Gathering keyword data from organic Google searches just got a little more complicated. Here’s what you can do about it.

What’s Changed

On October 18, Google switched search for their logged in users to SSL (HTTPS). At first, this may not sound like much of an issue, but because of the way URLs are constructed when searching with SSL, analytics tools can’t track the keywords used. This means that if someone who is logged in to their Google account searches for “Market Motive”, one piece of information will be missing. Yes, we’ll still know that the person came from Google; but we won’t know the keyword they used. (Remember, this is only for users who are logged in to their Google account when they do their search.)

What You Can Do About It

Google analytics currently imposes limits on the number of profiles (50) and the number of characters used in a report filter (256). But it was refreshing to find no limit to the number of statements in an advanced segment or to the number of characters in the regular expression field within a statement.

Nice move Google! Segmentation rocks!

In my testing, patience ran out at 45 statements which tested as accurate.

I used a 10,297 character regular expression* in one of the statements and it tested out just fine.

Have you gone higher than that?

* I'll… Continue reading

If one of Google's most significant challenges is to clear the cesspool of content spam, the temptation to use analytics data must be stronger than ever.

There is already evidence that Google is factoring in domain age and the presence of legitimacy indicators on site pages. There's even talk of giving more credibility to well branded sites or certain types of sites. But one of the more significant factors mentioned in one of Google's patents is "time spent on the document".

Longer time on the… Continue reading

Yahoo! Web Analytics has started a staged roll out giving access to some Yahoo! Store owners, Yahoo! Developers and Yahoo! Head Advertisers.

According to an earlier post from Dennis Mortensen,

"Yahoo! currently intends to provide the IndexTools Web Analytics service FREE of charge to clients and partners who accept the standard Yahoo! agreement."

This is great news for Yahoo-ites since the power of the underlying Index Tools came closer to true segmentation as any tool out there (save for my faithful ClickTracks).

Congratulations to Dennis and the Yahoo! gang for… Continue reading

Did you know that your web analytics system can be applied to your search engine optimization strategy? The keywords your visitors used to get to your site are prime candidates for optimization. But don't just look at visit counts for each keyword, because that's only a small part of the story.

To take advantage of this process, you will need three things in place:

1. You must reveal the goal of your site to your web analytics tool. For example, your "Thank you" page, or your email-sign-up-page might be a goal. If you have an e-commerce site, your order confirmation page is usually

Or: Three ways to get around misleading paid search reporting:

Most of us feel good when we see a positive ROI on our paid search campaigns. And most analytics tools give us plenty of opportunity to feel good about our campaigns.

But there is an inherent lie in the majority of PPC reporting tools, and that lie is based on the assumption that you have zero cost of goods. With few exceptions your products DO cost you something and thus any ROI analysis should be influenced by profit which in turn requires knowledge of margins.

When your campaign performance is measured by… Continue reading

What is the ultimate behavior of visitors to your web site? Do you want them to call? To fill out a request form? Do you want them to click a particular link? Or, do you want them to purchase a product or a service on your site?

“I want visitors on my site to ____________________________."

Answer the above question and you have established a “goal” for your site. The next step in web site goal and conversion tracking is to tell your web analytics tool which events on your web site represent a goal (or conversion). The most common way to do… Continue reading

Web stats are fun. Entertaining.  Colorful.  But decision making seems to be reserved for the 15% of web analytics users who are intent on growing a business.  If your website affects your revenue, you owe it to yourself to skip the senseless stats, like hit counts and unfiltered visitor counts, and enter every web analytics session with a question in mind. Questions like: Which ads will I delete today? Which referrers will I reward? My posts in this blog will help move you into the 15% that use web analytics to fulfill a strategic direction. --Michael…