Optimize And Analyze For Mobile, part 2

This is part 2 of a timely 3 part guest post on mobile analytics strategy and implementation by Feras Alhlou at E-Nor, a Certified Partner in Northern California. Here's part 1, which explained how to look for trends in mobile traffic to your website. Look forward to Part 3, "Act on your ROI", coming soon.

2. Give Your Reports More Dollar Power
Now that you know where your mobile trends stand (and hopefully it’s positive), make sure to analyze the data carefully. What does the trend signify and where do you want to go with the data?

After your CMO sees this amazing upward trend in mobile traffic (see the graph in the previous post), he will probably send the report to the CEO. The important question here is, can you show her the money? Surely, your CEO will be interested in how this trend impacts the company’s bottom line.

Again, check the Vistors->Mobile Devices report. This time, choose the Pie Graph version of the report to look at. You can pivot the table by Revenue if you are tracking E-Commerce or Goals with a monetary value. The report below graphs the revenue generated by mobile traffic segmented by mobile device.

Click to enlarge

Wow - iPad is bringing in the cash. This is highly actionable. You might want to ask yourself: is your site optimized for iPad? Is there a cross-promotional opportunity or coupon you can create with iPad?

And if you add up the total revenue from mobile devices, its more than $25k over the date range you're looking at. Let's say that's a week of data. Whatever you're paying to make your website ready for mobile, well, now you know - it's worth it.

If the $25K in revenue didn’t make analytics actionable, nothing else will. Your CEO can now easily connect the dots all the way to the bottom line.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Feras Alhlou, E-Nor

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Instant Preview issue resolved

Since Instant Preview launched in early November, some Analytics users have noticed increased pageviews in their accounts.

We’ve now fixed this issue, and visits from Google Instant Preview will no longer show up in your Analytics account. We will not be reprocessing the data to remove past visits, but you can use an advanced segment to see the visits from Instant Preview in the context of your total traffic. WebShare, a Google Analytics Certified Partner, has put together a blog post detailing this method (see “Option 1: Advanced segment”).

We’re sorry for any problems this issue caused especially as we get into the holiday shopping season. We’re working more closely with the Google Instant team to prevent issues like these from happening again.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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Web Analytics TV #14 - Just Wow

Well it’s another amazing episode of Web Analytics TV. In this exciting series with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them.

In this episode we award Darren in Southern California the "Ninja of the Episode" award for his great question about how to track clicks on links that point to the same destination page. Really great question Darren. Just send us an email and we’ll send you an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Here is the list of last weeks questions. Just Wow!

In this action-packed episode we discuss:

• (0:30) Tracking dynamic/variable goal values in Google Analytics
• (1:50) How to determine if async ga.js has loaded for outbound link tracking
• (4:00) How GA tracks sessions/visits with tabbed browsing
• (6:38) Adding event tracking to links without a lot of manual work
• (8:26) Best practices for passing campaign data via custom variables
• (10:15) Is there a way to export data from an old profile to a new one?
• (11:10) Ways to rollup data across accounts for custom dashboards
• (12:20) In page analytics with sites that changes content very quickly
• (13:30) Reasons why AdWords data in the API is a bit behind the other data
• (14:40) Native call tracking with Google Analytics
• (15:47) Why transaction and goal metrics might differ for the same page
• (17:30) Ways to track different links on a page that point to the same destination
• (20:18) Sharing advanced segments and custom reports with others
• (21:12) How to link many AdWords accounts into Google Analytics
• (21:50) Using autotagging to avoid AdWords-GA integration issues
• (22:47) How many visits do you need to determine statistical significance
• (25:10) How to track pay pal with Google Analytics
• (26:20) How reliable are city level metrics in Google Analytics
• (27:53) Good metrics to track the effectiveness of knowledge base articles

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Async _gat tracking reference and how to use it with _gaq
• The Analytics Pros Engine to auto-magically track events
• More information about how to set session level custom variables
• Google Analytics App Gallery with tools to simplify creating dashboards
• Specific dashboard apps like TrakkBoard, Shufflepoint and GA Data Grabber
• Google AdWords call tracking
• Avinash describes how to calculate statistical significance with analytics data
• Integrating a PayPal shopping cart with Google Analytics

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below. And, if you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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