In case anyone reading this is unaware, MeasureBowling is returning on Thurs 6^th June.  It is a simple concept, an evening out for the Digital Analytics community featuring no presentations, just fun times.  We have 43 people signed up so far which is a good start, targeting 60+ on the night itself.

But MeasureBowling is about more than just London.  It will be happening at the same time in 10 cities across Europe.  Utrecht (a city I had never heard of in the Netherlands) is currently leading the way with an amazing 62 bowlers but MeasureBowling is also happening in France, Germany, Poland, Scotland, Ireland and Spain.

The London event will be held at Palace Superbowl in the Elephant & Castle shopping centre, right next to the tube stop.  Tickets are £8 for two games + shoe hire so if you don’t have one yet, go to http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/6177804981 and get involved.

On the night

The actual bowling will start at 7pm, please be there by 6:30pm to be attributed to a lane.  The venue should not be difficult to find, just aim for the top of the shopping centre.  And remember, you are there for the bowling, not the bingo.

When you get in, walk around to the right, past numerous video games (you can play later) and we will be clustered in front of the bar next to the pool tables.  Please check in to say arrived.  Let us know then if you wish to be in a lane with friends rather than a random selection of people (random is much more fun).

Listen out for shouted instructions on when to get shoes and to start bowling.  We will have a list & maybe even a chart or two showing which lane people are in.  Accept that it will be a little chaotic to start with.  Go with the flow.

Platters of food will be provided through the night, nothing fancy but definitely tasty.  We will also be providing some drinks with the bar tab to be confirmed (please do be responsible with your alcohol intake).

Have fun bowling & chatting to people.

There will be a short presentation post the bowling to thank everyone for the evening and to present some awards.  It is up to you if you want to carry on from there with more bowling, playing pool, video games or more socialising.

Nerdshirt

In case people aren’t sure what appropriate attire is for a night of bowling, we will be running a NerdShirt competition.  It is quite simple, wear a shirt which reflects your distinctive geeky personality.  MeasureBowling will definitely be a nerd friendly environment.  Best shirt wins.

Swear jar

Following on the success at MeasureCamp, we will be introducing the SwearJar to MeasureBowling.  A short list of jargon terms, from both the Digital Analytics and Bowling worlds, will be selected.  Use of these terms will be fined with a contribution to the SwearJar, proceeds will go to a nominated charity.

Please comment if there are any particular terms that should be included on the SwearJar list.

Sponsors

MeasureBowling London is looking for sponsors who want to be involved.  It would be great to have 2 or 3 companies in this space contribute £250 each to keep participants fed and refreshed during the evening – to support the Digital Analytics community.  You will get your logo on the MeasureBowling website and publicity pre event and at MeasureBowling itself.

We do have one sponsor confirmed, eMetrics who will be sponsoring MeasureBowling London by providing a free pass to the London eMetrics.  This will be used as a (quite valuable) door prize for one lucky attendee.

Tell your friends

As with any event, MeasureBowling will only be as good as the people there.  So while we are at 43 people now, it would be great to get up past 60 and even more.  If you don’t have a ticket yourself, hurry up.  And tell your friends, peers, followers on twitter.

Looking forward to seeing you there…

Google Analytics provides you with 13 default segments in their Advanced Segment feature.  These segments are pretty good and they do tick a few of the boxes for the segments you would use most regularly.  But for me, they aren’t enough, there are more segments that are relevant to every website which need be added to your toolkit.

Below is a list of segments that I have set up within my GA login that I use with all clients.  Some will work for every website while others require some customisation to make appropriate to you.  And I admit freely there are many more “standard” segments that could be created, I did try and restrict this to the more common ones.

Note all segments start with a . to ensure they are listed at the top of the Custom Segments list.  When creating custom segments, I do recommend being careful with your naming convention so it is easy to rediscover useful segments.  And if anyone at Google is listening, please change the default setting to save a custom segment in this profile only, not in all profiles.

Device

These are based on the new dimension of Device Category (I am assuming that it is fairly accurate).  I am considering splitting Desktop by operating system (Windows, Macintosh and Other) but haven’t reached that stage yet.

• Desktop
• Tablet
• Smartphone

Browser

These are the four key browsers, you could add Opera, etc plus you could get more granular with segments for each Browser version (particularly useful for IE versions).

