A Time for Enrichment

Over the next few days, we're attending three conferences, Online Market World and Startonomics, both this week in San Francisco, and SMX East, next week in New York City.

We would highly recommend all three - more details about the shows are below and you can register at the websites. Maybe we'll see you there! We've always found that we learn more in one day at these conferences then we do in weeks of sitting in front of our computer screens. Nothing helps us stay up-to-date more than having conversations with other smart people and learning new skills in seminars.

Also, some authors who are near and dear to our heart are doing book signings at two of the shows, where they will be giving away copies of their informative and cutting edge books.


Online Market World (San Francisco)
This conference starts Wednesday and runs through Thursday in San Francisco. If you're doing any marketing or selling on the web, this is going to be a smart show for you. Take a look at this agenda. You might want to check out Web Analytics Glory in Just 30 Minutes: Measure More Than Clicks which will be presented by our own Avinash Kaushik on Thursday at 11:45am. Afterwards, he'll be doing a book signing and giveaway of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day in the lunch area at 12:30pm for the first 500 people who show up!

Google will also have a booth that you can stop by in the expo hall, and there will be a book signing there as well. Tim Ash with SiteTuners, a Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant, is the author of Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions. He will be singing books at the booth from 4:15pm to 5pm on both Wednesday and Thursday. Tim will be speaking on Wednesday at 3:00pm in the panel Advanced PPC: What It Is, How to Avoid the Pitfalls. Then on Thursday, Tom Leung from the Google Website Optimizer team will be part of a panel on Landing Page Testing Best Practices. Tim's book signings will happen directly after these talks.


Startonomics (San Francisco)
This new show is also taking place this week on Thursday in San Francisco. It's a comprehensive one day show for entrepreneurs - and those thinking of becoming entrepreneurs - to connect with each other and be inspired by those who've already walked the start-up path. Our friends Dave McClure and Jeff Veen will be speaking, among others. Take a look at the day's sessions where you can learn about very facet of making an idea a reality, from product design, marketing and monetization to scalability and strategy.


SMX East (New York City)
Then next week, SMX (Search Marketing Expo) East starts in New York City from October 6th to the 8th. Search marketing is of course right up Google's alley and Google Vice President of Search Sales and Sales Operations Tim Armstrong will be making a keynote during the show on Tuesday morning, after which, Avinash will be doing another book signing and giveaway at the Google booth.

Then, at 3:15pm on Tuesday, Jon Diorio on the Website Optimizer product team will participate in a panel on "Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing", after which Bryan Eisenberg from FutureNow, another Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant, will be at the Google booth doing a free book signing of his book, Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide To Google Website Optimizer.

At 4:45pm on Tuesday, Avinash will be speaking on a panel called "Paid Search Analytics." I will also be presenting on behalf of Google Analytics and Website Optimizer on Tuesday in a theater presentation.

Members of our team will be at all the shows, and again, we hope we run into some of you!

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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Monday

All classes will work on Fireworks tutorials today. Some of you have a lot of experience with Fireworks, and some of you have none. This is sandbox time; play around for awhile.

I will start class with some demonstrations of Fireworks.

If you need to "catch-up" with some assignments please do so today.

Also, please check out this story about iTunes and accessibility from the NY Times. I hope our Introductory Unit provides some context for this article. The effort to provide accessibility is a constant battle. Notice why they must do this---they are losing sales!!

Check out this Electoral Map from CNN. Websites must be interactive now. The bar has been raised from even two years ago. For the last election CNN would have provided a static picture of the map. With this map you control how you view the content. You can even edit what the map looks like (you can click on a state and change it from undecided to McCain or Obama). Play with it. How can you incorporate these design ideas into your websites?

Now it's easier to delete accounts

In the past, you couldn't delete your account from, well, within your account. Getting rid of a duplicate or test account required you to send in a formal request, and you were limited to deleting only profiles in your account. Now, you can delete an account with a click of a button in the "Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings" page. If you're the administrator of the account, and the account is not linked to any other Analytics or AdWords accounts, deleting your account is easy. (If you want to delete a linked Analytics account, please either unlink your accounts first or contact us.) Also, if you have many account administrators on your account, don't worry - they will receive an email notifying them of the account deletion. But they should let the other non-admin account users know that the account is deleted to avoid any confusion.

One last thing - please remove the tracking code from your site after you delete your account. Remember, there's no "undo" once you delete your account, so before you delete your account forever, we'll ask you to confirm that this is really what you want to do before you delete it.

We hope this feature makes it easier for you to manage your accounts! (Click the image below for a larger view.)



Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Friday Quiz

You should all finish your assignments and then:

Internet Literacy:

• Create a webpage that displays your schedule in a three column table (period, class, teacher). Use TH for the headings and TD for the data.
• Utilize a yellow background and black text for the webpage.

Web 2:

• Add a form to your Ansonia website. This form should be a sign-up for PSATs (what information will you need?).
• Link to the form from your index. Link back to the index from your form.
• Use the same background, color, and text layout as your other pages.
• Have the form post to email (anyone@anywhere.com).

