Chinalytics Longmarch Blog

One of the most elelgant features in Google Analytics is Advanced Segments. It allows analysts to quickly and easily segment visitors based on their behavior on your site and answer questions like:

• What share  of overal conversions comes  from visitors that were searching for brand search term vs. non branded terms?
• Which pages do visitors read that do not convert but don’t bounce? (Maybe you missed a goal, or the opportunity to add a call to action to critcal page)
• What is the conversion rate for visitors from groups of untagged referrers (e.g. social networking sites, blogs) vs. tagged traffic sources and search
• What is the best indicator for the difference between “super engaged visits” (>10 PV/Visits) and “normal engaged visits” (>1 to 9 PV/Visits). Is it the traffic source? Is it the landing page? Is it the conversion for a specific goal?

Just create 1 or 2 segments and compare the bahavior difference in almost any report in GA, instantly. Anyone who every tried to answer similar questions in Omniture or WebTrends will feel nothing but gratitude to Google to make segmentation that easy. You can find much more detail in Avinash’s great Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja! post.

What Avinash didn’t tell us in his post is how to supercharge our advanced segment using user defined variables. I learned about this power of this combination, when trying to segment out the behavior of registered visitors. GA has no build in function that can identify registered visitors, but Google Analytics Help had the solution. User Defined Variabeles!

Adding  a small piece of JavaScript to your login script

<script type=”text/javascript”>pageTracker._setVar(‘registered_user’);</script>

tags this visitor as a member of the “registe

red user” segment by setting a variable in the GA cookie that is handed over with each tracking image request. That sounds complicated but in the end it just means that GA now allows you to create a custom segment based on this User Defined Variable and voala, you can segm

ent each report for registered visitors. Sweet!

But why stop there? Advanced Segments allow an unlimited number of variations. For example

• Compare “Converting Registered Visitors” (who convert to a Goal) vs. “Non Converting Registered Visitors”, to improve conversion
• “Returning Registered Visitors” (more than 1 visit in the time period) to “Single Visit Registered Visitors”, to improve loyalty.
• etc..

To take matters further, Convurgency provided a list of ideas for User Defined Variables in their Google Analytics – User Defined visitor tracking post in Juy 2007. They include ideas like:

1. Visitor Type Segmentation (Business Users, Technical Users, etc) based on form inputs
2. Simple A/B testing by setting a user defined variable for each landing page
3. Referrer Segmentation

This was before the new GA code and before advanced segments became available. Respect! Now implementing all these ideas became even easier.

What are you waiting for? Go segment!

Any ideas for cool segments? Please leave them in the comments.

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Florian's GA certificate

If you think you can do that, too, just go to starttest.google.com, pay 50 bucks USD and give it a go. I warn you, tough. This is harder than you think! Well, at least it was harder than I thought. To prepare yourself, you can go the Google Conversion University and join the free online classes.

Be warned tough, that while the classes seem very straight forward at times, the test is not. They have a couple of tough nut to crack in there. Especially areas that I am not handling on a daily based proved tricky. Here are some areas I should have taken a closer look at before taking the test.

1. Adwords – Adsense Integration
2. Regular Expressions (Regex)
3. Tracking of sub domains and cross domain tracking
4. E-Commerce tracking

Be smarter than me and study those in advance. I hope my experience helps those of your still planning to take the test. I definitely encourage you to do so. It was certainly worth it for me. It forced me to up my GA game and become a better analyst. Now I can proudly put the “Google Analytics Certified” batch on this blog.

Thank you. You may stop applauding

P.S.: Also a big thanks to Google’s Avinash Kaushik, for his encouragement and inspiration.

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• Update: Analytics Webinar with Avinash Kaushik (adwords.blogspot.com)
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For those of you who couldn’t join yesterday’s Adworld 2009 event, please find the presentations of the Web Analytics session attached. Regular readers of this blog will have seen my 10 Rules for Winning through Analytics presentation already.

