With the old Google Analytics (GA) interface being phased out later this month, I take a look at the duel between Internet Privacy and Google Analytics that is likely to be more heated than ever in the coming year. Analysts like myself are preparing to wrestle with reduced data samples and doubts over the reliability of tracking data in Google Analytics.

[The purpose of this blog post is to inject an element of humour whilst identifying some of the new GA5 features and privacy-driven issues undermining GA’s performance upgrade - likely to impact GA in 2012. In the week that ‘The Greatest’ turned 70, there is only one way to sort this out…]

Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Let’s Get Ready To Rummmmblllllllllllllle!

In the red corner representing the interests of personal internet users across the globe, weighing in at 201lbs, the rising challenge to tracking data and analyst insight – Internet ‘it’s the law’ Privacy

In the blue corner representing web analytics and e-commerce marketers from around the world, weighing in at 220lbs, the undisputed heavyweight champion of website statistics – Google ‘Real-Time’ Analytics 5

“Ding-Ding”

Google Analytics 5 comes out fighting early in 2012 giving the crowd what they hoped for. Packed with new features that not only look pretty but fill some of the gaps that have frustrated data enthusiasts for some time.

Highlights include Real Time Statistics – no more waiting 24 hours to see your website stats. You can see how many people are on your site, and indeed what page they are on right now. Flow Visualization – allowing you to trace how your visitors navigate your site including time on page, interactions, goal paths and exit pages. Average Site Speed - displays the average loading time of your website. Multi-Channel Funnels - shows path to conversion for up to a month’s worth of site interaction. Social Engagement – tracks how visitors interact socially with your site.

With Google Analytics looking so good, it’s a self-inflicted injury that lets Internet Privacy into the fight. Encrypted search results for users logged into Google has shot Google Analytics in the foot as search queries are not provided for these secure searches. Coupled with Google’s own strategy to drive take-up of Google+ they stand to isolate themselves from much of their core support as marketers, search analysts and data modellers become increasingly infuriated with a loss of previously visible data.

Support from GA’s corner helps to relieve the pain felt by many. The question is whether the coaching team will run out of elastoplast if internet privacy were to launch a sustained attack or if encrypted search was adopted as standard practice.

Internet Privacy lands the biggest blow in the contest so far and catches GA5 in the EU. With the aim of protecting web-users from intrusive 3^rd party cookies (hear, hear) the proposed legislation is in danger of blocking perfectly legitimate first party cookies used for anonymous data tracking (like those used by GA) if users choose not to opt in. The ‘opt-in’ strategy is likely to annoy internet users, interfere with website performance and render a huge chunk of web data untrackable in GA should the EU cookie law be enforced from 26^th May 2012.

Not even a pop-up blocker could stop this one landing.

Examples from Ireland and Germany show how much of an impact we may face in the UK.

The German DPA outlawed use of Google Analytics for 2 years until Google Analytics finally caved into significantly improved compliance with Germany’s data protection laws. (the ban on use of GA was lifted in Sept 2011 subject to guidelines)

You can see the GA team looking to the judges table for a mysterious man-in-a-hat that might provide a ‘get out of jail’ scorecard

Wanting to offer fans more in the closing rounds, Google targets tool integration in an attempt to provide a quick win. GA5 integrates with Webmaster Tools data allowing you to analyse impressions, average position and CTR from within the new GA interface. AdWords data has been imported for some time, what’s to say Google doesn’t bring other tools under one roof before the year is out?

Internet Privacy is increasingly on the consumer-driven front foot. There is a growing market to cater for the privacy-conscious online consumer (CES 2012 has been packed with ‘secure surfing‘ products and gizmos). Expect this to continue to grow as privacy education and ‘best practice’ internet use permeates a more mainstream audience.

The 2012 agenda is full of mixed messages around privacy. On one hand facebook continues to push the boundaries of personal info sharing (changing the mentality of the next generation while they’re at it) and using some of this information for Corporate gains. On the other hand the clampdown on cookies and the ability to track web user data (anonymity no longer seems enough protection) stands to tie the hands of many web analysts -restricting insight and reducing marketing and advertising opportunities of the very same companies exploiting the facebook ‘Likes’ and user targeted ad campaigns.

So who’s winning the fight?

You’d have to say GA still have the upper hand and as the year rumbles on, it will be interesting to see how much impact the privacy agenda has on data tracking. The most interesting threat to Google Analytics comes from within. Having battled through algorithm changes and new search features, SEO data analysts have always found paths through the Google data minefield and changed course in line with Google as and when necessary. The new challenge thrown up by increasing amounts of encrypted search data leaves less room for manoeuvre and many of us may well find ourselves increasingly in the dark.

The verdict: A points victory to Google Analytics 5 but the fight is far from over…

You be the judge and add your comments below

Sam Zindel

Data Modelling Analyst – iCrossing UK

Related reading:

The making of Google Analytics 5

GA official privacy policy wording

Google EU Anti-trust action by April?

The default limit for exporting rows of data is set at 500 – fine for a smaller site with just a few dozen pages, or reports over a short time period. But what to do if you operate a larger site, and would like to export information for your several thousand pages? Or would like to download the entire list of keywords that brought users to your site? Based on the popularity of your site or variety of your content, these lists could easily generate tens of thousands of rows – potentially hundreds of thousands over a long enough period. This could lead to painstaking hours exporting 500 rows at a time to get at the data you need, and find the crucial insight that will change your world.

Fortunately for all of us spreadsheet-jockeys there is an easier way. Analytics veterans will be aware of a workaround to help them export larger amounts of rows at once – simply adding the text &limit= and the desired number of rows (up to a limit of 50,000) to the end of any Analytics URL, for example: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/keywords?……………..&limit=5000. With this extra parameter you’d be able to export up to 100 times more rows at once!

Anybody who has adopted the latest update of Google Analytics may have been dismayed to discover that this tactic will not work with version 5. So how can we achieve the same result now?

The process is similar, and hopefully a bit more straight-forward. When viewing your report of choice, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you should see this in the right corner:

From the drop-down menu, choose ‘500’. Once your page has loaded, you’ll notice an extra bit of text has been added to the end of your URL: it should now finish with explorer-table.rowCount%3D500. Replace the ‘500’ in this string with your desired figure – as before, anything up to 50,000 will work. Hit enter and export, and you have your data!

All well and good, but what if your data requirement is slightly larger? What if you need to export, say, 200,000 rows? Find the part of your URL that contains this text: geo-table.rowStart%3D0. The ‘0’ here can be amended to begin at any row you desire – so for the next 50,000, let’s start at row 50,001 with the following text: geo-table.rowStart%3D50001. The end of your URL should be changed to explorer-table.rowCount%3D100000. You’ll now have the next 50,000 rows ready to export.

Using this technique you could export one million rows by loading just twenty pages. To do this 500 rows at a time would require you to generate 2000 pages – quite a time-saving!

If you were the store manager and you saw this event unfold before your very eyes you would step in and do what you could to ensure that the user had a good experience from your store. Unfortunately webmasters and site administrators are unable to watch each transaction and monitor overall satisfaction of each user.

Using Google Analytics there are a few things that you can do to monitor the user interaction with the sites check out system:

Set Up Goals and Goal Funnels

With Google Analytics you can now track 20 goals, they can be used to track events such as ordering a catalogue, subscription to a newsletter, submitting a contact form. Goals can also be set to form part of a conversion funnel, this should be applied to each step on the checkout, and you can then assess if any pages have a high exit rate. The pages that you could track would be the shopping basket, the delivery options, payment page, and final confirmation page. Once this has been set up you can visualise the conversion funnel and see if any part of the checkout process needs to be investigated.

Event Tracking

This can be enabled by adding additional JavaScript to the error handling code and will track the errors which users are encountering. This can report back on user errors such forms not being filled out correctly, tick boxes not being checked, phone numbers not being entered in the correct format. While the checkout may be easy for you to use, the top events report may reveal a number of usability issues that are easy to fix.

Browser Performance

Designing and developing a website that works across all browsers is an extremely difficult task to undertake. The browser report will allow you to see the percentage split of which browsers are sending traffic to your site, you can then review the percentage split of conversions taking place on the site. If you discover that Chrome sends a healthy number of visitors to your site, but IE converts at a higher rate,  this could mean that part of the shopping cart does not perform that well with Chrome and that issue needs to be investigated.

Read the full article on th Google Analytics blog.

How can I view my Real Time Data?

Google are still rolling this out so for now you need to register your interest with Google to enable this feature for you. Once this has been enabled you will need to be using the latest version of Google Analytics. The real time reports can be found in the dashboard. Please note that this feature will not work on profiles which have been filtered.

What are the benefits?

Previously when launching a new product on your site you would make sure that you have done some of the following:

• Optimise the product for search
• PPC campaign
• Facebook campaign
• Blog post
• Home page promo
• Let the world know via twitter

Then you would have to wait 24 hours to see if your product launch was a success via Google analytics.

Now you can see what is happening in real time and further refine your campaign using live data to maximise your reach and target the right customers.

As long as your campaign has been correctly tagged up you can see what traffic is hitting your site as a direct result of the product launch. You may discover that the product launch is gaining more traction with users of a certain geographic location, allowing you to immediately inform the PPC team of this so they can create a localised PPC campaign to strike while the iron is hot.  Using real time search can also be a beneficial tool to monitor any potential viral campaigns such as videos or games. And, when used correctly, you can also proactively react and refine your other marketing channels.

Here’s a great article highlighting the pros and cons and current status of the Google Analytics Real Time reports.

What should I be doing now?
For more information please read the official post about Google Real Time Data from Google and don’t forget to register your interest with Google so that the Real Time feature can be enabled.

What else would be good to include in the future?
While it is not a current feature, we would like to see Google Analytics reporting on bounce rates in real time as this would enable us to also pick up on any usability issues with the site which may come about from a redesign or an update in the conversion funnel. Although not currently available we’ll keep an eye out for developments and let you know well in advance!

Please do not hesitate to contact your account manager should you require any further information as to how the Google Analytics developments affect you.

So what do you get for your money?

• Lifted data limits
• Un-sampled reports
• Attribution modelling
• More custom variables
• Service level agreements on data collection, reporting, ownership and freshness
• Custom training and support
• 24/7 emergency support line

Who’s it for?

• Brands which could be interested are those using Google Adwords and feeling they aren’t getting enough data and support
• Brands using other bid management software will need to consider whether they are getting a similar level of value to from their current supplier and whether Google Analytics Premium may be a more effective alternative

What should I be doing now?

The above links through to the fact sheet and overview page can give you a good grounding as to the new features and potential benefits of the new Analytics service. Should you require any further information we would recommend contacting your Google Rep, or gapremium@google.com

This article is an update / reminder on the topic following the recent introduction of the law in Ireland.

What’s happened / what’s changed

EU directive

In 2009 the EU e-Privacy Directive was issued, one part of which required all the member states of the EU to create a law to limit the files that a website could install on a user’s computer without their express permission.

The majority of files this affected are ‘cookies’ – small text files that are used to store small pieces of information. This information can be used for such purposes as storing preferences or tracking browsing history.

According to W3Techs.com, cookies are used by 46.6% of all websites, with 17.2% of sites using persistent cookies, that do not disappear when the user closes their browser.

This whole area can be quite confusing, and videos to simplify the topic can be found on YouTube – search for “EU privacy law”

UK Law

In the UK, this law was brought into effect on the 26^th of May 2011, though as this made virtually every website in the UK now illegal, the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) made provision for this by stating that website owners had a lead in period of a year to implement the rules.

“…allow a lead in period of 12 months for organisations to develop ways of meeting the cookie related requirements of the 2011 Regulations…”  – ICO ‘Enforcing the revised Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR)’

Irish Law

The Irish Government brought the Directive into law on the 1^st July 2011, with the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) issuing guidance on how to comply. In the same way as in the UK, this has made all Irish sites illegal. Crucially, however, they have not added a lead-in period to allow the changes to be made, meaning that they could choose to fine website owners immediately.

That said, it’s unlikely they will fine anyone until all the government sites comply with the law.

Which they don’t.

A quick test on www.gov.ie gives the following breakdown of the cookies used across a sample of 10 pages:

• qtrans_cookie_test is a session cookie, so allowed, if it is ‘strictly necessary’
• Google Loader is javascript that sets a number of cookies with a range of expiration dates
• AddThis sets a number of cookies which are used to enable sharing via social media

What it means for you

If you own and operate a UK website, the situation is unchanged – you have till the 26^th May 2012 to finalise your changes to meet the new law.

If you own and operate an Irish website, the changes must (by law) be made as soon as possible, to mitigate the potential of being fined

Is my site affected by this?

An interesting question here is to do with which country’s laws your site falls under.

Having spoken to an  ICO representative based in the UK, the feedback from them is that if a company operates a website that sells to UK consumers and the company has a physical presence within the UK, that website needs to comply with the new law. However, there are no hard and fast rules, so each site will be taken on a case-by-case basis according to this representative.

It is expected that the Irish DPC will use a similar approach of deciding if their law covers your site. As with the UK, this means that if you have a physical presence in Ireland, such as a subsidiary, then the website that Irish consumers use must adhere to the new law.

As to the rest of the EU – most member states have not yet decided how they will implement the directive, though it is likely to either be along the same lines as the UK, or potentially even stricter – currently Google Analytics (a common tracking tool) is banned in Germany due to privacy issues.

What steps to take next

Whether you operate a site in the UK or Ireland, the advice is the same – start the process to bring your site into compliance.

The ICO have produced clear and sensible recommendations which we would suggest are followed as a first step in deciding how best to interpret and deal with this change for your business:

1. Audit the use of all cookies on your website (identify what cookies are dropped, by whom and when)
2. Assess and rank the privacy implications of these (clarify the use and purpose of each cookie, and assess what the implications for user privacy are)
3. Decide on an appropriate solution with which to gain user consent

Whilst steps 1 and 2 can be done with relative ease, the contention is around step 3.

The ICO have demonstrated an example of how this can be done on their website

Analysis of the way this affected their ability to track users on their site showed that 90% of users declined to accept the cookies, meaning that now, 90% of visitors to their site were invisible to their analytics package. This invisibility will impact the ability to tailor a site to how it is used by visitors, as well as potentially reducing income if the site uses advertising.

Whilst these figures are alarming, it is important to note that this is only a single example website, and criticism has been made as to the design choice implemented by the ICO. The method of implementation will almost certainly be slightly different on each site; at least until a common approach can be agreed on, and it is important to ensure that the method you choose is best for both your business and the user’s needs.

Another interesting point to note is that the law only calls for one acceptance per site. This means that an opt-in can cover user settings, preferences, analytics and browsing history tracking cookies, in a one-for-all policy.

Browsers

One possible way the law can be complied with is by using browser settings, though as current browser settings are not considered sufficient, there are on-going discussions with the major browser companies as to how this can be met in the future.

If new versions are released before next May, this means companies in the UK may not have to make any changes, though it is by no means guaranteed.

Alternatives for Analytics

If a user chooses not to accept cookies, there are other methods of tracking available, including log file tracking, where the user is tracked via their IP address. This is not always as reliable as cookies, partly due to user’s often having non-fixed (dynamic) IP addresses.

The important thing to remember when looking at alternatives is that this may drastically change the quality and quantity of data you receive, so ensure you know the implications first.

Summary

This topic is highly contentious, and I’m sure we have not seen the last of it. As before, the next steps should be to check the type of cookies your site serves to your visitors. If their purpose is benign tracking for analytics, or user settings, you are more likely to avoid attention than if you install third party browsing history cookies.

It is important to note that any advice in the above post is not to be construed as legal advice and you are advised to seek your own counsel on how to approach this matter.

5 tips to using analytics for a better customer experience on your site:

1.       Make sure your website analytics is installed correctly

This may sound obvious but you will find that a lot of sites still don’t have all pages tagged up correctly with the right analytics tag. This could be from new pages being created on an ad hoc basis without going via the correct Q&A process, it could be that you have recently launched a new site design and didn’t transfer across the right tags or maybe you have changed your tracking tags and this has not been applied to all pages. A quick way to be able to spot pages without the right track tags on them is by reviewing the referral pages within your analytics to see what referrals are coming from your own domain, review these pages to ensure the correct tags are in place.

Also make sure that all conversion points are tagged up correctly and trigger the right information, e.g. customer data, commercial values. There is nothing more frustrating than building traffic to a website and not feeling confident that the conversion points are sending the right values or triggering at all. This is essential in order to effectively show the value of the work you are doing and it is worth checking, double checking and checking again!

2.       Set benchmarks in order to know what to measure yourself against

By setting benchmarks you can then know, and communicate, what works and what doesn’t with data to back you up. Of course you need to be confident that all relevant tracking has been installed correctly (see point 1). Benchmarks can be set around traffic, the type of traffic (e.g. by channel, brand or non-brand keywords), user behaviour onsite, as well as conversions points and their data.

A benchmark can be over a week or month depending on the seasonality of your website and the data that it gathers. To be able to get a better growth measure, year on year data can paint a better picture – however if you have just recently installed your analytics then this won’t be possible but something to bear in mind in the future.

Review the impact of your activity against these benchmarks to understand what is having the most positive impact on your site and take those learnings to continue to develop your marketing efforts. Also make sure that you take into account other external factors such as seasonality and customer trends to put your insights into context. For example you may have strong visibility in Search (Paid or Organic) but be getting less traffic than a previous month but this could be down to factors out of your control affecting customer behaviour, check out Google Insights, Google Trends or the news to see what has been happening that may affect online behaviour.

3.       Set up conversion paths to understand the good and bad elements that contribute to conversion

By reviewing which conversion points have pinch points or conversely which conversion paths convert highly you can take these learnings and review the design of the pages involved in your conversion paths, down to:

• the type of content that is displayed
• the ordering of the links, placement of conversion points
• required information on a page, and the amount of required information on a page
• the amount of pages to final conversion point

4.       Look at internal search data to see what your customers can’t easily find

In an ideal world you would present the correct page to your target audience, with the right information, whether they arrived at your site via Organic or Paid search, external links or via email or display marketing. This is not always the case and your visitors may look for further information via your internal search box. By reviewing this data you can look for search term trends that may require you to focus some of your marketing efforts to increase their visibility, within your site, within search engines or relevant 3^rd party sites.

5.       Set up and review data from your Google Webmaster Tools account

Don’t forget that your website analytics is not the only way to understand consumer behaviour. Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account to be able to get a different view, for example looking at the speed of your site or click-through rate from SERPs. By speeding up the load time of your pages/site visitors will get less frustrated with waiting for pages to load and will hopefully increase conversions onsite. By looking at click-through rates from SERPs you can see how attractive your site is to your target audience even before they have visited your site. More information about this can be found here.

One final point to bear in mind, if you are looking at multiple analytics packages don’t drive yourself mad looking to make all packages report exactly the same numbers. Analytics packages have different ways of measuring visitors and their behaviour, whether they are new or returning to your site. If you are using multiple tracking packages then compare them against each other by reviewing the trend of the data rather than the exact numbers.

If you’ve signed up for the preview, it isn’t immediately obvious whether you have access or not. You need to go in to an actual profile before the option to switch to the new interface appears.

Dashboard

One of the major changes to the platform is the ability to have multiple, customisable dashboards. Custom widgets can be set up to track almost any metric you can think of.

There are four different widget types as follows (from the Google Analytics Blog):

• Metric: Shows the value of a metric and a sparkline of that metric over the selected time period
• Pie Chart: Best suited for displaying breakdowns of a metric by a certain dimension. E.g., Visits by Browser Type.
• Timeline: A graph of any metric over time. You can also compare two metrics in the same graph.
• Table: Think of this as a mini-custom report. You can show one dimension with two metrics and up to 10 rows of data in a table.

The above image shows the different types of widget available and is the default setup. These widgets can be dragged around and deleted as you see fit. Having multiple dashboards will allow users to have their own view of top level metrics or to have separate dashboards for different channels.

Reports

The reports section is the main working area in Google Analytics. The functionality has remained largely unchanged, although the navigation is very different.

Fortunately, it’s very logically laid out so, for example, to find the new ‘keywords’ report you would go through Incoming Sources -> Search -> Organic. The keyword report is selected by default, but any other metric can be chosen from the links in the shown in the below image or from the dropdown, also shown.

Generally, the new interface feels a lot faster. The process of applying filters on a long keyword list seems to take less time than it did when using the old interface.

One fairly significant change I noticed is that filters and other selections now persist when changing profiles. This should make comparing data across two profiles very simple, but could catch you out if you have applied a filter and switched profiles expecting the filter to be removed.

Exporting Data

The way data is exported has changed, and not for the better in my opinion. In the old interface, the graph data was exported along with the main detail data. This was often useful for extracting trended data, but I cannot see a way to do this now.

Another unwelcome change is the addition of a ‘total’ row at the bottom of exported reports. I will very rarely need to use this and it’s easy enough to add in Excel if I do. In the meantime, if I forget to remove it, highlighting a column in Excel to quickly sum the data will over count by 100%!

Anyone who regularly pastes GA data in to templated reports will have to check that nothing breaks with the new export format, and any reporting that relied on the graph data will not work at all.

One more problem with the export feature is that the old &limit trick doesn’t work anymore, so there’s apparently no way to export more than 500 rows of data. This is a serious problem and if it isn’t implemented in another way, we will no doubt see many people turning to scraping the data (laborious) or using the GA API (difficult).

Goals

A welcome change, however, is the ability to use an Event to trigger a Goal. Quite why this wasn’t possible in the past is a bit of a mystery, as the two things seem to be made for each other.

The inclusion of this feature will allow more complex user behaviour tracking to be set up much more easily. Events can be set up for almost anything, which means the same can be said for Goals.

Goals also bring loads of cool features, including Goal Funnels – a great way of visualising user behaviour. You could, for example, set up a goal funnel for how far down a page a user has scrolled if you really wanted to!

Conclusion

Overall, the new interface changes are good and logical, but some of the alternations may cause a bit of complaint from the user base. I would imagine Google will be monitoring feedback closely over the coming months and hopefully the minor niggles will be ironed out in time.

Below are seven ways Google Analytics can be used to help make the right decisions during a redesign.

1. What browsers and windows sizes should we support?

When designing your site you want to ensure that the majority of your customers can view your website and convert without browser versions or sizes preventing this.

I’d personally think that you should design your website in a size that at least 95% of your visitors can see without having to scroll horizontally. An easy way to check what browser sizes your current visitors are using is to go the Screen resolutions report under Visitors > Browser capabilities > Screen resolutions.

By comparing to site average you can also see if any particular screen resolution(s) has a significantly higher bounce rate

In the graph above you can see that the wider screen resolutions are actually performing much worse – this could be addressed by using a liquid layout or JavaScript to position content.

A quick way to check if your site has browser compatibility is to look at the browser report and compare each type to the site average, for the website below it is clear that there is poor support for safari.

The mobile browser report can help to decide whether a mobile version of your site is needed by looking at the bounce and conversion rate of mobile visits.

2. What territory specific pages or languages do we need to support?

The languages report under visitors is a useful way of seeing the proportion of foreign visitors to your site; this is particularly useful if you have an international website as it may indicate territory specific versions required that may help increase conversions.

Additionally, even if your website is UK focused, you may find that foreign speakers use your site.  This is especially relevant if your business is travel related as foreign people living in the UK or visiting short term may be interested in your services.  See this report under Visitors > Languages.

3. Can our customers find what they are looking for?

The internal search reports are really insightful as they show what your users are looking for once they are on your site, giving you an indication about missing or difficult to find content. A word cloud is a quick way to see what search terms regularly appear.

To create a word cloud, download the data, put the search term in column A, the number of times it was searched in column B and paste the formulae =REPT((A1&” “),B1) down column C. Grab all the words from Column C and paste into Wordle.

Word cloud from the internal search of World Vision, one of our charity clients (posted with permission)

4. Which landing/promotion pages need improving?

In a redesign it is important to understand which pages need changing as well knowing which pages are working well and should be left as they are. Google Analytics offers several reports & metrics for interpreting the performance of individual & groups of pages:

Goal funnel visualization – one of the most easy to understand, it graphically shows where visitors are leaking out of your sales funnels. Goal funnels need to be set up manually and when done so can be found under Goals > Goal funnel visualization

Site overlay – Using this report (Content > Site overlay) you can see at a page level what visitors are actually click on helping to show the effectiveness of call to actions and promotions. Not only can you look at the number of clicks on these items but also the ecommerce value i.e. users clicking this button have gone on to generate xx revenue

£ index – this under used metric, shown in the top content report, shows how important visits to a particular page are when visitors convert. You may find that pages like the about us, shipping & returns pages have high £ index values as visitors often view them before making a purchase and help a user decide if they should buy your products. Sounds obvious but it might suggest that including a shipping and returns policy info box on product pages helps improve conversions (particularly likely on high value goods).

Bounce rate/exit rates – bounce rate shows the number of visitors that viewed one page and then left, while exit rate shows visitors that leave the site after viewing a particular page (they may have viewed multiple pages before). These metrics can help you understand which landing pages are under performing or common places that visitors are leaving your site.  

(Page URLs removed from image)

However, these reports, like most analytics, must be understood in context to know if there really is an issue or not. When evaluating a page it is important to consider the objective of the page, how does its performance compare to other pages and are any problems a result of a design, content, product or brand issue (always difficult to know!).

The analysis of the above reports provide a great starting point for user testing as they can help identify issues on your site that are preventing conversions.

After launch

When a new site is built it is obviously important to bench mark performance before and after using KPIs that are relevant to your business such as visits, conversions, average transaction value, revenue etc.

However, it can take a few weeks for these metrics to settle down making it difficult to tell early on if there are any problems with your new website. By setting up custom alerts you can get near real time warnings of any errors or changes that may have occurred. The sensitivity of these alerts depends on your website, suggested values are used below

5. Is tracking set up correctly?

A common error that occurs in Google Analytics is a large amount of self-referrals showing up in the traffic source report i.e. the top referring site is your own! This can happen for a number of reasons such as certain pages not having tracking codes, use of frames, page redirects or sub domain and/or multi domain tracking not set up correctly. These self-referrals overwrite the original referral information preventing you from knowing where these visitors came from.

To be able to fix these tracking errors quickly before they skew your reports, it’s useful to use a custom alert (Intelligence > Custom report) to email you if there are any large daily increases in self-referrals.

Even with this alert I recommend that you add an analytics check into your QA/testing process to ensure no errors or loss of data when an updates are made.

6. Has the redesign affected our search rankings?

With any luck your new site and content will have significant improvement in search engine rankings and subsequent increases in traffic.

But it wouldn’t be a lie to say I’ve seen a big brand push a site live without removing the staging server robots.txt file, which was being used to blocking search engine access, this in turn caused the new site to completely drop out of Google!  Even if large changes in rankings like that don’t happen, its useful to monitor organic traffic after launch to be aware of decreases or increases in visits (as well as changes in rankings using this GA filter).

If you do see drastic falls in organic traffic I’d recommend not reacting unless you’re absolutely sure you know the cause, rankings tend to jostle around a little after a redesign and you could end up changing something for the worse.

7. Tracking 404 pages

When launching a new site it is important to ensure you redirect old pages to new pages, however, errors can easily occur with redirect rules causing users to land on 404 pages.

Tracking visits to 404 pages in Google Analytics is easy, simply add the tracking code to the 404 page template and ensure the page title has 404 in it. Then to see which pages are missing navigate to Content > Content by title > find and click the 404 page, this will show you a list of page URLs that have been requested but not found. Unfortunately a custom alert does not work here as you cannot have the page title as an alert, therefore it is important to check this report regularly after launch. You can also use Google webmaster tools to check 404 pages but I prefer the additional traffic insights Google Analytics can give.

Please share in the comments any other reports, filters and advanced segments that can help during a redesign.

For the storage of personal data there are strict requirements in Germany. They may be collected only with the consent of the user. For Internet Service Providers it’s possible to identify a user on the basis of the IP address. Advertisers who use web analytics software possibly store IP addresses; however, as long as the user is not logged in to in to a web service, it is not possible to retrieve any information about the person behind the IP address.

Special attention is currently devoted to Google Analytics. The German data protection commissioners worry that Google uses web analytics data to create user profiles. In the terms of service  (TOS) (1) Google assured they won’t link the IP address to other Google data, but they also retain the right to change the TOS at any time. Millions of websites are affected. According to a recent article of Zeit online(2) more than 13 percent of all German websites use Google Analytics.

The controversial question still is: Are IP addresses personal data? Now the German courts have to decide. The legal situation is still unclear.

For digital marketing agencies like iCrossing, web analytics are very important. We use tools like Google Analytics to measure visits, page views, bounce rates and other performance indicators. The behaviour of an individual user is not relevant for us, so we have no interest in storing the user’s personal data.

I personally consider IP addresses no personal data. An IP address can change at any time, it can be shared and you never really know who the person behind the screen is.

Nevertheless: If the Germans courts decide that IP addresses are personal data this would be a slap in the face for the whole online industry.

(1) http://www.google.com/intl/de/analytics/tos.html
(2) http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2009-11/google-analytics-datenschutz