We’ve officially moved into our new flat and slowly managed to furnish it. We had been living in a rather nice townhouse for the last two years but due to some very strange neighbours at the landlady’s current place she decided she wanted to move her family back in, which meant a nice eviction for us with 4 weeks’ notice. Initially, it seemed like a reasonable amount of time, but August and September is the probably the worse time to move, students trying to arrange last minute accommodation and we’re definitely in a competitive renters market. Couple this with the fact that we both work full-time which meant viewings would need to be during evening and weekends meant we needed to get our skates on. So like any normal person (I guess), we hurriedly wrote down a list of requirements for our new property search. These include: 2 bed apartment [...]
I recently had a web analytics query from one of our clients specifically around the analysis they were doing for their library pages using the In-Page Analytics/Site overlay report. Being a council and receiving monthly visits in the tens of thousands it was pretty hard to believe that people were interested in some of the library pages but not necessarily going through to the library catalogue pages. So what’s going on? The issue lies with the actual content. The three links we see to the right of the image (Search the Library Catalogue, Renew Library Items, and Archives Catalogue) all receive no clicks. These links however go to the sub domain of the site. But why is that an issue? Well, the In-Page Analytics report is quite misleading, it works by tracking the normal JavaScript snippet on your site that transmits the data to Google each time a page is [...]
I recently read an interesting post on Public Sector Customer Forums about a mother’s dreadful experience when trying to apply for the school admissions service on her local council’s website. The post highlighted several flaws in the system named as ‘A faster more efficient way to apply’. Firstly, I whole heartedly agree that making the service available online is likely to be a faster and more efficient process: A faster way for the user and cheaper for the council because an operative will not have to key in the application form when it arrives at a council. I have summarised the steps the mother experienced during the application process: Applies online and specifies a username and password Submits an application and receives email to say ‘application submitted’ A few weeks pass and she decides to check application Logs back in using the username and password (which was written down) – not [...]
I attended the Call Centre and Service Management Expo at the NEC a couple of months ago and have been meaning to write this post ever since. It was a very interesting event from our perspective, we’re not a call centre, and can’t offer call centre software (which most of the vendors did). Nevertheless, we stood proudly with our channel shift message “Death of the Call Centre” the summation of how to drive your customers to the most cost effective channel by improving customer engagement and maximising efficiency. Although, it didn’t go down to well with the other vendors, it drummed up quite a bit of conversation with the delegates. I’m not pretending to be an expert in call centres, I’m very much not. But, by packaging up calls in a certain way it makes it much easier to ascertain where savings can be made. Take the graph below instance: [...]
This post focusses on why, what and how to set up goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in Google Analytics. When delving into the world of web analytics it can become overwhelming, very quickly. You have a lot of questions, you’re expecting answers to those questions, and you’re expecting it to solve all your problems. But instead you find a plethora of metrics and reports and it’s difficult to know where to start. But where you start is really quite simple. It always starts with one thing, your goals. What are you trying to achieve? This is the first rule of analytics. Think about what your business is trying to achieve and then align this to your analytics package: So you’ve decided what your goals/KPIs are and decided how these can best be aligned to your analytics package. Then you hit the first hurdle; meauring these KPIs do exactly that, [...]
A hostname is the name of the device where you receive your traffic from. Every time a visitor arrives at a page where Google Analytics is implemented, the information is sent to GA and the domain/hostname is displayed in the hostnames report (from the dashboard in GA click Visitors > Network Properties > Hostnames). For example my employers domain, GOSS, is http://www.gossinteractive.com so you would expect that if a visitor came to this page or any of the pages on this domain it would be displayed as: However, the hostnames report looks like this: www.gossinteractive.com As discussed, this is what you would expect considering it’s the domain name which hosts all the content. Therefore, it’s not surprising it has the most visitors. translate.googleusercontent.com This is Google’s translate service. Views from this hostname suggest there are visitors who cannot read the English version. www.web.com This is a website hosting service. This one [...]
A stormy start to yesterdays B2B’s Annual Conference: ‘A Brave New World: Digital Marketing in the 21st Century’, situated in an area of London I am not familiar with, just across from Tower Bridge and Tower Gate Tube station. The map provided by B2B was surprisingly detailed, although I still managed to walk the complete opposite direction to that of the venue which is probably down to my keen attempt to shield myself from the gales than fault of B2B. I arrived at 9.10, thinking the day started at 9.00 but in fact it started at 9.30 so gave me plenty of time to check-in my coat, grab a croissant, coffee and take a seat at the front at what appeared to be a well designed venue for the event. Not knowing what to expect, (I wasn’t hugely familiar with the work of B2B, although I get there emails regularly), [...]
In my last post I discussed how Google benefits from the long tail of search with its Adwords platform. Concluding that all seems well in Google land, more and more searches = more and more ads = more profit. But, what if users switch search engines, unlikely I agree, but it is conceivable. We all make the choice to use Google over the multitude of alternatives and my point is that it’s pretty easy to switch if we wanted to (change your browser setting or bookmark) and this revenue stream would decrease very quickly. So, ignore the reasons why we do stay with Google (good results etc. etc.). And focus on what Google are doing to prevent this happening. It doesn’t take long to realise that the myriad of free products Google brings to market (mentioned above) on a regular basis has something to do with it. Keep us in [...]
It is well documented that 97% of Google’s profit comes from ads. Although they do have a lot of product offerings; Chrome, Gmail, Wave, Google Docs etc. these do not directly generate income. Therefore, if Google is an advertising company rather than a search company, it makes sense for them to ensure that you use Google as your default search engine. The more searches that go through Google, the higher the chance that an ad will be clicked. On the other hand, the more people who use Google, the more likely advertisers will use Google Adwords to drive paid for search advertising. An increase in advertisers offering the same products for the same search queries will mean more competition, benefiting Google with; 1) a higher return (from increased CPC costs) and; 2) better targeted ads (Google wants to ensure it brings the right content to the right people). Some search [...]
Yesterday, I passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test with a score of 91%. It’s a 70 question online exam which you have an hour and a half to complete and you have to get 80% to pass (Google recently increased the pass rate from 75% and the reduced the time allowed by 30 minutes). I didn’t find this to be too much of an issue as I still had 15 minutes spare. The test comprises of multiple choice questions, usually with 4 answers to choose from. Some however, are the ‘check all that apply’ type, which I found the trickiest. Preparing for the GAIQ test Before you take the GAIQ exam, the best resource for preparation is Google’s Conversion University lessons, which are broken down in to easily digestible segments. It goes through the fundamental basics, which are easy and mostly common sense to more advanced analytic code [...]
