Showing posts with label Analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Analytics. Show all posts
OK. You now understand how to use some basic web analytics metrics to optimize your PPC campaigns. What's next?
Now it's time to take your PPC optimization to the next level with some more advanced analytics. By intelligently analyzing advanced web analytics data, you can glean new insight and optimize your PPC campaigns like never before.
Site Search
Site search is a gold mine for PPC data. It’s common for PPC managers to use site search data for search query mining. But site search data is also a rich source for:
- Negative keywords. Are terms showing up in site search that aren’t relevant to your business? For example, are people searching for things you don't sell on your ecommerce site? These should definitely be added as negatives!
- Landing page optimization. Site search is like a window into the psyche of your customer. It tells you exactly what they’re looking for. Really drill down into site search from PPC at the landing page level – it’ll show you where your visitors might be confused, and give you an idea of optimizations you need to make.
- Possible product or service additions. In addition to adding negative keywords for products you don’t sell, site search is also a goldmine of customer research data. Your customers are actually telling you what they want to buy from you! If possible, consider adding some of those products to your line.
Remember, companies pay big bucks for “voice of customer” surveys to learn what their customers think and want. With site search, you get a lot of that data for free – so take advantage of it!
Multi-Channel Attribution
If you use Google Analytics and have multi-channel funnels set up, you’ll find another treasure trove of data. Multi-channel funnels show you how many online channels your customers utilize, and in what order, before making a purchase or completing a goal.
The data can be quite eye opening. You might find that some of your broad, awareness-focused keywords that look like they aren't converting really are contributing to the sale – they’re just not generating a last-click sale. However, you may not have ultimately gotten the sale if not for that initial touch.
For example, let’s say you’re a vacation rental owner. In the early stages of vacation rental shopping, people might start out by searching for really broad keywords like “summer travel ideas,” “beach vacation spots,” etc. These terms probably don’t generate a lot of bookings for your destination – but they do give people ideas and options to consider.
Later in the research process, people might search for “beach condo on Lake Michigan.” Now they’re getting closer. And finally, they may end up converting on “Paradise Condos Michigan” – your brand.
If you’re just looking at conversion data in the PPC engines, broad keywords like “beach vacation spots” probably generate lots of clicks and few conversions; and your brand terms generate tons of conversions at a low cost.
You might be tempted to pause your broad keywords in favor of branded terms. This would be a mistake. You could be eliminating consideration terms that are contributing to conversions later on – they just aren't converting on that initial visit.
Here’s an example of actual client data:
The two campaigns with arrows next to them have a significant number of assisted conversions – more than twice as many assists as last-interaction conversions! If you were to pause these campaigns, you’d be missing out on sales.
Advanced Google Analytics Segments
One of the reasons I love Google Analytics, in addition to the fact that it’s free, is its user-friendliness. Google Analytics users can create advanced segments to slice and dice PPC data like never before, without requiring any technical assistance.
If you’ve used smart naming conventions for your PPC campaigns, you can get a bounty of detailed analytics data on your campaigns by using advanced segments. Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you’re an international advertiser, and you’ve created distinct campaigns for each country or region, like this:
In this example, the naming convention is Continent -> Country -> Language -> Brand/Generic -> Search/Display.
Let’s say that your EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) campaigns aren't performing as well as they should be, and you’re not sure why. Instead of running a bunch of PPC reports and Google Analytics reports and mashing them up, you can just create an advanced Google Analytics segment:
This segment will show you all EMEA campaigns with “transactions less than 1,” or in other words, no sales. Then, you can review all of your key analytics measures to see why the non-converting campaigns are under-performing.
What are some ways you use analytics data for PPC? Share in the comments!
When people talk about analytics solutions, they are often referring to Google Analytics. It’s simple to use, flexible, and best of all, it can help you make the right decisions.
There are quite a few analytics solutions available, so which one is the best? Which one helps you make actionable decisions that will increase your bottom line?
KISSmetrics & Crazy Egg co-founder Neil Patel joins us in this interview to give us his thoughts on the current state of analytics.
Eric Siu: Aside from Google Analytics, there seem to be a variety of tools that are effective at gathering actionable data, can you go over some of the best tools in the market and their benefits?
Neil Patel: Sadly there aren’t a lot of tools that provide actionable insights, which is why we built our own product... KISSmetrics. Most analytics solution like to focus on metrics like bounce rates, time on site, and even pageviews.
