Next Week: Two Incredible Conferences In One

Hey marketers and data heads: heads up! Next week is a good week to tell your boss you’re taking “enrichment time off.” We totally support using this excuse to take afternoons off and go to baseball games, or using it to let your boss know you won’t be at work on a Friday, when you're actually planning to hit the slopes early for a long ski weekend. “Enrichment time”. But regarding next week, we’re actually talking about legitimate, professional, guilt free, educational enrichment time at two web analytics conferences happening at the same place in San Jose -- next week!

You’ve heard of eMetrics, a premiere event for marketing and website analytics. We’ve launched a bunch of stuff at this conference over the years because the atmosphere fosters innovation. Well attended and sponsored by the Web Analytics Association, it’s also a chance for the web analytics industry to get together and share best practices and help each other.

In conjunction this year, there will be an additional conference in the same space, targeted specifically at conversions, called Conversion Conference. This conference is aimed specifically at helping you make minor or major adjustments to your website or campaigns specifically to increase your online conversions. It will share social events with eMetrics, and registering for both will help you take full advantage of the week. And when you register at the Conversion Conference site you can get a late-bird discount of $250 off. Enter the code CCW646.

Here are some of the must-see sessions:

Monday, May 3:

• 9am - 4:30pm: Google Analytics Workshop, led by Caleb Whitmore from Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. This promises to be a great training, with hands on examples from one of our most experienced partners. Make sure to register this week.

Tuesday, May 4:

• 11am - 12pm: Introduction to Google Website Optimizer as part of Conversion Conference
• 1:50pm - 2pm: "What’s New with Google Analytics" with our very own Brett Crosby
• 2pm - 3pm: see Brett again at the Conversion Conference in a panel with Eric Peterson called "Web Analytics & Uncovering Problems"
• 3pm - 3:30pm: Book signing and giveaway of a new book on Google Analytics written by Caleb Whitmore, Justin Cutroni and Sebastian Tonkin, who used to work on the Google Analytics team. This will take place in breakout room Cupertino.

Wednesday, May 5:

• 9am: keynote by Avinash Kaushik: "Leveraging Bleeding Edge Analytics Goodies"
• 12:15pm: Brown bag deep dive into what’s new with Google Analytics with product manager Jayanth Mysore

We hope to see you in San Jose next week, data heads, and you will return to work, savvier at all things web analytics, on the cutting edge of online tracking, and linked in with more professionals in your industry. Truly enriched.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

5 years ago today: Google acquired Urchin; Urchin became Google Analytics

It's been an amazing journey. Five years ago today, Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation. At the time, we had no idea how popular Google Analytics would become. To a great extent, Google Analytics' popularity is a reflection of the phenomenal accomplishments and hard work of many talented and passionate people here at Google. But mostly it is you, our customers, who have made the product what it is today. You've requested features, provided feedback, and asked tough questions. We're humbled and thankful. And, we're excited for the next 5 years. Congratulations and happy anniversary!

Posted by Brett Crosby and Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics User Conferences go Dutch!

Despite the travel havoc caused by the volcano in Iceland, today we hosted our first Google Analytics User Conference in Europe. Six of our Dutch partners joined forces to deliver an interactive and informative day for hundreds of our Dutch users.

Clancy Childs (Google Analytics EMEA Lead Sales Engineer) discussed business intelligence, traffic improvements, conversion optimization and the Google Analytics API.

Brian Clifton also joined the list of speakers to cover ‘Measuring success in a Web 2.0 world’

We had a further 12 workshop sessions hosted by experts from each of the partners including (to name a few):

• Developing a conversion attribution model using Google Analytics
• Creating targeted dashboards
• Landing Page Optimization
• AdWords Optimization

It was really great to meet some of our enthusiastic Dutch user base and we look forward to rolling out more of these User Conferences across the world. Copenhagen is next on the list! Stay tuned to the blog for more details.

Well done to ClickValue, Traffic Builders, OrangeValley, Traffic4u, Netsociety and Netprofiler for hosting a great day!

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

Web Analytics TV #8 with Avinash and Nick

This is the 8th edition of Web Analytics TV with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski where you ask questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

Here is the list of last week’s questions. In this episode we discuss:

• How to create Advanced Segments for many sites (or other parameters)
• AdSense in $index calculations
• Tracking affiliates in Google Analytics
• Using an Event as a goal like tracking people who watch videos to conversion
• Measuring embedded Flash with Google Analytics
• Should you use two analytics packages like Google Analytics and Urchin?
• Using custom reporting to display landing pages and page titles
• Breaking down paid vs organic search by landing page
• How site overlay currently works and reasons why it could not work
• The difference between unique visitors and absolute unique visitors
• How to get the / and /index.html pages to be the same
• Properly setting up Advanced Segments for time on site

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

• Google Analytics Campaign Tracking help center article
• Avinash discussed calculating visitor lifetime value
• Using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
• Using Advanced Table Filtering Google Analytics in 60 seconds video
• Avinash discusses Daily, Weekly and Monthly unique visitors
• Configuring the server default page in Google Analytics

If you found this post helpful, we'd love to hear your comments below. If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

How To Measure The Quality Of An Online Form

Guest post written by the team at Bluerank, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Online forms. You enter information into them all the time. You fill them out to make online purchases, sign up for things, sign into things, complete surveys, and more. They're an integral part of the online processes. And like all things, they can break.

