Simple web event tracking for Google Analytics: SkyGlue

How SkyGlue helped our own site – 3 (Why a visitor who seems interested in our content left the site?)

eric — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:07:33 +0000

Recently, by examining our own Google Analytics reports, we found quite some folks left the site after clicking on some of our custom report links and this became a pattern. For example, the following report shows a visitor stayed on our website for nearly 6 minutes, apparently he is interested in the content. However, he left after clicking the “Activity Log” link. This is abnormal since he should have clicked around to create other custom reports in Google Analytics. Why he left?



To figure out what was wrong, we went ahead performed the same actions our users did. What we found out is the reports links did not take us to the “Create report” page, rather, it took us to the profiles page in our GA account, where people got lost.

The reason is Google Analytics released its new version recently and our links were still set for the old version. These necessary changes are easy to be overlooked and would have caused quite negative user experiences. We cannot each time rely on users to tell us what went wrong. In this instance, this bug is so subtle that users may not even be able to realize this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Thanks for SkyGlue’s ability to track individual users’ on-page activities, we are able to find and fix the problem early on! We have added report offerings for the new GA environment as shown in the image below.



If you have a story as well on how SkyGlue helped you specifically, please share with us.

Thanks, Eric

Public Beta Announcement

eric — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:53:42 +0000

Happy New Year!

We have been quite busy developing the next release of SkyGlue for the past two months. Now, as SkyGlue enters into a brand new year of 2012, we proudly announce that we have opened up SkyGlue for public beta with features that are you have been waiting for. You no longer need to wait in line for a beta code.

Hopefully our public beta can make SkyGlue more readily accessible to folks who are struggling with their Google Analytics and folks who want to get more insights from their GA data.

Introducing the FIRST & ONLY on-demand retention report on Google Analytics

eric — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:55:56 +0000

SkyGlue is now is able to dynamically generate retention reports for you. This on-demand report is the first such report purely based on Google Analytics data. We have received many inquiries on how to produce high-value reports such as the retention analysis report from Google Analytics data. We understand it is such a valuable report and it helps you understand your user behavior and site performance, but the retention report very difficult to create. Now SkyGlue can create this dynamic retention report for you based on your requirements.

Even to go one step further, if you want to create your own retention analysis chart, we have DIY video guiding you through the steps.

Here at SkyGlue, we are committed to bring actions out of your web analytics data in the simplest way. Please give us feedback on SkyGlue and let us know how we can help you.

Eric

Google Analytics premium vs. Google Analytics standard

eric — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:25:20 +0000

Great News! Google Analytics just made two big announcements:

1, Google Analytics premium now available for enterprise customers

2, Real-time feature available for both free and paid version

We feel this is an exciting move for Google Analytics. It is acting to meet the needs of enterprise customers who want customer support and guarantees. In the meantime, Google makes it free version even more attractive (already the most poplar engine in the world) by letting people see real-time data.

This is a huge momentum, we believe more and more clients to moving towards choosing Google Analytics over other solutions as Google Analytics covers most of what other solutions offer, if not more.

Here for your convenience, below is a comparison chart for Google Analytics premium and standard version.

	GA Premium	GA Standard
Cost	$150,000.00	Free
Processing power	1 billion hits per month Freshness – report data is guaranteed to be no older than 4 hours Table aggregtion set at 1 million rows 50 custom variables Unsample report downloads	10 million hits per month (above this data is sampled) Freshness – no guarantees, though for sites with between 50k – 1m hits/day, freshness is typically 3-4 hours. Above 1m hits/day, reports are processed once per day Table aggregation set at 50,000 rows 5 custom variables Table data sampled when more than 500k visits are processed for a web property
Exclusive Features	Big query integration – run SQL queries against your data DoubleClick Integration – impression, cost, view-through data, re-marketing information Multi-channel attribution modelling 3 year data retention Real-time data	N/A N/A N/A 25 months data retention Real-time data
Service-Level Agreement	Yes Data collection uptime = 99.9%, Reporting uptime = 99% Data freshness = 98% Client formally owns all collected data i.e. ring fenced system	No No guarantees Data ownership is a gray area as data is replicated and distributed over the entire “cloud” i.e. not possible to isolate a particular dataset
Services & Support	Included with fee*: Implementation Training Dedicated account management Support – Telephone & email 24/7 support emergency escalation Provided by official authorized Google Analytics Certified Partners only.	Open market – users may purchase professional services from whom they wish Third party network of over 200 Google Analytics certified partners

source: http://twitpic.com/6shv6f

SkyGlue event tracking basics – Part I

jzhao — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 05:04:06 +0000

We got several questions on how Google Analytic event tracking category, action and labels are used in SkyGlue. This post will explain this in details.

The Google Event Tracking data model has the following components which map directly to elements in the Analytics Reports interface:

categories
actions
labels
values
implicit count

Here is the definition of the event field in SkyGlue. Once you understand the meaning of those, you can create your own customized reports in Google Analytics, you can also follow the links (under the Reports tab in your management portal) to create pre-defined reported created by us.

