Last week I was disappointed to find out that the brilliant iphone optimised version of iGoogle had disappeared and been replaced with the standard mobile version. Rubbish. Not only do I use this version of iGoogle as my standard homepage both on laptop and mobile, but it is basically my iphone homepage (if it actually had a home page function). Nothing else compares. Read more…

Analytics work is not just about crunching big numbers. Sometimes the figures can give you insight into the slightly more obscure uses of the site. In reviewing the keywords that people had searched for prior to clicking through to a recent insurance site I worked on,  I noticed the following outliers…

1. bearded dragon pet insurance
2. best job to say to car insurance companies to get it cheap
3. batman dog costume
4. are woodern stirrers more hygenic that spoons
5. animal dog porn
6. can i drive car after screen wash in power steering?
7. can dogs take human painkillers
8. bird feather sexing
9. does saturn rotate more quickly than earth
10. dogs stuck to gether

I only got to D in the alphabet but already had a treasure trove of bizarre terms….

What went through people’s mind as they saw that insurance link having just reviewed the results for “animal dog porn”? Needless to say it is probably unlikely that this particular client will be bidding ever increasing amounts on AdWords such as “bearded dragon” or “spoons” to help people part with their cash.

Drupal Release Information

Today I installed the Google Analytics module for Drupal. For those who don’t know, Drupal is a powerful open source content management platform used by a number of big companies including MTV, Sony and Amnesty International.

I have not had much interaction with it so far, although hope to post more information once I learn more. Basically the module automatically adds a settings pane into the Drupal admin interface that allows you to configure Google Analytics on your site without creating a custom module or adding in the tracking code manually.

So what else does it do that’s worth caring about?

• Adjust which users you track, ie ignore admin users, rogues and other unsavouries
• Set up which pages you do not want to track
• Add in your custom segmentation without resorting to manually adding the code
• Plus a whole host of other buzzers, switches and lumps to further stretch your implementation

This is not the only example of a content management/publishing system giving you an easy way to install Google Analytics code.

• Drupal module
• Wordpress plugin
• Joomla extension

All in all, if you happen to have a website powered by Drupal, then you may as well turn this on and start mucking about with motion charts or something.

Google Analytics is, on the face of it, a fairly simple tool to pick and tinker about with. But to implement it properly, customize it for your website and then interpret the results is a much more difficult task.

This post is designed to give you my favourite resources for getting more information about the various intricacies of an implementation…

• The standard Google site. Interesting and great for the basics, but not enough real life examples to draw from to really.
• EpikOne Blog. A blog written by Justin at EpikOne, all excellently presented and written with tons of real life examples of various tricks to really bring your data to life
• Avinash Kaushik is one of the key Analytics boffins to walk the earth. He has plenty of interesting articles covering GA and other analytics platforms
• The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection has a fantastic collection of various hints and tips, plugins, greasemonkey scripts and insight the Google Analytics platform

Thats all for now.

 

 

A bit of a funnel visualisation

Those of you who enjoy using the funnel visualisation tool will no doubt be interested in finding out where your users are going along the way through your various goals.

On sites where your users need to fill in forms with information about themselves such as to get insurance quotes or to register on a site, you can see what page the user has got to, but what about their behavior on the page itself?

Try adding a JavaScript event to each of your form fields (up to 10) like this…

onchange=”pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/form-tracking/about-you/txtFirstName’)” 

This will fire off a page view to google every time a user begins to edit a form field.