Just though I would let you know one of my favourite things about analytics... The site overlay tool - you can load your site within a window pane there, and there are little overlays showing how many visitors clicked what link, how many of those converted etc. Well, I was looking at that, and I noticed that inexplicably, from my home page, a lot of my visitors were clicking on the site's logo to try to get to, well, the homepage where they already were. So, thanks to analytics, I placed a 728x15 adlink unit under the logo, and it so far seems to have doubled my CTR! Man - I am loving analytics. If only they would let me see all of my referring URLs and Page titles on the same page....
I was going to buy an invite on ebay. Cant be bothered waiting for a month or so for google to send me one.
Yeah for some reason that function is not working for me...Everything is 0.0%...in both FF and IE...any thoughts? It seems like an awesome tool.
That site overlay is not working for me either :/ I'm getting an hard time understanding the analytics
It didn't work for me until I forced Drupal, my CMS, to force session cokies, and eliminating PHPSESSIONIDs. Analytics tends to treat pages accessed with different PSIDs as seperate pages. This caused every access to my homepage to appear to analytics as an access to a different page. ie, 1 for every different PSID access. Therefore, when I performed the overlay with no PSID specified, it found 0 accesses and 0 clicks, therefore really screwing over the count, and giving me 0.0% counts. So, perhaps a problem with PHPSESSIONID's on your end?
I must tell you, that is totally over my head. I do not use CMS, I do everything by hand. I am not currently saavy enough to do so. A little OT, but can you reccomend a CMS system for the complete newbie? Also, any thoughts on how to correct a possible PHPSESSIONID's problem on my end now?
The thing I've found with Analytics after a few days of use is that there are just too much options, too much information, too many links to click. You would have to spend days just studying everything the CP offers to fully understand it. Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time. Maybe over the weekend...
Looks like a few of us got invites this week. I am really liking it so far but I also agree with Jack, it's a bit overwhelming with all the options. I really wish there was an easy way to check referring URLs as well, I'd love a list of clickable referring urls. The site overlay is pretty slick though, I wish it would show you which adsense links were clicked.
Moe, JB, I agree with you 100%. It is flooded with options. I also like the ref url feature I have in my current program. It would be a trmemndous help if you coould see which adsense ads were being clicked.
yes it took time to fully understand everything. in the end it's so much fun to see all those data. IMO analytics is a very powerfull tool. jackburton2006 - i miss zhi yi already
I have never seen anything better than Google Analytics to see a clear a picture of what is going on with your pages. It tells what is going wrong, and what could be done to make it right.
there is an option go to settings and edit Main Website Profile Information then there is a field that you can exclude the phpsessionid or what every you want from the url query the field is called Exclude URL Query Parameters: I exclude ccUser, PHPSESSID
I would reccomend Joomla or Drupal. They are pretty complicated, but worth learning as they are both quite powerful. Seriously, they look scary, but are easy to learn.