The fact they are free is the amazing part, and to the chagrin of several hundred developers at competitors like WebTrends, Omniture (now Adobe) and Coremetrics it is just one more dink in the armor, especially when these types of enterprise features are considered something you would typically pay for.

Ok, so what it is… Well actually if you don’t have much traffic you won’t notice much when you click it.  Since I work for a large corporation and have quite a few small, medium and large Google Analytics accounts for my sites and other clients, I can see the disparity in what you get.  For bigger corporate clients there is data showing up.

2 kinds of data.

One is called  “Automatic Alerts”, the other are “Customer Alerts”.

Just assume the automatic alerts they decide for you, while you have some control on your own.  Weird thing is the actual types of control are very general with a simple low to high sensitivity bar.  Without a lot of information about this tool, I am going to take a stab at the relevance and how to use it…

Automatic Alerts (Variance Reporting)

Like I said, if you have some data coming through that is a bit more than just 10 visits a day, you will see something.  What I am seeing is any form of data that is above a specific variance curve showing up.  If you have had basic statistics.  I suffered through it twice in two MBA programs, you have the basic within like 2.5% of the mean at both sides of the bell curve.  When I see low medium and high settings, this probably is more like the variance of like 20%, 50% and 70%.   You can modify it a bit with that bar.

What does this really mean for analysis?

It pretty much it means they are “Alerting” you to unusual activity in your account.  For my corporate accounts I am seeing things out of the ordinary showing up, like traffic from a specific geographic location has increased by greater than 40%  or time on site has increased from a specific location by over 88%.  You will have to become a hack like me to understand the fact that this stuff is relative.  This means that it really can mean very little depending on the situation.  You have to dig deeper to see why or how it is a variance.

Time Frame

Trying to get a handle on what time frame means, it appears that if you choose a small time frame at the top of the page, you create a statistically insignificant amount of data to analyze, and you will notice that there is no results.  There are two types of time frames involved in this analysis.  There is the time of the report you are looking at, at the top of the page, and there is the “Time Frame”, one day, that is in the middle of the page.  You can shift this “Time Frame” back and forward (if you are not looking at today).  This way you can see if the trend is common each day or just for this day.  Does not look like right now that you can switch this from a day to a week or month, but that would be a nice feature. Maybe I am missing something on the screen to switch this.  Also, seems like this is going to cost us money at some point, so maybe that is the paid feature?  But then, I have not yet gotten to custom intelligence.

Alert Sensitivity Bar & Significance Bar

There is a significance bar on the right side of each metric and dimension.  This significance bar is related to the variance discussed earlier.  It can be used as a measure of how important, or in my old stat class we called this the Sigma.  I actually turned down the Alert Sensitivity bar in the middle right and noticed that a few of the alerts dropped off.  This sounds right, if it is straightforward.  Obviously you will have less alerts if the Alert Sensitivity bar is lowered.

Graphing Anomalies (Alert Data)

Another part of this is the cool way you can quickly access graphing.  Let’s say you are looking at a specific alert.  There is a little graph icon on the left of each alert.  Click on it, and you can that specific target data across the page time line, and BAM a pretty powerful way to use this thing…  Try it and see what I mean.

Alerts Candlestick Bar Graph

Notice this secondary graph beneath the normal graph. This one is tracking how many alerts per day.  If you are just starting out this is set for the automatic alerts only.  If you set up custom alerts, it will track them on this chart as well.  I am going to set up a few and then report back through this blog and my twitter account @dgudema on how they work.

Group By Metric | Dimension Function

There are 2 ways to Group the Information, by Metric & Dimension.  Metric refers to the basic metrics listed on the right side.  Dimension appears to be the more deeper secondary level metrics like region, new vs repeat visitor and other more detailed items.   Interestingly enough the higher level metric may not show the alert that is in the lower level metric.

I am sure that there is more here that I have missed.  I will cover it in my second article coming up soon.

First off, Event Tracking is a new feature in Google Analytics.  If you are already a user, it is a different thing you have to implement with tagging.  So if you are not an existing implementer of Google Analytics, you will have to start from the beginning.

I have been working with Web Analytics for over a decade, and there isn’t an analytics program on the market in the top 3 or 4 that I have not worked with, from Webtrends, Coremetrics, Omniture (Now Adobe), to Google Analytics. 

So recently when I was asked to write a short spec on the Event Tracking tag and how it works in Google Analytics, I had to look carefully at this tag.  It could be confusing, because Google Analytics typically does not use a lot of tagging.  You just pop it in there and it works!   Good news though, is that 99% of Google Analytics users won’t need another tag, unless they want to dig deeper (or have to).

