Google Analytics custom variables have been around for nearly two years now and while I find myself including them in implementations, I have not reviewed the results in detail.  But opportunities have arisen over the past few months to perform more detailed GA implementations and to dig into the data for custom variables.  This has [...]

That was the question I was asked last week regarding the performance of an online retailer.  There were three days of poor sales and my client wanted to know why.  I realised while investigating this that there is a standard process I follow. The first step is to confirm the drop in sales and which [...]

In my previous post on Search Term Categorisation in Google Analytics, I described how to set this up using profile filters and why it is an improvement on what other people are recommending.  WooThemes was used as an example (with their permission) to illustrate the exact filters required to set up relevant search term categories [...]

Digging around to understand search marketing performance can be difficult.  A site may receive traffic from tens of thousands of unique search terms, too much data to effectively analyse.  As a result, it is difficult to know what search terms or types of search terms are important and performing well for your business (even with [...]

In the first part of this series of posts on analysing web analytics data, I covered how the initial stage in understanding the performance of a website during the previous week is to compare the numbers for that week against a set of reference numbers.  While there are various alternatives to what reference numbers to [...]

A question that always seems to comes up when working with someone new to web analytics is how do you go about analysing/interrogating the data.  I find it a hard question to answer in a way as I see web analytics as more of an art than a science and therefore there is no distinct [...]

I was recently running some reports for a client on the performance of their traffic sources using the new SiteCatalyst Marketing Channels report.  I wanted to get the % of visits from each traffic source so ran the Last Touch Channel report using visits as the metric.  This report was then exported to excel so [...]

My original blog post on measuring multichannel marketing campaigns was focused on optimising future marketing performance across all marketing channels for an organisation and I made recommendations on what I believe are the best ways of achieving this goal.  However I didn’t mention or discuss other reasons for wanting to be able to allocate revenue [...]

With the incentive of an iPad, eConsultancy membership and a free pass to JUMP, I spent a proportion of my time while hiking around Peru trying to develop my thoughts on optimising the return from doing both online and offline marketing.  Naturally, as a web analyst, my focus on this is related to measuring and [...]

There has been some research recently suggesting that monthly unique visitor counts for a website are inflated by 2 to 4 times.  This means that if your web analytics tool is reporting 1.6m visitors for the month, the actual number of people who visited your website is between 400k and 800k.  Details of this research [...]