Google Analytics has recently launched a real-time function which allows you to see what’s happening on your site right now! The data is only available for profiles to which you have administrator access, or for profiles which don’t have any filters applied to them, and it’s only available in the new version of GA.
The screenshot shows some of the new data which is available and the reports update automatically with no refresh required.
The top chart is particularly eye-catching and shows page views within the last second and minute. As well as no doubt providing addictive viewing for some businesses, the data also has some great applications. Here are two great examples:
- If I run a call centre I already know how many calls are queuing / have been answered etc. I will now know how busy my site is at any moment and which content may be seeing spikes in activity, so I can better micro-manage my call centre staff which will ultimately provide a better customer experience.
- If I’m a publisher I now have easy to access real-time data on how many people “could” be reading my articles so I can better manage my highly perishable content.
If you’d like to try this out, but don’t have access to it, you can sign up for early access or wait for Google to roll it out over the next two weeks.
I was at an Econsultancy Social Short in Manchester today #econshorts and saw two great presentations (I’m sure all of the presentations were great but I could only make the afternoon session).
Social Media Influencers
@willfrancis of Harkable delivered a very humorous and informative session on how to understand and hopefully influence social media influencers.
Will reminded us that the book The Tipping Point is just as valid today as it was in 2000 and mentioned two great social media tracking products that are worth a look – Klout and PeerIndex.
Great content is key for influencers; in essence provide them with exclusive content, make them feel special, offer great incentives (not just financial) and be “nice”.
The Internet of Things
The second presentation was from Will Grant of Bitcala on “The Internet of Things” or using the internet to connect every object on the planet and to let them communicate.
Internet of Things
This was quite an eye opener because we’re used to the notion of Google and Facebook perhaps wanting to know everything about our online activity, but I’d never thought about this extending to objects.
And did you know that today the number of “things” already connected to the internet is greater than the number of people in the world!
Here’s how it could work …
… I’m watching a connected TV, an advert is shown, the TV knows who is near to it (ie that I am watching), within the ad it shows Likes / Google+ from people I know and as I drive past a store (probably Tesco) my smart phone informs me that I can get a discount code if I buy now and that the item is in stock and has already been reserved for me.
But, deep breath, do we want everything that can be connected to actually be connected? Who controls my / our devices if they’re hacked? We may think that privacy is dead now but will we have any hope of understanding who and what we have given our “privacy permissions” to? Do we really need or want this level of technology in our lives or is it already too late to stop the march of the machines?
But, and most importantly, could a connected kettle know it’s late, I’m still typing and that I need a cup of tea?
I’ve recently been a little stumped with some data being returned by the Omniture SiteCatalyst “% Paged Viewed” plug-in, so here’s a summary of what I found out …
Tracking what % of a page your users were viewing
The original Omniture supported plug-in - here’s Ben Gaines’ blog - simply returned the total % of a page which a visitor viewed. This works by passing the % view data when the subsequent page tag has loaded.
Whilst the original code was useful, Adam Greco blogged about an enhanced version of the code (not supported by Omniture) which also provided data on what percentage of the page a visitor scrolled to view. Using this version of the plug-in you can therefore see the total % viewed, initial % viewed and know what % had to be scrolled in order to be viewed. This is great data to help understand your user journeys in more detail and hence aid optimisation.
0 is bad
However, I had noticed that one of the most popular values was “0”, and given that the plug-in should always provide two values <total % viewed>|<total scroll %> this seemed like an issue.
After posting a few questions on LinkedIn, Tim Elleston came up with the answer. A “0” is passed when the JavaScript starts to load but the visitor then navigates to a subsequent page before the load completes. So, the “0” could be useful in your analysis if it appears frequently.
Zero is good
On a related matter, Ben Gaines commented that there is a quirk with classifications in SiteCatalyst because you cannot upload a SAINT file with a key value of “0”. Andre Urban of Omniture, suggested the following code as a great workaround because you can classify against the word “zero”.
s.prop50=s.getPercentPageViewed();
s.prop50=(s.prop50==”0”)? “zero”:s.prop50;
(Obviously change prop50 to your appropriate number.)
So, after thinking I had an issue I now understand more about how the plug-in works and I have a neat workaround to classify by “0” and enhanced reporting for my clients.
One last comment. I have just found out that Omniture now has a version 1.4 of the plug-in which provides the same functionality as Adam’s code. It has to be provided by Omniture Consulting so it’s therefore (and regrettably) a chargeable extra. Wouldn’t it be great if plug-ins such as this were fully supported by Omniture!
"% Page Viewed" report examples
The visits metric is central to web analytics. However, Google has recently made a change to how it defines a visit within its Google Analytics package. Previously Google deemed a session ended when one of the following conditions was met:
- More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
- At the end of a day.
- When a visitor closes their browser.
Now this has changed, so that a session now finishes when either:
- More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
- At the end of a day.
- When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes:utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.
The change took place last Thursday (11th Aug), with the understanding that none of the data held in your account prior to that date will be changed retrospectively – only data from this date forwards will be affected.
By using a changing traffic source to denote a new visit, this will likely increase the reported number of visits received by a website, without making any change to non-visit based metrics, such as page views. It will be more likely to affect websites or visitor segments where visitors are prone to revisit the site. This means when making any comparison between visits or visit-based metrics (such as average time on site or bounce rate)before and after the change you won’t be comparing like with like, and as such need to exercise extreme caution.
