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You could be losing visitors and business due to site issues that never register in your web analytics tool.

If you’re anything like me, you tend to look at your site’s performance mostly through web analytics data (maybe with some voice of the customer/survey data included). The problem is that web analytics tools don’t have all of the information you need.

Error Logs: Hidden Data You Need

This hidden data can be found in your website’s error log (aka apache error log). An error log is a simple file that lists all the errors your visitors encountered when trying to access your site. Errors are logged by IP address, date and time.

You can get them from your webmaster. If that’s you, the location varies but log into your host and look for the “logs” section.  Mine were at /logs/error_log.

After I got a “status 500 internal server error” screen when I tried to get to my own blog, I knew it was time to dig a little.

I found three common errors in my log:

1. Directory index forbidden by rule
2. WordPress database error Lost connection to MySQL server during query
3. Premature end of script headers: php4

One of my blog’s plugins was the source of many of the issues.  That was an easy enough solution — I just deactivated and uninstalled it.  The MySQL connection was lost.  It’s a relatively simple fix for Wordpress users, detailed right here.

If you’ve never seen a server log (I hadn’t, is that terrible?) , I pasted a portion of my own error log after the jump.

You can see how the error messages I listed show up repeatedly.  You may know that site speed is an issue, but you could  still be surprised how many people are encountering errors when they try to get to your site..  I was also shocked to see how much one Wordpress plugin was an issue (if you’re using Wordpress, I’d steer clear of Redirection)

I’m going to report back on how much (or how little) my site traffic increased/errors decreased.  Take a look at yours and comment so we can all see if you found anything interesting.

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This post originally appeared on Corry Prohen’s blog.  You might also enjoy my 10 tips on learning web analytics article and my advice about writing an analytics resume.

Eventually, your web analytics career is going to hit a wall.  Learning interactive marketing as a web analyst, you start with the numbers and then seek context.  When you stop to think about it, it’s really an inside out view, isn’t it?

You can master tags, logs and the many intricacies of implementation and that will get you so far.  If you want to go from good to great, then you’re going to have to stop learning analytics.

Advance Your Career with Action
Measurement craves action.  That’s why site testing (a/b and multivariate) has been such a huge hit.  Your success as a web analyst is defined by the impact of the changes your work inspires: more leads, higher revenue, greater customer satisfaction.

Start your search for by following the money.  In most companies, the budget is often biggest in one of these 4 channels:
1. Paid Search
2. Email Marketing
3. Organic Search / SEO
4. Landing Pages

1. Paid Search

eMarketer predicts that paid search spend will hit $10 Billion by 2010.  Each year, more money migrates from offline advertising to online buys, often starting with paid search (aka pay-per-click or PPC advertising).

Who’s to blame them?  PPC advertising, most often on AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, is among the most measurable marketing investments you can make.  That’s exactly why web analysts need to get up to speed… fast.

The basic structure of paid search advertising is simple: you select words, bid on them, write a text ad and send them to a landing page.  The reality is far more complex.  To get started, I recommend you start with a simple 5 point PPC questionnaire:
1. How are we performing against our yearly and monthly goals?
2. Which campaigns are driving 50% of our cost?  Which ones are driving 50% of our revenue (or similar KPI, such as leads)?
3. What are our ad groups and how are they performing?
4. What is our impression share for the top campaigns?
5. How is competition affecting our brand campaigns?

This is a mix of simple questions, but you’d be amazed how eye opening they can be for a web analyst.  I threw in “impression share”, because it’s a metric that few outside of paid search understand.  It once again highlights the need to move outside of just one tool.

You can get a good overview of paid search with this guide.  For free advice on measuring and optimizing paid search, check out the ClickEquations blog.

2. Email Marketing

Email is a rather unsexy channel.  Most people think of it as outdated at best or spam at worst.  The truth is that email is very much a part of online marketing in a basic way (support email, order confirmation) and more advanced uses (personalized offers, abandoned cart recovery).

