For the past month or so, I’ve taken a brief hiatus from troubleshooting web analytics to create a social media tracking solution…but I’ll post more on that later.
Recently I ran into an interesting problem – measuring click events using Webtrends for a site that I did not have admin access to. This means that there was no chance to change the profile settings to include the domain that we needed to report for. Our client also requested an abandonment rate as well as multiple version of the page.
Not an ideal situation, but, as it turns out, you can generate custom pageviews much like in Google Analytics. Now, this is a messy setup due to the output, and if we were using it on anything more than one page, I probably would have liked to have the admin create a custom report or two to help but that unfortunately wasn’t a choice. (more…)
Analytics · External · Javascript · webtrends
5
Step 1 Implementation. Step 2 ??? Step 3 Tracking
2 Comments · Posted by Andrew in Analytics
You’ve copied the JavaScript blocks. You’ve set up the .js file (if needed). You’ve set up the tracking suites and they’re waiting for data. And waiting. And waiting. 3 days have gone by and you have no user tracking at all. Everything looks to be in order…so what’s happening?
It could be that your users have turned off JavaScript. It could be that you have only mobile users (most analytics solutions offer a specific tracking code for mobile users now). Worst, it could be that you don’t have any visitors (check your site logs if you’re worried). Or it could be that the JS file isn’t loading and that your domain can’t communicate and package the 1×1 pixel request needed to communicate with the analytics servers.
For this last one…it might seem like a dark day. You’ll have to get expert help/sign up for a new profile/switch platforms/abandon all hope of obtaining user tracking. Not so. I’ve mentioned Fiddler before – this is the tool you want to use to ensure that your analytics data is being sent to the right location with the right parameters. This could be caused by a site update, a change in server settings, a deleted footer (it happens to all of us), or some other strange change that you didn’t consider the effects of. (more…)
Analytics · google analytics · implementation · Omniture · webtrends
Your visitors enter your site. They do stuff. They exit. You put money in one end and hopefully it comes out the other. One nice, convenient black box that you can explain away as something so dense you can’t see into the process inside. This might sound like a comical look at how people treat their website experience, but I’ve seen it more than enough to be able to tell you it’s far more common place than you think. Sure, it might not be to this degree, and there might be some light statistics coming out, but rarely are they used for more than a benchmark of current performance. If you’re just using analytics as to just see how you’re doing: too bad – you’re missing out on all sorts of great opportunities to provide a better quality visit to your visitors.
Visitor entrance
Info gained
Where visitors are coming from, what keywords they’re clicking, what search engines they’re using. Maybe one search engine performs much better for a given term than another, and focusing more advertising there would increase traffic.
Actionable data
Entrances give you the data needed to determine what tactics you’re using for discovery are working and what tactics are costing you money with little or no return. It also allows you to target and profile your visitors and their behavior on your site. (more…)
You don’t want this to happen. You really don’t.
Your client requests an Omniture setup with three platforms…let’s just call them A, B, and C. Ideally you’d have access to the admin console, but in this case you don’t. The evars have no input for different engine, but simply have the same names and properties as the props. You of course want to provide tracking that can drill down by engine, by category, by page, etc. So…where do you start?
Analytics · flash · html · implementation · Omniture · Reporting
The Problem
This was a seemingly simple task requested by a client. It seemed straightforward and hardly worth a second thought. I was supposed to track user entrance, page views, and falloff for a simple 4 step survey. The survey would be a JS shadowbox replacement for a more traditional HTML sign-up link and would provide visibility into information that users found interesting enough to prompt subscription.
The first issue was that I needed to track the user entrance into the experience, which wasn’t too hard: a custom prop on page, a custom variable, or even a query string passed into the tracking on the next page using a window.location.search call. No sweat. (more…)
Meteor is an analytics platform that offers the ability to track how much word of mouth traffic your website is gaining. To do this, after applying a JavaScript block to your website, meteor will cause a rapid refresh, appending a random tracking ID. When the user shares your link, it attributes those entrances to sharing and tracks how many users shared, who they shared with, and what actions each users ‘tree’ were responsible for.
Problem:Site tracking such as Omniture, Google Analytics, and Webtrends also use a JavaScript block to track, and may be affected by a refresh. (more…)
