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Category: Reporting & Analytics

Discuss the best ways to report on performance and communicate results to stakeholders.


  • Hi Mozzers, Can someone show me how to add a subdomain profile (sub.example.com) under the master profile (www.example.com) on Google Analytics. I am not sure on how to set it up. Thanks

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • Hello there, hope everyone is allright and rockin' the SEO world 🙂 Was wondering if anyone could give a tip on how to configure an 'Advanced Segment' on Google Analytics. Basically I need to isolate traffic for 4 specific subfolders. E.g. www.mywebsite.com/solutions/A www.mywebsite.com/solutions/B www.mywebsite.com/solutions/C www.mywebsite.com/solutions/D/part1 Please note that the website has more pages under the specific section. E.g www.mywebsite.com/solutions/Z www.mywebsite.com/solutions/D/part2 but  I only need to isolate the 4 directories (and their own sub-folders) mentioned above. Any idea how I could do this? Thanks a lot Joe

    | Joseph.Volcy
    0

  • I have a site selling items, I use paypal buttons and get a report using ipn back from paypal telling me when I have sold a item. I also have a Google analytics event setup on the button, and one on the confirmation page.
    For example in the last few days I have sold over 10 items from the website, but have only 2 events from the button and none from the confirmation page. The confirmation page depends on the user getting redirected back from PayPal so I can see that being upper reported, but there is no way you can buy without clicking the button.
    I have the chrome addon from google to debug your analytics code and it fires every time.
    The figures seem to report only about 20% of events over a long period of time. If it was not working at all, I could assume I have not set things up correctly but this is not the case, I get a regular flow of events but at about 205 of sales.
    I am very disappointed with GA, seems a waste of time. anyone else had the same expirence?

    | AlanMosley
    0

  • My domain oasisoftheseasallureoftheseas.com is down from 23 to 17. What to do? Thank you!

    | NadiaFL
    0

  • So. I have an online application form, on the website. It's maked with php, html and css. What i like to place on the email, is a cookie tracking system. For example, when someone search on the google for " web design ", and then see my result on google organic, comes the visitor to my site, charge the fields of application forms and click send. Than, me like an admin, i receive an email with informations of a customer, i see name/surname/etc.. but i like to integrate is for example, like to see a: IP from Visitors, who charged the fields Referrerr, if google, like to see which query he typed. How can i do this please?

    | leadsprofi
    0

  • Hi, My site was hit in  april and  did get a warning message in wmt for unnatural links , so i removed links and filed a reconsideration request , google then revoked the penalty . that was june , the site still has not recovered and thinking maybe i was hit by both panda and penguin , at that time i did not have analytics installed was using awstats . I have attached awstats for april So you can see when the traffic drop started . So was i hit by panda , penguin or both ? NElu6 NElu6.png

    | dweangorber
    0

  • For months now we have experienced major frustrations with Google's way of running and measuring traffic and providing analytical information. Although our measuring and segmentation requirements are not unique (I would heavily digress if I describe it) we established with Google Analytics engineers in engagements for more than 2 months, that GA is incapable measuring the traffic we require. The few products I came across which are capable of providing proper segmentation based on product categories are Kissmetrics (unfortunately not a all-in-one analytics tool), Webtrends (horribly expensive) and I just recently stumbled across Webtrekk (http://www.webtrekk.com/en/products/q3.html). I was wondering if anyone is using or has used Webtrekk and would be able to share some experience (and how it compares to GA and Webtrends).

