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Tracking Invalid Hits: Accuracy is Quite Important

Author: Joel Nagy

21 Jun

Why do tracking/analytics companies want their code placed at the top of the page (meaning below the opening tag) to be properly tracked? If a user exits quickly they should not be tracked.  It seems quite duplicitous to track a user that has exited a page before it has even finished loading.   Granted if you have a site that takes a bit to load you shouldn’t wait till everything on the page loads, otherwise you’d never realize that your page load time results in lost visitors.  But if a user exits a page or clicks away very quickly that visit doesn’t really count.  It would be like Nielsen tracking every channel I skip when I surf TV using the channel up button.

I also simply can not believe it when a tracking company claims that their code will not be guaranteed to work if placed in the <head> of the document or if the code is wrapped inside a generic tracking function.  If your code can’t be wrapped or placed in the <head> what did you do wrong in the first place, or what kind of tricks are you trying to pull? I don’t like to always use the exact code provided by these companies when working on a client website.  Your client’s needs for analytics may result in them changing tracking companies and then the developer would be forced to make widespread changes across a site to deal with such change.  Granted this type of change is not all that frequent, but it does happen and being prepared is far easier than redoing work.

I’m also not convinced that the analytics provided by many companies is accurate enough.  I’ve seen on many occasions that raw stats provide disparaging numbers when put against 3rd party companies and even between multiple 3rd party tracking companies when used together on the same page.  When the numbers of hits you receive on your site is the means for convincing ad placement or other financing I think that accuracy is quite important.

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    • Avinash Kaushik on Analytics

    Author: Joel Nagy

    18 Sep

    Today Avinash Kaushik of Google and the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day spoke this week at Web 2.0 here in NY and today to a private audience at the kb+p offices.  This was a great experience.  He is a very inteligent and funny person, who really made analytics feel like more than dry numbers.  He definately gave me a lot to think about and put a number of great ideas into my head for how to really let web analytics really produce results and improve the goals of the site.

    There were three important things (among others) that I gained from his talk:

    1. Nonline: Online visitors can help you run your offline media. By this you can see what your online customers who have true demographic data and habits like and dislike and relate this to the offline marketing. For example if you have products on your site that visitors in a particular region of the US like more than other regions you can learn that you should possibly try to market in offline ads in that area to help build your brand.  If you have a product configurator and you notice that visitors in Vermont save the configurations for products that are commonly green and you tend to use black products in your ads you may want to try a green product in a magazine ad in the Vermont area.  You can learn about your user demographics with tools like Microsoft adCenter Labs. 
    2. Micro-conversions: Find the imporantance of all conversions on your site, not just the ones that bring in direct cash results.  These micro-conversions can be anything that visitors on your site come there to see: Job Listings, Maps & Directions, Store Locations and Hours.  A visitor may only come to your site and view one or two pages for 2 minutes and leave; because they got what they needed.  So you should analyze the importance of these goals that your visitors want, they may not be what you thought they truly wanted or what you wanted them to want by visiting your site.  But in the end they result in something very important: a possible new employee or even an offline sale.
    3. Let Visitors Tell You What They Like: Use tools such as Google Optimizer to provide different styles or copy for CTAs (Call-To-Actions) and see which ones drive to the goal page.  This will let you realize what your visitors like to see, not what you think they want to see.
    Many of these ideas are so beneficial because all of us have an idea of what we want our customer to look for, how they should interact with our sites, and what kind of people we think they should be.  But in the end the most important thing is that customers are buying products from you and they are reaching the goals of your site.  These are the most important customers, so analyze who they are and give them what they want.
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    • Analytics Minus the Numbers

    Author: Joel Nagy

    11 Sep

    I would like a web analytics platform that focused on the results of analysis and not the numbers. I came up with the idea of visitor profiles that could be used to gauge the high level understanding of visitors. Then when you want to truly understand your visitors you dive into the data along with your masters degree.

    My idea for profiles consists of grouping many data points into categories. Here are just 4 profiles for an average site, many more could be created based on the content and focus of the site. These profiles can be adjusted to look at data for the whole site or simply sections of it:

    Bouncer - The type of visitor that reaches your site and leaves immediately, something often seen when users visit from banners or paid search links. Less than 2 page views in 30 seconds or less.
    Browser - A visitor that wants to see everything on the site, yet they don’t stay anywhere long enough to actually intake the content. Views 90% of the pages on the site in less than 30 seconds per page (thus a site of 40 pages would consider a visitor a Browser even with a session of 18 minutes.)
    Enthusiast - Someone that really explores and gains something by visiting your site. Views at least 40% of the site, but also performs such actions such as viewing videos to completion, filling out registration/send to friend forms, downloads content (basically a visitor that interacts with the content.)
    Casual - This is the default bucket, they didn’t bounce, they didn’t try to surf the whole site faster than Michael Phelps and they didn’t interact a lot.)

    These profiles can then be used to determine how the site is being used as a whole. So if your site launched a new feature and Bouncers increased overall or simply in that section then you need to look into why that happened. Or if changed your layout or navigation flow or appearance and Browsers weer the most popular profile, then you could establish that visitors were just trying to understand the new flow or were even lost trying to find the content they wanted. What you gather from the results may be speculative, but I’m sure it’s more than knowing that 1,675 visitors viewed 1.37 page views per session.

    UPDATE: A while ago I found Quantcast and found it interesting but at the time it didn’t have a very significant base of data.  But now that the company is a few years older, and to complete some more research into the space of Web Analytics I came across them again today.  They have on their site a similiar concept to my ideas, that they label “Site Frequency”.  I think this is right direction and should be something that they should expand on and make more prominent in their dashboard of data.

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  • Filed under: Thoughts

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