Field	Required	Google Definition	SkyGlue Definition
category	required	The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.	Activity of the user. For example:
action	required	A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.	Time-stamp + activity. For example:
label	optional	An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data	User identification. This is a hashed value of the user id on your website. For example:
value	optional	An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event	Not used

How SkyGlue helped our own website – 2 (Deeper understanding of visitors)

eric — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:16:34 +0000

SkyGlue helps you get deeper understanding about your visitors. Here is an example how SkyGlue helped us own engaging with our visitors better.

we used to have only one image (the first one) in the image gallery at our home page. Since we are using SkyGlue ourselves, we found many people clicked the “next” arrow on the image bar and couldn’t find more images and then they left. After adding more images, the bounce rate dropped significantly. Without SkyGlue, we wouldn’t have known that image gallery click is even an issue.

SkyGlue helped us reduce bounce rate!

If you have a story as well on how SkyGlue helped you specifically, please share with us. Your findings could potentially benefit other SkyGlue users.

Cindy

How SkyGlue helped our own website – 1 (find website bugs)

eric — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 04:00:52 +0000

As our users increase, we feel it is vital to let people know in a more direct way what benefits SkyGlue actually brings them. We are working on setting up some tutorials.

Firstly, we like to share with you a few examples how SkyGlue helped ourselves. Yes, we are using SkyGlue on our own website!

A few days ago, we found some people contacted us through the “Contact us” form on our website. However, the form is no longer working even though the message said the email has been sent.

SkyGlue actually helped us notice the problem. We can see the visitor clicked the form fields and hit the submit button, but we did not receive any emails. We then verified the form indeed was not working. Without Skyglue, we would not have found it out. SkyGlue can help you find what’s not working on your website besides collecting more data for analytics purposes.

SkyGlue helped us find bugs on our own website!

Cindy

SkyGlue on Business Insider!

eric — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:42:24 +0000

SkyGlue is featured on Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/skyglue-its-like-the-cia-for-your-website-2011-7.

We have received overwhelming signups/feedbacks/suggestions. We appreciate your warmest support and are very encouraged to see so many people wanted to try our product. Our goal is to help you improve your business.

We have been sending out a large number of invitation codes recently and we are trying our best in making sure you receive your code in time. If it has been more than a week and you still have not received your invitation code, we apologize for it and please contact us.

One thing we’d like to request in return for those who test us out is your feedback. Please give us feedbacks so that we can improve and help you more.

Thanks,

Cindy

Conversion funnel

eric — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:35:01 +0000

Conversion funnel is a technical term used in e-commerce operations to describe the track a consumer takes through an Internet advertising or search system, navigating an e-commerce web site and finally converting to a sale. The metaphor of a funnel is used to describe the decrease in numbers that occur at each step of the process.

Simply put, conversion funnel is the path visitors take from site entry to an online purchases or other desired actions (registering an account, upgrading service, downloading a white paper, etc.)

There are various paths that lead to a conversion. In a typical conversion funnel, visitors drop off along the way to the final step that completes the sale or achieves the desired action. The good news is that when your analytics program tracks the micro steps required to reach the final conversion act, it reveals actionable data that can be used to prevent drop-off. A microanalysis of the sales path reveals the problems that thwart conversion, leading to implementation of more effective calls-to-action at each step along the way.

There are two types of conversion funnel analysis: page-view based funnel analysis and event-based funnel analysis. Page-view based funnel is the default and traditional way of funnel analysis and it is easy to undersand, You track pages on the visitors’ conversion path and and find bottle necks. Such method is supported by Google Analytics and many other analytics produts. Event-based funnel analysis lets you create funnels based on the event you are already tracking, such method is supported by many startups and new anaytics companies, but they are NOT free. Google Analytics recently added Event Goals feature in their event tracking and they are seriously considering supporting funnel based event tracking and I look forward to seeing this great feature in the new Google Analytics soon.

Eric

My favorite Bloggers

eric — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:04:16 +0000

Anil Batra
Anil is a local analytics expert here in Seattle. He was mentioned in my previous blog on Individual Visitor Statistics vs Aggregated Data. He writes insightful thoughts on web analytics.

Avinash Kaushik
Best blog on web analytics. Most well-known person in the field; not to mention his most popluar book Web Analytics 2.0. You got to read his blog to stay current on innovations and trends in web analytics. I am thrilled he emailed me back on my comment on his article Mobile Analytics: Tracking Click-to-Call Mobile Ad Campaigns

Akin Arikan
Great post on ROI measurement. He reads every comment and responds to commenter with well thought-out and insightful conversation. A must read blog.

Gary Angel
Gary is a classic writer. Excellent posts.

Jim Novo
Jim blogs about customer lifetime value (CLV), retention and engagement; lots of commonalities with SkyGlue.

Justin Cutroni
Expert on Google Analytics. Loved his post on Celebrating Our Analytics Relationships. I am amused with his mentioning of the relationship between IT and business. SkyGlue’s tag-free event tracking should make both parties’ job easier. In addition, every GA user should read this The Executive’s Guide to Google Analytics.

Marshall Sponder
Marshall discusses the fundamental question “Does web analyst know what customers want?” in The Analytics Zone in Social Media Monitoring. As web analytics companies, we all ought to think about it.

Michele Hinojosa
MIchele’s post on Want to grow the analytics workforce? Go out and get ‘em reminds me we all have a mission in helping to grow the field.

Eric Peterson
Eric is a true expert in web analytics field. His post of Free webcast on Tag Management Systems on Jan 25th rings a bell with the complexity of event tracking tagging. Gladly, we share the same vision and are looking for ways to improve. Again, SkyGlue’s tag-free event tracking would make web master’s job a lot easier.

Let me know if there are other blogs I should add here. Thanks!

Eric