Web Analytics for Business Insights and intelligence

What is Mobile Web Analytics?

Mobile Analytics is no different from Web Analytics other then here we study the user behavior in the WAP website (Mobile Website) using data collected from the mobile users (Data such as visitor information, carrier information mobile used and so on..) to increase ROI through Mobile Users and to target the specific carriers or segmented Users.

Why Mobile Analytics? and How will it be useful?

Insights or Gold in Avinash’s term extracted through the data collected can be used to target the users to enhance and to helps in targeting the segmented users, here is more to say how mobile analytics would be helpful,

• Improve a WAP website or understanding of website architecture.
• Mobile campaign’s audience.
• Mobile Advertising
• Mobile Search Marketing
• Text Campaigns
• etc.

What do we measure?

Different vendors has claims to measure different metrics, some of the useful and most commonly measured metrics are

• Visitor Identification
• Mobile specific information
  • Mobile phone device
  • Mobile network operator
  • Country and Language

How do we Measure?

hmmm this is where the implementation jumps in, which I am going to write it in my next blog post.

Who are the players/vendors?

1. Omniture - With the release of SiteCatalyst 14.1, it has introduced mobile analytics capabilities which can measure the performance of mobile marketing campaigns, Omniture can measure,

1. Visitor Identification
2. Mobile Device Reporting
3. Mobile-Specific Collection Enhancements
4. Geo-location and Carrier Identification

2. Bango - To provide the highest levels of accuracy, Bango provides two different techniques for capturing mobile metrics - link tracking for campaign analysis and page tracking for site analysis.

More on Bango from MarketWatch

Features and benefits

• Site analysis - measure and improve your website for mobile traffic
• Campaign analysis - measure your ROI using independent data
• Unique visitors - how many people are visiting your site?
• Geo-locate your visitors by country
• Operator identification – including virtual networks (e.g. Boost)
• Handset information – make, model and features
• Compare goals against your campaigns and web pages

Source - MarketWatch

3. Amethon - A server side mobile analytics solution that sniffs network packets to track 100% of the http packets traveling between the handset and the mobile web server building real time analytics.

• Bandwidth (total, average per visit, total per file type)
• Hits (average per visit, number of downloads, page view breakdown)
• Visits (entry page, average duration, click paths, referring search engine)
• Visitors (browser type, user agent, operating system)
• Handsets (make, model, screen resolution)
• Mobile Operator (country of origin, operator name)
• Geo Location (country of origin, RDNS lookup)

Source - Wiki - Mobile Analytics

4. http://blog.sitestat.com/ - an another web analtyics service provider

5. Wapalizer - http://wapalizer.com/home/

6. Mobilytics - http://www.mobilytics.net/

7. http://mobilestats.co.uk/ - an another vendor which provides mobile stats

I will write about the Mobile Implementation in my next blog post.

Updated - 20080929

Found another mobile tracking tool

8. Clicky Web Analytics - Web Analytics on your iPhone - you can see some of the screenshots

Update - 20091104

9. ADMob.com - AdMob connects people who want to buy ads with people who want to monetize their mobile traffic through the AdMob Marketplace. We make advertising and publishing easy with solutions and tools to meet your unique needs.

I had a request within my company to instrument Form Analysis plug-in, so I thought why not I write about the measuring form performance or the term “Form Analytics”,

• What is a form? What are its key issues
• What to measure while doing the form analysis (to know about causes of failure or the reason for abandonment of form?)
• Solutions to track form interactions
• Setup and Configuration of Form analysis plug-in
• And the Usage part of form analysis.

What is a form? What are its key issues

Form is a bridge between the user and the site owner or just a info collecting junction from the visitors or in a bit technical terms Form is just the bucket or the bowl which has many elements used to collects the data from the user, and form has to be organized such way user should feel happy about filling it up rather it should be projected in such a way user should fill in completely.

Normally, you must have seen there is lot about the analysis, tips, benefits suggestion on most of the web analytics concepts however you must have not observed clubbing all the above along with the implementation and instrumenting part of it, lets see how well I could put forward the combination of both.

Form filling is of one of the checkpoint or the lead generation stage for most of the website, wherein form has to be clearly optimized to generate the lead i.e. it should be projected in such a way user should not get bugged up in filling rather they should fill it in no time with out compromising in collecting the relevant data. This makes analyzing the form more comprehensively where its border line in making use to convert from pre sales to post sales.

Through form we tend to learn lot about the user, what they need and what they are looking, it’s most necessary to make them to fill the required form with in the website and this is the issue/challenge here and we are trying to analyze how quick and how much easy we can make the user to fill the forms.

What do we need to measure while doing the form analysis (to know about causes of failure or the reason for abandonment of form?)

This is a good question, here is where we need to make the decision, we need to decide what to capture to take a better action on optimizing the form lets break this into different parts,

1. What we need from the form? or who have actually filled it?
2. Possible reason for not completing the form or Why user just Abandoned it,
3. Form look and feel.

