Happy New Year readers! 2009 is going to be a comeback year for everyone – I can really feel it! Let’s make the most of this fresh and exciting New Year by stepping away from our Analytics kingdom for just a little while and focusing on our Site Intelligence efforts, such as, stepping onto the dark side…I mean…your competition!

While it is illegal to use “black hat” techniques to keep tabs on your competition (such as using “spy ware” type software programs), keeping your eyes and ears open to what your competitors are doing is a critical part of being successful online. Knowing what your opponents are up to can give you great ideas and inspiration for your own website or marketing efforts. It can (and should) also serve as an alert or warning system as to what not to do online, which can be equally as important for you.

Here are just some of the many different things you can do to stay on top of your competitor’s efforts:

1. Visit their website!
Pretty simple, right? If you know the URL of your competitor’s websites, check it out to see what they have going on. Pay close attention to how they market to their potential customer base, the language they use, and the type of sales angle that they incorporate. Be observant of the layout of their website, color scheme, navigation, and – of course – products and services offered.

2. Search for them online
See how successful (or how futile) their online marketing efforts are by searching for their brand name. You don’t have to click on their ads or organic search results – just look them up on Google and Yahoo a few times. Here, you’ll want to take note of how aggressive /  passive their marketing language is, and what incentives / discounts / promotions they are offering.

3. Sign up for their newsletter / monthly email alerts / RSS Feeds
This is an excellent way to learn “what’s hot” with you business adversaries. Normally, your competitors will promote the latest and greatest product or service to their email database, including any speaking engagements or other important announcements that they have. Learn how they speak to their database and what re-marketing efforts they are using, and consider similar methods for your own Email marketing efforts (if they are using good methods).

4. Check out their social media / blog / viral marketing programs
Are your competitors present in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter? Do you know what StumbleUpon and Digg are? When was your competitor’s last blog post? If your competition isn’t focusing on any of these newer mediums, then this is an excellent opportunity to gain ground and establish a presence before they catch on. If they are already engaged in Social Media efforts, consider subscribing to their blog, their RSS feed, and “follow” or “connect” with them. They will most likely speak to their audience much differently in these mediums than they will on their website or newsletter – take note of what they are saying and doing here.

5. Do your competitors advertise / market offline?
Have you seen your competitor’s brand and products in a magazine or newspaper? Are they running a late-night infomercial or day-time TV ad? Have you heard their phone number repeated 9 times in a 30 second radio spot on your drive home from work? You may not be able to afford these mediums as they are FAR more expensive than pay-per-click advertising, but it’s good to pay attention to their offline messaging – visit their site the next time you’re in front of your computer and see if there is a connection between the ad that you read or heard and their website.

6. Look at your Referring Sites / Hostname / Domain Name Reports
Your analytics package should be able to tell you what websites have been sending you traffic, and, what domains are delivering you traffic. This is a great way to tell if your competitors are checking you out. Fight the urge to block out or exclude this traffic from appearing in your reports – keep this valuable data in your analytics package. If your competitors are really checking you out, chances are that you are doing something that has caught their attention, and you are most likely going down the right path.

7. Enable Data Sharing / Benchmarking (with Google Analytics)
Google Analytics allows for you to compare your basic website’s metrics against the averages of websites that are a similar size to yours. This is available within the Visitors >> Benchmarking report. The catch: You must anonymously share your data with Google and other services, such as AdWords, to be able to have access to this section. The benefits of knowing how you stack up against websites in your industry – and across every available industry in this section – far outweigh the risk of anonymously sharing your data with Google (keep in mind they already have your website data when you use Google Analytics, so it’s not that much of a leap of faith to enable Data Sharing in your Google Analytics account).

8. Use online research tools like Google’s Insight for Search!
Finally, get a grip on historical and current trends of keywords and key phrases with free programs like Google Trends for Websites and Google Insights for Search. You can perform searches for your competitor’s brand names and products, and you’ll be able to gauge the level of interest at global, national, and regional levels. If there are terms or key phrases gaining popularity that your competitors are using, you may want to consider jumping on those while they’re hot.

Checking out what your competition is doing can help guide your own efforts, as you learn what to do and what not to do. However, always keep in mind to play fair and behave in an ethical fashion – NEVER slander, defame, or bad-mouth your competitors on your website, your blog, or on your MySpace page. Don’t click on their pay-per-click ads, never subscribe their contact or info email to spam mailings, and refrain from posting negative reviews of their YouTube videos or their Local Submission listings.