    | MagicDude4Eva
    0

  • Hi Mozers, I have a niche ecommerce site http://www.ecustomfinishes.com that sells custom barn wood furniture. I have about 600 products online. 2 weeks ago I started rewriting my urls from /subcategoryurl/ProductA   to    /UNIQUEURL/productA for  my individual products, For example for my subcategory farm tables (150 products) I had /rustic-farm-tables/productA, /rustic-farm-tables/ProductB       ...."rustic-farm-table" about 150 times. 2 weeks ago I started changing the 150x "/rustic-farm-table/" to  a more descriptive URL such as /white-farm-table/producA /rustic-square-dining-table/ProductB /Black-harvest-table/ProductC Here is why I am need advice: I have  1181 pages, the page with the most entrances with "rustic-farm-tables"  is #31/1181  based on entrances. the 2nd most is #71/1181 Alternatively, I have 13 table product  pages such a as /12ft-Rustic-Farm-Dining-Table-p/12-foot-table-with-inlay.htm"  that get more entrances than any product that includes "rustic-farm-tables" Since changing the urls to be product specific,  my overall traffic has dropped 20%!!! So here is my question: do i continue to have the /UNIQUEURL/product be unique to the product, which is consistant amongst my best preforming pages, yet has dropped my traffic 20% in the last 2 weeks, OR do i keep /SAME-URL/product  which written as  a best practice, and be happy with the traffic I had? Could the 20% drop just be a temporary shock? Why would this happen? This would be a good long tail/head term experiment. Try to get more head terms, or do what you can do focus on long tail. I hope i was able to explain this well, I say follow the best practices of  my best preforming pages, however the 20% drop has me worried. Thank you in advance for your help

    | longdenc_gmail.com
    0

  • We are in the business of selling home and commercial light fixtures for about 10 years now. Our website is a very large ecommerce website with more than 40K pages including category, sub-category and product pages. We have been getting decent organic traffic mostly from highly competitive keywords and also from product/solution specific long tail keywords. Recently when Google changed the EMD algo we have seen a dip in the traffic (say about 60%). I can't be so sure that this is because of EMD update, but it started happening only after this update. There has been a rank drop from 1st page to 2nd page, decrease in no. of keywords driving traffic, decrease in no. of pages driving traffic, all these things have an negative impact on our organic revenue. I know that our back link portfolio is bad and the reason behind this is the SEO companies that we previously worked with, Thanks to them for this sloppy work. Other than back links, Is there anything fundamentally wrong on our website. Here is the URL http://bit.ly/QVFHgr

    | goldenageusa
    0

  • If I am changing my domain for my website and want to keep using the same Google Analytics account to keep the data from the old domain. How should I proceed? Do I have to start a new Google Analytics account for the new domain? If so how do I keep the old data? Or can I use the same GA account? Thank you.

    | brianhughes
    1

  • Hello there, Do you think Google looks at privacy policies as a ranking factor especially when websites use analytics that record a user's entire session? Obviously a small factor like this would only have a minor impact on website performance but I am curious to know if it's actually in the algorithm.

    | lezal
    0

  • I know, many people are up in arms with Google with their very frequent recent changes. I guess some of this is good - but at times I am also warming to the opinion that they are just losing the plot. To illustrate my point - check this ranking history for a keyword: Toyota South Africa I'm not sure how this image will display - but for no obvious apparent reason, from 02/10 - we were ranked 5, and now on 9/10 dropped right down to 44. I mean how is on supposed to explain, and rectify this when Google just keeps on changing the playing fields? shrug Ranking.png

    | ZakD
    0

  • One of my clients has english language websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk and one is on brandname.com. The precuations that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: 1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD3. have tried to differenttate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:Author Vis a vis Written byFormat vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Title structure 2. Description 3. Product Name 4. About the product text

    | CyrilWilson
    0

  • IS there any way on Google Analytics to calculate page visit duration for bounced visits? if so, what would need to be done?

    | offthemaptravels
    0

  • In mid September we had to so some redirects from old URL's to new URL's. We haven't seen a significant jump in traffic so we are wondering how long this might take before we see a change. We are the brand so we should be getting some sort of authority from Google, yes? Any tips that can be offered would be grateful as we are stumped.