As an analyst, you can lead the charge to maximize email ROI by asking:
• How does email stack up against other channels?
• What’s the most effective way to grow our subscriber list?
• What have we learned from past tests?  How can we structure future tests to boost results?
• Which segments of our list are most valuable?
• What kind of from and subject lines boost open rates?

I usually turn to the Email Experience Council to find resources for email marketing.  Their Email Stat Center is a really great collection of research and some stats for comparison.  The Email Benchmark Guide is a good starting point.  For more in-depth training, there is an Email Marketing Summit coming up shortly.

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On the topic of web analytics careers, this is a reprint of an article about web analytics training that originally appeared at the WAA.  If you could start your career over, what would you do?

1. You are Not the First Web Analyst - You do not need to invent web analytics. Somebody has encountered the problem you have. Establish a great base of knowledge by buying books like Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, joining the Yahoo Web Analytics Forum and subscribing to every measurement blog you can find

2. Go to Emetrics NOW - Your world view is likely to be very myopic: all about your tool, your website, your business. You need perspective. The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit will open your eyes, especially if you’re just starting.

3. Your Tool Can Do More Than You Think - Most people assume that what you get out of the box is the limit of your tool. This is usually wrong 99% of the time. You must not be afraid to ask your vendor about what else it can do.

4. Start a Blog or Business - If you don’t really, really own the numbers you’re responsible for, you’ll never really, really learn the data. Pick some side project, start a blog or a business, and measure the hell out of it. Trust me, you will learn a ton.

5. Automate Your Life - I’m repeating June here, but you simply must automate as much as possible. You will be stuck in Excel hell unless you can use technology better.

6. Test! Survey! - Repeat after me: not everything you need to know is inside of your conventional web analytics tool. Say it again. Now, do it. There is NO excuse not to start gaining experience. If you listened to #4, then you don’t need anyone’s permission.

7. Learn Other Disciplines (like SEO and Paid Search) - You will be better at your job if you understand what you’re measuring. Start dabbling in paid search, SEO, affiliates, email, WHATEVER. Just stop focusing on measuring and start focusing on doing the things you measure.

8. Communication is the #1 Skill You Need - Measurement without action is failure. If you cannot communicate your findings and persuade people to act, you will not be effective. Learn to present. Master the executive summary. Be one with PowerPoint.

9. Be Not Afraid of Technological Terms - I’m not a technically oriented person. But, the very nature of internet marketing requires that you at least grasp the basics. The nature of web measurement requires that you grasp a step above the basics. Like it or not, you need to tackle this sooner rather than later.

10. Teach Early and Often - It is very easy for people to start relying on you to measure. Unfortunately, this can quickly become limiting to your career growth. Measure for manager and he’ll optimize for a day, teach him to measure and he’ll optimize for life!

PS: If you want to learn paid search, check out the ClickEquations Blog.  If you manage large paid search campaigns, check out ClickEquations.

I’ve been thinking about attribution recently — how your software decides which channel gets credit for conversion (see my article on campaign analytics).  Attribution is really a question of credit and influence.  Which promotion contributed to that sale?

I believe that previous ad clicks contribute to brand awareness and can drive future searches and response.  But, they place a lesser degree in future sales. Yes, I’m more likely to come back and convert if I previously found your site another way.  They deserve a some assistance credit, but it diminishes over time and with each subsequent click and channel.

Direct traffic is the biggest attribution hole.  All of that traffic originated somewhere, we just can’t directly trace it back and it’s deflating other channel’s performance.

I think this is a religious argument.  There is no obvious and easy answer.  The best answer is the model that ultimately leads a business to invest in the channels that produce more profit, etc.  That said, we are very far off from that state. That’s why I think that software should give people a choice, thus circumventing any nits they could pick with whatever one we forced them into.

What kind of attribution are you using today?  Which kind would you like to be using?

