Survey

Today all classes will be adding a survey to their website using Google Docs.  Students will create the survey to collect information about their topic (Web 2/3--Flu, Web 4--School).  They will track data in google docs and publish that data to their sites.

This will require:

• Quality questions that encourage particpation and provide quality data.
• Using tools (blogs, website, etc..) to encourage students to take survey.  The more responses the better.
• Being good classmates by taking other surveys.  Check blog list on blogmeister.

Try to post your survey today.

Web 2/3 projects will be done on Tuesday.

How to Use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics

Last year, Justin Cutroni of EpikOne published a four-part tutorial on how to use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics. We've seen a lot of interest in this topic, so we thought we'd republish the first part of the series here on the Analytics blog.

Ecommerce Tracking Part 1: How it Works

This post is the first in a series of e-commerce transaction tracking with Google Analytics. Why is e-commerce tracking important? Well, transaction data is a vital piece of information when analyzing online business performance.

Sure, it’s great to measure things like conversion rate, but revenue is much more tangible to many business owners. Having the e-commerce data in your web analytics application makes it easier to perform analysis. Do you need to set up e-commerce tracking? No, but it sure helps. :)

The Big Pictures

E-commerce tracking is based on the same principal as standard pageview tracking. JavaScript code sends the data to a Google Analytic servers by requesting an invisible gif file. The big difference is that e-commerce data is sent rather than pageview data.

But how does Google Analytics get the e-commerce data? That’s the tricky part. You, the site owner, must create some type of code that inserts the transaction data into the GA JavaScript. Sounds tricky, huh? Well, its not that bad.

Step by Step: How it Works

Let’s break it down and walk through what actually happens.

1. The visitor submits their transaction to your server.
2. Your server receives the transaction data and processes the transaction. This may include a number of steps at the server level, such as sending a confirmation email, checking a credit card number, etc.
3. After processing the transaction the server prepares to send the receipt page back to the visitor. While preparing the receipt page your server must extract some the transaction data and insert it into the Google Analytics JavaScript. This is the code that you must create.
4. The receipt page is sent to the visitor’s browser.
5. While the receipt page renders in the visitor’s browser the e-commerce data is sent to Google Analytics via special GA JavaScript.
6. Here’s a basic diagram of the process. Again, the biggest challenge during implementation is adding code to your web server that inserts the transaction data, in the appropriate format, into the receipt page. I’ll cover the setup in part 2 of this series.

What Data can be Tracked?

Google Analytics collect two types of e-commerce data: transaction data and item data. Transaction data describes the overall transaction (transaction ID, total sale, tax, shipping, etc.) while item data describes the items purchased in the transaction (sku, description, category, etc.). All of this data eventually ends up in GA reports. Here’s a complete list of the data:

Transaction Data

• Transaction ID: your internal transaction ID [required]
• Affiliate or store name
• Total
• Tax
• Shipping
• City
• State or region
• Country

Item Data

• Transaction ID: same as in transaction data [required]
• SKU
• Product name
• Product category or product variation
• Unit price [required]
• Quantity [required]

A few notes about the data. First, the geo-location data is no longer used by Google Analytics. The new version of GA tries to identify where the buyer is located using an IP address lookup.

Also, you should avoid using any non-alpha numeric characters in the data. Especially in the numeric fields. Do not add a currency identifier (i.e. dollar sign) in the total, tax or shipping fields. this can cause problems with the data.

Continue reading parts 2-4 of this series on EpikOne's Blog, Analytics Talk

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics

Share Customizations and Dive Much Deeper, Available Soon...

Today at eMmetrics San Jose, we announced four feature updates coming soon to Google Analytics. These features are especially relevant if you're an Advanced user of Google Analytics.

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions

Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions are new features available in most table views that allow inline cross-tabular analysis of data. You can use these new power features to do in-depth, on-the-fly analysis and see all the information in the same table. View data by two dimensions at once, such as keywords and cities. Next, pivot by another dimension such as source, while also viewing two additional metrics such as visits and pages/visit.... all within a single table view.

The possibilities are virtually endless and potentially mind boggling (you've been warned!). Watch the video below.



Share Custom Reports and Advanced Segment Customizations

Also announced today is the ability to share customizations you have made to Custom Reports and Advanced Segmentation by simply sharing a URL. Think you have the ultimate custom SEO report? Post the URL for the report to your blog or email it to a friend. When people click on it, they import the report structure, so rather than seeing your data, they see the report you built, but with their data in it. Now people can share their more interesting Google Analytics customizations without having to send detailed instructions, just share a URL!

