Everything you ever wanted to know about GA but were afraid to ask...

It seems like every business I've worked in has gone through a phase of being a teensy weensy bit obsessed with stats. I can understand it. Its the interwebs. Its science right? Anyway, I wrote a summary for my team of all the issues around GAs especially in the context of driving traffic to third party sites like Amazon and I've decided its probably a good idea to make it into a post for future reference. These things change over time but not by much. As I keep saying, you cannae change the laws of physics. You cannot measure clicks to, only clicks from!

So the main thing to takeaway re: analytics is that its fantastic for measuring trends but rubbish for accurate numbers. So, it should be helpful to see for example if press or banner ads had an impact, if the graph went up but it won't tell you exactly how many people visited, clicked or bought. Even when you own the whole ecosystem (landing page, your own ecommerce basket etc.) its trends not numbers.

GENERAL ISSUES WITH ANALYTICS

Most of the general issues people think they know about with GA have gone. Sessions ending, browsers shutting and re-opening are not as big issues as they once were but they still exist for some people.

However, the "Do not track" law is a big problem. This is a new standard whereby when you download a new browser you have to have the option now to have "no cookies ever". 

Worse than that the new IE is default set to "no cookies ever". Its not huge yet but the "do not track" law could be a big game changer both for GA and behavioural advertising.

This makes everything a bit rough and ready just for basic visitor data even. 

You will always be under reporting with GA. Its always important to focus on trends not numbers for traffic or any data supplied via GA.

However, there are bigger problems:

1. If you do not own the site you are sending a user on to this adds another problem for calculations. 

2. If you do not own the shopping basket you are sending someone on to / you cannot place cookies in it then its impossible to measure conversion rates.

SETTING UP

General traffic to a website is trackable via Google Anlaytics code. We have one for all our quercubooks.co.uk/xxx sites and we just drill down in the back end to those pages to see data specific 

We can either drill down if its off our CMS to that page or if its an externally built page the web developer should ask for that code each time he sets it up. Otherwise = NO DATA! 

BASIC DATA

Pageview data is given by GA but its not helpful, ignore. 

Always the focus should be on unique visitors.

There are a lot of other stats which I could walk you through but I'd say this is the thing to focus on.

CLICKS ON PAGE

This is easily calculated when tracking click throughs to a site you own. 

You can use in page analysis to view the whole page with the number of clicks on each element. Lovely. You can switch this on right now for our main site.

The number of people coming to amazon (or any external page) via the landing page (or any other page we do not own) not so easy.

Link Attribution

This is great for tracking internally and keeping an eye on email to website to shopping basket where you own the whole ecosystem but you can't tag an amazon url you don't own that url. It won't work. Event tracking is the only option.

Event Tracking

What developers can do is use java script to send people to a page they don't know about for a split second before they go through to amazon. They can sit at that page and count the number of people popping through

without them knowing. This is called event tracking. It means installing some javascript and reconfiguring all outbound links accordingly (see here http://bit.ly/IXhK2J) 

We can then see the results in our GA account.

BUT, a lot of people never bother setting this up. And there's a reason for that. Its not particularly accurate either. The reason being that you are trying to hack the processes of browsers and they don't like that. They can detect spammy / hacky functionality and they won't always let it work.

It will always be under representing and you will never know by how much.

AFFILIATES

This is one way to look at sales. This is the only tracking Amazon allows. Its not accurate as it won't track you everywhere but again if you suddenly see a spike in Alex affiliate sales you know something is working via one of your affiliate links.

AJAX/FLASH/ANIMATED SITES

With these sort of sites everything happens on the page. This makes it almost impossible to track whats going on. Event tracking is ALWAYs the answer for seeing whats going on on the page. With fewer sites being built in Flash its less and less of a problem but something to be aware of.

HTML5

This works fine with GA (but experiences all the usual GA problems already discussed)

SERVER BASED ANALYTICS / EXTERNAL COMPANIES PAID FOR DATA TRACKING SOFTWARE

I am only mentioning these in case someone starts googling and thinking they have "found" the answer when they haven't.

Server based analytics means the math completely outside of google with a developer. It can give you page views not uniques so hardly useful.

You can pay for expensive tracking systems. These IMHO are only worthwhile when you are doing Adwords campaigns yourself, you own the whole ecosystem, you are churning though massive numbers and you need to analyse in detail which of numerous differently worded ads are affecting click through.