So generically, we need to know why the form left unfilled and also why it was completed (you must be surprised to see this question have a look into below description)

1. What we need from the form or analyzing who have actually filled it.

If we get the successful form completion that’s not the end and don’t think you have achieved perfection.

There is lot many questions need to be answered even after form is filled completely like,

• Time Taken in filling up the complete form
• Have they filling it sequentially? Or randomly, which form element was filled first.
• Have the user filled the entire form element or anything left out which was kind of optional.

Above details would be much helpful in further optimizing complete form.

2. Possible reason for not completing the form or Why user just Abandoned it,

Again you need to know what could be possible reason in not filling the form completely,

• Technical problem? Like browser compatibility issue? etc.
• Length of the form, too much of field elements.
• Naming conventions, good labeling of each of the field is also important.
• May be even the security issue.

3. Form look and feel.

Presentation is amazingly important wherever you go and whichever field you take, for should look beautiful for user to complete it.

Solutions to track form interactions

Keeping all the above questions, reasons and analysis in mind, we need the web analytics solutions to track all the user interaction within the form and that’s the need of the plug-in to the existing solution.

As I am currently working on the Omniture SiteCatalyst Solution, it has a plug-in for form analysis which you can add to existing code, you might have to request this plug-in from your omniture account manager.

Setup and Configuration of Form analysis plug-in

As I had mentioned above you need to request for Form analysis plug-in from your account manager, insert into your JavaScript file.

There are 2 sections in the plug-in,

• Configuration section.
• Function definition section.
• Form Testing
• Metrics

Configuration section

You need to decide, whether data need to tracked into traffic reports or the commerce reports and set the config variable accordingly. Under commerce you can measure mainly three events a. Abandon, b. Success, c. Error. Based on the decision on viewing the reports (Traffic or Commerce) configuration code will get changed.

Three main configuration variables useCommerce - set to be true if you are using commerce reports, varUsed - need to be set with all the variables used to populate for example prop or eVar variables and eventList - if commerce is used then event list needs to be triggered on success, abandon or error.

Function definition section

On any event like Success, Abandon or Error you have to call below function,

For example if the user while filling the credit card details enters 10 digits instead of 16 then you can call the plug-in function along with the details like error type, page name, form name and description of the error.

sendFormEvent( error_type, page_name, form_name, element_error)

Form Testing

Have a look at the below image, you can see event3 is triggered on successful submission of the form and eVar1 is used to fill the details.

Click on the image for clear picture.

Metrics/Reports

Click on the image for clear picture.

And the Usage part of form analysis

Here the main theme is to provide the comprehensive analysis of each of the users or a bigger picture of information on Success and Failures of the form filling.

Main metrics I would recommend to collect is

• Time Spend in filing the form
• Any unfilled elements
• What stage user abandoned the form?
• Rate of abandonment.

Updated:

1. I have found some of the interesting article that was published on form analytics, one which was impressed me was from Click Tale but I am not sure how difficult to implement it to get those details of data.

2. I have also found the way of implementing of form optimization in one of the article which might interests one who is using Google Analytics as the web analytics solution  “Optimize Form Length with Input Analysis“

I had recently published a blog post “Google Crawled my blog post in 32 min” well its no surprise or it’s not a miracle anymore, it’s actually a part of the blog services which Google accepts once after we published blog posts.

I started looking into deeper on how does Google actually crawls so quickly and later I found its a part of any blog service that it pings back all the blog search engines, and you can call it as “ping-o-matic“, In my observations once its published it will crawl and index quickly, however once its indexed it doesn’t re-crawl it again as quicker as it does for the first time, rather we never known when does it index for the second time if you make any further changes for your first time published post.

Just to give an example,

When there is a recent bomb blast in Bangalore, I was aware thousands of people start searching with keyword “bomb blasts Bangalore” however I wanted to check with the low traffic relatively so I updated my blog just with the heading, “multiple bomb blasts Bangalore” mentioning about the current situation of bomb blast thinking and also testing on a. whether it crawls very quickly posts which are recently published b. whether it will re-crawl if I edit it for the second time (You don’t believe my blog got suspended due to heavy traffic in a short time, Later I called the server administrator to make it to live again)

The moment I published it immediately crawled and my site was appearing in the second page for the keyword “bomb blasts Bangalore” and first page for the keyword “multiple bomb blasts Bangalore”, thats the ping effect within wordpress for every post published.

My second tests is to edit with the heading if it recrawls the changes, I changes my post heading to “Bomb blast in Bangalore, This time its Multiple” however even after 24hrs of time it not crawled the edited content.

Just to mention little bit more about the ping effect for Google, Last year Google has announced “Google Blog Search Pinging Service” where we can either ping Google Manually or We can set it for Automatic. Any Wordpress installed by default pings Blog search engines automatically once posts are published.

