In order to optimise spend and time invested in marketing activity, all traffic that a company has some control over should be identified within their web analytics tool.  For Google Analytics, this requires adding three to five URL query parameters to landing page URLs – the exception is Google Adwords traffic that can be automatically [...]

Social Media has developed into the next big thing in online over the past couple of years and that means it needs to be measured.  Specific tools have been and are being developed to understand where/how/what people are saying about your brands across the internet.  But web analytic tools should be used to understand social [...]

Justin Cutroni has just written an excellent post on five Google Analytics custom variables that ecommerce companies should definitely use.  Actually the principles behind these variables apply to all web analytics tools, just the type of variable used may differ.  He recommends using custom variables to track: coupon and promotional codes payment method shipping method [...]

The first two parts of this series covered two key methods in analysing web analytics data, comparing performance against a set of reference numbers and trending data over time to expose patterns.  This third and final part covers segmentation, what I would commonly refer to as drilling into the data.  Writing on this does sadly [...]

I have noticed various posts and comments about how you can’t do content grouping in Google Analytics, that you need to use SiteCatalyst or a similar paid tool in order to do this.  These comments surprise me as one of my first actions with a new client using Google Analytics is to set up content [...]

Everyone likes to know if the people visiting their website are seeing it for the first time or are regulars.  This is even more important when they are paying for the traffic, if the money is going on acquiring new visitors (potential new customers) or is it just providing a convenient entry point for people [...]

While I generally begin to look at web analytics data at a weekly or monthly level, there are times when it is useful to drill down to daily numbers.  This can be when examining the reason for a change in the data or simply to review the previous day’s performance.  But an issue arises which [...]