Further to one of our earlier posts about Event Tracking coolness with Google Analytics, Google have just enabled event ware advanced segments:
This is going to be really powerful when reporting on Website Optimiser Experiments.
High Performance E-Commerce Solutions. We provide a range of E-Commerce solutions for retailers of all shapes and sizes. With our applied expertise we build businesses as well as websites.
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Friday, 24 July 2009
Twitter live search widget - suggested tweaks for tweeples...
Take a look at the left hand side of our blog and our 'About Us' page on our site. You'll see we have integrated the new Twitter Live Search Widget. It's quite neat but...the generated code doesn;t work too well. If you go with the standard code, it won't look quite like the example and you'll find the tweats heading of down the page and stomping all over your content.
If you want to use the Twitter Live Search Widget in blogger, add the following line in the head section of yout HTML template:
or as we have done on our site, just drop the css ref in with the generated script:
Tweet on in safety Tweeples...
Addendum
Okay - with the script generated in ie, matters improve slightly.
I maintain, IE is *very* sensitive about script. Perhaps it's a combination of the script & IE.
Proceed with caution.
The style sheet *is* needed though.
If you want to use the Twitter Live Search Widget in blogger, add the following line in the head section of yout HTML template:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/1/widget.css"></link>
or as we have done on our site, just drop the css ref in with the generated script:
<div id="twtr-search-widget"></div>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/1/widget.css">
<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/1/widget.js"></script>
.
.
.
Tweet on in safety Tweeples...
Addendum
Okay - with the script generated in ie, matters improve slightly.
I maintain, IE is *very* sensitive about script. Perhaps it's a combination of the script & IE.
Proceed with caution.
The style sheet *is* needed though.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Moneyspyder joins Google Conversion Professional Programme:
London July 1st 2009: Moneyspyder today announced that is one of the first companies in the UK to join the Google Conversion Professionals Programme. Launched today, Google Conversion Professionals are recognised by Google as experts in increasing conversion: driving qualified traffic to websites and ensuring visitors become customers.
Moneyspyder has completed a rigorous selection process, demonstrating expertise in key Google Products (Google Analytics, Google Website Optimiser & Google Adwords) and delivering high quality products and services to enhance ecommerce website effectiveness. Using Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser, Moneyspyder offers clients services and products to identify, prioritise and maximise the opportunities on their site.
James Aston, Managing Director of Moneyspyder said "We are delighted to be recognised by Google as one of the UK's leading consultancy companies in e-commerce conversion enhancement. Although we are well known for our hosted e-commerce platform, fewer people think of us first for improving the performance of their existing web sites. Google's accreditation process was rigorous and tough but getting through it gives us the recognition we think we deserve as the people to talk to if you want to make serious improvements in your e-commerce profitability."
Alan Wrafter, Google Conversion Programme Manager, says "We are delighted to offer our advertisers the services needed to really drive conversions and profitability. Google Conversion Professionals are industry leaders in achieving the best return on investment for online businesses. There is so much room for website improvement that I encourage websites of all sizes to consider a consultation with one of our experts."
About Moneyspyder's Consultancy Services
Moneyspyder offers a full range of e-commerce optimisation services covering acquisition, conversion and retention. Our conversion service vary from fast turn-around audits, based on web analytics and customer journey analysis (last month we identified £100,000/month revenue opportunities from a 2 day audit) through to ongoing, monthly continuous improvement services.
About Google Conversion Professionals Programme:
The ‘Google Conversion Professionals’ program is designed to connect under-performing online companies with tool-agnostic conversion specialists who offer an array of services including:
Moneyspyder has completed a rigorous selection process, demonstrating expertise in key Google Products (Google Analytics, Google Website Optimiser & Google Adwords) and delivering high quality products and services to enhance ecommerce website effectiveness. Using Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser, Moneyspyder offers clients services and products to identify, prioritise and maximise the opportunities on their site.
James Aston, Managing Director of Moneyspyder said "We are delighted to be recognised by Google as one of the UK's leading consultancy companies in e-commerce conversion enhancement. Although we are well known for our hosted e-commerce platform, fewer people think of us first for improving the performance of their existing web sites. Google's accreditation process was rigorous and tough but getting through it gives us the recognition we think we deserve as the people to talk to if you want to make serious improvements in your e-commerce profitability."
Alan Wrafter, Google Conversion Programme Manager, says "We are delighted to offer our advertisers the services needed to really drive conversions and profitability. Google Conversion Professionals are industry leaders in achieving the best return on investment for online businesses. There is so much room for website improvement that I encourage websites of all sizes to consider a consultation with one of our experts."
About Moneyspyder's Consultancy Services
Moneyspyder offers a full range of e-commerce optimisation services covering acquisition, conversion and retention. Our conversion service vary from fast turn-around audits, based on web analytics and customer journey analysis (last month we identified £100,000/month revenue opportunities from a 2 day audit) through to ongoing, monthly continuous improvement services.
