Marketing Pilgrim - Latest Comments in 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

makeonlineshop — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 11:28:12 -0000

Hello,

Everywhere it is written to EXCLUDE some IP addresses but I find it quite ridiculous knowing that IP addresses change so often !

Please can you tell me if you have a solution to exclude a whole country ?

Thank you so much.

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Kathy J. Lowrey — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:09:40 -0000

Although Its an outdated article but its really great one. I had no idea you could exclude countries in GA. I need to take another look at the options available.

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Yeast infection treatment — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:17:12 -0000

i see those mistakes a lot...great post!

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Patrice Albertus — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:07:01 -0000

Thanks for this nice guideline :-)
Would be nice to add the brand query filter, to see the part of brand notoriety in search engine traffic.

Patrice Albertus's last blog post..Mise à jour vers Wordpress 2.7 officielle

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

John Flynn — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:06:10 -0000

Excellent article on the basics of Analytics -- some essential but often forgotten techniques to give your clients (or yourself) true Analytics results. If you're a client of a web marketer, be sure they are filtering out your company's and your home's IP's from their results, or you may be paying for "traffic" they're not even generating for you!

John Flynn's last blog post..Who Are You? What Are You?

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Yellow SEO - Search Engine Ran — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:03:41 -0000

Excellent Linda, top notch post on tweaking Google Analytics and in the end following this advise a webmaster would be able to improve conversions and bounce rate through the advice here.

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Internetagentur München — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 04:04:45 -0000

Even I am doing this for a long time - I could learn something here. Thanks. This is a very insightful description how to do webcontrolling in the right way!

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Rafael Montilla — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:41:59 -0000

Excelent Post, I have never used the filter but now i will.

Thank you

Rafael Montila's last blog post..Estrategia de Link building

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Bambang — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:46:18 -0000

I knew that something wasn't right with my GA report.. Sometimes I wonder how would I know that some or even most of the visits reported were actually coming from my PC.. Thanks, this post puts a light on my GA knowledge...

Setup my filter. Done.

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Martijn — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:01:20 -0000

Thank you Linda, hopefully I can filter my true traffic from now on!

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Jake Matthews — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:43:02 -0000

great post - thanks for sharing.

Jake Matthews's last blog post..User Generated Conent White Paper from IAB

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

the flash guy — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:51:28 -0000

Well done Linda, good stuff, very useful for any web marketing campaign

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

nile — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:25:10 -0000

Congratulation Body, Good Stuff

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Ruben Zevallos Jr. — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:20:39 -0000

Very good post... good info and deserved mention

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Web Marketing Man — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:05:37 -0000

This is indeed a substantial posting. Followed a link from your victory parade here, and must say there is loads of substance behind your work. Good stuff, thanks for sharing!

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Sean Maguire — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:35:44 -0000

Wow! What a great article Linda. I couldn't think of a more deserving winner. Congratulations!

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Prashant Kumar Pracheta — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:22:10 -0000

Hello my dear friend Linda...
Congrats ...... you really deserve it.

Keep it up............

Prashant Kumar Pracheta's last blog post..Google’s Lively.com - 3D virtual experience

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Judd Exley — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:02:00 -0000

I've been on the edge of this kind of knowledge (and application) for a while now with my clients, but now I finally have a term for it! Thanks for that, and you rock. Most excellent advice on the topic and all things that, if done properly, would improve the numbers for just about anybody out there.

Judd Exley's last blog post..Keyword Research - Marketing Pilgrim's SEM Contest

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Fifty Studio — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:24:27 -0000

I had no idea you could exclude countries in Google Analytics. I need to take another look at the options available.

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Josh Chambers — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:12:58 -0000

Thanks very much! Solid article. I'm continually shocked at how many people forget about internal traffic.

Really good summation.

Cheers.

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Linda Bustos — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:19:17 -0000

Thanks, Asif! That's what I love about blogs, the conversation continues after the article is posted.

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...

Linda Bustos's last blog post..How Do Ratings and Reviews Help Online Retailers?

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Asif Anwar — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:29:17 -0000

Very nice article Linda.

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...

Asif Anwar's last blog post..13 Prophecies of Internet Marketing - The Near & Far Future of Online Marketing

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Werbeagentur München — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:10:06 -0000

Well real good tips for getting out the unneccessary informations in the daily analytics time! :)

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Linda Bustos — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:40:06 -0000

Hi Lamees,

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).

Linda Bustos's last blog post..Using Buzzillions to Brainstorm Personas

Re: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Lamees — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:18:48 -0000

Hi Linda, Thanks for sharing this information. In one of my more popular posts, I use a client site as an example for a page element. As a result, they've been getting good amount of traffic from the post, however, obviously it's irrelevant to their site. Thanks to your post, I know now I can filter out this data and get more accurate traffic report. The one comment I have though, is it's possible to over optimize Google Analytics and lose some useful information. For example, in your third tip "Tracking Visitors Outside Your Target Market's Geography", what if you filter out Europe, for example, because you currently don't ship there, however, there is big interest from customers in that area? You might be losing on a good business opportunity.

Good luck with your entry! Looks like it has a great chance.