Section 5: Web Analytics

It’s called a bounce, and these can worth measuring in certain situations.

It’s a Key Performance Indicator. Of all the numbers you collect and analyze, only certain of them are true KPI’s. Web analytics rests on defining, measuring and reporting those KPI’s.

A metatag is a description of a webpage written into that page’s code which helps that webpage to be found by a search engine. Organic search rankings are based, in part, by metatags. Answer choice C is called a hashtag. Answer choice D is called a cookie. And answer choice A is completely made-up.

It’s marketing attribution, measuring how much of an action can be attributed as having been gained from something specific in marketing. Especially concerning multi-channel marketing, the issue of attribution is the only challenge of the above that has not been solved. The rest of these choices are no longer challenges, as analytics tools can now measure page/task abandonment, integrate more data, and get results from A/B testing. It’s important to understand what analytics tools can and cannot do.

The three key roles are C-level, IT, and Marketing. Road maps can help identify gaps in strategy, technology, and staffing. These are the three key parts of any analytics program, each of which must be complete in order to effectively run an analytics-driven business.

The main measurement challenge to segmentation is technical. Advanced tagging and advanced reporting are required in order to accurately segment your data. Segmentation does not require expensive analytics tool. Finally, although defining when a visitor is a segment is an inexact science it requires analysis and decision-making, not technical skill necessarily, so it’s not the main challenge.

Yes, it’s possible to track those visitors with promo codes and redirects. Simply advertise your website with a promo code, such as www.yoursite.com/newspaper, then redirect all visitors to that web address to your normal website, such as www.yoursite.com. Web analytics can help you count how many people visited the web address with the promo code.

Actionable knowledge. It’s not enough to simply produce the data, but you need to analyze the data, be vocal in meetings, publicize the data within your company and champion the power of web analytics to effect change. Web Analytics isn’t just about measuring, but about reporting and recommending.

A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while the user is browsing that website. Every time the user loads the website, the browser sends it back to the server to notify the website of the user's previous activity. Answer choice A is called a breadcrumb. Answer choice B is a metatag. Answer choice C is called a hashtag.

A KPI must satisfy all of the above. If it doesn’t fit any single one of the above criteria, it’s not a KPI.

The main disadvantage to using just log files is that they’re huge, significantly larger than page tags. Maintenance, storage, and cleanup require significant management. The Log file data is yours, you own it. So that’s an advantage, not a disadvantage. Error codes are able to be distinguished from one another, so again this is an advantage.

Page tagging requires that users have cookies and Javascript enabled, and that’s a disadvantage. None of the other answers are true for this method – it limits the useless data collected, it does track the forward and back buttons. The caching issues found in the log file method of data collection are not present when viewing page tags.

It’s the WAA, and it’s one of your best resources for information related to web analytics.

True, you’ll need to set up separate C-names and SSL certificates for each domain. It’s a simple process to do so, and it will allow you to accurately identify your visitors across all your domains. You can measure how visitors move across the sites, you can accurately gain accurate visitor counts across all domains, and, most importantly, you can associate campaign conversions across all the domains. Bottom line: If you set up your cookies correctly, you can absolutely track visitor behavior across multiple domains.

Web analytics data won’t be exact, so should not be understood the same as financial data. Web analytics data should therefore be used as trending data, measurements over time, rather than as exact data.

False. The C-name is standard practice and is absolutely not a dirty practice nor frowned upon by anybody. There are no ethical or legal considerations when using a C-name; it’s perfectly acceptable and used by big analytics vendors such as Omniture and Coremetrics

You’ll have to look at your log files to find this kind of information. So even though page tagging is the industry standard methodology of data collection, most analytics professionals recommend a hybrid approach, using several of these methodologies in conjunction with one another, in order to get the most robust data capture possibilities.

Because the video doesn’t “live” on your website, but rather on the YouTube website, any information you want to know about it will have to be collected via Javascript collectors and cookies. Your web server log files can only tell you about items that “live” on your web server. The bottom line is that the two ways of collecting data are very different.

It’s confidence. Only once you have confidence in the numbers that you’re collecting, confidence that the numbers are accurate and confidence that these are the right numbers to use as KPIs, can you move forward to Phase II, customizing the reports you’re creating to actionable business drivers.

Though user authentication, requiring the user to log in, is the most accurate, it’s not as practical as the persistent cookie.