It’s a New Year which means… resolutions!  I’m trying to skip the meaningless, aspirational goals that I usually dream up.  Instead, I’m digging down into the things that I can really commit to.  I’m making 8 resolutions for Digital Alex and ClickEquations.com (which I’m responsible for).

1. I will integrate my data.  People come to my site.  Then, they become leads, customers and retained customers.  I really want to make decisions about where to spend my money based on who is the most valuable.  That means I have to connect the clicks to the customers with extra site and campaign tagging.
2. I will QA my data at least once a month.  I’m going to totally level with you here.  I’m guilty of some web analytics sloth.  Sometimes I’ll QA data once, make the fixes and only deal with spot issues.  We all know data is dirty and I just can’t assume it’s right.  Bad data happens!  This is especially true on B2B sites (see above).  I resolve to do a more thorough review at least monthly and act swiftly.
3. I won’t have an ego about my website. In the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, I concede that I do not know everything.  That’s why it’s probably better for me to rely on what customers care about what the data says.  Multivariate testing and voice of customer, here I come!
4. I will prioritize speed over perfection.  I’ve been accused of a “shoot first, aim later” style and, frankly, I’ll embrace the label.  In my opinion, it’s better to ask forgiveness instead of permission.  To me, it’s all about speed.  The same is true in online marketing, design and analytics.  It’s easy to obsess to the point of inaction.  I’m not saying to be sloppy, but I am say that something launched at 80% is better than nothing launched at 95%.  Speed has a tremendous value.  I will analyze until the answers are good enough and then correct.

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Ever since Apple released the iPhone, mobile internet browsing has never been the same. With the release of the 3G version, which sold over 1

Track iPhone visitors to your site in Google Analytics.

 million units in 3 days, it’s only going to grow faster.

I was a total geek and took off half a day just to buy iPhone 3G the day it came out. 2 stores and 4 hours later, I got it and I’ve been obsessed since. That got me thinking–how many people visit my blog on an iPhone?

How Many iPhone Visitors Do You Have?

Answering this question delves into an infrequently used area of analytics–technographics. Technographics are the nitty-gritty about your visitors:

• What kind of browsers do they use?
• What is their screen resolution?
• What operating systems do they use?

It’s actually a great source of information for your designers and developers. They can make more informed design and code decisions.

To find out how many visits you had from iPhone geeks, you need to look at the operating systems.

1. Open Google Analytics, pick the profile you want and time period
2. Click on “Visitors” in the left nav
3. Choose “Browser Setting”
4. Click “Operating Systems”

You’ll then get a report like this:

iphone analytics

Voila, now you know how many iPhone visits you got. But, what did those people do?

Track iPhone Visits to Your Site with Google Analytics

One of the biggest (and most annoying) issues with Google Analytics is that you can’t easily slice all* the data by different segments of your audience–paid search visitors, email campaign respondents, iPhone visits, etc. Instead, you have to setup a separate profile.

Setting up your iPhone profile in GA takes 3 steps:

1. Add Website Profile and Setup Your Basic Administrative Options
2. Copy Your Goals
3. Setup Filters to Capture only iPhone Visits

1. Add Website Profile and Setup Your Basic Administrative Options

• First, click “Add Website Profiles” under the Website Profiles box (to the left of User Manager)
• Click, “
  Add a Profile for an existing domain”
• Pick your domain and give the profile a name like “iPhone Visits”. Hit finish.

Okay, now you have to setup the usual administrative options like any profile. Click the “Edit” link in the Website Profiles box. Fill out the following fields:

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Maybe it’s the competitive pressure from IndexTools/Yahoo or just a carnivorous appetite for your data, but Google really seems to be on a tear with analytics lately.

Google Trends: Covered in Scales (and Competitive Data)

First, there was the Google Trends update.  Google Trends, for those who don’t know, allows you to trend the volume of searches for a particular set of queries over time.

