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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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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So many great news today! First Omniture’s announcement about the Baidu, then the news that Google Analytics has a new Benchmarking function. Lets talk about the GA Benchmarking first, so I can focus on Omniture / Baidu in a longer post during the weekend.

Why Benchmarking?
Reporting is easy, providing actionable recommendation is less so. In an earlier past I recommended a 3 step approach based on answering 3 simple questions:

1. Is this number good or bad?
2. Why is the numbers good or bad?
3. What can we do to improve this metric and is it worth the effort?

In order to answer questions 1 and 2 it is critical to know how well other players (especially competitors) are doing, since comparing just to your own numbers will leave you in bubble without context for question 1 and without best practices for question 2. Find more details in Avinash’s post on competitive intelligence.

Why is this announcement so important for China?
Regular readers of this blog might remember my rants about the lack of benchmarks in China. While you can benchmark you reach (unique visitors) with some accuracy using IResearch’s iUserTracker, key industry benchmarks like CPC, CTR or Bounce rate are unavailable in China. There is not even an industry organization like the IAB that
conceivably could report such numbers. As long as you don’t have a large sample of clients or long experience in the market, you are out of luck (just barely avoided a 4 letter word here)

How useful will it be?
Well, that depends. I just singed up for the service (you need to agree to share you own data anonymously first) and will share more comments in the future, but I see a number of limitations.

• The benchmark needs to be relevant to my industry, GA allows you to choose among a number of verticals to address this issue. So the value will depend on how close this match is.
• The benchmark needs to be relevant to my geography. Most benchmarks are widely different in China than they are in the US (or in Japan, or in Germany for that matter). So far it seems this problem is not addressed. That is a key weakness for us poor web analytics souls in China an without this feature, GA benchmark will remain a nice graph is the system.

Yours truly will of course immediately get in touch with his local Google resources and see what he can did up. Stay tuned for more. [Update: My friends at Google confirmed that the benchmark is global. No luck for the wicked]

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