The rather random clicking habits of the average user or sabotage of my new click tracking gadget?

ClickHeat is an interesting open source script that can be used to track users clicks on your website. I thought I would stick it on since it gives a slightly more detailed view than Google Analytics and would be interesting to compare to more costly products such as Omniture and its ClickMap feature.
Read more…

Larry in-particular is partial to a slice of the analytical stuff

So having assumed my little baking stunt was a one-off foray into the world of SEM and blog popularity I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find my cake atop Google’s official analytics blog. So I thought it was time to go a bit meta and investigate the whole thing. Google didn’t exactly give a full in-depth account of my activities, which turned out to be ideal really. People were coerced into investigating my sugary creation to the full without realising it. People truly are wowed more by icing and baking than any ridiculous cardboard construction or wrap.
Read more…

Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This weekend Clarkson and I decided to build a cake based on the Google Analytics dashboard. It was a fairly complex construction that ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. It was based around a Waitrose Lemon Drizzle cake recipe, with lemon butter icing filling. I actually had to bake three separate cakes. One for each layer of the main body of the cake and another to use for the 3D elements on the top.
Read more…

Only the two hundred and thirty fourth member with this mighty title

Today I was invited to take the newly introduced GA IQ test and passed with a fairly reasonable 85% (You need 75% to be assured of the award). It tests you on a variety of the subjects covered at the so-called “Conversion University” and is actually pretty tricky. You can only take the test once and have about 90 minutes to scrabble around dredging your brain for answers. I became increasingly worried as I went through due to how hopeless I was being with the answers. This was made far worse by the onset of time passing by. I kept doing annoying mental calculations for how long I had for each question and due to some truly awful arithmetic it seemed like I had not long for each. In the end I had about 30 minutes to go over everything again and change a few things around.

Read more…

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.

 

 

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.