Spying On Your Visitors

Warning this is another Google Analytics loving post.

As some of you may know, one of my motivations for this blog is to try out cool new things before implementing them on a site where changing the source is a process. The things that are really cool I apply to the sites I maintain for my employer. This is one of those things.

Recently, I was looking for way to further spy on my users and I found it, again in Google Analytics. This is not a new feature but cool none-the-less.

Problem:
Say you have a page with a bunch of external pointing links, and you want to see where your users are going. Normally GA would not track those users because the landing page does not have your GA tag. Or here is another scenario, you have a page with multiple links pointing to the same page. GA would normally tell you, these are the same link.

Solution:
Add a this code to your link:

onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/posts/post_title/example.com');"

After adding the code, you link will look like this:

<a href="http://www.example.com" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/posts/post_title/example.com');">

This will appear in your content reports as page views. The content will be labeled, in this case as "/outgoing/posts/post_title/example.com". I have created a syntax that I stick to, allowing me to easily understand where the link is and where its going. You could just put "example.com" but if you had that link in a few location it would be hard to tell which one was actually creating the traffic (outside of the navigation summary report).

You will also need to move you GA tag. Instead of the tag being right before the close body tag, it needs to be right after the open body tag.

Results:

Your results are reports that clearly tell you where your users are going and what they are clicking on.

I would say, this does involve touching every link you would like to track in this manor. So it can be very labor intensive. In my opinion, this should only be implemented selectively.

Back to the sandbox thing, if you look at the source of this blog (beyond this post) you will see that I have successfully implemented this technique here.

View Google Analytics Graphs By Months & Weeks

The guys over at Google Analytics are working hard. This morning when I logged in I was pleasantly surprised. Google has given us the ability to view graphs in analytics by month and by week, in addition to day. Why is this important, you ask? Easy, often looking at the data on a day to day basis can be very misleading. Only when zooming out the a longer time period can you see trends developing. While looking at longer time periods you are also less likely to make recency bias related errors (This guy does a great job or explaining recency bias).

Weekly View:


Monthly View:

Benchmarking Lives

If you are using Google Analytics and Benchmarking, check it out. Its up and running!

http://analytics.google.com
Analytics Blog

Blogging 101: Where To Start

Ever thought of starting a blog but don't know how? This is a crash course designed to get you up and running; fast.

Get A Domain Name:
Pick whatever you want, like I did with Anzel Online or pick a name that will give you an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) edge. Try to think of a name that is relevant to what you are going to be doing. If you are making a website about yourself, your domain name should be www.[yourname].com. If you are talking about the best colors to paint your house, you should choose www.besthousecolors.com.

When searching for the name, do not search on the domain name registration sites or WHOIS. If you do, and you decide that you just don't want to buy it today, there might be a chance that a prospector will snatch it away from you. Instead, just type for prospective names into the nav bar of your browser or do a Google search.

Generally I go to Go Daddy. You could pay sticker, or you could do a search for Go Daddy promo codes and see if you can get a few dollars off.

Get E-Mail With Your Domain:
It's nice to have an e-mail address that is associated with your domain. You can do this for free by using Google Applications. Go to www.google.com/a/ and follow the directions. If you already use Gmail, you can just link the accounts.

Get a blog:
Who wants to pay for web hosting or try to install word press? Use blogger. It's part of the Google family so it will play nice with your Google Applications account. All you will have to do is follow the directions given by Blogger, creating a CNAME file. You will have learned how to do this when you got your Google Apps account. I suggest that you create a sub-domain (example: blog.anzelonline.com) and redirect www to that sub-domain. This way when your blog takes off and you want to create a real website with your domain name, you will not have mispointed links all over the Internet. You should also get a FeedBurner account. This will help you syndicate your blog. They also have a ton of cool features like FeedFlare, Site Stats, and most importantly, Subscriber Count.

Customize Your Blog:
Choose a layout that is simple. Then do your creative thing. Remember, this is not a MySpace profile, your blog pages should still look nice, be user friendly and load quickly. There are tons of CSS tutorials out there, and I am a proponent user of Franken-coding. Meaning you take functioning code (with permission) and edit it to work for your uses. If you use Firefox, and I suggest you do, get the Web Developers tool bar, its got lots of handy tools to help you understand what DIVs are doing what.

Set Up Analytics:
Now is a good time to set up Google Analytics. Just go to analytics.google.com and follow the directions. They still give you an option of old Urchin tag or new analytics tag, use the new tag. Put it on your layout in blogger, so it appears on every page.

