Leaders in the report were the usual suspects: Omniture, Coremetrics, Unica, Webtrends, as well as lesser-known Netherlands-based Nedstat. Since the last report, Google Analytics has risen to ‘Strong Performer’ status given its enhanced features for the enterprise market.
I’ve read the report and found it to be a well-considered summary report card of the industry. However, I would caution executives against flipping too quickly to the overall summary rankings data. Although the comparative costs of the various web analytics tools are ranked, cost is not a weighted factor in the overall ranking and does not influence the chart visualizations.
Cost, of course, is a very important factor to most businesses, the Fortune 1000 included, and so I would recommend using the report’s companion Excel-based vendor comparison tool to score vendors as best appropriate for your needs.
Another tip in selecting or switching to the right vendor for you: Web analytics tools are not mutually exclusive. You can install more than one. Given that GA has no licensing costs, you can’t hurt your budget by adding it to your mix of tools, regardless of the primary web analytics platform you select. I know it will add incremental insights, especially to your search marketing. And if you add Projected ROI and Comparative ROI columns to your Excel evaluation, I can even pre-calculate with confidence the result of the formula: “#/DIV0!”
Sometimes, when sifting through analytics data, it’s useful to be able to quickly identify an exact match for a particular keyword within a large set of results within Google Analytics. This is especially useful when working with sites that generate hundreds or thousands of referring search keywords.
I scoured the web looking for a tutorial on how to filter for an exact phrase in Google Analytics, and when I didn’t find one, I did some testing and figured it out. So without further adieu, here’s the syntax that must be used to isolate exact phrases in keyword data:
^Keyword Phrase$
It’s as simple as that. And here’s a screenshot to help further clarify the process. Try it for yourself the next time you need to isolate a very specific keyword variation!
Google Analytics Exact Match Filter
If you’d like to see several exact matches, you can combine keywords using the | operator. So your filter would look like: ^online schools$|^online education$|^online learning$
Special thanks to Hugo Guzman for his help with this post.
Rumors and noises have abounded for years, but like a mid-summer cacophony of cicadas, the decibel on legislation of online advertising is ratcheting higher. And the voices are not making music to the ears of ROI marketers. As BusinessWeek reported last Thursday, pending legislation may threaten to turn the lights out on targeted ads using third party cookies.
Last week, MediaPost had an interesting piece on how the “It’s not my job” mentality of many agency search specialists is causing wide-ranging client dissatisfaction. They backed up their assertion with some fairly meaty survey data, which helped drive home the point with empirical evidence from the client pool.
As I read through Forrester’s recent Wave Report on listening platforms and think through some of the innovative conversations we’ve been having with clients and colleagues, a simple thought has begun to manifest itself.
There are many ways to redirect a web page, but few are SEO friendly, and even fewer can be tracked through Google Analytics. Here I’m going to show you a way of tracking 301 redirects with Google Analytics.
1) About SEO Friendly Redirects
Typically a 301 redirect, the most SEO friendly type of redirect, is setup on the server level via the .htaccess file or httpd.conf file. These are easy ways of setting up 301 redirects, but they don’t allow tracking via Google Analytics. So we’re going to setup our 301 redirect at the page level using scripting.
Every so often, I’ll talk to a company or two that utterly and completely reaffirms my belief that some large companies are still very fuzzy on the true meaning of social media.
Here are some examples that help illustrate this stance…
The stats tell the tale in dramatic fashion. Over 525 print magazines were shut down in 2008 and thus far this year through the first quarter, over 87 magazines have been shuttered. Closed – not because consumers have stopped reading news and feature related material – but because these print vehicles, whether they are newspapers or magazines, failed to make the shift to the digital publishing platform in time.
Besides the costs of paper, printing and postage growing each year, there was also a shift of the behavioral and media consumption profiles of their subscribers from corner newsstand buyers to internet newsstand buyers. The dramatic shift of advertising revenue away from legacy offline channels to the interactive arena all impacted the balance sheets of these hordes of magazines.
One of the frustrating limitation of Google Analytics is the inability to export more then 500 results for any given report. Here is a quick little work around:
1) Within Google Analytics, create a report that has more than 500 results.
