Analytics - The Pringle

Google Analytics 1 visit 00.00.00 avg time on site, 100% bounce rate

Posted by on January 23, 2012 in Analytics

Find the annoying 1 visit, no time on site and 100% bounce rate visits in Google Analytics? Frustrating seeing 1 visit, but there is no time? Not possible right?

Don’t panic, it is an actual visit. Yes, the visitor did leave after viewing 1 page. Keep in mind, that Google Analytics works with sessions. So if a visitor does not view an additional page on the site, Google Analytics will not have data on how long the visitor viewed the initial page. It won’t be able to pass the initial pageview data to the script on the following page.

Time to look at other metrics than fixate on avg time on site for a single visit.

What is bounce rate? Answer is not always call to actions

Posted by on August 19, 2009 in Analytics

Most people may very well be aware of what bounce rate is exactly, while there are still some that may misunderstand this metric, however it’s crucial to understand this metric correctly, otherwise actions that may need to occur to improve a site based on this misunderstanding may not deliver the results you may expect.

Avinash Kaushik, in a interview on WebProNews regarding bounce rate, mentioned “I came, I saw, puked and left” as the quick lamens explanation, while the technical explanation for bounce rate according to Avinash is “Single Pageview Session” for the bounce rate metric. In essence, you will notice when going through your analytics stats that visitor bounces are in line with a visit without navigating further (no clicky clicky), unless an event is triggered during the visit. In contrast, Blogs tend to have a higher bounce rate as visitors are usually there to read an article they found in a search or link, and will leave when complete (as said, in most cases).

Google Analytics subdomain tracking, custom script & filters

Posted by on May 17, 2009 in Analytics

There are a few pro’s and con’s to setting up individual Google Analytics website profiles for subdomains VS using a custom script to track to track your visitors across a website’s various subdomains. This post will cover using a custom Google Analytics script to track your visitor data across various subdomains within your website. If you are concerned on how you will be able to differ between the various subdomains from your analytics data, not to worry, i will cover that further within this post.

Google Analytics – creating multiple goals

Posted by on April 21, 2009 in Analytics

For many Google Analytics professionals this may be fairly straight forward, however many people using analytics on occasion require more than 4 goals for the website profile they are currently tracking.

The answer is very simple, a website profile is exactly that, it is a profile for a website. Need more than 4 analytics goals for a website? The solution, simply create a duplicate website profile for you site.

Login to your Google Analytics account, select your analytics account where the website you are currently tracking is located. Remember that analytics accounts contain website profiles. The analytics account dashboard will then display the website profiles that are associated with the selected analytics account and it is from here that you are able to create additional website profiles, setup goal tracking and manage filters.

Exclude filter in analytics for WordPress post/page previews

Posted by on January 29, 2009 in Analytics

I’ve never had to really create an exclude filter within Google analytics before, never had the need to exclude pages/queries from sites i’ve worked on. However i always need to preview my posts, allows me the opportunity to take another scan over for basic errors and to tweak images (perfectionist at heart).

I’ve hard coded my tracking script into the footer of my wordpress theme, so previewing posts is always tracked within the analytics. No point in creating a custom exclude filter for my home and office ADSL line, as the IP address always changes as well. So the other solution would be just to exclude all “preview=true” URI’s from being tracked, to help having to see my previews in my top content pages breakdown in analytics.