Posted by Jim Cain on July 12, 2011
One of our most-referenced blog posts of the last year was the one we wrote about the parallels between a good business analyst and Batman’s two primary sidekicks, Robin and Alfred. We really do use that example all the time when talking about stakeholders in the great clients we work with through the Analyst program — and we always treat them like Batman.
We use way more pop culture references in the office than we do math/sciences ones. A good reference tells a story much better than a detailed (and alienating) technical description. If you don’t believe me, ask me to explain tag management systems using nothing but Terminator 2 references.
With this in mind, I thought I would use the blog this week to share another popular pop culture reference that comes up in meetings all the time, in the form of the following sentence:
“So, what would Doc Brown do?”
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Posted by Colin Temple on July 6, 2011
I posted recently about event tracking, arguing that everything on your site should be worthy of tracking because everything on your site should be valuable. When people wonder about the value of website elements, what often comes to mind is social media.
Social media is difficult to track, and as a result, it’s notoriously difficult to assign value to it. So, adding tracking to the few places you can is important. One of those places that we frequently encounter is the Facebook Like button.
Last week, Google introduced Social Interaction Tracking in Google Analytics. Essentially, this allows you to put events from social media interactions into a special category that groups all social engagements together. We’ve been tracking social media interactions on our clients’ sites for quite a while, but until now this was done with event tracking. The new format, using the Social Interaction reports, lets you view the data through reports that are specifically tailored for this kind of activity. It also lets you more easily group any kind of social interaction together, and provides some automatic segmentation of socially engaged visitors.
So, using this new code, here’s my update on how to track Facebook “Like” buttons in Google Analytics. In this example I use the latest code from Facebook, so you’ll want to update any existing Like buttons you have. I also used the latest, asynchronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code.
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Posted by Jim Cain on June 28, 2011
Image credit: Gideon Tsang via Flickr
I had a very enjoyable lunch last week with a few technology executives, where the focus of our discussion was on creating dashboards and reports that the CEO will want to read (one of my favorite topics).
We were talking about different approaches to initial dashboard builds for a CEO, and all the approaches were totally different (and effective with the right kind of person). One concept was around building all the key data points that any executive would want to see, so that they can easily put together their own dashboard.
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Posted by Colin Temple on June 23, 2011
Image Credit: jared via Flickr
Everything that happens on a website is an event.
We’re in a strange place with this ‘events’ business in web analytics right now. Event tracking is still relatively new and many are only now really discovering them. The events paradigm allows you to track activities that were previously outside the realm of measurement by firing off a JavaScript codes that say, “hey, something happened!”.
This leads us into a bit of misunderstanding. Traditionally, web analytics involved looking at page views. Some page views were boring. Other page views were conversions. Some other page views were somewhere in between, part of a conversion funnel. Web analytics tools became much more relevant when they started tracking ecommerce conversions, so you could see how much money was being made. So far, so good.
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Posted by Colin Temple on June 2, 2011
In a move reminiscent of Facebook’s option to put Like buttons out on the web, Google yesterday opened up its +1 website voting to web pages. This social feature, which already allowed you to share results on search engine pages, lets your website users directly “+1″ content from your site’s pages. It’s Google’s answer to the Facebook Like, Tweet This other social sharing buttons.
As analysts, we naturally want all of the data, so my first thought was, “OK, how do we track this thing?” As it turns out, Google thought of that as well. When you’re creating your +1 button, there’s an Advanced Options area which lets you customize the button. One of those options is to reference a callback function — JavaScript code that will execute when a +1 event happens. This is the perfect place for a little Google Analytics event tracking.
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