Last week we introduced Logaholic 7.1, which adds a feature than can automatically analyze Web Analytics trends. We call it the News report. Since we’re pretty excited about this feature, let’s go ahead and take a closer look.

Source: xkcd

What’s the problem?

The problem with checking your Web Analytics regularly is that it often takes a lot of time because there is so much information.

Rather than just looking at a bunch of numbers on a screen you want to try to find meaning in the data. Why are my visitor numbers going up or down? Is my traffic from Google converting into customers? Where did that sudden spike in pageviews come from?

To answer these questions we need to closely look at multiple reports, charts and graphs, which can be time consuming.

The premise of the News report is that it will analyze the trends in your data for you, so you don’t have to spend any time on that.

The News report will show you a text digest, highlighting any noteworthy events in your data. To do this the News report looks at a number of Web Analytics trends. These are:

• Visitors and pageviews
• Country trends
• Page trends
• Referrer trends
• Error trends
• Conversion trends
• Keyword trends
• Bot/Crawler trends

The report identifies any significant events by calculating the standard score (also called Z-Score). For weekdays, the average used to evaluate an observation are based on all weekdays within the selected date range. Saturdays and Sundays use separate averages for each day.

In statistics, the standard score is the signed number of standard deviations by which the value of an observation or data point is above the mean value of what is being observed or measured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_score

The report will allow you to choose a default z-score, which will determine how sensitive it is to changes in your data. This will result in an increase or decrease the number of news items you see in the report.

Let’s take a look at an example below:

Notice the news items are categorized by topic, and color coded to reflect the rise or decrease observed.

The topic of any news item can be clicked to pull up a context menu which will allow you to investigate the issue further. The menu will give you quick access to different reports in the software like trends, conversion rates or anything else that is relevant to the context of the news item.

This makes the News report the ideal starting point for investigating your traffic. It will give you an instant overview of the most important events that occurred in your data since the last time you looked and provide you with a targeted entry point for deeper analysis.

The News report is available in Logaholic 7.1 and were happy to announce that it’s in the free version so everyone can use it out of the box.

We’re happy to announce the immediate release of Logaholic version 7.1. This version adds a range of new reports and features.

Introducing the News report

Everybody loves a good chart. A line chart is a great for spotting changes and trends, but there are a lot of charts to cover. Sometimes you just don’t have the time.

That’s where the Logaholic News Report comes in. It analyzes all the trends for you and singles out events that are noteworthy. That way you have an instant overview of any important changes or events in your data.

Any news item can be clicked to bring up a context menu that will allow you to investigate further. It’s the perfect starting point for a quick dive into your stats!

Introducing UTM reports

In this version we’ve added full support for UTM parameters. We’ve included a UTM breakdown report and separate reports for all 5 parameters so you can view your traffic by source, campaign, medium, term and content.

Any UTM parameter can be easily turned into a Logaholic segmentation filter for further analysis in other reports.

New javascript tracking tag

We’ve also updated our tracking code. It now collects more data and has even less impact on browsing speed. If you are currently using our tracking tag, it’s important to update the code in your pages when you upgrade to Logaholic 7.1. Of course, it’s also backward compatible with older versions of the tag.

The new data allowed us to add these new reports:

• Ad Blockers; shows you what percentage of visitors are using an Ad blocker
• Page Load Time; show you the average time it took for your website’s pages to load in the browser
• Time on Page; shows you how long visitors spend on any particular page.
• Page Scroll Depth: shows you how far your visitors scrolled down a page.

You can combine our new javascript tracking tag with analyzing your log files. That way you get the benefits from both data collection methods.

Adwords traffic verification

We’ve also added 2 reports to help you verify the traffic you may be getting from Google Adwords campaigns.

Adwords Clicks per Day shows you how many unique visitors clicked, how many clicks per user and how many of those might be bots.

Adwords Clicks per User shows you the Adwords traffic on a user level, down to the actual IP number.

This information has already helped several Logaholic users get refunds from Google on some of their ad expenditure.

Logaholic 7.1 is now available on our site, please enjoy and let us know what you think!

Logaholic Web Analytics will support the use of UTM url parameters in it’s next release, Logaholic 7.1.

What are UTM parameters?

UTM parameters are a way of tracking your advertising and marketing efforts. The idea is to “tag” incoming links with the information you need to measure your marketing performance.

There are 5 variants used by marketers to track campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. Wikipedia breaks them down as follows:

Here is an example of a link that uses UTM parameters:

http://www.logaholic.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_camp=Logaholic71

This link would allow us to identify the traffic source (Facebook), the ad payment type (CPC, cost per click) and the name we’ve given this campaign.

Using this information we can segment our traffic into discrete groups, so we can measure the conversion rates for each one.

Urchin Tracking Module parameters (or UTM) were first introduced by Urchin. Urchin later became Google Analytics. As a result, UTM parameters have become widely used.

If you’ve used UTM parameters in the past and have the log files for your website, you can now use Logaholic to analyze all your previous and current campaign data.

Logaholic 7.1 will be available early next week, so stay tuned.

By “Fake”, I mean that this traffic it is not generated by humans, but by a myriad of scripts, bots and other automated processes. Some are well intentioned, but most are not. These busy little bees scan for vulnerabilities on your site, wordpress login pages, test scripts and a 1001 other things.

If you only use javascript tags to collect data about your website visitors (i.e. like Google Analytics), you have absolutely no idea that this is going on. You have no idea that so much of your bandwidth and server resources are being consumed by agents that are trying to damage you.

The only way to find out what all these creepy crawlers are up to is to analyze your website’s log file. However, the results can be overwhelming compared to tag based data collection.