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari
• Internet Explorer

Channel

The default segments provided by Google already include Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct and Referral.  These additional segments rely on campaign tracking having been implemented with a standard naming convention – although Social Media should work as is.  Again it is easy to extend for more channels or to get more granular e.g. each social media network.

• Email
• Affiliates
• Display
• Social Media

Location

I have recently started using a simple segmentation of Domestic and International for websites based in a single country.  These segments here are for the UK but could easily be modified for any other country.  Plus you can create a segment for each of your key countries as I have done for the US.

• Domestic
• International
• United States

Entry Point

These segments depend on your page naming convention.  The homepage one should work for most websites (as long as the homepage name is either /, /homepage or starts with /index).  The other two are examples, one for a retail website, one for any website containing a blog.  I would recommend setting up these segments for all key page types within your website.

As an example, for a retail website, I would use entry points of Homepage, Category pages, Product List pages, Product pages & Other (potentially adding Search Results pages, Basket page, Blog pages, etc).

• Homepage
• Product Page
• Blog Post

Fake Traffic

If you aren’t aware, you can sometimes get fake traffic being recorded within your Google Analytics data.  The first relates to bots crawling your website or something, I have never discovered exactly what.  The second is when the Safari Top Sites feature views your website to grab an image.

If you want to know if either issue is affecting you, apply the first two segments to your data.  If you are getting traffic from bots, you can exclude them from your profiles using a profile filter, although this will only impact traffic going forward.  Use the 3^rd segment to view historical data.

There are some blog posts recommending how to eliminate the issue caused by Safari Top Sites.  Please let me know if you have a solution which works.  Unfortunately a segment that allows you to view clean historical data cannot be created within GA.

• ISP Robots
• Safari Fake Traffic
• Exclude ISP Robots

Suggestions?

Anyone want to suggest some more standard GA segments?  Just remember they should be applicable to any website, not just a really cool segment that is incredibly useful to you.

Day 1 Opening Keynotes

First up, we had Brad Rencher, the Adobe General Manager of Digital Marketing opening the Summit.  From early on, I was reminding myself that the Adobe Summit is now a Digital Marketing conference, not Digital Analytics.  So the target audience is marketers with analytics being one of the tools they can use.

Brad introduced the concept of the last millisecond, the tiny period of time when everything has to connect perfectly to achieve success.  People want the same things they always have but due to evolving expectations, they want it now.  This means the time you have available to deliver has been greatly reduced.  The Adobe view of this process (apologies as ever for not writing things down word for word) is:

• Listen to signal from consumers
• Predict expectations (based on behaviour)
• Build the response
• Deliver this response (in the last millisecond)

Based on this model and those expectations of immediate response, real time data is critical.  I didn’t totally buy into this though.  The resources required to deliver a response based on real time data are very large.  I agree that it is possible and will deliver a positive impact but it feels like more a top of the tree actions.  There are likely many more low hanging fruit which will deliver more value for the resources invested.

Coincidently, Avinash has “Real-time data is life changing” as the first of 8 data myths that marketing people believe in but can actually end up getting them fired.

Product Demo

Adobe has consolidated their many products into five pillars, greatly simplifying their product offering.  We moved into a very slick product demo illustrating all five tools using a common example.  And it was very impressive, seamlessly moving from department to department and from data to solution.  Even had a couple of big brands saying how powerful it was for them.

The core of it does appear to be a project management tool (the Adobe Marketing Cloud) – this is not a negative.  It was a displayed as a tool that eliminated silos and enabled rapid transmission of ideas.  But while a slick product demo, it was light on the details (which an analyst can’t cope without).

A key question was if a company has four of the five products, can this process still work?  For example, if they use a different CMS (e.g. BT Fresca), can they still easily push elements live on the website through this UI?  And all their predictive tools, just how accurate are they?  How can you claim to predict the behaviour of a new campaign, that is just not possible.  Slick demo but I was sceptical.

Most importantly, how was their web analyst satisfied with the quality & detail of the analysis work they did – I would have sent them away to do a proper job…

Adobe Analytics

During the demo, the new Adobe Analytics was introduced and I found this exciting.  Rather than offering SiteCatalyst with lots of extras, Adobe has simplified (finally).  There are two packages, standard and premium, the price is still based on the number of measurements generated.