Among the other three  decks I want to highlight the “Measurement and optimizations at Qunar” presentation Charlene Ng gave. Qunar is one of the leading travel portals and the leading travel search engine in China. They have presented atthe June WAW but the current deck is more detailed and provides a much better understanding about how they do analytics.

Thanks again to DCCI for hosting this event and of course for all the Speakers & Sidney Song (OMD) – as the moderator

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One of interesting new features of Google Analytics, we didn’t have time to explore during the March WAW event, is Motion Charts.  Motion Charts are a fascinating visualization idea, displaying up to 5 dimensions of data in a very intuitive format. They were pioneered by Dr Hans Rosling in a famous TEDtalk discussing global health and are now available in Google Analytics to visualize web analytics data.

Motion chart or my blog traffic - click to animate

If you are interested to learn more about Motion Charts in GA, click on the image above to see my blog traffic visualized using motion charts and take a look at this training at the Google Conversion University.

The use of Motion Charts in not limited to Google Analytics however. They are also part of the visualization tools in Google Docs (see an example by the guys from Efficient Frontier) and can be accessed through an API. A good example for using the motion chart API is Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer tool, that measures users influence on Twitter, and visualizes changes in influence over time. These interfaces open a wealth of interesting usage areas for data analysts, that can be integrated in dashboards and client presentations.

Now here in an idea: Use motion charts to visualize online buzz!

In China, product related discussions happen mainly BBS’s and sometimes on blogs. So these are the platforms we spent most of our time tracking and analyzing for our clients. to visualize user discussions on these two platforms, I propose the following motion chart setup:

The idea, of course, is to use this visualization to identify trending topics that need to acted upon. Those topics would clearly show in the top right corner (many posts, attracting many responses responses) of the chart with large bubble   sizes (many page views) and red color negative aggregate sentiment).

I you have any ideas on visualize social media tracking data? Let us know in the comments!

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• Video of March WAW with Google’s Stephanie Hsu (longmarch.chinalytics.com)

As a follow up to the March WAW video, here are a few more links to interesting Google Analytics resources.

Google Conversion Unversity Videos on Youtube

Google uploaded videos of 24 for presenations covering GA funtionality, Web Analytics skills and best practices to Youtube. These are very well done and insightful. You can find Stephanie Hsu’s presentation of AdWords integration there as well.

Google Conversion usiversity trainings and Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test

A collection of short trainings, covering topics from ‘first steps in GA’ to ‘In-depth Analysis’, very useful for beginners up to more advanced users alike. They  explain all GA features and some analytics techniques.  The trainings also form the basis of the GA Individual Qualification test, that allows individual analysts to become certified in GA. That is a very powerful personal marketing tool right there. Would I prefer hiring a Google IQ certified applicant over one without any certification? You bet!

Regrettably, both videos and trainings are mainly available in English.  The Chinese version of the conversion university, while available, lacks the breath of content and the link to the IQ test. So the work the the GA China team is clearly cut out.

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For those of you who didn’t have the  March Web Analytics Wednesday Beijing with Google’s Stephanie Hsu take a look at the video posted above.  Its a full recording of the presentation and Q&A session. The presentation last for 32 minutes and then we have 23 minutes of Q&A. Make sure you don’t miss the insightful questions from our audience. For Song Xing’s video of the event take a look here. We understand that image and sound quality are still sub-optimal and are working on it.

For those of you who have never attended a WAW, this is also a great sneak peak, to see if joining us would add value to you. What is missing from the video of course is the great food and the networking. For that you really have to turn up in person.

During the presentation, in front of a record crowd of 60 attendees,  Stephanie focussed on Custom Reports and Advanced Segments. Both are very powerful tools and Stephanie does a great job demonstrating that power. She is showing actual screenshots from GA, which sometimes makes it diffucult to read what is on the slides. This is compoundend by the fact that I had to use an evluation version of a video conversion software to get the video uploaded.