Produce Content:
This is either the hard part or the easy part. If you are like me, creating the content is the hard part because I mostly like playing with the pages, various features and dabbling in the social media. If you have something to say, I guess learning how to edit CSS and keeping your DIVs straight will be the hard part.

Promote Your Content:
This is the fun part, or the part that will get you in trouble. I suggest that you submit your own content to social bookmarking sites (like Digg). That way you have control over the title and description. You should submit your site to any social bookmarking site where its content is relevant (if it's not relevant, it's what we call spam). Additionally, you should tell all your friends on MySpace and Facebook.

Network, Network, Network:
The more people you tell, the more people will visit. Just remember, you are trying to be helpful, not a spammer. If you are writing about Beer and Wine, you should not be posting links in AA's forums.

Monetize:
So, you want to make money off your site? Easy, because you are using a Blogger account just add Ad Sense boxes. If you are not a Blogger user go to: adsense.google.com (or click on the link in my sidebar) and follow the directions. If you take my advice, you can also use FeedBurner to place ads in your feed and on your site. The ads will appear above or below your FeedFlare.

Google Analytics VS FeedBurner Stats

For anyone serious about understanding their website, blog and its visitors/readers, a tracking piece of some sort must be in place. For those new to analytics, there are two major types of tracking: server logs or tag based tracking. Server logs are big ugly documents generated every time a request is made of the server. If you are serious about looking at your server logs (and you should be) get Aw Stats. Aw Stats parses the logs and makes them manageable by mere mortals. For those looking for trending and not necessarily the accuracy required by an accountant or you do not have access to your servers logs, tags are for you. Google Analytics is the 800 pound gorilla in the tag market. There are others out there that are very good, if not better than Google Analytics, but those are not free. For those publishing a feed through FeedBurner also have access to FeedBurner Stats. FeedBurner Stats is a nifty tool that might make a blogger wonder if they need Google Analytics.

How They Work

Google Analytics utilized a java script tag placed before the close body tag. Every time a tagged web pages is loaded, the tag goes and checks in with the mother ship. If you are using a service like Blogger, or you have a engine running your website, you are luck and only need to put the tag in once. If your site is old school, you will have to manually put the tag on every page. As a minor tangent: I have attempted to place these tags onMySpace, but they seem to get blocked. It might also have something to do with the fact the MySpace is using Google Analytics.

Feedburner works in several different ways. First, your feed exists on their site, so they already have that traffic when a subscriber requests updates. When you addFeedFlair to your posts you are essentially doing the same thing as adding a Google Analytics Tag. FeedBurners Headline Animator is another cool feature, works a bit like a tagged URL.

What They Record

The Google Analytics tag sends back a variety of information. When asked what Google Analytics can see, I like to tell people that when you visit my site the only thing I don't know is what your wearing but I could probably figure that out. The downside, if this is a downside, is every page that you want to track must have a tag. You will not get the all important navigation data if you leave one out (See my article "What Google Sees Referring URLs"). Google records all the traffic information you could want from search engines and referring websites. Direct traffic by its nature is harder to track. If you are sending the links, you can tag the URLs, this will give you some trackability.

Feedburner appears to tell you all the same basic data the Analytics would, however, in nowhere near the detail. Feedburner provides just the basics: visitors, pages, incoming and outgoing. The power of FeedBurner is its ability to tell you the number of subscribers (estimated based on the number of feed hits) and the reach (basically the number of unique visitors). The cool thing is these stats can be derived even when your blog is being read through a reader. This would be near impossible for Google Analytics as you would have to figure a way to get the tag in your post and all readers would have to allow posts to run java. Even then your data would be super strange, each reader would look like a page in your site.

What is sacrificed by using these services

Both FeedBurner and Google Analytics are Free (and owned by Google). When you use these services, you are paying with your data. If you don't like the idea of someone having access to our site's analytics, I suggest you stick with server logs and go live in a cave*.

What You Should Use

Feedburner would never record enough data to give you a clear picture of navigation on your site, nor would you expect it to. But Analytics would never give you the usage blog information needed by a serious blogger. So my answer is both. If you are serious about getting a clear picture of what your readers/visitors are doing, you use both. In addition,Feedburner is a veritable treasure trove of cool features, if you are publishing a blog, you should check FeedBurner out. If you are not already using some analytics program on your website, you are seriously behind. Google Analytics is a great application that is friendly for all experience levels**.



* Depending on your paranoia level, this still might not help you. You would definitely want to avoid an Internet connection and possibly never look up, for fear of being caught by a spy satellite.
** Ok, so it leaves something to be desired when trying to geographically segment Ad Words stats.