With standard, you get

• SiteCatalyst
• DataWarehouse
• Discover – unlimited licences
• ReportBuilder – unlimited licences
• Genesis – unlimited connections
• SiteCatalyst Tag Manager

Finally, Discover, the true Analyst’s tool is included as standard.  And ReportBuilder is the default Excel plugin.  It means EVERY company with SiteCatalyst will have good tools available which have the potential to be more powerful than Google Analytics (depending on set-up and ability of users).

Adobe Analytics is available on all new contracts.  I would recommend anyone using SiteCatalyst to immediately negotiate to upgrade their existing contract (unless they already have all the additional tools/features).  Note that Insights is the difference between the Standard and Premium package and fair enough that you pay extra for it as this tool is not necessary for most companies.

Day 1 Closing Keynotes

Remembering again that talks which are targeted to inspire marketers don’t do a lot for analysts, I didn’t take all that many notes in the afternoon keynotes.  Some points I did note down although not sure if it was points by the speakers or what I thought of as a result of what they were saying:

• Deloitte Digital says companies need to have a strategy (to be fair to them, they are a very young department and have not been around as long as L3 Analytics)
• The world is changing rapidly and this brings a whole new set of challenges for everyone (the old ones are still there as well)
• It has never been easier to turn ideas into reality
• The best organisations take away people’s pain points
• Successful organisations have a purpose greater than themselves
• The most powerful force is imagination, technology is just a tool

Summit Party

A brief word on the Adobe Summit party.  Jessie J was incredibly impressive.  Given the audience doesn’t quite match up with her normal demographic, she gave a classy performance with a big smile the whole way through.  I didn’t stay too long after she finished but am sure the party continued till late as it always does.

Day 2 Opening Keynotes

I started late on the second day as needed to complete some client work first, so only caught the last two speakers.  The first speaker was reporting back on the BBC’s online coverage of the Olympics.  Reporting was the operative word, the key learnings for the BBC appeared to be to show stuff live and help viewers feel they are there.

The second speaker was Felix Baumgartner, the man who skydived from space.  He was the only non digital speaker and easily my favourite.  It was simple stuff, he wasn’t trying to inspire us, just tell his story.  One line has stuck with me though.

Felix was describing how he was the youngest in the team working on the project, working with some very senior & experienced people, who started out seeing him as just an adrenaline junkie.  He had to “earn the respect I deserved”.  There was no doubt in his mind at all that he deserved this respect, just that it took a while for everyone else to recognise this fact.

Again, this was not said to send any sort of message about believing in yourself or to inspire the listeners.  Felix was just answering a question.

Summit Sneaks

The final session was all about sneak previews of features Adobe may be releasing in the future.  I didn’t take notes through this session as was in shock from my experiences on stage with Nina Conti.  I do remember a couple of features seemed pretty familiar from Google Analytics though…

One feature, which I believe was described as “BoomData”, seemed like it could be pretty useful.  If I remember right, it allowed you to drag and drop any data from SiteCatalyst into Excel and more impressively, to somehow drag data from Excel into SiteCatalyst.  By bringing the data into SiteCatalyst, you could quickly compare against a range of different SiteCatalyst data sets without having to export them one by one.

Networking

The most useful aspect of Adobe Summit for me was not the content or even the party, it was catching up with other members of the Digital Analytics community.  So thank you to all the people who had a chat with me, I really enjoyed it.  My biggest regret from the two days is that I didn’t manage to make time to talk properly with Evan LaPointe or even to say hello to Rudi Shumpert.

Final Words

So that is Adobe Summit over with for another year.  I am not sure how to summarise – no question at all that is an incredibly slick and polished event which is extremely well run.  I just need to remind myself that it is a Digital Marketing event which means I am not the target market.

It is worth attending if you want to be inspired or to see what is possible with Adobe products.  But, based on the last couple of years, it is not somewhere you can learn ideas for using Adobe Analytics – which is what I want from the event.  Hopefully Adobe will work on this for next year.

Analytics Rock Stars

This session was a series of tips with the speakers headlined by Brent Dykes of Web Analytics Action Hero fame.  He was joined by three practitioners working client side.  There were some nice tips presented during this session, sadly only one was new to me.

The tip is relevant to booking engines for travel related organised.  It is to group booking dates into useful buckets with the example given of holiday periods e.g. Christmas period, school holidays, summer break, Easter, etc.  For SiteCatalyst, this can be accomplished using SAINT although possible directly through the tagging with the help of a good developer.

The value then comes when evaluating performance of campaigns (internal and external) against the date period they prompt bookings (or searches for bookings) for.  So your summer campaign would ideally prompt bookings for the summer but this might not be the case.