About Google Conversion Professionals Programme:
The ‘Google Conversion Professionals’ program is designed to connect under-performing online companies with tool-agnostic conversion specialists who offer an array of services including:
- Marketing Effectiveness (landing page tuning and AdWords ROI improvement)
- Tool Installation (custom implementation of analytics & testing tools)
- Data driven insights (improving your website based on insights from analytics and testing data)
- Systems Integration (merging of your content management systems with analytics data to improve RoI)
- Product & Services Consulting (product, service and pricing recommendations)
Monday, 22 June 2009
Enhanced Google Website Optimiser tracking using setVar and Event Tracking
Moneyspyder has been using Google Analytics and Website Optimiser for some considerable time now. As Google Analytics Authorised Consultants and Website Optimiser Authorised Consultants we are constantly looking for new opportunities for clients to improve the quality of their sites across all their KPIs.
When analysing Website Optimiser test data, we've identified a serious need for more fine grained data to get really crisp results. For example, Website Optimiser will tell you how many visits have occurred to each of your experiment variations and how many visits have converted. The nature of the conversion may change of course as might the secondary and tertiary effects of tests. How can we see whether a test of the on-site search functionality has increased ecommerce conversion? Can we see whether customers engage better with the site if they see more featured products? Website Optimiser data won't necessarily answer these questions out of the box. We've identified a couple of techniques that will help though.
Babyetc.co.uk was about to conduct a couple of tests. I'll gloss over the tests here because this post is more about the how rather than the what'. In a nut shell - are the featured products adding value and can search or newsletter signup perform better sitting next to the logo?
Newsletter signup in the header with no featured products:
Search in the header with featured products:
The tests ran for a couple of weeks and the first result comes in:
No great surprise - search usage is improved by nearly 40%. The other test is still running though. So, were searchers buying more? Are featured products engaging customers? Are test subjects spending longer on the site? Are these changes adding value to the bottom line? We'll consider event tracking first of all:
Event tracking is currently a beta feature. You'll need to request it to be added to your Google Analytics account. It's a much sweeter mechanism for recording single events than virtual page views especially if you don't want your content report data soiled.
First of all, get your test set up and running normally. Now, you want to record an event firing for each variation and potentially for each conversion. We'll cover variation tracking - goal tracking is a lot easier!
You'll need to find out your experiment number - you can find this in the WO control script provided (it's the variable k):
Now, before you track your event, let the WO script do the first part of it's magic, then using the experiment number, you can interrogate the __utmx cookie to find out what variation is being served:
Before any further WO scripting - track the event (uacct is the GA account ref used for your given Ga profile):
Bingo - WO variation views are tracked as events, simples! So, how does this look in GA? Head over to your reports, go into Content -> Event Tracking:
In the overview you'll see something like this:
Not that interesting...drill into actions though and you start to see real data treasure. Here's the ecommerce tab:
Row 0 refers to the original, row 1 is the search box in the header and row 2 is the newsletter signup.
We can see that AOV is down - no big deal - not statistically significant. We can also see that conversion rate and overall revenue are up and highly significant. So, the test confirmed more searches were happening but beyond that, we know that searchers convert 2-3 times better than non-searchers so we would hypothesise that revenue and conversion would increase with search usage. This data confirms the hypothesis and tells us by how much!
Now we can drop this data out and run it through SPSS (enterprise scale stats tool) to run more numbers through at our leisure to gain further insights: not something you can do with WO reports.
User defined variables are a really neat and powerful segmentation mechanism that we can use to provide a facility that allows segmentation of data based on partiular events firing. For many cases, segmentation based on events will not be useful or interesting but coupling event tracking with WO tests does make segmentation worth while. Say I wanted to see on-site search usage stats, ecommerce performance and site engagement data in one custom report based on a user seeing a certain test variation - now segmentation becomes useful. You don't have to use event tracking with user defined variables - I did in order to explore the technique. Say for example you've extracted the variation number as in the event tracking example. Now we can use superSetVar from Lunamaterics to set a user defined value using a similar naming convention to the event tracking:
As you can see, we are a Rails shop - feel free to substitute the syntax of your choice to get the right uAcct value in place.
Right now, Website Optimiser has not suggested as clear winner for the featured products test. I wonder how things are shaping up?
If we were to head over to Visitors -> User Defined and take a look at the ecommerce tab we would see the following interesting report:
'featured-test=0' is the original where feature products are shown. 'featured-test=1' is the test where featured products are not shown.
Now, create a custom segment:
And apply this to the report then go look at the ecommerce tab:
You can probably see how you can now look at any report in GA to see how your tests in WO are affecting metrics across your site.
Now, I have to say that these techniques are still in development - if you see any potential issues, it would be great to get your feedback. Likewise, if you use any techniques here, do so at your own risk. When trying out new techniques, do so in safe profiles - not your main data repositories!
I implemented an event tracker and a superSetvar call in a rather dumb way and ended up destroying a days worth of bounce rate data! Hopefully you have been interested by this missive, perhaps even inspired but certainly warned!
When analysing Website Optimiser test data, we've identified a serious need for more fine grained data to get really crisp results. For example, Website Optimiser will tell you how many visits have occurred to each of your experiment variations and how many visits have converted. The nature of the conversion may change of course as might the secondary and tertiary effects of tests. How can we see whether a test of the on-site search functionality has increased ecommerce conversion? Can we see whether customers engage better with the site if they see more featured products? Website Optimiser data won't necessarily answer these questions out of the box. We've identified a couple of techniques that will help though.
The test(s)
Babyetc.co.uk was about to conduct a couple of tests. I'll gloss over the tests here because this post is more about the how rather than the what'. In a nut shell - are the featured products adding value and can search or newsletter signup perform better sitting next to the logo?
Newsletter signup in the header with no featured products:
Search in the header with featured products:
The tests ran for a couple of weeks and the first result comes in:
No great surprise - search usage is improved by nearly 40%. The other test is still running though. So, were searchers buying more? Are featured products engaging customers? Are test subjects spending longer on the site? Are these changes adding value to the bottom line? We'll consider event tracking first of all:
Google Analytics Event Tracking
Event tracking is currently a beta feature. You'll need to request it to be added to your Google Analytics account. It's a much sweeter mechanism for recording single events than virtual page views especially if you don't want your content report data soiled.
First of all, get your test set up and running normally. Now, you want to record an event firing for each variation and potentially for each conversion. We'll cover variation tracking - goal tracking is a lot easier!
You'll need to find out your experiment number - you can find this in the WO control script provided (it's the variable k):
function utmx_section(){}function utmx(){}
(function(){var k='123456789123',......
Now, before you track your event, let the WO script do the first part of it's magic, then using the experiment number, you can interrogate the __utmx cookie to find out what variation is being served:
variation = '';
x=find_utmx('__utmx');
if(typeof(x) != 'undefined'){
variation = x.substring(x.length,x.length-1);
}
Before any further WO scripting - track the event (uacct is the GA account ref used for your given Ga profile):
var tracker = _gat._getTracker(uacct);
tracker._initData();
if(label != ''){
if(value != null){
tracker._trackEvent(category,action,label,value);
}else{
tracker._trackEvent(category,action,label);
}
}else{
tracker._trackEvent(category,action);
}
Bingo - WO variation views are tracked as events, simples! So, how does this look in GA? Head over to your reports, go into Content -> Event Tracking:
In the overview you'll see something like this:
Not that interesting...drill into actions though and you start to see real data treasure. Here's the ecommerce tab:
Row 0 refers to the original, row 1 is the search box in the header and row 2 is the newsletter signup.
We can see that AOV is down - no big deal - not statistically significant. We can also see that conversion rate and overall revenue are up and highly significant. So, the test confirmed more searches were happening but beyond that, we know that searchers convert 2-3 times better than non-searchers so we would hypothesise that revenue and conversion would increase with search usage. This data confirms the hypothesis and tells us by how much!
Now we can drop this data out and run it through SPSS (enterprise scale stats tool) to run more numbers through at our leisure to gain further insights: not something you can do with WO reports.
superSetVar
User defined variables are a really neat and powerful segmentation mechanism that we can use to provide a facility that allows segmentation of data based on partiular events firing. For many cases, segmentation based on events will not be useful or interesting but coupling event tracking with WO tests does make segmentation worth while. Say I wanted to see on-site search usage stats, ecommerce performance and site engagement data in one custom report based on a user seeing a certain test variation - now segmentation becomes useful. You don't have to use event tracking with user defined variables - I did in order to explore the technique. Say for example you've extracted the variation number as in the event tracking example. Now we can use superSetVar from Lunamaterics to set a user defined value using a similar naming convention to the event tracking:
unSetVar('/featured-test','<%= ENV['ga_account'] %>');
superSetVar('/featured-test='+variation,'<%= ENV['ga_account'] %>');
As you can see, we are a Rails shop - feel free to substitute the syntax of your choice to get the right uAcct value in place.
Right now, Website Optimiser has not suggested as clear winner for the featured products test. I wonder how things are shaping up?
If we were to head over to Visitors -> User Defined and take a look at the ecommerce tab we would see the following interesting report:
'featured-test=0' is the original where feature products are shown. 'featured-test=1' is the test where featured products are not shown.
Now, create a custom segment:
And apply this to the report then go look at the ecommerce tab:
You can probably see how you can now look at any report in GA to see how your tests in WO are affecting metrics across your site.
Now, I have to say that these techniques are still in development - if you see any potential issues, it would be great to get your feedback. Likewise, if you use any techniques here, do so at your own risk. When trying out new techniques, do so in safe profiles - not your main data repositories!
I implemented an event tracker and a superSetvar call in a rather dumb way and ended up destroying a days worth of bounce rate data! Hopefully you have been interested by this missive, perhaps even inspired but certainly warned!
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