Google Analytics is a tag based analytics program, which makes it a bit harder to track actions for untagged items such as documents. For example, if I want download tracking for my famous pdf white paper or power point presentation - it’s something which is not out of the box in Google Analytics.

In this post I will show two ways to track document downloads in Google Analytics.

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This post will be the first of a series, which will cover Google Analytics Filters.
Google Analytics has become a widely used service. The reasons range from it’s being Free, its ease of use, Google’s amazing distribution channel and perhaps also some of the actual product qualities

There are also quite a few downsides to Google Analytics - which I will cover in a separate post.

So let’s dive into an interesting capability most Google Analytics users are not using, and sometimes not even aware of its existence.

Google Analytics Filters - Lesson #1

Excluding my own traffic from reports

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 ”the vast majority of web content is made up of poorly optimised websites. By that I mean poorly optimised for visibility (visitors can’t find you via the search engines) and poorly optimised for the user experience (leading to low conversion rates). These two are closely related and web analytics is the key to unlock the potential of both.” (Brian Clifton)

Hi,

I just read a very good interview with Brian Clifton.
For those of you who don’t know who Brian is, he is (was) the Head of Google Analytics in EMEA, holds a Phd, a veteran to the web marketing industry and the author of the new book: Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

Brian is now leaving Google and going back to be a Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media - the company he founded back in 1997.
The interview is very interesting, and I just wanted to quote one sentence (at the top of this post) I feel is the essence of web analytics or Web Metrics as some call it).

Web Analytics is the place where most optimization techniques are reflected, where they can all be measured, demonstrated and leveraged. When wanting to show a client their SEO or Usability is not good enough, simply review their analytics. On the other hand, to know the problem of web sites - simply look at their web analytics - you will find the most intreaguing business aspects strengths and weaknesses of their operation. It’s not all about how many visits did I get yesterday vs. the day before - it’s the basic analysis of your business, thrugh the eyes and behavior of your customers.

Well,
It only took two days and dozens of failed logins, error messages, appology emails and so on - but I’m finally in - and I am now the proud owner of 2 Microsoft Analytics profiles

So, I just wanted to share the first experience of setting up a profile and going over the different features and settings - mainly because I just started to collect data andthere’s nothing to actually see in the reports.

The overall UI is quite good. It has the same look and feel of Microsoft Adcenter, and similar hierarchy and navigation, whic are very smart as they shorten the learning curve. The interface is AJAX rich and runs quite fastly.

Going over the signup process, there was a very cute feature which offered to automatically install the tracking codes to my web site - amazingly I agreed to let it log to my FTP server and do what it should - but as expected, this failed. Actually, the only page that had the Adcenter code after I run their wizard was the default wordpress readme.html file which hardly counts for a page, and the good thing I got from this was to delete it from the server. It is quite obvious to say that the software gently ignored the worpress files and filders which are ending with the fantastic .php extention - and I’m intreagued whether this is because they really don’t follow anything other than .HTML or intentionally?

Well, I logged to my control panel of word[press and pasted the codes myself where they should be. One of the funny things I have yet to understand - is that the user account authentication code consists of only 4 capital letters (you can see in my source code of this page), and the next profile as well as one another friend of mine just entered - were pretty much following. I wonder how they authenticate the web sites…?

Going over the profile settings, there are very clear options, and when entering each option I found the logic to be very straight forward, simple, easy to use andunderstand. The con here is that it seems much less sophiosticated than Google’s filtering system as well as other tools. All in all, I get the feeling that this is more targeted towards newbies and small businesses than larger more complex web sites. here’s how it looks like:

In the coming days, I’ll update a bit deeper on the actual reprots and data!
*cheers*
Ophir

Well, it’s seldom when I can write about two new revelations in one week, and be exited with both. But I guess this is one of those weeks…

I just received an email from SEOmoz, followed but reading Rand Fishkin’s Blog Post  announcing the re-launch of their premium service as “SEOmoz PRO” (nothing new, seems more like “hype”) service - however, and here comes the cherry - a completely renovated interface, AJAX / Web 2.0 extra cool and interactive interface!

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