Tracking Internal Campaigns with Google Analytics

Internal ticket sale campaign on RedSox.com

Internal campaigns are marketing efforts that are run on your site and promote your products and services. Here’s an example from the Boton Red Sox site. They’re using ads on the homepage to promote ticket sales. Companies should track how people react to these campaigns and which ones are most successful. But what’s the best [...]

Google Tackles Campaign Attribution with AdWords Search Funnels

The Google Analytics Path

There’s been a lot of debate in the analytics community about campaign attribution and how to assign value to the various marketing touch-points that lead to conversions. If you’re new Campaign Attribution you should check out the book Web Analytics 2.0, it has a good, functional overview of the attribution challenge. Throughout the discussion it [...]

New Google Analytics Goals

Google Analytics Goals Configuration

We all know that it’s critical to measure conversions, or goals, for our website. But for a long time Google Analytics limited the number of conversions, and types of conversions, you could track with Google Analytics. All that changes today (October 20, 2009). You can now create up to 20 goals per profile in Google [...]

Segmenting Unique Visitors in Google Analytics

You can easily add Unique Visitors to any Google Analytics Custom Report.

Google Analytics now has the ability to EASILY segment Unique Visitors. Some of you may be yawning, but I can hear many, many people saying, “That’s fuc*ing AWESOME!” Unique visitors is a critical metric especially in the advertising industry. But it’s also a really hard metric to measure because it take a lot of data [...]

Google Analytics Custom Variables Overview

GA Custom Variables are like Data Decorations

Today Google releases Custom Variables (cv for short) in Google Analytics. This is an evolution of the custom segmentation feature. This post is meant to give you an overview of the feature. We’ll discuss how to use it in a later post. Like Custom Segmentation, custom variables are a flexible way to add more information [...]

Tracking Zero Result Searches in Google Analytics

No Posts Found

I <3 Google Analytics Site Search reports. There’s amazingly actionable data in those reports. But they’re missing one vital piece of information: searches that don’t produce any results. Why is this important? Don’t you want to know when visitors search and don’t get any results? Zero result searches can help your identify missing content on [...]

Segmentation Options in Google Analytics

Google Analytics Browsers Report

As web analysts we live and die by segmentation. Without the ability to segment traffic we can not isolate which segments are producing and which need improvement. Google Analytics offers many different ways to segment data. Each has pros and cons but there is always a way to get the data you need…. well, almost [...]