I would add additional dimensions here of the booking window (time between now and the start date), length of booking, location and value of booking.  Comparing conversion rates from search to booking across all of these dimensions could provide some very interesting actionable insights.

Other tips included:

• Ideas for making SiteCatalyst dashboards more readable & user friendly (my advice is still to do it in Excel)
• Use Marketing Channels as your one source of truth for traffic source performance – totally agree
• Create calculated metrics using a combination of metrics and segments (limited by creativity) allowing you to compare performance across multiple areas in one place
• Use a logical structure and initiative names for the Calculated Metrics – this is relevant to everything, especially Page Names but also segments and campaigns
• Whatever the solution/tool, combine all date in one place
• For product merchandising, create a scatterplot of all products across two dimensions with different tactics for products in different quadrants

Advanced Analytics

This was another tips & tricks session (with a theme of time saving) featuring Ben Gaines, everyone’s favourite Adobe Product Manager (plus another client side practitioner).  Key tips here were:

• Set up the Key Metrics report for managers for their top 5 KPIs (including segment to apply to them) – so they don’t constantly ask you for the same information
• Use Processing Rules to define variables without the need for dev involvement
• Extend this using Context Data Variables so you don’t need to predefine if a piece of information is an eVar, sProp, etc
• Use segmentation to drill into your data

A basic summary for all of this is quite simple:

Step 1: Do a proper & complete set up of your web analytics tool based on the information you need to know

Step 2: Learn how to use the tool and its features

You will save time and finally start getting value from web analytics.

Customer Analytics Part 1

This session started very promisingly with Simon Ricketts from Channel 4 describing their approach to segmenting their visitors.  Interestingly, it does include just exporting all of the data out of SiteCatalyst, instead creating a unstructured data warehouse by combining it with other data sources in a Hadoop environment – allowing for detailed ad hoc analysis.

Visitor behaviour is grouped based on their Recency, Frequency and Value (value defined based on Dwell Time).  This leads to about 7 different visitor segments being created based on different types of website behaviour.  Segments can then be created in SiteCatalyst to reflect these segments.

The missing element in this session was a detailed example of the process for setting up these segments and applying them to reports.  It shouldn’t be too difficult to do (within Discover) but would have been nice to have been shown this.  I was also unclear what proportion of visitors login across the Channel 4 properties so if this analysis applies to 50% of their traffic or only 5%.

Econometrics

This is a session I was genuinely looking forward to.  I have been arguing for a while that Attribution is not possible (whatever the cost of the tool/consultancy) and that we need to find alternative approaches to evaluating and optimising marketing campaigns.  Econometrics sounds like a possible option for this.

And the first 10 minutes was great.  Dr Sid Shah definitely knows what he is talking about and introduced the ideas of Econometrics in a nice simple to understand manner.  The basic principle is to calculate a baseline for a campaign (using other data in some way), compare against actual performance with the difference attributed to the impact of the campaign.  It then gets complicated with multiple campaigns & different quality campaigns.  But I was sold on this being a valid approach to accurately calculating the impact of campaigns.

Unfortunately we then switched to a presentation on Attribution which highlighted the many issues with it but went through how Sky attempts to use it anyway.  No issues with the presenter but she didn’t appear to believe in Attribution either.

I really really wish this had been a full session on Econometrics.

Customer Analytics Part 2

The final breakout session I attended was another on customer analytics featuring my old boss Matthew Tod.  I know he likes to be controversial and make people question what they are doing so anticipated an interesting session.  His co-presenter was Adam Jenkins, an Evangelist for Adobe Analytics.

Adam started out by stating 3 facts (apologies if I don’t get this word perfect):

1. Customer Analytics is the future of Digital Analytics
2. Conversion rate doesn’t matter (an old favourite of Matthews)
3. Digital data is only a part of customer data

Unfortunately all 3 “facts” are merely opinions.  I disagree with all three which made this a very difficult presentation to sit through.  I have had plans for a while now to write a blog post about how I believe there are three types of analytics for online companies:

• Marketing Analytics (pre website behaviour)
• Web Analytics (website behaviour)
• Customer/Member Analytics (post website behaviour)

For companies where the majority of visitors log in, e.g. community websites or those with most useful content behind a login, I agree that Customer/Member analytics is the most critical.  For the vast majority of companies, it is only one element.  Any analyst who focuses all of their attention on say 5% of website visitors (most retail websites) is leaving a lot of money on the table.