Wednesday

Today we will continue to work on our technological operations and concepts . For each class this should complete the most basic ideas for creating a webpage. When you learn how to use new tools remember to ask for help if you need it. First ask your partner, then ask me. But also start using your other sources more (blog, HTML tutorials, etc...). Ask a question on your blog and look for a response.

Internet Literacy:

• Complete the project for Chapter 3 on tables. Click here for extra help on tables. I will send you the files needed to make this project. You should make a folder called "Project 3" in your class folder.

Web 2:

• You will work on Project 5: Forms. This is not a complicated chapter, but there are A LOT of buttons to use so I though it would be prudent to go through the chapter. There will be a few moments where the book does not quite match the software as the book is for an older version. Be patient. Click here for extra help on tables.

Web 3:

• You will continue to work on making things roll, bounce, and explode.

You Cut Quite a Profile

Editor's Note: This post is the first of a regular series of guest-authored posts with our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, who are certified by Google to offer support and consultation to Google Analytics customers.

This first post is written by LunaMetrics in Pittsburgh. Learn how to use Google Analytics from set-up to analysis at their one-day training, "Getting ahead with Google Analytics," on October 3 in Washington, D.C. Sign up here, and read on to learn a useful technique for seeing segments of traffic.

In Google Analytics, it's easy to isolate segments of your traffic such as paid traffic, or organic traffic, new visitors or returning, Firefox users or Safari users using a specific report (such as New vs. Returning) or the Dimension drop down menu within reports. Obviously, you want to see how different visitors behave and how your online campaigns and search engine optimization efforts are paying off. But sometimes, you may want to really be able to inspect this data easily within all Google Analytics reports for a website. You may have a question that Google Analytics answers for the whole site, but you want to know it for only a specific segment. In that case, set up a few profiles which filter down to these segments for your site.

For starters, what does setting up duplicate profiles mean? After you set up your Google Analytics, you can go into the Analytic Settings and choose Add Website Profile. You get the choice of adding a profile for a new domain, or for an existing domain. If you choose "existing," you don't have to do any additional work to your site, but you now have a second place to look at the exact same data, and you can play with it any way you want.

A previous post on this blog, Experiment using different profiles, detailed how to create duplicate profiles for your data manipulation enjoyment. Go crazy with filters! :-) Since you can create 50 profiles in a Google Analytics account, multiple profiles are a good way to view your data through different lenses and isolate certain segments.

Once you've learned to use multiple profiles and see data this way, you have the ability to learn more from your analytics. For example, you can create a profile that only shows paid traffic and you know that the Map Overlay report is only showing that visitor segment. In another example, you might need to know how visitors from a certain campaign reacted to the steps you set up in one of your funnels. Create another profile, filtering in only the campaign you care about, and looking at the Defined Funnel Navigation report.

This is semi-advanced stuff, but just remember to leave at least one "real" profile where you don't filter at all. That way, you can work on the others without making mistakes on the data that you are relying on to guide your website decisions. Not sure if that Regular Expression or filter are going to capture exactly the right data? Set them up on your sandbox profile and see if they work. Some of the other Google Analytics Authorized Consultants told us they set up a sandbox profile for every "real" profile whenever they configure a new customer's account, so that both profiles have the same data history.

Profiles enable you to test theories. Maybe you don't understand why your visitors are behaving in a certain way that shows up in your "real" profile -- but have five potential answers. Set up a profile that includes only yourself, using filters. Then try all the strange things your customers may have done and see if your sandbox profile will duplicate the real profile.

Here at LunaMetrics, there are 10 profiles that we set up for almost every client website right off the bat. You can see them below in an example which uses www.googlestore.com (you'll need to customize and troubleshoot the filters mentioned at the bottom to your own campaigns and site):

And here they are in detail. Most of the filters are custom include filters:

1. No Filters: Profile with zero filters. Use this for troubleshooting.
2. Only Direct: Include filter for the field "Campaign Source" only equaling the pattern "direct" visitors
3. Only Internal: Use an include filter which will include only traffic from internal IP ranges on IP address.
4. Only New Visitors: Include filter on the field "Visitor Type" equal to "new"
5. Only Organic: Include filter where the filter field is on "Campaign Medium" and the pattern is "organic"
6. Only Paid Search: Include filter on "Campaign Medium" equaling the pattern "ppc|cpc"
7. Only Referral: Include filter on "Campaign Medium" equaling "referral"
8. Only Returning Visitors: Include filter on "Visitor Type" equaling "returning"
9. Organic And Paid: Include filter combining the above two filters for "Only Organic" and "Only Paid Search" to include all search engine traffic
10. Overall: All traffic except filter out internal IP ranges using the "Exclude all traffic from an IP address filter."

Here's a screenshot of the filter for the "Only New Visitors" profile mentioned above.

Many of you are probably only managing one website, and can quickly set these profiles up manually. We were doing this manually at first but as we added more and more clients, we created an iMacros script to actually set up these profiles and filters automatically. If you're interested in learning about it, feel free to contact us or attend the training in Washington, D.C. on October 3.

Written by Robbin Steif and John Henson, LunaMetrics, with Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics team