Intelligence is a new feature for Google Analytics. It sounds like it sprung from a challenge by Avinash Kaushik to the GA team. Eric Peterson has called it brilliant. Stephane Hamel says it challenges traditional web analytics vendors. Jacque Warrens says that at this point, he’d pay for Google Analytics.
That’s a lot of positive buzz. So, here are some comments about this new, exciting feature for little ‘ol me :-)
Guess I’m Floating Comfortably In Data, Not Drowning In It
Let’s start with one general thing: it sucks to have small websites. I won’t go into details, but the average amount of visits we get is on the smaller end because what we advertise is definitely in a niche industry. So, with the sensitivity bar set to low, there is hardly anything of note:
Such is life; makes you want to work harder for every single visit.
A Math Brain For An English Major
What is all this intelligence about, though? After using it for a while I’ve come to the conclusion that Analytics Intelligence is about making my life easier and reports more actionable.
If your position at XYZ company is at all even remotely similar to mine, you get to work in the morning, fire up the computer, open your browser to Analytics and BAM, you have graphs! Then, reality sinks in…what I am to do with all these graphs? What do these lines means? In a word, what really matters? And at this moment your degree in English isn’t helping (that only comes in handy when it’s PowerPoint time and you present insights for all the HiPPO’s).
Easier insights come about because Intelligence automatically surfaces starting points. Some examples:
These are just a few examples of how Intelligence can do some of the legwork for you so you can get better starting points and act quickly.
Things That Make You Go HUH?
But, there are some things that did remind me this is a new system.
When you start getting to higher sensitivity, some of the alerts kind of leave me wondering. For instance, this alert tells me the conversion rate on the landing page we have for a specific campaign grew (look on the left):
But then, it tells me the exit page was the landing page itself (look at the middle). Is there really a correlation between the conversion rate going up on the very same page where people are exiting? This alert really had me scratching my head.
One thing that might be a great feature is to be able to search for alerts; a small box that you can start typing a metric or dimension that has an alert associated with it. I found myself finding an alert, getting sidetracked, and not remembering what day the alert was on, but I knew it was associated with direct traffic.
And, funny, this draft has been on going for a while now, and Google read my mind about releasing ways to annotate analytics, so that solves my other complaint.
The Verdict
Use it. This is great. As soon as you get used to reading the reports and figuring out how everything is connected, it gets much easier to find springboards for analysis.
An Aside: Some Philosophizing
This is a huge step in the direction of putting business data and analysis in the hands of even smaller companies. I was surprised by the comments on Eric Peterson’s review of GA Intelligence. Here’s a section of my response (for the full version, click here and scroll down):
Will people misuse the information? Sure. Do people understand how it got there? Probably not entirely. But now the stakeholders for small to mid size businesses who don’t know how to calculate an upper and lower control limit with the SUM, AVERAGE and STDEV function in Microsoft Excel have at least another valuable piece of information about their business than they did yesterday. That’s great.
Interestingly, Avinash Kaushik already had this in mind. In a brief email correspondence, he mentioned to me that:
[…] the world of online analytics will be ruled by the messy masses. It has to be. Decision making is so much faster and democratized now. What you see from Google now is a manifestation of that belief. Tools should go as far as they can to make data more accessible, give better starting points.It’s all about giving non-Fortune 500 companies the tools to better spot departure points for action, something every Main Street shop could use.
I’ve been playing around with Google’s new tag builder, and checked out the PHP script they have specifically for sites geared towards mobile phones. For a number of reasons our company is more interested in anything Google Analytics/PHP.
Here’s some information we get from the javascript version of Google Analytics:
And here’s some information we get from the PHP version of the script:
You can “decode” a lot of these utm fields by checking out the troubleshooting section for Google Analytics. Interestingly, Google states that “All the same data that you’ve come to expect from your Google Analytics reports is now available for mobile websites.” But from what I see here there might not be exactly that much. I used Firebug for this first test. I’ll guess we’ll have to wait and see what it looks like in actual reports.
“We’ve had the good fortune of learning from our many relationships with big agencies. And we have been doing a lot of strategy and thinking and not getting paid for it.” —
Michael Ferdman, founder of Firstborn, from the article Does the Industry Need Big Digital Agencies Anymore?
I laughed when I first read this; I had visions of the talented bright-eyed digital folks striking out on their own to execute campaigns and strategies as they envisioned…and then coming to grips with the real world. Looks like we all live and learn. All the best wishes to those who have taken the risk of doing the remarkable on their own :)
“We need fewer ‘three easy steps to Twitter success’ lectures. We need more ‘how to communicate with an Executive in order to be effective’ lectures.” —
Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Analysts and Executives
A great piece about the lack of leadership from analytics vendors, corporate executives and analysts.
I need some help making sure I did my analysis correctly. Our clients have seen a pick up for their market recently (real estate), and I am wondering if what I think I found is correct: I’m basically working on inferring intent. We have a few months of data now, and I want to know what keywords tend to attract people that look at higher-priced product.
I went to the content section, filtered by floor plans, and by using Google Analytics new pivot table feature, I pivoted by keyword (organic and paid). I exported the top 50 keywords and rearranged a little bit in Excel. So, the data is organized by keywords on the left column, product category on top, and pageview counts in the middle:
____________Plan 1___Plan 2__Plan 3
Keyword___PgView__PgView__PgView
Keyword___PgView__PgView__PgView
(Sorry for the weird formatting; Tumblr doesn’t like tables evidently)
Here’s the thing; I calculated a mean, standard deviation, lower and upper control limits for each column individually; then, using conditionally formatting, I visually brought out the keywords above the upper control limit, but only by column… not for all the data put together. Does that make sense? Not just in my explaining, but in how I’m going about the analysis?
