terms, Traffic Viewed is generated by people. This isn’t a completely sure thing, but it’s close enough for most purposes. Traffic Not Viewed is generally generated by things that are not people. This includes robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes.

LIVING ON SERVER TIME

AWStats shows server time, not necessarily your time, not necessarily your time zone. For example, when reading times in AWStats reports, it’s important to remember that the server might be in Central Time while you might be in Eastern Time.

Don’t knowwhenyour server is?

There are two solutions:

• If you have shell access to your server: Open a terminal program, ssh to your web server and log in, and run the date command at the prompt. The output from date lists the time zone, as shown in the figure that follows. Note that this data may not appear exactly the same on your program because your time zone may differ. In fact, many servers outside the United States will use GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

Running date on your web server

• Ask your web host.

Robots are software programs that access web pages for their own purposes. Search-engine crawlers (also known as spiders) are robots that index web pages for inclusion in their search results. There are other spiders with less savory purposes such as harvesting e-mail addresses for use by spammers. Worms attack your web server, either to shut the server down (a denial-of-service attack) or to break into the server. Either way, worms can create a large amount of traffic that is of no interest beyond making sure it doesn’t overwhelm your server completely. We’ll get into “special status” HTTP requests a bit later. But in general, these are “noncontent” responses that redirect the visitor to another page or inform the user that the page cannot be found.

AWStats records only Bandwidth Used, Hits, and Pages for Traffic Not Viewed. For the most part, you can ignore those statistics. If your web site is even remotely busy, most of the Traffic Not Viewed is search engines crawling your site. As Martha Stewart would say, “This is a Good Thing.” Don’t fret about it. In a bit, we’ll discuss how to tell if you’re suffering from an infestation of worms or another malady. Sit tight.

People

Now, on to Traffic Viewed. In AWStats, Traffic Viewed is, to the best AWStats can guess, traffic generated by people. Why guess? Because AWStats is a log analyzer. Every time your web server sends out a message to a client — any client — it logs that action. There’s no real way to tell from the log if an access is really a person. It could be a person. It could be a proxy server. It could be 35 people sharing a web connection on a local area network (LAN). There could be people reloading pages from a cache (a page stored on their computer) downloaded the day before. When using any log analyzer, there’s a fudge factor. That’s the nature of the beast.

Bandwidth

The bandwidth measurement is a webmaster’s first lesson in the importance of collecting useful metrics as opposed to useless ones. With the exception of knowing whether a site is nearing or over its bandwidth limits, there is pretty much no useful business purpose to a measurement of bandwidth. Most web sites don’t benefit from knowing the size of the average download.

With one small exception. Here in the United States, we tend to think of everyone as having high-speed Internet. The fact is that broadband penetration is less than 50 percent in the United States. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (www.oecd.org) only 137 million people have high-speed access worldwide. Such figures could mean that half of the people who visit your web site are using dial-up at 56 Kbps or less.

At 56 Kbps, loading time for pages and other content such as multimedia is a big issue. It used to be that you had about 10 seconds for your page to load before a user would abandon the page. Now you have about two seconds. You can use the average bandwidth per visit along with the average pages per visit to get a very rough estimate of how much data your average visitor is downloading and how much time it takes.

Hits

For the first few years that we had web sites, we all quoted the number of “hits.” It wasn’t until 1997 that we realized hits are another meaningless metric. Why? To a web server, any access of any document — a page, a script, a multimedia file, an image, and so on — is a hit. Because one page or site may have lots of images, and another may be mostly all text, hits become a particularly poor measure of a site’s performance and an even worse measure of how a site performs in comparison to other sites.

Pages

Finally, we’ve reached a meaningful metric — pages, also known as page views or page hits, the subject of Figure 2-4.