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Andrew Edwards is a managing partner at Technology Leaders, a web analytics consulting and technology firm based in New York.

He is a co-founder and former board member of the Web Analytics Association.

A pioneer in the interactive space, Andrew formed one of the first web development companies in New York in 1993. Andrew won numerous industry awards during the 1990s and helped found Technology Leaders in 2002. At Technology Leaders, Andrew has spearheaded the development of a consulting practice focused exclusively on web analytics.

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Painting the Enterprise Picture with Google Analytics

Written on
Jul 22, 2009 
Author
Andrew Edwards  |
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Painting the Enterprise Picture with Google Analytics

google_small.jpgADOTAS — A recent Forrester report indicated that a rather large percentage of enterprises are using Google somewhere, somehow. I don’t doubt it. But what I do know is that there are very few enterprises relying today on Google for their main analytics effort.

Perhaps rightfully, Google is still thought of as an analytics sandbox—where you experiment, dabble, maybe use it as a control. Google says on its web analytics home page that GA is an enterprise tool today, but many analysts would say that’s debatable. Advanced users tend think of it like the little water-color set you got when you were a kid—you blobbed on color here and there and learned that blue and yellow made green, but it never amounted to much.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Even today, before Google launches a true enterprise version of the tool, you can paint a much more realistic picture than you might have imagined.

Here are some of the ways you can make sure your Google Analytics picture looks more like a Vermeer than one of those watercolors you may have daubed as a kid:

No. 1: Extend “Four Goals” to “Many Goals”

Google’s user interface provides you with “four reporting goals” around which to build your analytics environment. These goals can be used to track different conversions on your site, such as lead forms or newsletter registration. My first line of advice is: don’t let Google lock you into just four goals. Have you thought about creating additional Google profiles instead? Each profile is allowed to have four goals.

At some point you may reach a limit in how many profiles you build. But even if you had four profiles, each with four goals, that’s like having sixteen reports—at this time, I don’t know of a way to change the report nomenclature, so that is one of the features you’ll have to wait for. But at least you have the built-in flexibility that Google gives you in the four goals, except you now have more than just four of them. In other words, you’re maximizing the amount of reporting you can get by doing something you may not have thought you could do. Think of Andy Warhol’s soup cans. Especially when he puts about fifty of them into a grid on one canvas. They’re just soup cans, right? Except, they’re not. They’re multiples—you’re looking at soup cans in a new way.

No. 2: Segment Your Audience

To paraphrase George Orwell: all users are equal, except that some users are more equal than others. And you want to know about how the more equal users use your site. Without segmentation, all users really are equal. You can’t differentiate the behavior of a repeat visitor (or a visitor that keeps going to the same place) from a visitor that came once, poked around and left, having wasted your bandwidth. Segmentation lets you define classes of users: first time, occasional, frequent, recent, high-activity, low-activity and so on.

In Google, “visit” segmentation is pretty mature. But “visitor” segmentation is a little bit outside the box. It can be done in a couple of ways. The first is through the Google user interface, where you can set up and apply different segments to any reports, such as users coming from a particular geography, or users who came to the site more than once. The downside is that Google is a little bit murky on how they create rollups across multiple visits—so it’s still just a little short of the clarity you can get from paid offerings.

Another way of doing it is by using a custom definition and storing it in a persistent cookie that classifies the visitor at the beginning of a visit. It does a neat job of tracking across multiple visits, but it can only store one value. So, if you need to include segment information such “female, 30+, married,” you may or may not have success getting all that into one segment name.

If you’re willing to work Google a bit, you can get a form of segmentation—but only up to a point. Think of those great Depression-era WPA (Works Progress Administration) murals now fading in the post-offices: all kinds of people working different noble tasks. They’re all possessed with their own dignity and purpose. Except that only some of them are going to buy something from you. Using Google, you can do a pretty good job of segmenting them out, understanding their behavior, and make more money on your web site. Paid solutions make this more of a core offering—but you can do it today with Google and some know-how.

No. 3: Use the API

Google now has an Application Programming Interface, or API, in beta—soon it may be in general release. Once you get your hands on this, it’s like you just won a brand new art studio with canvas, every size brush they make, all the paints you need, and great light. With an API you can “tap into” Google and write code that “talks” to it to make it do new things it was not originally designed to do. Or, you can create new interactions between Google and a custom tool you create yourself. I know some folks who have created an exception analysis tool—it alerts you when your data has changed relative to its historic norms—and the API provides a conduit that allows it to scan all the Google measures and then alert a subscriber when the exception has taken place. If you’ve got your hands on any real programming skills, this opens up a whole new world for you, with Google performing a data collection service for your specific analytics task, with your specific analytics interface With this one, you’re like Salvador Dali: anything you dream up, as long as it involves data collection, can be made to happen with Google at its core.

No. 4: Advanced e-Commerce Tracking

You can do pretty advanced e-commerce tracking today with Google Analytics. If you can get access to the server-side scripts that talk to your product database, you can write code that allows the server to pass to Google accurate information about product name, category and quantity purchased, as well as order totals. If you can’t get access to the server-side script, another option is to use a more advanced data collection tag that “scrapes” e-commerce data from the page, assigns categories to different products, and logs the data. The result can be quite specific; for instance, the total revenue generated by selling high-quality oil paint to students purchasing from a particular art school. Can you do this today with paid solutions (and more)? Yes—but Google is coming of age, just as today’s graduate from an MFA program may be tomorrow’s collectible artist.

No. 5: On-Click Tracking

Do you have a CMS that allows users to print any content item—or download it as a PDF? Typically, tracking these links is like observing a quark in a particle collider—they’re kind of exotic and they exist “on the fly. But if you create a “listening” script that evaluates every click on a link, it can send the corresponding data to the collector. Events can be categorized as print, PDF, and even when the click leads to an event that takes place off the web site,” followed by details to help identify the exact event. With the listening script, it becomes as predictable as paint-by-number.

***

These are just some of the examples of how you can paint an enterprise analytics picture with Google—a tool that happens to cost nothing. However, it’s important to take note that in each example some expertise has to be applied before any meaningful result is achieved. So just as it is on the day your paint box arrives in your studio, expect to need some talent—or to hire some talent—in order to create an analytics landscape suitable for hanging in the executive suite.





Reader Comments.

Trying to squeeze a quart out of a pint pot.

The author is right in that you can bend the Google Analytics system and make it do a heap of things it wasn’t designed to. You might be able to get a couple of Enterprise-like reports out but that doesn’t make it an Enterprise web analytics tool. (I can run faster downhill with the wind behind me, but I’m not going to be taking on Usain Bolt anytime soon). Don’t get me wrong Google Analytics is great sandbox tool for Web Analytics as is Yahoo! Analytics and many of my favourite web analysts cut their teeth on it. However anyone that has the time and the interest in analytics to work around Urchin’s limitations should probably be looking to upgrade themselves to a paid-for profile based WA solution to start gaining deeper (and more rewarding) insights.

Posted by Matt Bragg | 3:08 am on July 21, 2009.

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