    | K2_Sports
    0

  • Hi, we defined several goals in Google Analytics, and the reported amount of conversions seems to be correct. Today, I switched into the multi-channel funnel to look at assisting conversions etc.. There, the total number of conversions is higher than the amount of conversions in our goal-section (807 vs. 734). Did I miss something? I always thought the numbers should be the same? Any idea why they differ that much (time span was 14 days)... Thanx...

    | accessKellyOCG
    0

  • Hi, I buil this site on WordPress, http://www.pilatesboisfranc.com When you go on <<plan &="" pricing="">> on the menu you can purchase a package online.</plan> When you click ''Get Started Now'' or ''Add to Cart'' the buyer is redirect to this external site: mindbodyonline.com QUESTIONS: Can I track my sales on Googles Analytics? Can I creat a goal on G.A. ? I found this video: https://getsatisfaction.com/mindbody/topics/chalk_talk_how_to_setup_google_analytics Is this the right way to do this? About goals, a simple goal I would like to create is, one purchase. Can I acheive that? Not shure about Goals. When I test and purchase, URL is always the same https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/ASP/home.asp?studioid=30371 I'm know only very basics stuff when it is time to play in Analytics, I hope you can provide help in details. Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • I know that blogging is good, because everybody says it is. I know that I can sort out the top landing pages in Google Analytics and see how many of the entrances come through blog posts. How do I measure the impact blogging has on the bottom line? Would I sort out the entrances to blog entrances and then see how many of those visitors ultimately converted either through a micro or macro conversion? Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences. How do I convince upper management of the impact of blogging?

    | gaytravel
    0

  • Google analytics installed, but they are not showing. What additional things should i add there? I need to see most popular search queries and add more content to these pages for panda.

    | bele
    0

  • In Google analytics or site catalyst, is there anyway to target IP addresses to see how many of my daily uniques are daily, weekly, monthly and what % are just 'tourists'/'one-offs'? My site is a local news site... Or is there another way to find this info. I am trying to work out what my core audience is (that keeps coming back every day or every week). Kind regards

    | MirandaP
    0

  • For various reasons, I have a couple of domains with a couple of hundred subdomains on each. I would love to track how many search impressions they get each day as an overall site in webmaster tools. I have this information for my normal domains and it's a great way to track progress up the rankings (in addition to hits). Anyone know if it's possible to add wildcard subdomains to webmaster tools or any work around? I have tried *.domain.com but it's not accepting it. Thanks

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0

  • GM Mozzers, I apologize in advance if my description of this issue is confusing, but I'm doing my best here. Anyway, due to legal reasons, one of the publications I manage was forced to change their name. We set-up a 301 redirect from the previous domain and have also set-up an analytics profile for the new domain, however, as it stands, visits to the old domain outnumber those to the new domain 12:1. Is there anyway to set-up my analytics profile to the new URL so that this traffic is being attributed to the new domain and the new site, since, after all, it is a redirect. I hope that I explained this sufficiently. Any and all insight will be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.

    | NiallSmith
    0

  • Client received an email on LeadLander showing actual business names in traffic results. Has anyone used or have the lowdown on LeadLander? Is it spammy? Seems to not have much buzz online, mostly active in 2008.

    | mxmo
    0

  • Hi everyone I am new to this site and I receive the above message which states, "Meta missing description tag" can anyone explain what this means, Otherwise I will contact someone tomorrow.

    | IamPowerful
    0

  • Hello, Quick question, when I create a custom filter on a profile that already has data collected will that filter apply to already collected data or will the filter only apply from the day it was created? Am doing a custom exclude IP filter. Much thanks,
    Davinia

    | Unity
    0

  • I feel like a noob for asking but I have to know 🙂

    | benjaminspak
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a series of sites (~25) that are all regional e-commerce sites with the same URL structure eg. www.[region]-product.com as well as a 'master' site (eg www.product.com). I also have a single Adwords PPC account which point to all of the regional sites as well as the master site. As part of the payment/checkout process you only ever get taken to a sub domain of the master site (eg payment.product.com). My question is: Is it wise to use the single PPC Adwords account to set up an Analytics account under which I list all of the regional sites and the master site? Once that's done I'm not entirely sure how I can track sales from a regional site to the payment process of the master site and have sales correctly assigned to the right domain. On the payment process I can only use one site ID tracking code so I'm not even sure I can correctly assign a transaction to a single site if multiple sites use the same payment pages. Example: Visit to region-product.com > Quote form submitted to payment.product.com > Payment completed on payment.product.com > Sale is assigned to which domain? Can anyone who understands what I'm trying to achieve comment on the plausibility of this? Many many thanks!

