All analytics packages come with dozens, if not hundreds of reports that slice, dice and segment countless variables, all purporting to offer comprehensive metrics about the performance of your search marketing campaign. While many of these reports are great, you can often get much deeper insights – and “ah-ha” takeaways – from lesser known or even undocumented reporting options. Speakers in this session show you how to tap into these undiscovered gems.
Memorándum de Entendimiento (MoU) entre Codelco y SQM
Hidden Treasures in Google Analytics - SMX East 2011 - Adam Ware
1. Hidden Treasures in Google
Analytics
SMX East 2011
Adam Ware
@wheresitworking
2. My (Main) Hidden Treasure:
Regular Expression &
It’s Power in Google Analytics
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3. Overview of Regex
“A regular expression provides a concise and
flexible means for matching strings of text”
- Wikipedia
• A “language” for matching patterns through
searches
• Different “flavors” in different applications
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4. Regex in Google Analytics
In report queries In Goals
In Advanced Segments
In Profile Filters
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5. Example I: Report Query for
Branded Keywords
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6. How many ways can a branded
term be spelled?
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7. Building a Regex: Start with Strings
Tie together likely strings:
br[a-z].*t[a-z].*y
Will cover britney, brittney, brattney, brritney,
britny, brinny, etc.
That got us 326 out of 593! How do we get the
rest?
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8. Add more strings
String strings together using pipes and
parenthesis:
(br[a-z].*t[a-z].*y)|([g,p_r[a-z].*t[a-z].*ny)|(br[a-z].*t[a-z].*ni)
Now up to 383 out of 593…
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9. But where do we put this?
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10. Example II: Query for 2 and 3
Word Phrases
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11. What’s in a word?
This is basically stolen from a blog post by
Carlos del Rio (@inflatemouse)
^s*[^s]+(s+[^s]+){1,2}s*$
Why would you want that? More specific
searches happen deeper in the funnel?
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12. Put it in the same place…
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14. Example III: Finding Specific
Types of Landing Pages
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15. Ridin’ & Ropin’
“I want to see the key
metrics for vistors who land
on a men’s “cowboy boot” or
“ropers and lacers” page –
category or product detail.”
Page paths are
http://www.ariat.com/men/CowboyBoots/ProductName
or http://www.ariat.com/men/RopingLacers/
Here is our RegEx:
(/men/.*cowboy.*)|(/men/.*ropers.*)
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16. Similar place, different report
Mmmmm, results to analyze….
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17. Bonus Treasure! Motion Charts
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18. But wait, there’s more…
This is just the tip of the iceberg with RegEx.
Try building Advanced Segments with these…
Don’t just look at the landing metrics for those
pages, but see what those visitors do with the
rest of their visit!
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19. What’s an advanced segment?
You have to learn these!
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20. Basically the same capabilities as
report queries
But you view all your reports, and only see
the metrics for these visitors!
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21. Resources & Thank You
• Slides up at http://adam-ware.com/resources
• Contact me if you have questions:
Adam Ware (@wheresitworking)
• Follow Us at @SwellPath or
SwellPath.com/blog
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Hinweis der Redaktion
It is essentially a language that is used in searches, for matching patterns. Enables the search to be far more complicated than it can be by simply trying to match alphanumeric patterns, even if there is the ability to use a wildcard.The different flavors depend on the regex “engine” the application uses; many commonalities, but many differences also.
This comes from http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html. There are 592 misspellings here, and one correct spelling.
People are very likely to get the “br” in the beginning, a “t” in the middle, and the “y” at the end.
Up to 383; not going to kill myself for this preso.
Pipes and parenthesis allow us to use “or” logic in our regular expressions. Using them here, I’m able to get up to 383; not going to kill myself for this preso.
This Regex selects 2 & 3 word grouping. This makes it very useful when applied to Keywords. For many sites 2-3 word phrases are the bulk of the search engine traffic (in some cases 50-60%). This group also has the quality of being the first place where action intent starts to appear. Consider the difference in intent between ‘Dog Costume” and “Batman Dog Costume.” Who is most likely at the end of their buy cycle?
It all goes in the same place as the previous example…
Want to see 4-word searches? Just change the numbers in the brackets….
Next I’m going to talk about ways you can use RegEx to isolate pages in content-oriented reports, and in this specific example, the landing pages report.
I’m using a client of ours as an example. This is Ariat International, they sell riding boots, including cowboy boots and roping boots. They sell many other kinds of boots, but let’s say they just want to see the data for landing pages in these two categories. Here are the URL paths we have to work with, and here is our RegEx
We’re going to put it into an advanced report filter, just like before, but the dimension we’re filtering on is Landing Page (not keyword). So, plug that in, and I get the results I want.
Here is my “bonus hidden treasure”. If you already know about these, hopefully you have found some cool ways to use them. If you don’t, I find the landing pages report one of the best places to use them. These are called Motion Charts. You can change the standard line trend chart to a Motion Chart by hitting the dropdown up here. There are many ways to tweak the chart, but in this example I’m looking at Visits on the X axis and Bounce Rate on the Y axis. I also have the size of the circles set to be visits and the color to be Bounces. Once I’ve absorbed how this all looks, I can “play” the last 30 days and identify pages that had “extreme” or abnormal numbers or rates of bounces. A very cool way to identify pages that may see weird drops and peaks in their bounce rate, or other anomalies.
My last “hidden treasure” isn’t very hidden, it’s something that Google has promoted and brought to the forefront of the interface, but I find that most people aren’t using them. I find that even fewer people are combining the power of RegEx with Advanced Segments.
Advanced Segments allow you to isolate a group of visitors and view most of the reports, just for that segment. You can think of some neat ways to use this; a very effective way to drill into your visitor base. You can access them from almost any report using the button/dropdown up here. To create your own custom segment, hit the button down here.
The interface is very similar to the advanced query option in reports. And, we can use the same expressions we came up with for the report examples. We can actually create an advanced segment, and then analyze the behavior and activity of those visitors that reached our site via those keywords or through those landing pages. We can go look at any report, and only see the data for that segment. Awesome!