Unless you are an ad network, pageviews typically won’t tell you much as well as the other metrics I mentioned above. People need to focus on metrics that affect their revenue such as conversion rate, marketing attribution, life-time value of your customers, churn, etc.
ES: A lot of people talk about "actionable data." How do you go about finding this and avoiding so called "vanity metrics"? What are vanity metrics anyway?
NP: First you need to figure out what affects your revenue and profit. There typically are a few variables that affect it for almost any website:
- Traffic sources: What sites, campaigns, ads… are driving your traffic.
- Conversions: What traffic sources are converting.
- Conversion rate: What is your overall conversion rate as well your conversion rate per traffic channel.
- Life-time value: What is each of your customers worth. Not just in the short run, but also in the long run.
The list can of course continue depending on the type of website you have, such as “churn” for subscription and SaaS based businesses. But you can take the metrics above and focus on those metrics and avoid the rest.
For example, instead of measuring your traffic and hoping that it goes up, start measuring your converting traffic. If your overall traffic decreases, but your traffic from the sources that are causing you revenue goes up, that’s all the matters (assuming you don’t have a publishing based business).
Find the 5 or 10 metrics that affect your bottom line and focus on improving them on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. As for the rest of the metrics, you can look at them, but it would be a waste of your time to spend much time on those “vanity” metrics.
ES: With so much data to look at, analytics can get overwhelming. What's the best way to use analytics tools without getting too caught up in the ocean of data?
NP: A lot of companies like having hundreds of reports that allow them to dig into all of their data. The issue is you don’t have enough time to improve all of them and the reality is, most of those reports/data points won’t affect your bottom line.
Instead you should make a list of all of the actionable metrics that affect your bottom line. Then order them in a list, in which number one would the metric that you feel can have the biggest impact.
After you do that, go through that list and make a note of all the metrics that would be easy for you to improve upon. After you’ve done that you should then start focusing on the metrics that will have the biggest impact on your revenue and are the easiest for you to control.
Once you improve that one metric you can either continue to work on it, or you can move onto the next one. By doing this you will continually focus your efforts on improving your revenue versus boosting numbers like pageviews that may not have an impact on your revenue.
ES: A lot of people use Google Analytics today because it's a pretty effective free tool, can you tell us what some of the major flaws are with Analytics?
NP: I also use Google Analytics because it covers a lot of basic analytical data points that most companies should track. But there are a few flaws with it:
- There are too many reports. So many that it drowns people and they aren’t sure what to do.
- In your Google Analytics dashboard they highlight a lot of metrics by default such as pageviews. Although you can adjust your dashboard, a lot of people feel these metrics are important so they focus on them.
- Google Analytics doesn’t force users to track things like goals and conversions. That’s one feature that they should focus more on as if you don’t track your conversions you won’t know which traffic sources are making you money and which ones aren’t.
- In Google experiments (their A/B testing) they focus on conversion rates instead of having people optimize for revenue. You can have a lower conversion rate and make more money potentially by doing things like decreasing price points.
- Google Analytics funnel report only works with future data after you setup the funnel. You can’t use it to analyze your old data.
- Google Analytics can’t help you fine tune your revenue because it doesn’t track your backend metrics. It works in tracking your front end website, but what about your backend… such as upsells, repeat buyers, life-time value… etc.
ES: In one sentence please explain how KISSmetrics is different than Google Analytics?
NP: KISSmetrics helps you maximize your revenue by giving you actionable insights on your customers.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on the metrics that matter most for your business.
- Order the metrics by importance and then focus on them.
- Forget making hundreds of reports and instead focus on the key metrics, figure out a plan, and take action.
- Google Analytics is useful, but it does have its limitations (such as backend tracking).
Fortune 500 companies can expect to push more than a gigabyte a day in raw web analytics data, which can be easily tripled for media companies. Big data is anything anyone ever talks about anymore, so the C-suite has never been more interested in integrated analytics, shining a spotlight on the web analyst team to deliver more than just pretty charts and high-level talking points.
Pulling the information from web analytics software should be less than 10 percent of the work, with an overwhelming 90 percent of time dedicated to deriving insights your organization can use to drive change.
So how to you go from pulling numbers to authoring insights?