Matthew then stuck to his guns on how Conversion Rate is totally irrelevant.  I continue to disagree with him, while the website conversion rate declining doesn’t necessarily mean bad performance, start applying segments and it is the key metric for most organisations.

Wrap-up

So I was a bit frustrated with the last couple of sessions (and it only got better when I was dragged up on stage for everyone’s general amusement a little while later).  There was mixed feedback from other sessions that people attended, some of the technical labs ones were said to be great as the presenter really got into the detail but others were considered quite basic.  I believe the Marketing Innovations track was well received as it was more about concepts.

My request, and that of every other analyst I talked to with more than a couple of years experience, is that a new track is required for (real) Advanced Analytics.  We don’t care what company the presenter works for, we want their knowledge & ideas – mostly we just want to learn something new. Please…

The Summit party is always a highlight with Jessie J confirmed as the main act this year.  This narrowly edges out the food at the conference which is always special, I am definitely looking forward to the menu reflecting the Spanish theme this year.  And it is always good to catch up with other members of the Digital Analytics community that I can usually only chat to on twitter.

The purpose though of Adobe Summit is to learn some new stuff.  To gain some knowledge, ideas, techniques, approaches that you can apply to get more value from your analytics.  Plus to be inspired by successful people and entertained by funny folk.  Hopefully this will not be a conference where I walk away thinking it was fun but I didn’t learn anything useful.

With six breakout sessions over the two days, I thought I would do some preparation work and identify which ones I would like to attend.  I downloaded the Adobe Summit app to my iPad and read through all the session descriptions.  Given my interests, I am focused on the Digital Analytics track with one slight diversion to Digital Advertising.  Hopefully the wifi is pretty good in these rooms & I will be able to share my favourite tips (follow me on @peter_oneill)

Wednesday – Tips, Tricks & Networking

12:00 to 12:45 – Analytics Rock Stars: Roll with the pros to rock your analytics

• I am hoping to learn some new approaches and techniques that I am not currently aware of.  I am especially looking forward to Brent Dykes as not previously heard him speak

14:00 to 14:45 – Chat with people on stands

• Sadly none of the sessions at this time really appealed to me personally.  So thought I would wonder around the stands while they are quieter, catching up with some contacts plus checking out new technologies.

15:15 to 16:00 – Advanced Analytics: The time saving tips you are not using

• If Ben Gaines is speaking, it will definitely be good.   Any tips that reduce the time before you can start getting value from analytics (not implementation or reporting) are incredibly valuable.

Thursday – Customers, Members & alternatives to Attribution

11:50 to 12:35 – Using advanced customer analytics to fuel customer retention

• I am becoming more interested in the ideas behind using members/customers post conversion as this is vital for some of my clients, so interested in hearing approaches used here.  And Jan knows what he is talking about.

13:45 to 14:30 – Econometric modelling for marketers

• As attribution is not possible, people need to investigate alternative approaches to understand and increase the impact of their marketing campaigns.  Econometric modelling has long sounded like a solution to some of the business questions to me.

14:40 to 15:25 – Customer Analytics: How to survive in a customer driven world

• My ex boss Matthew Tod is speaking here so it is sure to be an entertaining session and I will be preparing my most difficult questions for him.  This is again related to my desire to learn more on the field of customer analytics.

If you are headed to the Adobe Summit and would like to catch up, let me know either by leaving a comment here or sending me a message on twitter.  And look out for some summary blog posts following the summit, potentially one on the Wed night before the party starts but not making any promises (please check time of publication and if after 8pm, do not read).

If you are a member of the Digital Analytics community and don’t mind a bit of bowling (or a fun night out), come join us on Thurs 6th June for a night of MeasureBowling.  It doesn’t matter where you will be in Europe, we should have you covered with 10 cities confirmed as participating to date.  Check out details and links to register on the MeasureBowling website.

I have listed reasons below why I believe Adobe should select me as the roving reporter.  But rather than the reasons, I intend to rely on the power of Social Media.  So, to all members of the Digital Analytics community, if you believe I would be a good Adobe Summit Roving Reporter, please say as much via a comment on this post – even just writing a +1 should be sufficient to count as a vote in my favour.  I will be submitting my application by the evening of Thurs 4th Apr so please comment before then.