So, here’s what it looks like (click on the image to see larger):
And this links to a “public” (read:scrubbed version) of the Excel file if you’d like to take a look at exactly what I did. get link to revised spreadsheet below
Anywho, I figured this is one way, but I am sure there are many others. You can chat about this through my username brandingme on Gmail or AIM. A simple tweet of this is good, this is wrong, or I’m going about this the wrong way helps too :D
**UPDATE**
So, I’ve been thinking a lot more about this analysis, and I revised the Excel file. Basically, instead of doing the upper control for each individual column, I did it for all the data, which you will see on the bottom if you download the spreadsheet. Still no feedback from anyone though :-(
Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet), via AVC.com
I may be spoiled because my company was already doing search marketing years ago, so I didn’t have to set up the Google and Yahoo accounts. I’ve been tasked with setting up a Bing account though, and thought I’d share my thoughts along the way.
Billing
Billing is annoying. We don’t have a giant budget so we can not get invoiced, but we have to spend X number of dollars for 4 months to become a “trusted account.” I understand the need for trust, but I had three different phone reps tell me three different things along the way. That’s frustrating.
Pausing An Account?
I set up a dummy account until I could get a credit card for the real account. I want to delete the old account (or at least pause it), but I have no idea how. I’ve even searched the help section, and to no avail. I simply tried deleting it, but it said it had active ad groups. Trust me, it doesn’t. I paused those ad groups. And the campaign. And paused them again for good measure (kidding).
Time Zone
Oooo, I would love to love to be in Athens! I don’t know about Ulaan Bataar. though. But alas, I must set this to meager ‘ol Eastern Standard.
Campaign Targeting
Interesting; I can even target by demographic. I’ll have to read up on that when I have time. If I select only to show in the United States, why doesn’t it show that after I hit “Apply”? Do I even need to only select the United States?
Budgets
Okay, I’ve set the budget to be per day; now why is there a red exclamation point next to maximum monthly budget? I know from entering the credit card the red exclamation is nothing short of an omen…
Negative Keywords
Okay, I have my Excel sheet open, but no copy paste for me. I have to use commas to separate multiple words or phrases?!?!?! OMG. Over the years we’ve developed a very robust negative keyword list, this is going to take forever…anyone know any shortcuts????
[EDIT] The shortcut is my colleague sitting behind me. Done and done. [EDIT]
Oh. Now even more hassle. The character limit for negative keyword list, including commas, is 1024. But, heck, I hit “Apply” and it looks like it accepted. Fine with me.
Ad Group Settings
Huh… I didn’t even know MSN had a search and content network. So, let’s only do keywords for now, hit continue and…dang it. “The character limit for the negative keyword list, including commas, is 1024.” Boo. If I remember right, there is no limit for negative keywords on Google. I’m just going to delete all of them for now.
Hit continue and…”You must select at least one type of ad distribution for your ads to be displayed.” Whaaa??? Okay, guess they don’t have a “search network” like Google (Maps, Amazon, et. al.) Guess they literally mean the search engine itself.
Okay, continuing to next page, the ads.
Text Ad
Oops. The ad text goes only on one line, instead of two like Google. Okay, copy and paste three text ads, save, and done. Not to shabby.
Keywords
Alright! Keywords, baby, keywords! Copy, paste, add to keyword list. BOOYAH. Done.
Keyword research tool to the right. Hmm, I’m curious. Okay, type in “[city] apartment”, and my keywords suggestions are:
Um, no thanks. Moving on…
Pricing
Hmmm, so I know what these words cost on other engines, but if Bing doesn’t get as much search volume as other engines, they probably should cost less. Done.
Review
Okay, everything looks right to me. Submit. Done.
Now, rinse, wash, and repeat until all the ad groups are up… a lot of ad groups. Can I just go home already?!?! To my wife? And 30 Rock? Le sigh…
El Fin
This was a very frustrating experience at first. The pros: targeting by location was fun, but it seems like you have type actual places, rather than being able to do a circle that is X miles wide, like in Google. Another pro is more text available in the ads, so you can undo all those dumb abbreviations and spell out the whole word. One last con, besides everything else I listed above, is the budget estimates. It’s really confusing where they are getting their numbers from, or what the numbers even mean.
Peace out.
How You Could Be Utilizing Web Analytics More Effectively
I get excited when I see other people thinking the way I do, as in, when they share my vision of the future. The biggest reason why is it’s a small confirmation that I am in fact not crazy. This is a relief :P
Fake Steve Jobs wrote an article for Huffington Post giving his take on what we will experience with the new GodTablet iTablet. In the persona of Fake Steve, he shockingly compliments Brian Lam of Gizmodo for his understanding that the iTablet will be a source of hybridized content.
Anywho, this is where I pat myself on the back (hahahah); two years ago I wrote about an eBook that presented a similar desire for this “hybrid” content (although I didn’t call it that). Basically, I wanted an all-inclusive reading experience that would include photos, video, music, etc. Good to know Apple with be providing a gadget that will fulfill this desire and induce child-like wonder.
I work in the interactive department of a real estate advertising firm and have been doing a large SERP study. When double-checking some things I found Yahoo to be rather optimistic; one of the first page organic search results is a story from Bloomberg. About rising home prices. In New York City. It’s dated 2007.
Ah, for those pre-recession days…
Woah, how did I miss this? Google’s Insights for Search has added a “forecast” option; anyone know when this went live?