Data Infrastructure Services, Part 5: Web Analytics

We feed both our web analytics tools, Google Analytics and GoSquared, via Segment. This should mean things like page views and definitions of new users should match up across tools. It also means we're not running separate tracking code for the web analytics tools - just the one set of javascript for Segment.

Google Analytics is fine. I mean, it's big and confusing but it probably does most everything you need somewhere in there, and if there's a huge change in your traffic, you'll be able to quickly see it.

Here's one cool thing it does that I've seen people try to build independently:

That particular view is Acquistion -> Social -> Users Flow. People are often interested to see both how people enter their sites and where they go after the first page.

Behavior -> Behavior Flow gives a similar view but lets you choose the starting segment from things like landing page and country.

You can scroll further right and add more levels of depth if you have really long user sessions that cover many pages.

Here's a wacky one that I learned about at this job: when you go to Acquisition -> Search Console -> Queries you'll get something like this

(Oh man, it looks like that one is from Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels -> Click Organic Search in the table. .... this is fine. And a nice example of how complex the tool is.)

ANYWAY you'll notice that your top search term is (not provided). If I understand correctly, when someone is logged into a Google account, their search terms don't get passed along to all our analytics.

Google also has a tool called Webmaster Tools  which is all about the Search Console. When you look at your queries there, you'll get something like:

what? all the searches are in this one. No big surprises in our case, but it was good to see that. You can get a few other search related metrics in the Webmaster Tools view, but the full queries are the main thing that you can't find in Google Analytics. (Having access to one tool doesn't magically get you access to to the other.)

By the way, I realized recently that the timezone for your Google Analytics is set at the "View" level:

I get the difference between Account and Property, but I don't really understand why you would have "View"s under that. But you do. and your timezone is set in the View Settings link right there.

(I found this out because our numbers weren't matching with GoSquared despite both getting data from Segment. Pretty sure it was just that GoSquared was on Mountain Time and Google Analytics was on Eastern.)

Hey let's talk about this other web analytics tool we use: GoSquared. I think they also want to be in the customer communication and analysis space, but we're just using them for the web analytics.

They only do a few views, but they're nice to look at and easy to read

they're all a variation on this for different time frames. It does quickly show you comparative traffic, referrals, pages viewed, user stats. The Now and Today views can be really fun to watch right after you post a tweet or a send a newsletter - seeing the traffic roll in real time is a thrill and incidentally validates that you did get the links right.

They also send Daily, Weekly, Monthly emails to show how you're doing

Nitpicky statistician here: the red and green numbers are just about direction, not change size - I'm not really excited about a +0.1% change in pages per visit or worried about a +0.1% change in bounce rate. There's also no consideration for variation - I'd love to see some std. error bars around that trend line! Comparing to the previous period is great, but it's not enough.

That said, I do skim all these emails - looking for major changes in the shape of the trend, or any weird referrers that brought us traffic. (It's fun to see someone linked to you in a blog post!)

We've recently added their Ecommerce emails which show in a similar way how much money you're making at what time and from what sources - definitely nice for understanding the dynamics of your business.

What do you find most useful in your web analytics? What other tools should I be checking out?