1. Compare Trends, Not Just Differences
Web analytics software makes it extremely easy to compare equal periods of adjacent data, such as month-over-month or year-over-year, but other logical comparisons such as average weekday, current day versus the same day last week and other options are much more difficult to configure.
Unfortunately, the best way to find meaning in trends is by exporting data into Excel and crunching these numbers manually or by using pivot tables. You can then add layers of additional analysis such as calculating the long term mean, variance, and standard deviation.
2. Analyze the Significance of Your Data Before Drawing Conclusions
Nothing is worse than a web analyst that “cries wolf” over every little hiccup in a conversion rate. I once had a colleague that was very worried about a campaign’s performance, which dropped off sharply 8 weeks after launch, only later to learn that it was a back-to-school campaign and we were approaching Thanksgiving.
As discussed in the previous tip, calculating standard deviation is an easy way to determine whether the change you see in absolute numbers is statistically significant, if your data falls outside of two standard deviations of the mean.
3. Dig Deeper With Segmentation
Deciding on a driving force for statistically significant change is where you’re likely to spend 90 percent of your time in formulating insights.
Sometimes the driving force behind observed changes can be painfully obvious, such as broken functionality on a website, but other times a change can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. By segmenting your analytics data, you can quickly find commonly-shared behavioural traits that are influencing the changes in trends observed.
4. Correlate Reported Trends With Business Impact
This is the part of the report that should answer: why do I care? As a simple rule of thumb, try to attribute fair assumptions in revenue generation, cost savings, or visitor satisfaction back to the trends you observe.
For instance, did the landing page for a seasonal campaign perform significantly better last year? If so, how quickly could a change be made and what is the overall effect the change would make on bottom-line sales dollars?
5. Make Insights Actionable
The easiest way to make insights actionable is to derive ideas for a complementary optimization program. While there are many places to start optimizing, the goal for your web analytics reports is to include insights that can actually be completed within a short amount of time and have a significant impact.
It neither make sense to test modifications to pages with less than 1 percent of your overall site’s traffic, nor does it make any sense to recommend changes to pages beyond your organization’s control.
How do you make your web analytics reporting more insightful? Share your comments and ideas below!
Convincing others of the importance of organic search and the need for SEO management has admittedly become easier over the years. Many have followed suit with competitors to jump into SEO endeavors to keep pace and many are coming to see that online organic ROI often times is much better than traditional marketing, is better targeted and easier to measure.
However, there remains a skeptical, more “old school” crowd, that still needs to be shown the need for organic search devotion. Whether you work for an agency trying to make a sale or on an in-house team tired of not drawing leads, taking a look at your Google Analytics data with this 10-minute drill down on what organic is doing for you can make a great impact.
Google Analytics has taken great strides in the last year or so by adding multi-channel attribution data to site reporting, in addition to maintaining historical bare bones data that can be quite convincing in itself. We now enjoy an analytical progression where additional data on referred visits that shows organic may be playing more of a part in your site conversion success than previously thought.
What follows are some of the common questions and responses you might get as you're painting the picture.
Why is Organic Search Important?
A very high-level look at analytics in the Traffic Sources>Overview will show that most of the time sites retrieve the lion's share of traffic from organic search. The only time this isn't true is when you:
- Have the most established brand in the land and drive a lot of traffic through the direct channel.
- Have an amazing social (or another type of) campaign rewarding you with a ton of traffic in the referring site channel.
- Have robbed a bank to feed your paid search needs.
While you're looking at the above diagram, take a look at last year. Has the percentage of traffic from organic search increased? Great, let's keep it up. Has it gone down? Not so great, it's time to reverse becoming a web dinosaur and revive your online presence.
Organic Doesn't Convert, We Get Our Leads from Direct Traffic
Oh, really? This is why I so enjoy the advancement in multi-channel attribution.
With this data we can see how much of an impact the assistance of organic search has with other referring channels. Where once it was thought that the direct traffic channel was the hero due to last touch goal tracking, we can now see that many initial visits led ultimately to a direct channel conversion but were initiated via organic search.
Yeah, Yeah, We've Built a Big Brand, That's Why Organic Search Converts
With this in mind we could simply go into organic search reporting, assuming there is conversion goal or ecommerce tracking, and see if this response is really true.
Yes, branded search converts at a higher rate since the visitor was looking for you, but what power does non-branded organic search have beyond basic non-branded keyword filtered conversion reporting?
