Getting Started FAQs: Web Analytics

 

You must be an admin so that you can create an organization or edit the settings for an existing organization. The web analytics settings for an organization are found on the Edit Organization page.

 

This tutorial tells you what you need to know about getting started with web analytics. There is a link at the bottom of each topic that takes you to the next topic.

 

To make web analytics work, you must put tracking code on every page in your Web site that you wish to track. There is an “Adding Tracking Code” topic which is part of the overall “Getting Started with Web Analytics” tutorial. We recommend that you view the full tutorial; however, you can view the specific topic about tracking code here.

 

This tutorial explains the process. After setting up the integration, you will have much more powerful segmentation and reporting tools than if you use Email Marketing alone.

 

There are several fundamental report types. It is important to understand that the reports in themselves only provide general information about your site. Each report is enhanced through the use of visitor segmenting.

 

Search Report - Search keywords that visitors used to reach your site, broken out by search engine.

 

Site Overview - Overview of your site: entry and exit pages, overall visitor count, overall search terms, visitors, unique visitors etc.

 

Campaign Report - A list of your ad campaigns, with the cost of each, the revenue generated and the final ROI.

 

Funnel Report - A configurable view of stages and page groups within your site showing how visitors moved through them.

 

Data Dissection Report - An extended tabular report that correlates metrics with visitor behaviors.

 

Click Fraud Report - Listing of ad campaigns with behavior that looks like potential click fraud.

 

A segment is a group of visitors that you identify based on some Web site browsing criteria. All the reports in Web Analytics are broken down by segment; this means, for example, that you can determine the search keyword that results in purchases (by segmenting the visitors who see the purchase page) and the advertising campaign that produces the most visitors (by segmenting the visitors referred from that campaign). There are many other complex analysis scenarios.

 

The Viewer is a software program that you can download and run on your computer; it is used to analyze a local copy of the dataset. The Viewer offers all the reports that are accessible from the Lyris HQ interface as well as the Navigation Report and the ability to create Segments and Funnels. After they are created, you can export the Segments and Funnels to Lyris HQ so that they can be viewed by everyone.

 

Tracking parameters are the key to successful analysis of campaigns. Everything about tracking conversions, PPC keywords, and successfully associating purchases with the originating campaign depends on a landing page with a unique URL where visitors arrive when they click through. Because the URL must be unique, it's impossible to construct a different physical page for each campaign; you'll quickly need a very large number of pages. Instead, you can add tracking parameters to the end of the URL. The result looks something like this:

 

http://www.top5flicks.com/Action/signup/?bh_se=adwords&bh_camp=Action%20Rentals&bh_adg=Action%20Rentals&bh_head=one&bh_i=41

 

Everything after the question mark is called the query string. This string consists of five parameters; each parameter comes in two parts: a variable (the text on the left side of the equals sign) and a value (the text on the right side).

 

Here are the five parameters in the string (separated by an ampersand (&)):

 

bh_se=adwords

bh_camp=Action%20Rentals

bh_adg=Action%20Rentals

bh_head=one

bh_i=41

 

Explanation of the variables:

 

bh_se: the search engine the visitor came from. This is typically "adwords" (Google) or "panama" (Yahoo)

bh_camp: the name of the campaign

bh_adg: the Ad Group the Creative belongs to.

bh_head: the headline of the Creative

bh_i: used to identify similar or recreated Creatives.