Manage Customizations Across Profiles

In addition, if you have multiple profiles you will be able to pick and choose which ones get which Custom Reports and Advanced Segments associated with your account. So if you import or create the ultimate Search Engine Marketing report and one of your profiles doesn't do SEM, simply don't add it to that profile.

All of these new features are in beta and will first be available to show attendees, then will begin rolling out in everyone's reports over the coming weeks.

Posted by Brett Crosby, Google Analytics Team

Wednesday

I found an interesting flu quote:

Pandemic years are associated with many more cases of influenza and a higher case fatality rate than that seen in seasonal flu outbreaks. It is common to encounter clinical attack rate ranges for seasonal flu of 5% to 15% in the literature. For pandemic flu, clinical attack rates are reported in the range of 25% to 50%.

It might be worth reading to understand some of the concern officials had.  This is the difference between average flu and pandemic flu.

For the next few days you will be creating your websites.

Here are a couple of sites we have looked at over the last couple of days that I think show modern design:

• Save Darfur
• Oberlin College
• White House
• Smokey the Bear

Be sure to review all the components you plan to include before you complete the initial design.  By the end of the day you should have completed the template on your main pages.  Be sure your design choices are conistent through all of your pages.

Surface your Google Analytics data in Google Ad Planner

We know that web publishers can get frustrated when public estimates of their traffic don't match what they're seeing in their web analytics accounts. Publishers with ad revenue at stake need to present the best possible data to advertisers, but they couldn't do much about it... until now.

Today, we are announcing an integration with Google Ad Planner Publisher Center that allows you to opt in some of your Google Analytics data into Google Ad Planner so that you can replace traffic estimates with directly measured Google Analytics data. Of course, this feature is strictly optional and provides the most value to publishers who have ads on their site. A lot of publishers have requested this feature and we hope that those of you who do enable the feature will enjoy seeing data that matches what you see in Google Analytics.

To see how your site is currently displayed in Google Ad Planner, visit the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center and search for your site. If you want to get started managing your site profile in Google Ad Planner and opt in your Google Analytics traffic metrics, first enable the "Share my Google Analytics data with Google products only" from within your Google Analytics data sharing settings page. Then, go to your Google Ad Planner account, sign in, and select the Google Analytics metrics you'd like to share publicly. Once you do, your Google Analytics traffic metrics will replace Google Ad Planner's estimates of your traffic, and potential advertisers can see the important metrics that you are seeing.*

For more information about the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center, visit the Ad Planner Help Center, or watch our video below:

*Please note that publishers who decide to share their Analytics data for the first time may have to wait up to 48 hours to see the traffic data in their Ad Planner account.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Google Ad Planner Team

Tuesday

All classes will begin making their websites for their projects today.

1. Check to make sure that your Google Docs account is activated and you have the password.

2. Open Dreamweaver and create your site and subfolders.  

3. Once your site is active save the first page as Index1.

4. Create a folder in your website panel named Images.

5. Import any files (images, movies, flyers, etc..) that you have already created to the correct folders in your site panel.

6. Put a title for your page in the appropriate box.  I don't want to see any "Unititled Documents".

7. Save page.  Wait for activity.

We will spend some time today collaborating on the design of your pages.  I hope to make it a fun activity.

Back to Basics: An easy way to spot quality traffic

Your site may be getting a lot of traffic from referring sites, but which websites refer visitors that actually convert to a goal? There’s a basic report that can show you where your quality traffic is coming from: the Traffic Sources report.

To spot which website links are referring visitors that convert to your goals, follow these steps:

1. On the main ‘View Reports’ screen, choose Traffic Sources in the lefthand navigation.

2. In the same area you'll now see a list of subset of reports. Click on 'Referring Sites.'

3. Now you'll see a report of all the top sites that refer traffic to you ("referral" = the user clicked a link on the sourcesite). Click on the Goal Conversion tab.

4. Now you'll see the top 10 referral domains. In the bottom gray section, choose a larger number for 'show rows' in order to see them all.

5. You'll get a breakdown of goal conversion percentages for every referral. Right above the data table, you'll see a score card listing your site average's data so that you can compare it to the information coming from specific sources.

Of course, for this report to actually show goal conversion data, you’ll need to have created goals for your website. You can either read a quick how-to from our Help Center, watch a video, or view a GA IQ learning module on it.

If you run an ecommerce site and would like some more information on identifying valuable referrers, you may want to check out this post written by one of our Authorized Consultants.

Posted by Christina Park, Google Analytics Team