Google Analytics Event Tracking

Google continues to do a good job of adding additional functionality within their Google Analytics framework. Their Event Tracking is well done (with the usual capacity/scale issues). I do like how well they've laid out the tracking code, and even threw in a couple of extras in there (time tracking and mouseover tracking).

Of course, WebTrends and others have had this functionality for years now, and have much deeper customization options...but I am biased.

A couple of notes on GA's event tracking:

1. Bounce rates will change. They are treating events as additional "requests", so if you have a single-page visit with an event triggered (automatically or through interaction), it's no longer considered a single-page visit.
2. There are limits to how many events they will count. This is a free service afterall, but they note that in addition to the other report limits within GA, there is a limit to the number of requests per visit they will include in the reports. Watch how you implement events!
   

Back at WebTrends...

This past week was my first week back at WebTrends. First, let me say thanks to Alex, Bruce, James, Mike S, Shane, John D, John R, Leo and Barry who all made time for me to bounce ideas around and find the right fit for me. Everyone has made me feel very welcome back.

So, why jump back inside analytics? And why back to WebTrends?

#1: The WebTrends Team
You can't underestimate the power of a strong, smart executive team. I had the privilege of working with an incredibly bright, innovative, forward-thinking management team at Jive, and I can tell you it makes all the difference to have a quality team with whom you can trust, engage, and collaborate.

Alex is building something special here at WebTrends. I had heard it from others, and I can already see it. The team rallies around him, and the exec team isn't wasting any time to make real change within the company.

#2: The Analytics Industry
I like this industry. The technology is dynamic, our customers are creative, and there's a large number of smart people out there solving interesting problems. I see too that the WA blogging world continues to grow, and there's plenty of twittering from a plethora of sources as well. This level of sharing and collaboration is very healthy for us all.

Many thanks to the many voices out there who are keeping us all enlightened, challenged, converted, and otherwise demystified. I'm looking forward to getting ramped back up and connected with you all again.

Focus and Innovate

A colleague turned me on to the quote below from this article...smart stuff from O'Reilly.

We don't know yet how problems in the overall economy will affect our business. But what we can do now are the things we ought to be doing anyway:

• Work on stuff that matters: Assuming that the world does go to hell in a handbasket, what would we still want to be working on? What will people need to know? (Chances are good that they need to know these things in a world where we all continue to muddle along as well.)
• Exert visionary leadership in our markets. In tough times, people look for inspiration and vision. The big ideas we care about will still matter, perhaps even more when people are looking for a way forward. (Remember how Web 2.0 gave hope and a story line to an industry struggling its way out of the dotcom bust.)
• Be prudent in what we spend money on. Get rid of the "nice to do" things, and focus on the "must do" things to accelerate them.

  These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count.

Forbes Article on Jive

How awesome is this. A great article in Forbes magazine on Jive

Upstart Jive Software aims to change the way people work by bringing social networking to the office. It's up against some firm called Microsoft.

Jive Software chief executive David Hersh has a lofty goal: a world where office work is so fulfilling, inspiring and free of trivialities that parodies like Dilbert and The Office cease to exist.

There are loftier goals--ending genocide, famine, cancer--but Hersh's is a good fight, and you can make a lot of money helping companies get themselves out of those endless e-mail chains and pointless meetings of office work. Jive's software uses the Web to do that.

"People live in e-mail and documents no one else can see. We're changing the way companies work," says Hersh.

Jive's newest product, called Clearspace, uses Web collaboration and communication tools such as forums, wikis and blogs to allow people in different offices to work on a short-term project using a single Web calendar, to-do list and discussion rooms. A manager can scroll over names of subalterns and see what they're working on and whether they're in the office, traveling or at home.

Very cool indeed.

Tracking Search Terms in Jive's Clearspace

Jive's Clearspace application is a very powerful tool for building active, engaged communities. Whether you are using it for collaboration, blogging/publishing content, for discussions, or documentation, you'll want to know what your visitors are searching for on the site so you can make sure the right content is available at the right time.

There are a couple of ways to get a handle on the on-site search traffic. For one, you can simply query the database (if you're running Clearspace on-premise) for search terms used by your visitors (among other things, the search table also includes which userID made the request, along with how many results were returned).

Even easier though is to make sure your analytics tool is setup to correctly interpret a Clearspace search query. A Clearspace query makes a request like this:

Example: http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/search.jspa?

Parameters include:

• q = the search term
  
• resultTypes = the types of items inside Clearspace to search
  
• peopleEnabled = true/false - whether to include searches on profiles
• dateRange = searching for something in a specific time period
  
• communityID = searching in a specific community
  
• rankBy = sort criteria

Generally speaking, setting up on-site search tracking for most of the web analytics packages is pretty straight forward. For example, to setup Clearspace on-site search tracking for Google Analytics, you'll perform the following steps:

1. Login to your Google Analytics account and navigate to the "Analytics Settings" for your account.
2. Edit your profile settings for the profile analyzing Clearspace
3. Select "Edit" next to your "Main Website Profile Information"
4. Scroll down to the Site Search section and enter the following information. You can only add 5 categories, and Clearspace has 6 different parameters (above), so you'll have to choose 5 of them (I don't include the CommunityID as most searches are not targeted at a specific community on the sites I've seen)

Save your changes, and that's it. Now just wait for those fabulous search reports to start coming your way so you can continually optimize the site for your visitors.

WebTrends Widget

I've updated my WebTrends widget to use the latest WebTrends ML2 web services, and give it a more ML2'ish look and feel. It's a very simple widget, which is another way of saying, I'm looking forward to other folks copying it and making it much more powerful (I have a long list of to-do's, so if you're interested in collaborating with me on improving it...please drop me a line!).

Any WebTrends On Demand customer can use this widget to view data for their account.

The basics:

• Install Yahoo! Widgets if you haven't already
  
• Download the widget
• Run the widget, entering in various widget preferences: your username, password, account name (WebTrends On Demand account name), profile ID and which time frame you want.
  
• That's it!

The new ML2 web services utilize SOAP to allow customers and partners to upload or download data. The upload capabilities are incredibly powerful for organizations who want to augment data collected (upload product data, or campaign information, or external visitor attributes, or ?!). I'm utilizing our data exchange service to query reporting data for this particular widget.

If you're interested in more of the guts of this widget, feel free to email me directly. As always, I don't speak for WebTrends...nor is this a WebTrends supported project...it's really just a tool to help folks think about how to use the data, and think of other ways to visualize data creatively. Enjoy!

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics, widget

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One View Of Widget Stats

Interesting "widget" stats from the smart folks over at Lijit. Their approach is to crawl blogs and look for "any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript". Most of those widgets are analytics tools, along with ad providers, and other social networking tools.

The information is a great commentary on our industry...look at the list of analytics providers. Does anyone else see our industry as a page torn from The Innovators Delimma? Where are the usual suspects you think of when you think of web analytics? Instead what you see are small, scrappy, smart solutions that are moving core analytics to a commodity service.

Filed in: analytics, web+analytics

Technorati Tags: analytics, web+analytics