    | panini
    0

  • Is there any way you can view data from all of your Google Analytics accounts? For example, if I wanted to view know how much mobile traffic all my sites had, could I do this? Rather than just looking at each site individually. Thanks

    | intSchools
    0

  • Howdy mozzers It's in the question title really. Zero impressions showing for the last few days on. Multiple accounts Any thought out there

    | Big_Partnership
    0

  • Hi guys, looking at the best way to organize this - Site 1 - Shoe Store - (Old site with analytic history - UA-12345-1) Site 2 -  Clothing Store - (Brand New UA-54321-1) Right now i have 2 separate GA Accounts for the sites. But i would like to track goals from Site 2 to Site 1.  For that i need to set up cross domain tracking. So i take it i would need to create another account under Site 1 - (UA-12345-2) and put that new code on Site 2? Or do the UA numbers have to be exact? example both 12345-1? In which case, i would need to set up 2 different profiles with filtering? Main concern is i want to keep separate data for both sites, espically if UA's will be the same. Trying to visualize - UA-12345-1 Profile 1Shoes/Master Profile 2 Shoes Profile 3 Clothes Or UA-12345-1 Shoes UA-12345-2 Clothes Thanks, Mike

    | IsHot
    0

  • Hiya guys, I have a little problem, not sure which one I should be using, for 301, be easy on me I've not dealt with this before. So we have http://www.talknightlife.co.uk and I've done redirects for http://talknightlife.co.uk to http://www.talknightlife.co.uk host http://www.talknightlife.sheffieldspeedcameras.co.uk to http://www.talknightlife.co.uk Because my website is purely a forum and in the canonical error from the optimisation tool is showing 301 canonical = http://www.talknightlife.co.uk/forum.php  should I be redirecting that to http://www.talknightlife.co.uk or the other way round, or just leave it ? I'm a little confused Cheers in advanced for your help guys

    | Lukescotty
    0

  • We recently launched 13 product marketing sites based on a Wordpress Multisite setup. To track all 13 sites we decided to use one web property, so we can use the same tracking code for all domains. To track the sites seperately, we set up a profile for each product site with a hostname filter. This works well for most stats, but eCommerce tracking is where the problem starts. Per profile we obviously want to track the products purchases on that website only. What happens now is that all purchases from all product sites are tracked on all profiles. How can we change this? Should I alter the eCommerce tracking code or can I fix this with an additional filter per profile? Thanks for your help Mozzers! Regards, Pieter van Diggele
    Online Marketing Executive
    Elsevier Opleidingen

    | RBO
    0

  • Being the type of person that can't stop checking my Google Analytics, I noticed this morning that between the hours of 12 and 2 central time last night I recieved a strange surge of direct traffic. My site typically gets around 40 direct visits per day (most of them coming during peak hours around the time people are getting off of work). I received 150 direct visits during this random time in the middle of the night. My bounce rate soared as almost every visit was a bounce. The visitors locations are spread out as if it is natural human traffic. Every single one of the visitors is using a chrome browser. Has anyone else run into something like this?  All I can think of is that someone might have an addon or toolbar for chrome that linked to my site for a while in a way that caused unsuspecting visitors to end up on my page. For now I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the traffic doesn't return, as it could be bad news for my Adsense. *Edit: Also of particular interest, each direct visit went to an internal page on my site and no two of the 150 visits went to the same internal page. I also added an image showing a normal complete day's direct traffic and my direct traffic for today so far (The bulk of the surge came yesterday but the shot from today illustrates the surge better because it is missing my naturally daily direct traffic that comes in the afternoon) heXFb#LiiEr

