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Thanks for putting this together!
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LOL on the paypal account :-)
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http://www.findresolution.com/2008/05/google-an...
That profile tip is golden. It's a great workaround for sites that need to configure multiple goals, or want more flexibility in their goals.
Linda Bustos's last blog post..8 Google Analytics Sins: Are You Guilty?
I would like to just point out something quickly on tip #4 to the people reading. You say that when excluding query parameters in your profile settings you need to "Add your parameters separated with commas, no spaces. I did a test of this just recently and in actuality I believe that the query parameters need spaces between them.
I used two profiles, one was spaced out like this: tx, id.
and the other was not, like this: tx,id.
The profile that was using the spacing worked but the one not using the spacing did not and I was still seeing all of the different URL's for the same page. Just wanted to point that out to an otherwise perfect article!
Linda Bustos's last blog post..8 Google Analytics Sins: Are You Guilty?
I am actually searching for an analytics package that can track multiple sites from one login. A pre-requisite is that the tracking software is cookie driven rather than log based. There isn't much out there from what I've seen and I certainly don't want Google Analytics or any other evil Google tool (aside from Googlebot) near my SEO work.
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http://www.ydeveloper.com - Yahoo store Design & Development
Thanks! If I win, I'll make sure to do a CrazyEgg version :-D
Linda Bustos's last blog post..8 Google Analytics Sins: Are You Guilty?
Now if only Google would allow us to set more than four goals for each site, then we'd be in great shape.
There is a workaround for the 4 goals, you can create extra website profiles to configure more goals. Jeff Campbell, comment #11 shared this link which shows you how:
http://www.findresolution.com/2008/05/google-an... .html
Linda Bustos's last blog post..Improving Product Descriptions Using Competitor Customer Reviews
2 Stupid Typos I Missed When Proofreading This Blog Post
1. "...commas, no spaces" instead of "commas, not spaces" (thank you Jesse for the heads up)
2. "...make sure it's a backslash or it won't work" should be "forward slash" - I've been known to mix up "turn left" and "turn right" as anyone who's had me as a passenger-seat GPS system will affirm.
My apologies, thanks for all the comments, sphinns and del.icio.us love despite the foibles :)
Linda Bustos's last blog post..Improving Product Descriptions Using Competitor Customer Reviews
Good luck in the competition!
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Good luck with your entry! Looks like it has a great chance.
Actually, setting up filters in Analytics doesn't affect a visitor's ability to access your site or to convert.
You can set up a separate profile if you want to keep tracking countries you've excluded from your main market. You could exclude your other markets from these additional profiles, so in essence you can get very targeted geographic analytics reports for each major region. This could be valuable if you're testing campaigns for markets you're thinking of expanding to, or only serve in a limited fashion (certain products you are willing to ship, etc).
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And one of the best article for this SEM Scholarship, which is a matter of envy ;-). Moreover, I have seen these information scattered throughout the blogosphere. But, this is the mostly comprehensive and compiled version with images.
I have been stuck to analytics for more than 3 years and continuously monitoring & studying traffic 3-4 hours a day. Therefore, I am motivated to add more to your article:
- You get overwhelming traffic when your developers are working on your site. So, you always need to filter out the IP before they start working.
- In the same sense, you may also get traffic from copy-fraud, who are trying to steal your content to build a competitor site. We experienced this earlier and found 500 hits in a day.
- Websites or Social Media making badmouth about your business can mean a lot of traffic. But they will not make any conversion, rather ruin your future conversion as well.
- You didn't mention the offline page load. If someone stores your webpage in their computer and they open it, then they will also not convert anything that time. Although, the analytics also dhow them as refered traffic from e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\Asif Anwar\Desktop
Asif Anwar
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/05/13-prop...
Asif Anwar's last blog post..13 Prophecies of Internet Marketing - The Near & Far Future of Online Marketing
Offline page load is interesting, do you have an estimate of how common this is?
A commenter on Get Elastic also offered up a number of advanced additions to the article:
* Forgetting to tag links in email campaigns
* Forgetting to separate navigational searches from search engine keyword, by using a custom filter for Direct Search or on page addIgnoredOrganic
* Not changing keywords and url`s to lowercase (GA groups “KEYWORD” and “keyword” differently)
* Allowing log spam by not adding an including only hostname: (www\.|)mydomain\.com
* When using ppc - not recording actual search keyword by using a custom filter e.g $A3 in (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*) and
* Forgetting to manually tag paid search landing pages in yahoo and msn.
* Not segmenting visitors by type (e.g return visitors behave differently to new visitors, or Hunters behave differently to Browsers http://tinyurl.com/4×2k73 )
When installing:
* mixing urchin & ga.js
* Forgetting to tracking mailto: clicks
* Forgetting to tag links between 2 domains or links to/from an externally hosted shopping cart.
Most interesting to me is:
* When using ppc - not recording actual search keyword by using a custom filter e.g $A3 in (\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)
What this does is show you exact long tail keyword the searcher used, rather than the keyword in your AdGroup that the impression was attributed to. We hope to get a screencast tutorial on this at Get Elastic in the near future.
The commenter is only identified as "Phil," as he cannot openly identify himself for professional reasons. But he had some more really fantastic tips in the comments here: http://www.getelastic.com/8-google-analytics-si...
Linda Bustos's last blog post..How Do Ratings and Reviews Help Online Retailers?
Really good summation.
Cheers.
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Congrats ...... you really deserve it.
Keep it up............
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Setup my filter. Done.
Thank you
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Would be nice to add the brand query filter, to see the part of brand notoriety in search engine traffic.
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