You Should Test That!

Daily eBusiness Optimization Ideas

Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’

Why Bounces is a Better Metric than Bounce Rate

February 12th, 2010

This is the follow-up post on the bounce rate poll from Can You Answer this Simple Google Analytics Question?. If you did not vote yet, please do it before you read further.

The results are the following:

The correct answer is marked in the green box

As you can see, only 20% the voters got it right (only 25 votes). It’s not surprising as some of the reports in Google Analytics can be misleading, i.e. top content, content by title or content drilldown.

To find out the number of bounces (or the real bounce rate) one have to look at the landing page report, not at the content performance reports (top content, content by title or content drilldown). The reason is for that most of the time, a page will have a bounce rate only if it serves as landing page (single page visits).

For the example used in this poll

Misleading Bounce Rate

if one multiplies 826 (unique page views) by 52.17% (bounce rate) it results in 430 bounces, which totally wrong. Let me explain.

If you look at the landing page report (image below) for the same page, same time interval (dec 11, 2009 – jan 10, 2010), you’ll see that while the bounce is the sameas on any of the content performance report (52.71%) the real number of bounces is 24, which is not by far 52% of 826, but a merely 3% of it.

The Real Number of Bounces

If one will look at the Top Content report and see 10.000 unique page views (almost equal to visitors) with a 50% bounce rate, it might wrongly conclude that 5.000 visitors bounced.

So where is this confusion coming from? While the data in the Top Content, Content by Title and Content Drilldown reports are based on page views (unique or not) the bounce rate column is actually taking into related with data from other report and it’s computed based on the entrances to that specific page.

I think that the bounce rate in the aforementioned report should be supplemented by the Bounces column or. For that you can use the following custom report to have the bounce rate and the bounces in a single report.

If you wish you can use this custom report to look at the page views (I was not able to combine Unique Page views with Bounces in Google Analytics custom reports). I am looking at the page view columns as a relative importance of the page, then I look at the bounces and if the number is high compared to the page view I take a quick look at the bounce rate.

Custom report with pageview, bounces and bounce rate

Rate this post!

GD Star Rating
loading...

1 comment »

Posted in Don't Do Like Them, Google Analytics

Tags: bounce rate Google Analytics

Can You Answer this Simple Google Analytics Question?

January 11th, 2010

Hey you, web analytics ninja, you think you can analyze websites? Look at the screenshot below and answer this simple question:

What is the number of bounces for the red squared page?

Bounces in Google Analytics

Loading ...

If you wish to find the correct answer, please subscribe to my blog. I will publish the correct answer in one month time.

Rate this post!

GD Star Rating
loading...

3 comments »

Posted in Google Analytics

Tags: ga Google Analytics google analytics quiz

Use Google Analytics to Negotiate Your Salary

January 1st, 2010

If you deserve a salary increase use the following tip for better chances of getting that raise. The tip assumes that you have access to your company’s GA account and you did a good job (the numbers you’re responsible are going up (i.e. visits) or down (i.e.bounce rate).

Let’s say you’re the SEO guy and you’ve been hired in May 2009 to increase the organic traffic or rankings. First, you should associate a monetary value to the traffic source you’ve been responsible with and then get the numbers ready for the salary negotiating meeting; usually your boss will look at revenue or profit. If you are taking care of an ecommerce website, you can use the following GA report to measure the impact of your work on your company’s revenue: traffic sources –> search engines –> ecommerce tab on the revenue column:

SEO impact on revenue

Compare two date ranges, May 1^st 2008 to Dec 31^st 2008 with May 1^st 2009 to Dec 30^st 2009. The revenue difference between these two time intervals will be your upper card.

Too bad that for this website the commerce tracking was not properly installed, so there won’t be a delta for the revenue values. However, you can use the columns visits and the per visit value to approximate the SEO impact:

Your delta will be 48.85% (47k visitors) – wow nice job, you should get a bonus too – which, at $5.05 per visit value, translates into $244k additional revenue generated by SEO. Now you have the upper cards!