Have a great 2009!!!

Tag-Based (or script-based) Web Analytics programs have excellent, business-friendly advantages that help organizations make intelligent, insightful decisions about their website. This applies to websites from businesses across every imaginable industry and size, from the local flower shop to the U.S. Government. These benefits include (but are definitely not limited to):

• Full suites of reporting options
• Colorful, easy-to-use graphics and reporting interfaces
• Data that is “good enough” for any marketer or decision-maker to use
• Fast and almost always reliable data

But with script-based web analytics – and like anything in life, really – there are pros and cons, or, the good and the bad. Unfortunately, not every visitor can be tracked with script-based web analytics programs. Some individuals purposely configure their browser settings to block web analytics tools from tracking and collecting data; others have no idea that their browser settings are configured in a fashion that would block or interfere with the data collection process. Most website visitors using mobile phones simply do not have the technical capabilities to be tracked by web analytics programs.

What this means is that tag-based web analytics solutions can only track visitors that allow themselves to be tracked. There are three separate elements that users can restrict on their browser of choice, rendering script-based analytics programs completely helpless. Users can block or restrict images, JavaScript, and cookies from loading or processing – blocking or restricting any one of these means “No Soup For You!” I call these elements the “Three Evils of Analytics Tracking” (Sounds scary, doesn’t it?).

Images
A part of how web analytics programs (like Google Analytics) operate is by requesting a 1×1 invisible GIF image to the Google Analytics servers for storing and processing the data it has just collected. If a browser does not have images enabled for whatever reason, this request cannot be satisfied, and data – although collected – cannot be sent to Google Analytics for processing, hence, no data in reports.

This doesn’t affect too many folks, as almost everyone has their browsers set to load images, and only a very small percentage of the population even knows how to do this in the first place. However, this is a major problem when tracking things like Email Open Rates, which in most (if not all) cases are handled by a request for a 1×1 clear pixel GIF image to the necessary server. If a person does not click on “Download Images”, that person is not able to be tracked.

JavaScript
The main logic behind all tag-based web analytics programs is JavaScript. JavaScript is easy and fast to implement, and it’s the type of web analytics tracking solution that makes the most overall sense across the board. It is with a few lines of JavaScript code that a website can set cookies on a person’s computer, collect data, and send that data to the appropriate processing server, be it an in-house server or a data warehouse of some kind. However, not all that glitters is gold. If users have JavaScript disabled, they cannot be tracked – it is that simple.

Luckily, not many folks disable JavaScript, as it is such a commonly used language, present on almost every website out there. However, a very small percentage of folks do block JavaScript, which is unfortunate for anyone involved with Web Analytics. This really affects mobile phone users in a big way – since the browsers on a lot of mobile phone platforms cannot execute or understand JavaScript, they cannot be tracked by default. The only thing that anyone can do about this is to hope that soon enough, all mobile phones will be equipped with a JavaScript-executing browser.

Cookies
Cookies are very small files that get set by websites on a person’s computer. These small files collect information pertaining to their activity on a website: when they entered the site, when they left the site, where they came from, what source of traffic brought the person there, how many times a person has visited the site, and so on. Cookies come in many different shapes and sizes, life spans, and security levels, but if any of them are blocked or disabled by users on their favorite browser, web analytics programs cannot store or collect data about these individuals.

Unlike Images and JavaScript, Cookie “management” is a very big concern, and it’s the biggest evil of the three. Some people block only specific cookies from specific sites. Some people block all cookies, regardless of where they originate from. Others have daily, weekly, or every first of the month cookie deletion parties on their personal computers, where they wipe off every cookie imaginable. All of these actions hurt tag-based web analytics programs, un-purifying data and distorting figures. This affects a very sizeable portion of the population – some independent reports have this figure at 3 or 4% of all internet users, while other reports have this figure in the high teens / low 20’s.

So how do I know that my data is “good”? Should I be worried about this?

This shouldn’t be something that you lose sleep over, but you definitely need to be aware. If data quality is something that your organization simply cannot live without, tag-based web analytics solutions are going to give you a lot of headaches – you want to consider using log-file parsing programs or packet-sniffing programs, although there aren’t too many of those programs available anymore. You may also want to consider using raw server log information to help.

If tracking every single person that visits your website is not the most important thing – that is, you can live with being a few percentage points “off”, and a little margin of error, then you really have nothing to worry about. Web analytics programs weren’t designed to collect the exact number of hits or queries like your server is configured for – web analytics programs were designed to give you valuable insights about your website’s performance, which can effectively be accomplished with the percentage of data that they can collect for most companies.