Ignorance is bliss

Bots usually don’t read javascript files, which means they do not show up in javascript based solutions like Google Analytics. As a result, the numbers you see mostly represent real humans. This is a nice side effect, because for marketing purposes we are usually only interested in humans.

If you’re analyzing log files, this becomes more difficult. You have a lot more information, but how to see which visitors are real and which ones are not?

As the number of malicious bots has skyrocketed over the last year, log file based analytics have diverged more and more from the javascript based numbers.

Until now, log file based analytics has mostly relied on bot detection via the information in the user agent. This catches most of the “legitimate bots” which are left out of most reports by default.

Evil bots however try to pose as real users so these usually slip through the cracks, inflating the number of visitors compared to a javascript tracker.

Best of both worlds

To solve this problem, Logaholic 7 now features “Behavior Based” bot detection. This classifies all clients as a “bot”, unless it behaves like a human. For example, when the client requests both html and images or javascript during a visit.

In terms of bot detection, you’re now guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.

Most reports in Logaholic display only “human” data by default, but can be switched to “all traffic” to see what the creepy crawlers are up to.

This way you have useful reports from the marketing perspective, but also from the security and IT perspective.

All new Logaholic profiles using log files will be automatically set to Behavior Based detection. Existing profiles can be switched manually – but prepare for a massive drop in visitors … and don’t shoot the messenger 🙂

Get Logaholic 7 now!

Today we have a guest post by Gilad Maayan from the Web Analytics & BI Wiki:

In today’s fast-paced industry, companies face multiple challenges as they attempt to form a solid marketing strategy that meets business objectives. These challenges include managing marketing technology across the organization, difficulties in reaching prospects, driving customer engagement across a multitude of platforms, and tackling the complex world of web analytics.

Apparently, tackling analytics for your website is a challenge even for seasoned marketers. A recent survey by Think with Google uncovered specific challenges related to analytics technologies – namely, 61% of marketing decision makers struggled to access or integrate the data they needed in 2016.

Here are three types of web analytics challenges businesses are dealing with today and some ideas on how to solve them.

1. Too Many Metrics

In today’s industry, access to web metrics is the name of the game. But many marketing teams tend to go too far and become web analytics fanatics. Knowing which metrics to measure is important, but how do you make sure you’re measuring the right metrics? Or maybe you’re using too many metrics, without clear guidelines on what to do with the results?

According to Jay Baer of Convince & Convert, just because you can measure something, doesnt mean you should. Identify the metrics that are important to your business goals. Don’t measure all metrics obsessively, but identify the few metrics that do require closer attention, such as visitors and pageviews, conversion rates, top pages, and more.

2. Data Accuracy and Data Security Issues

Another challenge related to web analytics is that site performance data isn’t always accurate. Issues such as missing tracking code on web pages, data sampling with skewed results, ad block services that filter out valuable analytics data, and incorrect data filters are only a few examples of where you things can go wrong.

Beyond plain website analytics, mobile and web apps introduce additional complexities. Even if your mobile app analytics is spot on and you’re tracking the right metrics for your apps, this doesn’t ensure that you have full visibility of your users’ various data sessions.

Make sure that untracked or overly exposed data isn’t causing privacy or security vulnerabilities. Recent data privacy regulations are forcing US companies to put data privacy front and center, reviewing data security policies and ensuring better workflow management to prevent data breaches or even cyber attacks.

A solid network is key to protecting the systems running behind the scenes, those systems in charge of your users’ data. Define proper monitoring procedures, put security testing in place, and make sure to reach full application visibility to track performance at all levels and protect your system against application-level threats.

3. Insufficient Knowledge

In the survey mentioned above by Think with Google, 26% of marketers said they didn’t have the right analytics talent to meet marketing objectives, such as improving campaign effectiveness. They reported it was a struggle to get buy-in and support from executives.

Even if your organization has already established a suite of web analytics tools to provide meaningful insights into user behavior, you might be working hard to deal with the information overload. Add web analytics dashboards, customer experience tools, heatmaps, and BI analytics into the mix, and you’re sure to be overwhelmed.

One way to address this challenge is to use a reporting platform that simplifies the way you view your data (take a look at Logaholic, which does just that).

But even before you drill into a specific metric or technology, you might need to take a step back, widen your perspective, and improve your general understanding of the space of web analytics, BI, and big data.

This was one of the motivations the Web Analytics & BI Wiki built by CoolaData – makers of a big data behavioral analytics platform. The team at CoolaData took on a project to make the available content about web analytics and BI for digital marketing more accessible. The wiki is the first knowledge hub that collects all the relevant information on the subject and organizes it in a meaningful structure.

There are many additional resources that can help you get a better grasp on BI and big data concepts, for example, gurus such as Avinash Kaushik can guide you through some first steps in figuring out web analytics.

Closing Thoughts

Most organizations are convinced they lag behind their peer group when it comes to deploying and managing the performance of marketing technology. The CMO of a Fortune 100 company was embarrassed to admit that her team struggled to manage all of their technology. Believe me – we are all in the same boat.
Source: http://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/5-challenges-marketers-must-face-in-2017/

For many companies, the acquisition and implementation of new technology has gotten ahead of the logistics of tracking and managing data that is already in place. In this article, we discussed three common challenges businesses face when incorporating web analytics technologies and how to tackle them.

But there are many more. The fast-changing digital marketing industry introduces daily questions: How should we address big data? How do we support a multitude of platforms, especially IoT devices? Which marketing processes should we automate, and how to improve existing automation?

Don’t run from your challenges – identify them, and find strategies to solve them. With a balance between the right tools, solid professional expertise, and knowledge about the latest trends, you’re already on the right track to meeting your goals.