Google finally introduced scales and the ability to export data to a comma separated value (CSV) file.  Thus, you can finally get a sense of how dramatic WebTrends search volume has dropped vs. Omniture’s.

Then, Google upped the ante on the competitive intelligence market by releasing Google Analytics for Websites.  Admittedly, it offers very few features compared to enterprise tools like Hitwise or mid-market options like Compete, but it will certainly open up the field to more people.

Of course, some people might be interested in exactly where this data is coming from:

Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users, powered by computer algorithms, and doesn’t contain personally identifiable information. Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.

The Arranged Marriage - Google AdWords and Google Analytics

From the beginning, Google Analytics has been synchronized with AdWords (though, not always well suited for measuring paid search).  Lately, it seems that Google has been pushing the switch from AdWords Conversion Tracking to Google Analytics more aggressively based on 2 points:

First, Google is dumping your old reports

Second, Google is pushing AdWords in Analytics and Analytics in AdWords

This makes perfect sense, of course, for Google.  The question is… what’s next?

It’s something of a design truism that you can be decent at more things or great at a few things. Scarce resources, time and customers always force trade-offs. I like to think of “decent at more things” as a horizontal focus. Being “great at a few” would be a vertical focus.

Before eMetrics in San Francsico, I speculated that Google Analytics would make an announcement about the return of Measure Map (a blog measurement). They did resurrect it as a vertically focused tool designed just to help Blogger users measure their blogs.

On the flip side of the equation, Omniture used their annual summit to announce the newest version of their tools and the integration of everything into the Omniture Suite. Integrating each tool still takes some configuration, but the suite is definitely more horizontal in nature.

Different Users, Different Needs

The web analytics industry is growing up. It’s still a very geeky field, but as more people create and advertise online those same people are paying attention to measurement.

There’s a bunch of users who need focused data that’s simple. Not everyone needs access to every metric under the sun (when was the last time a blogger looked at technographics?). For those less experienced in web analytics, too many numbers can be confusing to navigate and understand.

Some users need focused data that’s richer than horizontal tools can provide. Specialized metrics and a clear presentation can make vertical tools much more applicable and useful. Email or affiliate analytics are probably good examples of targeted measurement.

Of course, we all want to simplify our lives. Horizontal tools can often integrate many different channels in one place. There’s no discounting the value of a unified world.

You Tell Me

At the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line. What numbers do you need to measure and improve? What tool delivers the right user experience to make it easy for you to find and act on the data that matters? The answer may be one horizontal tool, one vertical tool or a combination of the two.

What do you think? Is the future of web analytics vertical or horizontal?

If you enjoy blogging and you savor free web analytics software, get ready for Google Analytics Version 3… well, something.

As anyone who follows analytics knows, the vendors love to make big announcements at Jim Sterne’s eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. With the San Francisco summit just round the corner (May 4th - 7th), you had better bet that some news is on its way.

Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Measure Map is rising from the dead.  Measure Map is the blog analytics company purchased by Google.  Jeffrey Veen then went on to influence the design of Google Analytics visual overhaul.

Quote The Crunch:

I went through the signup process, which requires a Google Analytics account and tracking pixel. They then said “Great! You’re all set. We’ve got a few things to set up on our end. We’ll send you an email when we’re ready (soon!) and explain how to log in.”

We’re looking at one of 2 scenarios here:

1. Google will have 2 products: a blog focused analytics product and the more robust Google Analytics.  I could see them rolling out Google Analytics: Blog Edition as a standard part of all Blogspot accounts.
2. Google Analytics is about to get a facelift with additional social media data integrated into it.

Personally, I think #2 is the more likely option.  Since I can’t make it, I’m counting on June to report back all the findings.  Avinash, who is running Measure Map, probably can’t spill the beans early, though I guarantee he’ll have a post up after any major announcements.

Mmm… delicious blog data.