Ever since Google Analytics officially released Advanced Segmentation about a month ago, I haven’t been able to stop using it. How can you blame me? It’s awesome to slice and dice data in ways I could never have sliced and diced data before – and the things that I can learn about my website’s data are invaluable.

Here are three of my favorite advanced segments (so far) with Google Analytics. In parenthesis below, I outline what each segment means. The first segment is a default segment; while the second and third segments are custom advanced segments (The names of the second and third advanced segments are also “custom”):

1.  Visits with Conversions / Visits with Transactions
(All Visits that have converted / made a transaction at some point in a visitor’s history with the website).

As I mentioned above, this Advanced Segment is one of the “default” or “pre-packaged” Advanced Segments that Google Analytics provides, without having to create your own. And, it’s one of the best ones. With it, you can see how visitors that have performed the actions that you have defined are behaving, what pages they are landing on, how often they return to your site, and anything else that you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. You can learn a lot about your converted visitors with this segment (and get insights and ideas on what you can do to get them to convert again).

2. The Power of your Brand
(Dimension: Keyword; Condition: Contains; Value: the first word of company name; AND Dimension: Time on Site; Condition: Greater Than or Equal To; Value: 30; AND Dimension: Pageviews: Condition: Greater Than or Equal To; Value: 3)

Would you care to know how strong your brand name is, and how engaged visitors are that used your brand name or company name as their search term? This segment can give you excellent insight to your customers or potential clients who already know you by name, which means they are well beyond trying to find you, and are most likely closer to reaching out to you, or buying from you.

3. Social Media Awareness
(Dimension: Sources; Condition: Contains; Value: The name of any social media site: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc…)

Measuring the traffic that your website receives from social media platforms is becoming increasingly important towards these last few months of 2008, and you can expect Social Media to really become important in 2009. This advanced segment puts you in the game by allowing you to see all of the traffic from the more popular social media websites that are out there. Monitor this segment over time to get a feel for how interesting and engaging your social media initiatives are – if they are interesting, and if you have a strong social media presence, traffic will start coming your way before you know it.

BONUS Advanced Segment:

4. Are You Experienced?
(Dimension: Visitor Type; Condition: Matches Exactly; Value: Returning Visitor; AND Dimension: Days Since Last Visit; Condition: Less Than; Value:7; AND Metric: Time on Site; Condition: Greater Than; Value: 180; AND Metric: Transactions; Condition: Greater Than or Equal To: Value: 1)

This Advanced Segment excludes all pretenders, rookies, and newbies, and focuses on allowing you to analyze what your most experienced, best customers are doing. Use the clues that you find in your reports after applying this segment to learn what makes your best customers tick, and compare that against your customers who do not engage with your website at this level.

There are thousands of different possibilities with Advanced Segmentation, which means that once you start creating your own, you’re bound to come up with an advanced segment that will meet your specific needs, answer your specific questions, and become favorites of your own.

The hottest news in the world of Web Analytics this week arrived on Wednesday the 8th, when Dennis Mortensen, the director of data insights at Yahoo, officially announced the release of Yahoo Web Analytics.

The web analytics community, and myself personally, have been waiting anxiously for this day, ever since Yahoo acquired IndexTools 5 months ago. IndexTools was always considered to be a great program for the price. In fact, a common slogan used by bloggers that referred to IndexTools was “…it’s 80% of WebTrends at 20% of the price.”

So what is Yahoo! Web Analytics, and what can I do with it?

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a tag-based Web Analytics platform, like Google Analytics. However, that’s about as much as they share in common, barring some of the basic reporting features found in any analytics package. Yahoo! Web Analytics has worked really hard over the last 5 months to distance itself from Google Analytics, to claim its spot in the Web Analytics industry, and so far, it has been well received by almost everyone in the analytics community.

What are some of the benefits that Yahoo! Web Analytics offers?

