Web Analytics TV #19 - The Most Productive Episode

Welcome to one of our most productive episodes of Web Analytics TV yet! We had so much fun doing this one, you are going to have a blast as well.

Web Analytics TV, as you well know by now, is powered by your questions. In this episode we had questions from Australia, Brazil, India, Denmark, England, Netherlands and so many other places. Y’all rock!

If you’re new to this show, our process for this show is simple.

Step 1: You ask, or vote on, your favorite web analytics questions. Vote on next week’s questions using this Web Analytics TV Google Moderator site.

Step 2: From a secret undisclosed location at the Googleplex Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer them. : )

In this episode we bring back the “Ninja of the Episode” and award it to Aaron from Tasmania, Australia. Really great questions Aaron. Just email us and we’ll send you a signed copy of Web analytics 2.0.

Here is the list of last weeks questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:

• (1:36) Cookies and laws (and milk)
• (2:28) Setting multiple conditions for goals via Advanced Segments
• (4:45) Using event tracking and custom reports to track calendars
• (6:45) Getting site link data in Google Analytics
• (7:37) Tracking conversions for individual products
• (9:25) Best practices for setting up Google Analytics for different clients
• (10:35) Tracking shopping carts on different domains
• (11:54) Tracking internal site search on AJAX-type site search
• (13:50) Combining referrals from different sites
• (15:30) Implementing cross domain tracking with the async-tracking code
• (17:05) How to determine when data is sampled
• (19:42) Browser support for page speed reports
• (22:08) Getting the name of each configured goal via the API
• (23:16) When the GAIQ test will include version 5 content
• (24:08) Getting hourly overview metrics in Google Analytics
• (25:11) Differences between webmaster tools clicks and visits in GA
• (26:18) How much income should you have to employee a web analyst
• (30:06) Goal completions by different landing pages
• (31:19) Visit duration calculation in Google Analytics
• (32:53) Where to find e-commerce city and region data in Google Analytics
• (34:02) Stopping other sites from sending fake traffic
• (34:55) Virtual page views showing up in custom reports

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Tracking SEO rankings and sitelinks with Google Analytics by André Scholten
• Using setDomainName to set GA cookies to a root domain
• Cross domain tracking with async tracking
• Goal configuration data in the Management API
• Hourly traffic pattern reports in Excel from the API by Next Analytics
• How analytics tools calculate Time on Site by Avinash Kaushik
• Using a hostname filter to reduce spam by Jason Green

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below.

This series would not be possible without your awesome questions. Please submit them on our public Google Moderator site, and while you are there don’t forget to vote for your favourite questions. Avinash and I will answer them in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team