My qualifications for the role

The key purpose is to communicate the events of the day through social media, tweeting during the course of the day and writing wrap-up blog posts after each day.  For evidence on the post conference blogging front, I present my following two posts:

• Wrap-up blog post from 2011 Adobe Summit
• Wrap-up blog post from 2012 XChange conference

I could provide similar evidence of live tweeting from conferences but I have over 3.5k tweets to scan through…

There is a requirement to be passionate and enthusiastic about digital marketing.  My focus is more digital analytics but I believe that should be sufficient.  I am a regular at WAWs, Conversion Thursdays and Web Analytics meetups (co-organiser) in London.  In 2012, I spoke at eMetrics and the Lille Web Analytics Camp.  Plus I attended XChange Berlin, Adobe Summit and Conversion Conference.

That is just a list of events I attend.  After participating in a number of unconferences for other areas of Digital, I decided it was a format that Digital Analytics would benefit from.  With the support of other members of the community, I have organised two MeasureCamps, (an unconference for Digital Analytics practitioners).  The most recent of these was held on Sat 16^th Feb with 140 Digital Analytics practitioners attending from around Europe.

My work currently is primarily using Google Analytics but I have had a lot of experience with Adobe SiteCatalyst over the years.  Websites I have worked on using SiteCatalyst include Vodafone, JPMorgan and Premier Inn.  Blog posts that I have written focused on SiteCatalyst include:

• Useful calculated metrics for SiteCatalyst
• Guide to SiteCatalyst ReportBuilder
• Tracking marketing campaigns in SiteCatalyst

Thanks…

In my defence, it has been a really really busy year so far, great for myself and L3 Analytics, bad for the writing of blog posts.  The year started off by moving into White Bear Yard, a co-working space in central London.  It is really exciting being surrounded by start-ups and the enthusiasm for making stuff happen in the digital space.

The 2^nd MeasureCamp was held in London on the 16^th Feb.  It was another great event with 140 Digital Analytics practitioners attending from around the UK and Europe.  This time we had only a small number of pre-scheduled sessions and it was great to see so many people step up to run a session on the day.  The 3^rd MeasureCamp in London will be held in mid Sept and I am starting to get questions on what is required to hold it in other countries – that is really exciting.

On the client front, it has been incredibly busy.  In only 3 months, L3 Analytics has worked with seven new clients (hopefully add a couple more to that list next week).  These have been a step up in size but are allowing me to prove that the practices developed with start-ups can be applied to companies of any size.  So welcome to:

• Hearst International (publishes Elle, Cosmopolitan, etc)
• Cath Kidston
• Quality Solicitors
• Science & Development Network
• Global Integration
• Dolls Kill
• WaterAid

Of course, work continues with existing clients including:

• Livestation
• Duedil
• eBooks for Sainsbury
• Get Lenses

The priority for L3 Analytics for April (besides client work) is to get at least one person on board to support.  I have been saying this a while but it is no longer a choice.  The other item that must be crossed off the to-do list is to apply to be a Google Analytics certified partner.  Again something which is becoming more and more a necessity.

There are two big conferences coming up in the next few months if anyone wants to catch up.  I am signed up for XChange in Berlin and do recommend this event for anyone wishing to have some detailed discussions about analytics.  I hadn’t registered for the Adobe Summit but will be applying to be the roving reporter so hopefully will be there too.  For a more grassroots style event in early June, watch this space…

It was a topic I have wanted to explore for some time, building on discussions from my former employer Matthew Tod and extending with my own experiences and thoughts since then.  I disagree with the current approach using Campaign Attribution models (last click, first click, weighted attribution, etc) as I believe the data it is possible to collect will always be incomplete – leading to incorrect interpretations & decisions.

This presentation explains why Campaign Attribution is broken and then goes on to explore the real business problems/questions and suggest alternative approaches which can work – even if very difficult.  Following Matthew’s description of Last Click attribution as the goal scorer in football, all points are made using football as an analogy…

I expect a large degree of disagreement with my thoughts here and look forward to these discussions.  I managed to get a reasonable level of agreement at eMetrics on the issues raised, although this was followed by “I will continue using campaign attribution” (which confused me).  Please have a read through and let me know what you think.

The reason for this urgent need is due to my recent blog post on my plans to grow L3 Analytics.  The post was more successful that I anticipated and I have received response from five skilled analysts (self selected themselves based on holding a similar vision).  I agreed with two applicants to run a web analytics project as a trial.  This was planned for early next year then an organisation become available who was keen on this and able to start immediately.  So my need is for a second organisation so the second candidate can also work on a project.

