jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Quick Pulse – How is Traffic & Earnings in 2010?

Just trying to get a quick pulse of the traffic and earnings outlook in 2010 so far… and looking for feedback on the questions below. Just to be transparent, I will also answer them myself first! I truly don’t want or expect to get any EXACT numbers… just a pulse. Share Your 2010 Traffic & Earnings I am going to try and make this as copy/paste easy as possible! Just copy from...

How to view actual goal numbers rather than percentages in Google Analytics

I’ve never understood why Google Analytics shows percentages rather than actual numbers in the “Goals” report when you are looking at traffic sources. The information below is good but it’s a lot better to just see the numerical amounts. Luckily there is an easy way to show the amounts, if you are at home using custom reports. Simply set up the report using...

How to identify your sites worst pages

The worst page on a website is the last page that a visitor looks at before they leave and unless that’s the final page in your checkout process you need to be looking at ways to improve it. An easy method to identify pages that are causing your visitors to leave is to order your Google Analytics content report by “% Exit” but this doesn’t really help because...

Your unique visitor figures are 2-4 times too high

Analytics programs are never going to be 100% accurate but you might not expect them to be over-reading by 2-4 times on your unique visitor numbers. According to research this is exactly what’s going on. Scout Analytics has developed algorithms for tracking users across different devices using dozens of unique attributes and utilize patent-pending algorithms to derive a unique...

Analysing traffic increases & decreases using Excel

With the huge amounts of long tail traffic websites get these days it’s very hard to analyse where sudden traffic increases and decreases come from. If you get 100,000 visitors one month and 80,000 the next month somebody is going to need a report detailing where that traffic went. Google Analytics offers a fairly comparison of one months data over another and is also not too...

The Lost Cross-Channel Affiliate Tracking Notes

For affiliates concerned that their hard work will be wasted by ‘leaky tracking’ of offline conversions, Jonathan Treiber’s offline tracking panel at Affiliate Summit East provided hope for a more accountable tomorrow. (I know, we’re already at Affiliate Summit West – the technology is still new and the tips Jon shared still valuable, so bite me .) Treiber is the CEO...

Take Advantage of Your Own Popularity!

One of the biggest areas ANY website owner struggles with, is finding ideas for new content! Sure, we all “think” we know whats best for our visitors based on our own experience and research, but how about taking it up a notch, and delivering content on top of what they already like! This post is going to walk through a simple way of discovering exactly what your existing readers...

Google Analytics Wishlist

Google Analytics has been rolling out new features pretty fast recently so I thought it might be a good idea to create a wishlist of features people want. Mine are below, add yours in the comments. Real time reporting Ability to “move” an account from one login to another (for those poor clients whose data is owned by the web design company) An API that isn’t limited to 10,000 rows...

Are Links a Good Proxy for Traffic?

One of the most exciting developments on the web in the last two years has been the increased ability to combine two or more technologies to create something new. We see this most in the Social space, of course, but overlaying data sets could lead to a dramatically increased understanding of the world we live in. Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called...

Make Google Analytics load faster with asynchronous tracking

With site speed apparently set to be a factor in the 2010 Google algorithm webmasters are looking for easy ways to speed up their sites and Google wants to help. The latest Google Analytics code loads asynchronously allowing your page to load faster – download it here. Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a “separate lane” to handle part of the processing...

5 SEO Focussed Web Analytics Tools

Most people at small to mid-size companies don’t think too much about analytics and are happy to let Google Analytics do all their day to day reporting. We think Google Analytics is a great product but it shouldn’t be the only tool you use. Below are some innovative web analytics tools built with SEO, conversion rate optimisation & social media in mind for you to try. BVLD Status BLVD...

Playing with Google Analytics Intelligence

Google Analytics has been adding loads of new features recently and in the last few days the Intelligence feature has finally been made live. This new feature allows you to see an overview of the major events happening on any particular day before segmenting the data to drill down further. You can also create alerts to warn you if your search traffic for a particular keyword drops by more than a...

Google Analytics adds advanced filters in content reports

Yesterday Google added an Advanced Filters tool to the content reports allowing users to filter using a number of different parameters. The tool even supports regular expressions. The filter can be seen at the bottom of the keyword or content reports and allows you to drill down into the information in a much more intuitive way than the previous filtering options allowed, mainly because it’s...

Analysing Bounce Rates & Satisfaction Rates

Most people are in broad agreement that the brand update is about maximising satisfaction rates and making sure as many of your visitors find what they were looking for at your site rather than having to go to Google and search again. However some people are looking at satisfaction rates and thinking about bounce rates but they are a totally different thing. First of all lets look at how Google defines...

Google Analytics Gets a Bunch of New Features

Google announced a number of new and upcoming features for Google Analytics today. The features, Google says, focus on three things: power, flexibility, and intelligence. It is the intelligence aspect, which Google places the most prominence on, and this comes in the form of a feature called "Analytics Intelligence," which will provide users with automatic alerts of significant changes in...