So, as a reminder, the basic chunk of Google Analytics code looks like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-XXXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

You get this when you login to Google Analytics, go to edit your account and click on “check status”.  If you need more info on how to do this, I am going to write an in depth overview of google analytics and will cover the basics in that article.  

Basically replace the UA-XXXXXXX-X with your code, or grab the full javascript code from www.google.com/analytics/ , pop this code into your html, and you are ready to go with Google Analytics.

Extra Tags & Event Tracking

There appears to be about 5 or 6 extra tags for Google Analytics (depending on what article you view on the web), and finally 2 extra tags for the checkout process.  By tag, I am referring to lines in the analytic javascript code block.  The big one that seems to be getting lots of attention recently is Event Tracking by Google Analytics. This is because it is new in their program and answers a lot of problem areas that Google Analytics did not cover in the past. 

The basics of Event Tracking are you add a line of code per event.  This would mean adding the following line:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

to the google analytics javascript block.  I would place it right above
pageTracker._trackPageview();

You would replace the variables in _trackEvent in order to produce specific tagging of Events. 

Category

The Category is used as the highest level tracking.  This means it ties together all the other variables and should not be too unique per line.  It is required.  This means if you are tracking a series of events,  you would keep this the same per event page or action.  If you are tracking a WebForm for instance, then keep all of these the same wording like “Web Form” so they are grouped together.

Action

The Action is used to track the type of so called ‘actions’ the web surfer is taking.  So for this example, you would use “Viewed Form” or “Completed Form” or “Received Error” or something similar.

Labels

The label is used to show additional info about the event you are tracking.  It is kind of like giving a page a title.  In this case this could be “Seeing Form On Page” or “Filled Form Out” or “Got Error On Form”, or it could just be “Form Page”.  If it is unique that is fine as well.

Values

The values field is an Integer or Number field, so it often won’t apply.  A great article about about this subject, the Event Tracking Guide, says that it is great for counting or summing things up like download time.

That’s it for now.  There will be a future article on my success or failure in implementing the event tracking in Google Analytics.

To solve this problem, there are several places to look, including Google and doing a site:YOURWEBSITENAME.com search and clicking on every link to using Google Analytics.  The Google Analytics method is the best, since it automatically tells you what needs to be fixed.  This does not mean you should ignore the google search engine and looking at what are big incoming links in advance.  Remember once you find a broken link, and you are using the WordPress Redirection Plugin, I highly recommended in a previous blog entry (click here to learn more info), you need to enter the entry into Redirection and fix it.  If you are just learning that this did not require an .htaccess entry in Linux or htapi entry in windows, you are learning about a whole new world of improvement…

So back to Google Analytics.  First of all you need to have a 404 page, which is where all the pages end up when they find no entry in WordPress, including the redirection plugin.  This typically will be a 404.php page in the theme directory you are using.  If you are sending people to your site map page, that is fine as well. 

There are several ways to get this info in google analytics.  I recommend using page title.  For instance, on our site, the page title of our 404 page is called “Page Not Found”.  Go into Google Analytics and click on “Content” and then on “Content by Title”.  If you have just migrated, and the first day has passed, just set the date to the current day, to remove anything that is older than today, and find the “Page Not Found” (or other) title.  If you click on this title name itself, another screen will open and reveal all the URLs that arrive at that page.  This is your list of incoming broken links, sorted by the most important links at the top of the list.

Now is the detailed nitty gritty work.  You need to re-enter each of these links into a url to test them and make sure they are broken.  Once you are have found one that is being clicked on from a website out yonger, take it, copy it into the redirection plugin.  You do this by Adding a new Redirection, then copying the link into the Source URL.  Remember to not use your full path, just the /filedirectoryetc/ path, and then go over to another browser and find the end URL you want to send the visitor to and then copy and paste this path into Target URL and click Add Redirection.  The default is a Permanent 301 redirect. 

There are a lot of other options in the redirection program like using Regular Expressions.  These work fine as well, but make sure you read the instructions carefully, since some redirections are impacted by other redirections…sequentially.

Let me know if you have any comments are questions about this process, because almost all sites come to point of migration, and this blog entry is really about the aftermath of a big migration.  Our last WordPress migration did go through, but it had lots of small items that we had to fix along the way.  I am going to add another blog entry covering these additional problems we ran into, creating a load balanced WordPress Enterprise solution!