We’ve carried out an analysis of the data for some of our clients to determine what the effect of the changes is, and the results have been very interesting. For some there’s been little change in their metrics, whilst others have seen an increase in visits.
The client above exhibits the changes that you’d expect from the Google visits update, with an increase in visits after the change, but no jump in non-visit based metrics, creating a knock-on effect for metrics which are based on visits, such as bounce rates and page views per visit. In fact for this client the impact of the change is massive and far higher than Google’s expected circa 1% change!
So, aside from having to explain to stakeholders why a jump in bounce rate or fall in page views per visit is caused by a definition change rather than visitor behaviour, what other issues does this change cause? As the main change to the definition of a visit is based on traffic sources, those sites where a visitor might use more than one source in quick succession to visit a site will see the largest changes. This will likely affect sites with high competition as visitors jump between sites, refine their search terms or look for money-saving sites to lower their costs.
Users of Google Analytics may wish to review their campaign tracking methodology in light of these changes to ensure it accurately reflects the attributes of the campaigns pushing traffic to their site. Furthermore, it’s now more advisable than ever to avoid using the Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters to monitor internal campaigns (as used by some people) and use event tracking instead.
Above all though, the key thing is not to panic. This is a one-off change to a definition of a metric, so provided you record this within the annotations section of your account and provide the necessary caveats to any reporting you provide, there should be no issues. It’s rather like when a business changes accounting procedures; they have the same customers who spend the same amount, but certain figures are recorded in a different way.
Is there a better way?
A few blogs on this topic have questioned why Google didn’t keep the old visits metric and introduce a new one in order that historical data could be viewed without a step-change to a clients’ data. This would make sense for many clients. In fact, approx 11 years ago RedEye had a neat solution where it reported on visits and click-throughs to provide a work-around for this issue.
Visits worked in the same way as GA used to work and the click-through would be incremented each time a media placement was clicked on. So if I arrived at the site 10 times in a visit we would report 10 click-throughs against the appropriate media placements and 1 visit.
Thanks Omniture for putting on another great Summit #omtrsummit Here is a collection my thoughts and notes:
Omniture Summit 2011
Sound-bites
“Mobile is the glue which ties together our digital and organic life.”
“Brand perception today is being influenced more by customers than brands.”
“There is a shift from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends.”
“65% of companies have ‘lost’ campaign data due to implementation errors. And 86% of companies reported on having implementation issues.”
“[Implementation] audit early and often.”
“Interpretation is a living thing.”
“An attempt to lure is not a social media strategy.”
“Competing for the future is about competing for the moment.”
“[Social] brands think people want a relationship with them whereas consumers want discounts and offers.”
“There is a now a 5th ‘P’ of marketing; perhaps the newest is going to be the most important, PEOPLE”.
“The 5 ‘i’ of social marketing: Intelligence, Insight, Ideation, Interaction & Influence.”
“Successful landing pages are built by asking the right questions at the earliest planning stage.”
“You need to use tracking code to monitor clicks from social campaigns wherever possible as only 60% of visits are from a web-based app. The remaining 40% will report as ‘direct’.”
“Integrating art with science.”
More smart mobile devices were sold last qtr than PCs and the growth of mobile will continue to be far faster than PC; with many people in the world only ever experiencing online via mobile (eg India has 500m mobile vs 100m PC).
Omniture report suite specific
Adobe Tag Manager launched. Enables you to manage all your tags through a container tag.
Adobe Social Analytics is now in Beta and looks great. It will be interesting to see how Adobe price it.
SiteCatalyst V15 allows you to create a segment and push it to Test & Target.
SiteCatalyst V15 ‘normalise’ feature is something I’d missed when looking at the Beta. This will be very useful to aid quick comparison of trended data.
Focus of Omniture’s development is moving towards mobile first.
Make sure that you keep an up to date implementation document repository, including: SDR, change log, a copy of the s_code with full comments of what the code does, audit dates and actions.
Use Fiddler to map a local copy of the s_code to your site to enable better testing.
Set alerts for high traffic and KPIs.
There are publishing widgets to push data to the public; such as showing top searched items or products on to your homepage.
The Adobe Tag Manager product launch (I haven’t seen a demo or any literature beyond the PR yet so my understanding is limited) should prove to be a smart move for Adobe and its customers.
The tool will allow customers to deploy tags from other vendors through the SiteCat tag. Should a customer do this, then Adobe knows that it will be a much bigger business pain for that customer to leave Adobe and switch to a competitor because it won’t just be the SiteCat tracking which would stop working when a contract ends. This should help ensure longer term contracts and revenue protection for Adobe.
The customer will benefit by having an easier mechanism to deploy tags and crucially to maintain their SiteCat 
implementation (which for many brands is a significant pain and barrier to optimisation). This will save many clients perhaps several months of wasted time whilst they are waiting for availability in a release schedule to update the code.
My feeling is that this tool should be provided free of charge to all customers and it will be a mistake if Adobe decide to charge anything more than a nominal fee. If there is a significant charge, then I suspect many companies will use an independent Tag Management system (such as the UK vendor TagMan) which will allow them to move away from Omniture in the future and all their existing tags will continue to work.
Whilst I’m taking about “free” I believe that Digital Pulse should be packaged with SiteCat for all customers to help maintain a good quality implementation. A better implementation leads to a happier client and a stronger client / supplier relationship.
#askbrett and the “Brett Error Show” was great – check out the YouTube video (link not available yet) when it’s live.
Official photographer photos are on Flickr.
Even Jonny Vegas wanted to know more