Once again, we step further into analytics and take a look at what wasn't so apparent on the surface of keyword referral tracking. Look at the Multi-Channel Funnel section of Google Analytics. By assessing the top channel groupings assisting each other to conversions you may quickly see a picture such as this:
One of the top assisted paths is organic search driven and revisited through the direct channel, which you can see contributed with 200 conversions. See how this becomes more convincing once we look at channel assistance?
OK, But Branded Search is Probably What Helps Assist in Direct Traffic Conversions
Another great facet of digging deep in analytics to prove the case for organic search is customized Channel Grouping. We have the ability to not only see where organic search helps other referring channels convert but to create custom channels filtered by either branded or non-branded keywords.
The sub-headline above gets shot down pretty quick when you see something like this:
OK, I'm Convinced!
Looks to me like the direct channel owes non-branded organic search a beer!
While trying to convince a needing party of the importance of organic search and SEO as a referrer of traffic, you can parse data several different ways to prove your point.
The above is a 10-minute method to show from a high level to a very granular level what organic search brings to the table outright and also how it helps the site convert as a whole.
Retailers, get ready! A big holiday season is upon us and an online shopping experience that’s short of smooth is simply unacceptable.
My previous column, "10 Conversion Boosters for Ecommerce Pages", focused on creating an exceptional shopping experience on product pages, but ultimately, the goal is to get those shoppers to checkout. Because this is the most crucial aspect of any transactional website, paying attention to the details can help you build a reputable and sustainable business – and earn you a lot of money.
So to get you on the right track, here’s an 18-tip checklist to boost online checkouts.
1. Progress Bar
Always make sure your checkout process includes a clearly numbered and labeled progress bar. Whether it takes 3 or 30 steps to complete, make sure they are all laid out clearly for your shoppers.
As a side note, an interesting thing to test here is a vertical vs. horizontal layout. Remember that there is no right or wrong. There is only what works for your customers.
Here's an example of a vertical bar:
And a horizontal progress bar:
You’ll notice that the best practices are common in both of them – the steps are numbered and labeled, the current step is highlighted and future steps are indicated but grayed out.
2. Repetition
Don’t ask customers for repetitive information. Once you have asked for the name, address or email, make sure that it appears across the session to that customers. If a shopper needs to type the details again, they may find it cumbersome and simply abandon the process.
3. Information Copying
If the same information is required twice in the checkout process, make sure that a client can copy it instead of entering it again. Better yet, make it as simple as a click of a button. For example, if a shopper has the same billing and shipping addresses, give them the option to use the same information again easily.
4. Distractions
In the checkout process, it's important to remove any distractions so the customer can focus exclusively on the transaction process. Don’t give them a reason to click away and bounce from that page.
Up and cross selling are great, but they need to be tightly related to the purchase in progress. By all means, suggest extras and accessories, but your main nav and any dynamic graphics should be completely avoided in this area.
5. Error Messages
In the event that you are using error messaging, make them friendly and easy to understand. Please, no in-your-face “INCORRECT USER INPUT IN PHONE FIELD!” messages. Instead, try something a little softer like "Please re-enter your telephone number."
If you want to take it a step further, create error messages that relate to your product or brand. Here’s a great yoga error message from Lulu Lemon:
6. Error Areas
In case the checkout error messages occurs on a page other than the page with the errors, preserve the information that the user has already input instead of asking them to enter it again. If they have to re-enter all the information again, they’re very likely to bounce off the page.
7. Pricing
Make sure that you clearly display your prices and shipping charges and taxes before the checkout process is completed. If you’re unable to do so, use a tax estimator like this one:
Whereas it might not be 100 percent accurate, it’s usually close enough. No one wants to buy something before knowing exactly how much it costs.
8. Confusion
Don’t display complex formulas for shipping prices that will confuse the customer. Just calculate the price and show it to them in a definitive manner.
9. Free Shipping
Consider making shipping free, if your business can afford it. You conversion will improve remarkably if you are able to offer this advantage.
10. Delivery Time
Always estimate the delivery time and make sure it’s clearly conveyed. It's always useful if you add a margin to the delivery time. It's better to deliver before the time than to deliver afterward, right?
11. Delivery Method
Make sure to mention the delivery methods available and provide a reference number and tracking information for the shopper to follow up with. Nothing is more frustrating than spending your hard earned dollars on something and having no idea where it is.