Let's talk about them from your point of view, as the manager of a website. If you have one or more on your site, it's important to check how they perform and see whether they are a hampering a conversion process because of low quality. The great news is that you can use Google Analytics to do quality control on your forms. Read on to learn how.

Forms usually consist of a number of fields grouped into several steps. What's more, many of them are subject to validation. The presence of validated fields is a prerequisite for conducting a test of the form. It is advisable to validate the form at the time of sending.

Form Error Rate (FER)
When we want to measure the quality of a landing page, we check the Bounce Rate. However, in the case of measuring the quality of a form, we introduce a new metric called Form Error Rate.

SubmitError: number of unsuccessful attempts to send the form

SubmitAll: number of unsuccessful attempts to send the form + number of successfully submitted forms

Example 1
A visitor was looking to buy an insurance policy online. In order to do that, he had to fill in a form with 25 fields. He got a confirmation that the form was successfully submitted on the 3rd attempt. Here is how to count the Form Error Rate in this case:

SubmitError = 2

SubmitAll = 2+1=3

Example 2
Visitor 1 managed to fill in and submit the form at first attempt, while visitor 2 submitted the form successfully at third attempt. Lastly, visitor 3 tried 3 times, but finally resigned. In this case:

SubmitError = 5

SubmitAll = 5+2=7

Error registration in Google Analytics

To track errors in online forms we can use _trackPageview() function. When the user tries to submit the form, it undergoes validation and the information about incorrectly filled fields is coded.

Example
There is a form with 2 fields.

Fields 1 and 2 get validated. When the user makes an error in a field, it will be coded as "1" and a "0" means that the field was either filled correctly or it was not subject to validation. So "10" means there were two fields, and the first was filled in with an error, and the second was filled in correctly.

(click to enlarge)

If the form is submitted successfully, the code will look like this: "00". In that case, the function that registers information about errors will look as follows:

pageTracker._trackPageview("/onlineform/00");

In order to analyze the data registered in Google Analytics, we should export it to an Excel worksheet. Let’s assume that during some period of time the following data was registered for our 2-field form (which the trackPageview function will populate in the Content report called Top Content):

There were 23 page views of a form. An error occurred 18 times, and 5 submissions were successful.

SubmitError = 18
SubmitAll = 18+5

The higher the Form Error Rate, the worse situation we have with our form. Obviously, an FER of 100% would mean that our form is not working at all. In the example above we have an FER of 78%. This means that our form needs improvement. In general, when the FER is under 20 % it means that our form doesn’t hamper the online sales process.

When analyzing the data, we can find the reason for low form quality. In the example, field 1 was the most problematic what means we should give it some extra attention.

We hope that this method is helpful, and you use it as a model for your forms, or even for other functions or operations you have on your page. Registration of errors enables you to calculate the error rate, identify the areas that are the most difficult for users, and optimize them.

Posted by Tomasz Lewandowski from Bluerank, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Making the Web Faster

Today, our web search team announced how Google search now uses site speed as a factor in ranking. All things being equal, a faster loading site is better than a slower site.

With this announcement, we wanted to remind you about Google Analytics asynchronous tracking. The asynchronous tracking code has a faster load time and can improve site speed, especially on rich-media or script-heavy pages.

We encourage users to update to the asynchronous snippet to help make your site and the web faster. You can read up on how to implement the asynchronous snippet on our Google Code site. We also have a comprehensive list of migration examples to help you make the switch.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Custom variables webinar available for your viewing pleasure

Custom variables is one of the most powerful features in Google Analytics. With them you can segment traffic by almost any attribute. We recently hosted a webinar on how to make the most effective use of custom variables. If you missed it, you can now watch this highly informative webinar on the Google Analytics YouTube channel.

If you’re interested in learning how to use this powerful feature in Google Analytics, sit yourself down with some popcorn this Friday night and get analyzing.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

Back to Hits

Over the years we’ve worked hard to make complex data easy to access and easy to understand. We’ve released features like Advanced Segmentation, which lets you segment your traffic on the fly, Custom Reporting-- the ability to create and share your own reports--, and Analytics Intelligence, an algorithmic intelligence engine that automatically spots important changes in traffic. All of this work was done with the belief that you needed this data in order to make sense of your website traffic.

We’re big believers that data trumps opinion, so we set out to prove our belief. We’ll be the first to admit that we were wrong. After extensive analysis by our quantitative teams, we’ve uncovered that hits (or How Interneters Track Success) is the only metric that actually matters in web analytics. Forget that business about absolute unique visitors, goal completion rate, or even bounce rate. If you want to achieve success, you need to focus on hits.

With this finding, we’ve gone back to the drawing board with the Google Analytics interface. Since this will be a major change, we want to share with you a preview of the new Google Analytics UI:

(click to view full-size)

To help you make this transition, Avinash Kaushik is releasing a new book: Web Analytics 3.0 - The Greatest Hits. The new book (more of a thick brochure, really) is chock full of nearly 1,000 words on how to use hits to track your success. It’s your chance to learn how to hit from a true analytics ninja. Plus it’s much shorter than most of his blog posts.

We’re looking forward to exploring the next stage of web analytics with you. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a hit counter to watch.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team & Hits Master