Here are the inferences

• There is NO surprise if the Google crawls the recently published post immediately and ranks in top of the page.
• Google might not crawl of index the edited content of the same posts.
• Blogs have or can have auto pinging service which pings all the blog search engines once posts are published.

Let me know your thoughts please, Just in case

There is a multiple bomb blast in Bangalore, 1. Mysore Road and 2. Madiwala. News says 2 dead and many injured.

Mysore road is very near to my home, hoping not much people have injured, We were thinking Bangalore is the safest place to live and terrorist have started targeting Bangalore (Bengaluru) too.

Now, as I said its multiple.. its 6 different places now, Near Mallya hospital, Richmond Circle etc .. Not known how many people have dead. This bomb blast is really scaring people thinking of migrating into Bangalore.

Waiting for further news …

The blasts took place at 1.30 pm in Nayandahalli, 1.50 pm in Madivala (2 blasts) and 2.10 pm in Adugodi.

One person was killed in four blasts that rocked Nayandahalli, Madivala, Adugodi areas on the outskirts of Bengaluru on Friday. Two blasts were reported in Madivala

Updated: Now is 8 Bomb blast registered.

You should also read How “HP Analytics” handled Black Friday 7/25

Its pretty much handy, infact, i had observed few days back while reading my mail its similar to Google Experimental Search - Shortcuts

When I say shortcuts, its just for moving the mail cursor for up and down along with the opening part of it which comes very handy have a look at the shortcut table below,

Key       Action
J              Selects the next result.
K             Selects the previous result.
O            Opens the selected result.
<Enter>     Opens the selected result.
/             Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>     Removes the cursor from the search box.

Did I said about “Google Experimental Search” above? have a look at clicking on itself. 3 new ideas, not so new a. Alternate views for search results b. Keyword suggestions. c. Keyboard shortcuts

Google had crawled my very new blog post in just 32 min !!!

I don’t believe this, rather even you don’t believe I am sure, I was started writing a blog post WATTT- Web Analytics Tagging & Testing Tool and I just clicked on the publish button and I kept tweaking for few min reading it for minor corrections, accidentally when checked if Google had crawled my site as my blog domain is kind of new, Surprisingly I saw Google had crawled the post which I have just published !!! Have a look at the screenshot

Please feel free to drop a comments if any of you had seen similar instance.

I am yet to define my goals for my blog comprehensively, though I have initially thought I should write a very comprehensive posting on Web Analytics Implementation,

As a Site Owner or as an Analyst you must be surely interested in knowing Which Web Analytics Tool does your competitors use, and what Ad Network or the Behavioral Targeting or any other tools they are using.

I found a very interesting Firefox plug-in WASP - Web Analytics Solutions Profiler, to make it more understandable or readable for users who are into Web Analytics Implementation, I would love to call it as WATTT- Web Analytics Tagging & Testing Tool a Firefox extension for implementation specialists who wants to do quality testing and understand how their web analytics solution is implemented. However, the tools official name still remains WASP its known as WASP - Web Analytics Solutions Profiler in the Industry.

I have been into the Implementation from last 2 years, and in my experience the most difficult part of implementation process is testing that is checking if the tracking code matches our requirements. Specially while testing the flash implementations where we need to check each of the Interactions.

Before I goahead and talk about the feature of this plugin, I should say about the author and devloper of this plugin, Its developed by Stéphane Hamel, leading Canadian voice for web analytics. He’s a well known speaker, educator and blogger having presented at eMetrics Summit, as a tutor for the award-winning UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics and a blogger at blog.immeria.net. for more details please visit his website immeria.net

What WASP can do?

1. It can detect any Web Analytics, Ad Network, and Behavioral Targeting Tools which is currently available.
2. It displays all the beacon breakups that is Query Strings & cookie breakdown (whether its first party or third party)
3. It make sure all the pages are tagged correctly and data being captured appropriately
4. For more comprehensive features please visit, http://wasp.immeria.net/index.htm

Getting started with WASP

It’s very simple to install and yeah its only compatible with Firefox, click on the below link, and follow the instructions.

Once you restart your browser and you can see icon on your status bar and there you go you are up with Web Analytics Tagging Testing Tool

As you browse the web, information about the web analytics solutions detected by WASP will be automatically shown in the sidebar.

Let me show you the screenshot,

Open up any of the website in status bar its shows which web analytics tool the website is using, if you click on it, it opens up in the side bar which shows up all the detailed information, such as query strings and cookies using within the webpage.

Below screenshot shows which analytics tool does Dell.com is using.

You can see above, Dell is using Omniture SiteCatalyst, and also notice that when you highlight any of the variables, it also shows what is the Usage of it inside the reports. I have highlighted c1, in details section it shows Usage: Custom Insight (prop) 1.

Please Note: This tool belongs to : http://wasp.immeria.net/index.htm Thanks to Immeria.net