If you’re responsible with the SEO of non-transactional website, then you should tie your organic traffic with the goal(s) of the website (lead sign ups, downloads, time on site, etc) and associate a monetary value with the goal(s). If the difference is positive, it’s time for you to negotiate!

Good luck in 2010!

Rate this post!

GD Star Rating
loading...

11 comments »

Posted in Google Analytics, Others

Tags: Google Analytics salary negotiation

Visits to Goal Report in Google Analytics

December 28th, 2009

If you have eCommerce enabled in your Google Analytics, you can take the advantages of an useful report in the eCommerce section – the Visits to Purchase report. However, if you run a non eCommerce site (a non transactional website), there is no such report as Visits to Goal, thou it may be useful.

Here’s how to configure a custom report that can help you with that:

Google Analytics - Visits to Goal Custom Report

A sample of what is producing:

Another useful report will be Days to Purchase, but Google Analytics doesn’t provide such a dimension/metric as Day Since First Visit to play with

Notice:

keep in mind that Google haven’t yet changed the dimensions and the metrics to accommodate the newly added types of goals (I only see dimensions only for goals 1 to 4 while now you can have up to 20 goals)
if you set up more than one goal you may see conversion rates like 200%
this report is just an workaround this issue and I do not expect it to be 100% accurate

Rate this post!

GD Star Rating
loading...

No comments »

Posted in Google Analytics

Tags: Google Analytics visits to goals

Google Analytics Hack – More Columns for Pivot Tables

November 18th, 2009

This is an advanced hack for Google Analytics. However, this won’t help you hack into your competitors’ accounts ;), but will help you export more data from Google Analytics’ pivoted tables.

This is not the same hack as the exporting more than 500 columns of data from any report. That one was one of the most annoying things I’ve fixed (to be read hacked) long time back.

You’ll need:

- Firefox

- Live HTTP header (http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/)

What are we hacking?

We’ll make possible for the analyst in you to download more than 5 columns from Google Analytics’ Pivot Table reports. Warning: it may cause head bleeding from too much banging against the wall when you’ll analyze more analytics data :).

Usually, when you download pivot tables, you will be able to download only 5 columns (pivot by landing pages – only 5 in the example below:

Only 5 Columns in Pivot Tables

Ok, let’s start:

Go to any report that has the pivot table option and segment the data the way you want to analyze it (for testing purposes you can use the example above: go on Traffic Sources report à then Referring Sites and then pivot by Landing Page and choose Showing Visits)
Start Live HTTP header (in Firefox, under Tools) – do not load any other pages between step 2 and 3
Make sure you checked the Capture box on live HTTP header
Go back to your Google Analytics window and select a new number of page rows on, under Show rows (the footer of the pivot table). At this moment, the table should reload – tricky, the URL didn’t change ;)
Open the Live HTTP header window
The first line there should be the request sent to Google Analytics in order to reload the pivot table. You should see something similar to
Live HTTP Header
Copy the link (should be the first if you didn’t load any other page or made other HTTP request – music or video streams) and load it in another tab. You should have something similar to:
Pure html table
Now look for the &tcols=5 parameter. Change it to &tcols=50 and load the new URL
Here you go, 50 columns:
50 Columns In Pivot Tables

Nice. This data is what you need, to make your life even more miserable, but now this is not enough for you. You want to have this exported in Excel.

Here’s a bonus hack for Google Analytics – I feel like today you should buy me a coffee, buddy.

The URL that exports Google Analytics reports in CSV for Excel (&fmt=5) is:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=5 and some parameters after.

You will have to copy everything starting and including &id=…. from the URL you previously modified (the one with &tcols=50) and append it to Google’s export URL. The export URL will look like:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/export?fmt=5&id=1234567&esig=4&seg0=-8&pdr=20091016-20091115&cmp=visit_segments&trows=25&rpt=ReferringSourcesReport&seg=1&view=4&tchcol=0&tst=0&segkey=source&afs=false&eid=TableChanged&tab=0&tcst=0&tpivk=request_uri_1&tcols=50

Exported Pivot Columns

Now, go back and start trying to do the same. And if this is not enough I will try to publish a video tutorial – later this week/month/year, depending on how busy my clients will keep me.