The focus of the project is on providing recommendations for improving business performance – all recommendations based on the available web analytics data.  The complete list of project deliverables is:

• Presentation covering recommendations for website/marketing/tactical changes to improve business performance
• Instructions for a developer to improve the Google Analytics implementation
• Configuration of the Google Analytics account
• Naming conventions document for all GA custom variables and goals
• Creation of at least one custom Google Analytics dashboard

There are short timings on this as the trial will be running from the 11th Dec to 19th Dec.  Key requirements on the organisation is to be available for a kick-off meeting/call on the 11th/12th Dec to discuss business requirements and available for the presentation on findings, ideally on the 19th Dec.  The organisation also needs to be have Google Analytics currently installed on their website and to agree to the fee (that is to cover the time of the applicant).

I will oversee all work to ensure work is of a high quality – I  can provide my guarantee that the organisation receives high value for the cost and will perform the work myself if it is not up to standard.  But confident in these two applicants that this will not be required.

Yes, this is sudden & there is a cost involved.  But it will provide you with the ideas to take your business to the next level in 2013!  If interested, please contact me at peteroneill@l3analytics.com and I will be happy to answer any questions.

Within GA, this approach requires the use of five page level custom variables. Yes, there are only five custom variable slots available total (soon to be more). But I said five variables, not five slots. Form pages and 404 error pages are two different page types and therefore we can reuse the custom variable slots. In fact, I generally use three slots for all of my page level custom variables.

Validation Errors

The first set of custom variables need to be set on pages where a form validation error has occurred. There are three pieces of information to be captured (so three slots):

• the name of the form
• the name of the first field that triggered a validation error
• the error message for this field

Only the name of the first field that triggers a validation error needs to be captured as it is not realistic to capture everything, the first field will be sufficient.

The naming convention for these validation error custom variables is thus:

The GA code on the page if you fail validation on a payment details page due to the customer entering a card number with spaces (form should be fixed to accept this) is:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'form error - form', 'payment details', 3]); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 2, 'form error - field', 'card number', 3]); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 3, 'form error - message', 'Invalid card number, spaces not allowed', 3]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Your developers will need to add code to capture the form name, field name and error message. Note as well that the maximum length of each custom variable name and value combination is 128 characters so the error message may need to be truncated.

404 Page Not Found Errors

The code for 404 error pages is similar with only two pieces of information to be captured:

• URL of the page
• referrer to the page

Note that I recommend using the same page name for all 404 error pages as it makes identifying and understanding the scale and impact of these pages much easier.  A page name can be as simple as /error-page.

The naming convention for these custom variables is:

The code on a misspelled page for the L3 Analytics Set-up service that is accessed via a YouTube page would be:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, '404 error - url', '/services/web-analytics-setup/', 3]); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 2, '404 error - referrer', 'www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sk7cOqB9Dk', 3]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/error-page']);

Accessing the Insights

So the data is being collected but how does it become actionable? DO NOT use the standard custom variable reports, they are not accurate/useful for page level custom variables. Instead create custom reports, one for each business question you wish to answer.

Each custom report should use the metrics of unique events (this equates to visits) and pageviews. The dimensions should be custom variable value 1, custom variable value 2 and, for the Form Validation Errors report, custom variable value 3. On the 404 Page Not Found Error report, create a second report tab with the two dimensions reversed.

The key point is to create a filter for each report. This filter is based on the dimension custom variable key 1 matching “form error – form” or “404 error – URL”.  To make even easier, I have already created these custom report for you, simply copy these URLs to the address bar while in the appropriate Google Analytics account.

• Form Validation – https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=BwoYgr2CTOiqHr-nAvrc7A
• 404 Page Not Found – https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=XxXO7qP5T1u0LuOZM3pR7A

Identifying Actions to Take

On the Validation errors report, you will see a list of forms with the number of validation errors triggered for that form. Click on a form and you will see that fields that triggered the errors, again ranked based on number of errors. Finally click on a field name to see what the actual validation errors are. That’s actionable information!!

It is a similar story for the 404 error page report. You can see the top urls or top referrers creating these errors. In either case, you can click through for more information to help you narrow down the cause of the errors. Now go fix the links or set up some redirects.

So what do you think? Can you suggest any other ways this approach can be used? Please share the story in the comments if these reports help you to fix any problems.