Google Analytics’ Conversion University will be updated this week to reflect the new Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) lessons, currently hosted on the Google Analytics IQ Lessons page of the Google Analytics site.

As of December 22, 2011, these are the presentations currently available on Conversion University:

http://conversionuniversity.com/

As of December 22, 2011, these are the presentations currently available on Google Analytics IQ Lessons page:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/iq.html

Please note that a few of the new presentations are not currently available:

• Campaign Tracking and AdWords Integration: (404)
• Analysis Focus – AdWords: (YouTube Video – Not Available)
• Analytics Intelligence: (YouTube Video – Not Available)

If you are currently studying for the exam – good luck.  If you need advanced help or a full Google Analytics audit, please contact us.

Google announced a revision to Google Analytics with regard to Site Speed on Friday, November 18, 2011.  The speed at which the pages of your website load has been a talking point for a while, with Google working on tools to gauge the performance of your pages in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  Ideally, a page with a high average page load time could be analyzed and possible factors increasing load time addressed.  As a matter of foreshadowing, Matt Cutts wrote a blog post on April 9, 2010 entitled, “Google incorporating site speed in search rankings,” which stated that Google had incorporated Site Speed amongst the signals used to determine search rankings.

Previous to this Google Analytics Site Speed announcement, website owners who wanted to track their Site Speed in Google Analytics had to add an additional line of tracking code into their GATC to gather the data for the Site Speed report:

_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
 
This is no longer necessary.

The _trackPageview method (_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);) controls the data collection, which feeds the Site Speed report.

If you have a firm foundation in Statistics and wish to be able to control the sample size collected by Google Analytics – currently, Google Analytics collects 1% of visitors or 10K hits per day – you can use the _setSiteSpeedSampleRate() method (_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 5]);) which should be added before the _trackPageview method in the GATC.

Have you been looking through your Google Analytics account trying to make sense of Metrics and Dimensions?  Or are you beginning to create your own custom reports and figuring out which metrics and which dimensions you want to include?

• The following are a few basic points about Google Analytics’ Metrics:
• Metrics are shown with dark blue text on a light blue background.
• The data associated with a Metric is displayed below the Metric name in a column.
• Metrics focus around numbers.  This includes numbers (metric examples: visits, entrances, and clicks), time (metric examples: Time on Site, Time on Page, and Time after Search), and percentages (metric examples: % Exit, Bounce Rate, and CTR).

The following are a few basic points about Google Analytics’ Dimensions:

• Dimensions are shown with white text on a light green background.
• The data associated with a Dimension is displayed in a row, with each box corresponding to a Metric’s column.
• Dimensions need to be paired with Metrics for meaningful data analysis to occur.
• A few common Dimensions are: Keyword, Medium, Time On Site, Exit Page, and Request URI.
• This includes numbers (metric examples: visits, entrances, and clicks), time (metric examples: Time on Site, Time on Page, and Time after Search), and percentages (metric examples: % Exit, Bounce Rate, and CTR).

Dimensions are shown in green and metrics in blue, as shown in the following image.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Now that you understand the difference between Metrics and Dimensions, enjoy using Google Analytics to the fullest with custom reporting.

Have you ever wanted to create a report in Google Analytics that only contained certain dimensions?  For example, have you ever wanted to see metrics specific to two referral sources for a given time period, without having to export into Excel and sort?  Today’s blog post is all about learning how to customize a report within the new Google Analytics platform by using the pipe symbol to create a regular expression.

To get started, log-in to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Standard Reporting (see figure below):

We navigated to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals, but feel free to choose your desired report.  Any report that has an advanced sort option (see the blue “advanced” link in the top right of the below figure) has the same procedural steps as this example.

1. Select Advanced Sort

Click “advanced” above the data that displays in your desired report.  The screens should expand (see figure below):

2. Select Dimension

If you would like to change the dimension, now is the time.  For this example, we would like to keep the default as Source.

3. Select Matching RegExp

From the Containing dropdown menu, select “Matching RegExp.”

4. Write Your RegEx

This report shows a number of different referral sources.  For this example, let us assume we were asked to generate a report that contained only referral traffic from LinkedIn and Twitter, so logically; we would want the report to contain LinkedIn traffic OR Twitter traffic.  Translating this to a regular expression would yield:

linkedin|twitter

Then click the Apply button.

In the following figure we show that this is not case sensitive:

linkedin|twiTTeR

It should be noted that a more complex Regular Expression would need to be written to exclude variations or subdomains appearing in the report (in this example, mobile.twitter.com), if desired.

For a list of the most commonly used Regular Expression symbols and a number of regular expression examples, please read our blog post entitled “Regular Expression Examples for Google Analytics.”

Google announced a revision to Secure Search on Tuesday, October 18, 2011.  The change went mostly unnoticed by casual Google Analytics users, but swept through the online marketing and analytics communities like wildfire.  One week later, we would like to show an example of how the change is affecting Google Analytics reports.

But first, let us answer the question: “What changed?”

A user who is logged into Google, whether Google+, Gmail, or another Google property, conducts a  search through the Google Search Engine for “pumpkin carving kit” and lands on a site selling the aforementioned item. 

Prior to October 18, 2011, the owner of the landing page (assuming they have Google Analytics properly set-up), could pull the Organic Search Traffic report in Google Analytics (under Traffic Sources, Sources, Search, Organic) and see “pumpkin carving kit” amongst other search queries that delivered organic traffic.

After October 18, 2011, the owner of the landing page could pull the same report, but now, the search query “pumpkin carving kit” would not be present.

Example of Google Analytics Data After Revised Secure Search

The above screen shot clearly shows that the change took affect on October 18, 2011 and that this web property sees “(not provided)” instead of specific search queries.

Where can I read more information?

Read the post from 10/18/2011 on the Official Google Blog, entitled “Making Search More Secure” for technical details and our October Newsletter article entitled “Google Search Change Impacts Analytics Data.”