Here are some of the goodies that Yahoo! Web Analytics offers:

1. It’s Free – In 2009, most every customer of Yahoo will be able to have access to Yahoo! Web Analytics (YWA). These include Sponsored Search marketers, Yahoo! Store owners, Small Business customers, and anyone else that is conducting some kind of online business with Yahoo.
2. Real-Time Reporting – YWA is going to provide up to the minute updates in its reporting interface, so you won’t have to wait a few hours or even a full day to see results. This will be great for Sponsored Search marketers, as you’ll be able to refine and optimize your efforts on the fly – and make intelligent decisions along the way.
3. Executive Dashboards – Fully customizable dashboards, where you will be able to create a separate dashboard for anyone within your organization.
4. Live Cost Analysis - This allows you to view Google, Yahoo, and MSN data, integrating it with the revenue that your website collects (Ecommerce).
5. Side-by-Side Comparative Reporting – This allows you to compare two different reports, one right along side the other.
6. Advanced Path Analysis – Drill, baby, drill! This report lets you drill down all the way to individual visit levels.

There are many more features outlined in the Yahoo Web Analytics features section.

My personal thoughts:

This is the best thing that has happened for the Web Analytics community in 2008, and into 2009. Everyone knows that I love Google Analytics, and that I even sometimes wear my Google Analytics T-Shirts in public (Oops…I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud…). Competition that YWA is going to provide against GA will only make BOTH platforms better over time. Each organization will likely try to one-up the other, introduce new reports or features that the other doesn’t have, and try their best to be the #1 “Free” Web Analytics platform out there. Ultimately, the true winners are you and I, the consumers. We’re going to get awesome reporting tools from both programs, and they are both going to improve and offer even more cool stuff over the course of time.

One feature that Yahoo Web Analytics will also provide users by default is data privacy. If this part of IndexTools has lived on in YWA, users will need to upload the necessary JavaScript file on their servers, meaning the data is never sent to a Yahoo server for processing. With GA you can do this, but the default option that is used by mostly everyone is having the JavaScript file reside on a Google server, meaning your data gets sent there for processing before you see it in your reports. This should be something very attractive for customers where privacy is a big concern.

Stay tuned folks – 2009 is going to be a great year for Web Analytics!

It’s a bit surprising to me how many folks do not make use of their segmenting / cross-segmenting options in their Web Analytics Packages. Some folks don’t even know or aren’t even aware of what it means or what it does. So for today’s blog post, I would like to explain what it is, and how you can make use of it.

What is Segmenting?
In Analytics, segmenting is basically viewing one particular set of data by another set of data. It allows you to “drill-down” or “dig deeper” on a particular page, traffic source, or keyword.

For example, let’s say I am looking at data from my Google.com Organic Traffic. I can see how many Visits, Pageviews, and so on that came from the Google.com Organic Search Results. The next thing that I think about is to discover what keywords from the Google Organic Search Result sent me the traffic. In whatever analytics program you use, you should have a “Segment” or “Drill-Down” option that will allow you to do this, either from a drop-down menu or a series of checkboxes and submit buttons. Then, you’d be able to see the keywords that brought you traffic from Google.com on one page.

This, like the title of this blog, “makes your life easier”, because you don’t have to open multiple report windows or spend a lot of time trying to find things in your analytics package of choice.

Can you give me some more examples of things that I can do with segmenting?

Yes. Here are some of our favorites here at MoreVisibility:

1. Segmenting any Organic Traffic Source (Google Organic) by Keyword, to see which keywords brought traffic to your site,
2. Segmenting any Organic Traffic Source (Google Organic) by Landing Page, to see what visitors saw upon arriving at your website,
3. Segmenting any paid (Cost-Per-Click or CPC) Traffic Source by keyword or landing page,
4. Segmenting any page (like the homepage) by Visitor Type (New or Returning), to see how each group of individuals behaves on the pages of a website,
5. Segmenting a Landing Page (a CPC Landing Page) by Source, to see which initiatives were responsible for bringing in the traffic, and how each performed,
6. Segmenting a Campaign by Ad Content or Ad Group, so that you can see how each individual Ad Group performed in a cost-per-click program,
7. Segmenting a country in your Map Overlay or Geographical Areas report by Revenue (my favorite), so that you can see which states and cities brought in the most revenue,
8. Segmenting Browser or Operating System by Screen Resolution or Screen Colors (our graphic design team loves doing this),
9. Segmenting a Source by Hostname, to see what domains are collecting data on my account and which domains have tracking code on them
10. Segmenting anything by the User-Defined value in Google Analytics (which is already custom segmentation – so this is double segmentation!)

If you are someone who has never really made use of segmenting before, you need to start doing so right away. It’s a very powerful feature, and arguably the most important feature of all of web analytics, and you can really dig deep and slice & dice data in countless ways. It also saves you a bundle of time – and makes you look good, too!

As far as custom segmentation goes, this is great if your web analytics package has it. Play around with it and make use of creating custom segments to make you look even better!