Analytics for Twitter
If your a Twitter user, you will no doubt know that there are no good tools for providing analytics other than your friend count and followers. Check out Ad.Ly’s new analytics system at Ad.Ly Analytics
In its free version you can see the following:
- Gender
- Breakdown of engaged or disengaged followers
- Who your top 4 most influential followers are
- Time of day you tweet and get re-tweeted
For $9.99/month you can have access to a more in-depth report that details.
Creating Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
If your one of the few left who haven’t taken advantage of advanced segmentation in Google Analytics, stop reading this post and give them a try… ok, well, keep reading 
Advanced segments allow a good Google Analytics user become a Great analytics user – for that matter, a great internet marketer.
I manage PPC campaigns for clients over at this internet marketing company and as such, build many different campaigns with different focuses. Some are interested in leads, others sales and some understand the importance of “micro conversions” or steps in the overall sales process. For clients who understand the value of micro conversions (visits to key pages, downloads of white-papers, views of video’s etc), setting up goals around these items is your first step. With advanced segments, you are able to take aspects of traffic and measure its performance against these goals.
How to Create an Advanced Segment
1. First, have a plan for what element of traffic you want to analyze. For this example, lets look to segment all “paid” traffic as my client wishes to see how his paid ads are performing in Google, Yahoo and MSN in addition to the paid banner ads.
2. To do this, pull “medium” from the dimensions drop down over into the dotted line box, the condition should be “matches exactly” and then type “cpc” into the box.
3. Click “add or statement” and repeat step 2 but type “banner” in the box where “cpc” was typed before. NOTE: In order for this segment to result in traffic, your banner ads links need to be tagged properly using Google’s URL builder and the medium function will have needed to be tagged with “banner”
4. Be sure to name the advanced segment – “Paid Traffic” for example would make a nice title.
5. Click “test segment” to ensure your filter is working properly and results in a positive number of visitors.
6. Save the segment and return to the Google Analytics dashboard.
Above the date range, there is a drop down for Advanced Segments, select this and open up the options for Google’s pre-defined Advanced Segments, and (to the right) your new segment. Select the option from the check box and vola! You should now see how your paid traffic performs in comparison to All traffic (or any other advanced segment you created).
Google Analytics Filter – Display Full URL
Filter Name: Display Full URL
Filter Purpose: This filter comes in handy when you are tracking multiple sub domains or third party domains in one profile. Before I continue, if you are attempting to do this, make sure you read how here and understand that you will “break” the site overlay report. Applying this filter will show you the full URL from you main site, sub domain or third party domain.
Filter Difficulty: Easy
Instructions:
Create a test profile – always a good idea when testing with filters.
Filter Name: Display Full URL
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Advanced
Field A -> Extract A = Referral – (.*)
Field B -> Extract B = User Defined – $A1
Case Sensitive – NO
Filter Credit: Reuben Yeu – Online Marketing and SEO Consultant
Google Analytics Filter – IP Addresses
Filter Name: IP Address
Filter Purpose: Whether your website serves a large organization or is a small “mom and pop shop” filtering out internal traffic can make a big difference in the statistics you generate from Google Analytics – or any analytics package for that matter. If you measure Goals (and I strongly recommend you do), in general, an internal visitor to the site (employee etc) is less likely to complete a goal (form fill out or purchase) as that isn’t their intention of visiting the site. Further to that, many large organizations set their computers to default to the company home page as the first site a browser loads when opening. As a result, you would most likely see an abnormally high bounce rate, low page views and skewed numbers to your return visitor stats. Thus, filtering out your internal traffic is very important.
Filter Difficulty: easy – moderate (depending on if you have multiple IP ranges to filter).
Instructions:
1. Make a record of the individual IP addresses and a list of the IP ranges for your company.
2. Create individual IP filters for the individual IP addresses, be careful to use the proper regular expressions when creating your filter. For example, the IP address 173.32.223.162 should be entered in as 173\.32\.223\.162
3. Take your IP ranges and enter them into Google’s handy IP Address Exclusion generator here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55572
An individual IP Address Exclusion should look like this:
An IP range filter, using Google’s tool above, should look like this:
Filter Name: IP Address Filter
Filter Type: Exclude All Traffic from an IP Address
Filter Field: IP Address
Google Analytics Filter – Force Lowercase
Filter Name: Force Lowercase
Filter Purpose: To ensure URL’s and pages that can be visited/accessed using both upper case and lower case characters are reported as the same page. For example:
www.analyticscookies.com/Google-Analytics.html
www.analtyticscookies.com/google-analytics.html
are reported as the same page. Without this filter, Google Analtyics will report these pages as unique, when they should be the same.
Filter Difficulty: easy
Instructions: As with every filter, be sure to create a test profile so as to keep your main site data in tact.
Filter Name:Force Lowercase
Filter Type: Custom Filter, Lowercase
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Credit: Google