The video was graciously provided by one of our attendees, but neither of us are experts at filming and editing video. Any recommendations and support in the filming and editing process you can provide is highliy appreachited.

What did you think of this month’s WAW? Like it? Hate it? Want better Chinese translation? Let me know in the comments.

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After talking about Omniture and January and Webtrends in February we are completing the Web Analytics trinity in March with a presentation about Google Analyics. In a premier for the Beijing WAW we have a guest from the Google Mountain View HQ to give us Web Analytics insights, straight from the source.

Stepahnie Hsu, Analytics Specialist at Google, will reprise her Google Conversion University talk for us, and dig into the integration of Google Adwords and Google Analytics. I have also asked her to share some insights into the new GA features like advanced segmentation and motion charts. Stephanie will be supported by Zhou Yang, Google local GA support specialist, for translation and localization.

In another first, and courtesy of OMD’s Sidney Song (宋星) we will also be able to record the event on video and share it with those of you who cannot attend.

Please join Stephanie, Zhou Yang, me and 30 – 40 other web analytics enthusiasts to learn more about web analytics, meet other web enthusiasts and have an all around great time. Bring any friends who might be interested to join our community along as well to:

Location: Luga’s Villa (right behind 3.3 in Sanlitun)

Time and date: Wednesday March 3rd  4th , 8PM

We will have a buffet dinner and soft drinks available for our guests. Be prepared to spend RMB 50 for the evening. As usual the knowledge you get in exchange is invaluable

Please RSVP by commenting to this post or drop me an email florianpihs[at]gmail[dot]com.

P.s.: Thanks Stan for helping me to correct the date

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I just got an email from Stephane Hamel announcing V 1.02 of WASP, his Web Analytics Solution Profiler utility. Congrats and kudos to Stephane. Good job. Rock on.

For those who have not heard about WASP here is the skinny:

WASP is a Firefox plugin for Web Analytics professionals that allows you to easily do

• Quality Assurance:  Check If your own pages are correctly tagged, that is
  • If there is a web analytics tag on your page (works for ad tracking tools, A/B testing tools and e-commerce tracking as well). This works page by page, but also automatically with a crawler if you are using the licensed version.
  • If that tag is executed correctly and is sending the right data to the Web Analytics server (e.g. the right profile ID in GA, or the right Omniture SAINT tag). This works especially well for Omniture and Google Analytics, since WASP provides an “enhanced tags view” that explains each data point sent to the server.
• Market Research:  If and page you are visiting has a web analytics solution installed (e.g. your customers, your competitors, or your own business in other countries)

I have been an enthusiastic WASP user for more than a year and encourage you to test it out. My only reservation is that it doens’t work well for Flash “experiences”. To Q&A those, we have been using HTTP Watch and looked at the data sets send to the server manually. I am looking forward to version 2.0,  so I can ditch HTTP Watch completely.

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Those of you that cannot attend our Web Analytics Wednesday event next Thursday, do not despair. The folks from LexAd are running a Google Analytics workshop in Shanghai on April 22nd and May 27th. This is not the first time they do that, just the first time I notice Thanks Sidney for pointing this out! If any one of my readers has attended their workshop before, please let me know how it went. The comment section is the perfect place 

Given the great interest in the WebTrends drinks / dinner event, I am
happy to announce the next Web Analytics Wednesday (on a Thursday) for
Thursday April 3rd / 8PM – 10PM. Sponsored by Web Analytics
Demystified Inc., I have invited Google’s Zhou Yang to present a quick
introduction to Google Analytics (15 min) to start off the discussion.
Given the great interest in tools, I am planning future sessions for
WebTrends, Omniture, SinoTechMedia and other vendors in upcoming
months. Please do recommend other vendors you are aware of, I am happy to add more to the list.

Time: Thursday April 3rd / 8PM – 10PM
Location: South Beauty (Dong Zhi Men branch)


Please RSVP on the Web Analytics Wednesday website or by commenting to this post.