12. Simple
Always keep the checkout process simple with as few clicks as possible. The more pages you add between the product page and checkout, the more risky your sales process becomes.
Take the time to lay out your entire process. One technique I use is that I print out every single page of the process, stick them all on a wall (seeing it offline really puts it in perspective), count how many clicks it takes to checkout, and find ways to either combine or eliminate steps.
13. Stock
Display the stock status of your items and do so before the user puts the item in their cart. This way the shopper does not make it all the way to the end of the process, only to find out that the order can not be fulfilled. If you don’t have it, don’t sell it.
14. Reaffirm
Always restate the offer and guarantee/warranty on the order forms. Shopping cart abandonment is always an issue. Do your best to curb this by displaying the offer again on the order form.
I love the 100 percent Unconditional Lifetime Guarantee and Easy Returns policy from Eddie Bauer.
15. Payment Methods
The Internet is a global marketplace, so it is important to make sure that you have as many payment methods available as possible. Make sure that you display all of these methods clearly in the checkout process.
16. Payment Flexibility
Offer different payment options such as three payments or even a "try before you buy" offer (have them pay shipping upfront and the rest over 30 days). Creativity is the name of the game here.
Check out this payment plan from Les Mills: product + free shipping + 3 month payment plan.
And for absolute clarity, a reiterated explanation of how your credit card will be charged:
“Today you will be billed $14.95 plus any tax if applicable. If you choose to keep the product, 30 days from today you will be billed $59.95. 30 days after that you will be billed $59.95. A final $59.95 will be billed 30 days after that.”
17. SURI
No, no. Not Tom Cruise’s kid. SURI stands for simple, usable, reassuring, and intuitive.
Go through your entire checkout process and ask yourself (and others) at every single step:
- Is this simple?
- Is this usable?
- Is this reassuring?
- Is this intuitive?
Only when you’ve answered “yes” to every single one of those will your checkout process be ready.
18. Test & Refine
Even if all these tips are proven best practices, you’ll never really know their effect unless you test. Some of them might work for you, others might not. So implement things in a controlled environment, keep a close eye on your important metrics and never stop testing and refining your process.
So are any of these tips currently in your checkout process? Are there any you’re curious to try? What kind of tests have you run and which ones have yielded positive results? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.
With every new feature, Google Analytics becomes more powerful, but also more complex. Hidden in the nest of menus are four powerful features that you might have overlooked.
1. Page Speed
How many times have you sat as your browser loads and loads a page? How many times have you just given up, hit the back button and found another website?
Page loading time is directly related to both user satisfaction and conversion rate. This is especially true of landing pages and home pages.
Google Analytics now allows you to see the average loading speed of individual pages on your site in the Page Timings report, which you can find on the Content menu:
The report shows you the average page load time, in seconds, which allows you to quickly pinpoint the offending pages that are getting a decent number of page views:
Page attention to the Page Load Sample, which reports the number of times Google has crawled this page to get the Average Page Load Time. A higher number means it’s more reliable as an average. A sample of one or two could be easily skewed by one slow day.
2. In-Page Analytics
Ever since the rise of ultrabooks and mobile phones, screen size has been on a decline from the days of desktops. That carefully considered and immaculately designed call-to-action you created may be beautiful, but what’s the good if most of your visitors can never see it?
Google is sunsetting their standalone Browser Size tool in favor of the In-Page Analytics report built into GA, which you can find in the Content section:
Click on the Browser Size button, next to Show color and under the metrics. You can navigate your site like you would normally do in a browser and the data will refresh.
Hover over the bands on your pages to see what percentage of visitors can see various sections of the page. These data are even more useful than Browser Size, because they’re based on actual visitors instead of Internet averages.
3. The Network Report (aka Reverse IP Lookup)
Google Analytics records a variety of technographics for every visit to your site, things like screen resolution, operating system, etc.
They also record the Network of the visit, which you can find in the Audience section:
Most of the networks listed will be Internet service providers (ISPs), but you will also see company names for offices large enough:
For B2B companies, this is a scrappy way to know which prospects are researching your products. It can be great for prospecting and lead nurturing.
4. Visualize With Motion Charts
Visualizing and comparing data over time is a powerful way to expose trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. But, it can be challenging to do that for multiple data points and segments at once, especially in a conventional spreadsheet format.