    | pattersonla
    0

  • Hi there, been combing this page for some answers - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite but can't seem to figure it out. Scenario - Site A Site B Currently have 2 different GA accounts set up on each. Is it possible to Track a Goal that happens on Site B, that comes from Site A - In Site A Reports? So say, Site A has a Newsletter, directing them to Site A but promoting Site B - i'd like to track the effectiveness of the newsletter. Site A is running a white label of Site B service. Thoughts? Cheers

    | IsHot
    0

  • How can our website rank on page 3 in google.co.uk and yet it ranks on page 20 for the same keyword on google.com? This doesn't seem to affect our competitors though and its only our site that is being affected/penalized.

    | dobersby
    0

  • Why do these keep changing for sites that I have verfied over and over and over and over? About a month goes by and the meta code has changed and the site is unverified again. Seems like a trick to force you into logging into Webmaster Tools all the time. What gives???

    | 2CDevGroup
    0

  • Hello Everyone, On one of my sites PokerOnaMac we experienced a 75% drop in traffic in about a week (since September 3rd). I took a look at GA and the penalties have been applied sitewide. I also checked my Google Webmaster Tools, and there are no messages regarding "unhealthy link structures." We have had other sites penalized by Penguin & Manual Removals, but they are recovering now. What is my best bet to find what is wrong? Thanks

    | BestOdds
    0

  • Trying to get some best practices on testing SEO changes. We are going to make a bunch of changes on subsets of pages. Say testing about 5 different on-page changes. Originally we were going to submit separate Sitemaps to GWT and see if our test sets get indexed, how quickly, etc. But we noticed that GWT says some pages in our Sitemaps aren't indexed even though we know they are (what gives?). So we thought, for each test, let's put a unique code on the page so we can see how many get indexed by Google. But that doesn't solve the issue: how many people clicked on our test pages. So we are thinking of putting a tracking pixel on the test pages, specific for each test. But then I am thinking, why not just create a separate Google Analytics profile and place that code on the test pages (set up goals to track visits per test since we aren't going to change the actual URLs). and on and on This is where you come in. What kind of tracking do you implement when you set up tests? Advice appreciated! E

    | ErinTM
    0

  • Hello All, Lately in my Google Analytics account I have noticed a referral source labelled: localhost:4444 The number of visits is really high from this source, but I have no idea (no clue!) what it actually means. Can anyone shed some light on what this is about? Should I be creating some sort of filter to screen out this as a referral source (assuming it is not legitimate)? Many thanks in advance. Cheers!

    | Robert-B
    0

  • I have a client that has been struggling with their organic traffic the over the past several months. We figured they had been hit by Penguin and some of Google's other algo changes...But I just dug in a little deeper in Google Analytics, and their traffic is actually up year over year for Google organic, but they are down 75% + for both Bing and Yahoo organic. They drop seemed to occur around April, 2012, and they have rapidly lost Bing and Yahoo traffic ever since. Can anyone help explain why this might be happening? A Bing and Yahoo algo update? Or just fewer people using those search engines possibly? I'm not quite sure how to make up for all the lost traffic in Bing and Yahoo. Any suggestions are appreciated!

    | BlueTent20
    0

  • The quest for the "accurate" backlink profile never ends. We now have Webmaster Tools to help us with this search. My question is whether the backlink profile according to WT is the backlink profile according to Google. Do Google's search algorithms and WT synch up? If this is the case, forget OSE and MajesticSEO, WT will be the main backlink analysis tool I use going forward. Thanks for any insight.

    | b4004040
    0

  • Hello Everyone, I've been using Google Analytics for some years now, and I never really used it in an advanced way (alerts, goals, conversions, etc...) I was wondering if there was a good place for me to learn GA so I can start using it to it's full potental. Thanks Zach

    | Zachary_Russell
    0

  • Hi All, I have seen a increase of direct traffic from hostname amazon.com inc. This only happened on one day. Any ideas what/why it is? Thanks

    | Sayers
    0

  • I'm trying to get our domain (verdantly.com) set up correctly in Google Webmaster Tools.  Currently, I have three "sites" setup: blog.verdantly.com  (wordpress.com blog redirected to this subdomain) www.verdantly.com verdantly.com The subdomain blog and www show up without errors.  However, the naked domain shows a DNS error.  I've checked the DNS settings at the registrar and don't see any issues. So here are my questions: 1.  Am I correct in setting up the naked domain AND the subdomains separately in Webmaster tools? 2.  How do I track down / resolve the source of the DNS errors at the naked domain? Thanks!

    | letsdothis
    0

  • Hi everyone, We're trying to determine why Google Analytics is showing multiple versions of the same page as having "landing page traffic". For instance, these 2 pages are both shown as landing pages in GA: www.oursite.com/product_page
    www.oursite.com/product_page/ This occurs many times in Google analytics.  Also, there are instances such as these: www.oursite.com/index.php/custom_product_url www.oursite.com/custom_product_url I can't find anything in Google Webmaster tools that would indicate a problem.  However, this GA data is making me think there are duplicate content issues on the site... Thanks in advance for any help...

    | darkgreenguy
    0

  • Are misspelled brand queries considered branded keywords? I'm trying to segment branded traffic and wasn't sure what to include.

    | IMM
    0

  • I have made a bunch of changes thanks to the Crawl Diagnostics Tool but now need to re-run as I have lost where I started and what still needs to be done. How do I re-run the crawl diagnostic tool?

    | Professor
    1

  • Since using SEOMoz to diagnose and address issues with my site www.esecaucus.com, my page views have plummeted while my number of visits and unique visitors has remained intact. Does this mean that previously the amount of page views were artificially inflated by some kind of technical error in the site?

    | Nobody1533077082756
    0

  • I want to finally make the switch from Urchin to GA in Analytics, but the Google support page is no longer working (I realize I'm late to this so they likely took it down/moved it to where I can't find it). I've been searching on Google but can't find a straightforward guide to changing that won't disrupt my data. Anyone have a link to a working guide, or can you provide some guidance?

    | Axios_Systems
    0

  • We are actively looking for a couple of positions. A qualified SEM (for PPC, etc) pro that has experience with Google but also others including BING and Yahoo. And a good SEO person who gets it is about delivering a result and not blowing sunshine up someone's skirt or pant leg. 
    That said I got a resume the other day from a guy and he stated he had a Master's Certificate in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University. I looked them up and they offer a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree in Internet Marketing. They also offer a certificate in Internet marketing they call a Master's certificate. So, I set a time for him to call me as I was mildly skeptical. 
    When I started asking about the certificate (His LinkedIn page had Masters Degree in IM) he said he had taken the certificate and I did not pursue the LinkedIn. I asked how long he was in school for the certificate and he stated 6 months (curriculum is 4 months and is fairly t h i n.
    I asked what he had done and he had completed an Internship with a Texas company and helped a construction firm move to page one. When I asked how he started telling me about inserting keywords in the meta tag field in the CMS..... He did not know what a title tag was, knew nothing of content, H1, H2, Local Optimization and then wanted to tell me how when you put their Domain name in google they are number two on page One.  So you get it, I believe. I am just really frustrated with the whole "certification" etc. thing and believe we do need it. Market Motive is as close to good as I can see, but I would love to hear from you. (Note on MM- I do not like the if you pay monthly you get Provider or whatever but it you shell out $3500 you are a Master. Just doesn't feel right to me. And, I did speak with someone a while back with a masters from them and again, I scratched my head). Would just like to hear of your experience and if anyone has hired from these schools with success.

    | RobertFisher
    0

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