Consider the amount of traffic you receive from various channels, which you can see in the Traffic Sources report:
One powerful way to see which channels are driving visitors and their content consumption is the Motion Chart option, which you can activate by clicking on the bubble icon above the data:
Motion Charts uses four tools to help you visualize trends:
- Size: Varies bubble size by metric, so you get a sense of proportion.
- Color: Easily identify the various segments.
- X axis: Plot one metric, such as visits.
- Y axis: Compare to a second metric vertically, such as page views per visit.
When you activate the chart, the size and location will vary according to the metrics you’ve defined as they change over time.
A simple way to get started is to watch traffic and average page views change over time, particularly useful for a blog or content site.
- Go to Traffic
- Choose All Traffic Sources
- Select Medium (Looking for the Primary Dimension options above the data)
- Choose the Motion Chart and hit play
If you use Google Analytics, you know it tracks visitors to your website, the number of pages they viewed, bounce rate and various other metrics. Using Google Analytics, you can determine most popular pages on your site, the pages by which people most commonly enter your site, and the various pages you set as goals for visitors to complete.
What Google Analytics doesn't measure is file downloads. So what happens if one of your goals is to have a visitor to your site download a file, such as a PDF?
There are two key methods of tracking non-HTML file downloads. You can choose to track the download as an event or as something called a virtual pageview. Both choices require you to manually call the tracking code via some in-line JavaScript.
Using Events
Events are built-in to Google Analytics. Simply call your code and Google tracks it in the event.
The trackEvent code needs two pieces of information: category and action. You can also opt to give three more pieces of information: an optional label to better define your event, an optional value to quantify the event numerically, and an optional flag to define whether the event will be used in bounce-rate calculation.
When applied to a PDF download, it would look something like this:
< a href="myfile.pdf" onClick="gaq.trackEvent('Downloads','PDF','myfile.pdf','1.50',true)"/>
This line of code creates a hyperlink to my file.pdf and tells Google Analytics to track an event every time the link is clicked. The event will register in the downloads category. "PDF" would be the action and the label is my file.pdf. The line also sets $1.50 as the value and disallows this visitor action from triggering a bounce.
Using Virtual Pageviews
Virtual pageviews use the same trackPageview call already installed on your website. By default, that pageview tracker tracks the current URL in the browser. However, if an optional URL is passed to the trackPageview call, it will track that URL instead of the current page. When used in the PDF download example, it looks similar to this:
< a href="myfile.pdf" onClick="gaq.trackPageview('/myfile.pdf')">
Like before, this line of code tracks the my file.pdf download when the link is clicked. This time, however, the download will be tracked in the Content section of Google Analytics. Since you're tracking a pageview, this automatically will count as an additional page, thereby never registering a bounce.
What's the Difference?
Does it matter? Each has their own merits. Goals can be measured as pages or events. Both have funnels or flows to follow a visitor's path through your site.
Strictly speaking, a file download isn't a page to be viewed. So marking a pageview might not be the most precise solution.
Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate at Google, literally wrote the book on Google Analytics. I reached out to him recently, asking which method he preferred:
Thom Craver: Which do you prefer for tracking non-HTML file downloads - virtual pageviews or events?
Justin Cutroni: I like to use events. As long as your tool support events. I don't think that non-HTML files [are] pages, so events make more sense to me.
TC: Fundamentally is there a practical difference where you would choose to use events over virtual pageviews?
JC: There are almost no differences between an event and pageview. Both are used in time calculation. Both can be configured as a conversion. The only slight difference is that a virtual pageview can be used in a Goal Funnel. However, Event Flows will show the progression through a series of events. While it's not the same as a conversion funnel, it's getting closer.
TC: Should I change what I'm using based on your answer? Or is it enough just to say I'm actually tracking and measuring?
JC: If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Reconfiguring analytics, and changing your metrics can cause a lot of headaches. While I firmly believe that your analytics needs to change as your marketing tactics and strategies change, I also believe in data consistency. At the end of the day, this isn't about right or wrong. This is about getting data. And if the data works for you, then you're OK.
Are you tracking file downloads? If so, which method do you use? Tell us in the comments below.
A very special thank you to Justin Cutroni. For more on how to implement events or virtual pageviews and other features in Google Analytics, check out Thom Craver's Introduction to Analytics session on Day 1 of SES Chicago, taking place November 12-16.
