Nedstat is one of the largest Web Analytics company in Europe, it provides comprehensive and complex web data analysis solution to many big brands. Because one of my clients is currently using Nedstat to track website, so I am quite lucky to have fully access to it. I decided to write a number of posts of how I use Nedstat to analyse web data and generate insights for improving performance.

nedstat web analytics

Here is Nedstat Web Analytics Series 1, to use Direct View to determine the customer behavior.

Goal completion tracking is the ultimate way of measuring online success, it can be sale, sign-up, engagement or even abandonment. Number of goal completions is not just a figure, it’s what we can use to find insights to obtain better outcomes. Many people are still just comparing number of goal completions month by month or day by day, but they are yet to know where has to be improved. So how can we determine the goals value in an effective way?My answer is: Advanced Segmentation.

google analytics advanced segmentation

One of my clients has multiple ads running on Facebook, Google Adwords and it also has a large amount of traffic from Google organic search. How would I tell them the performance of ads? Maybe just number of goal completions of each day or each month? NO, if I do that, I won’t be able to tell where we should improve, whether is ad not attractive enough, or the landing page sucks or anything else. Apart from that, customer behaviors are totally distinguishing on different sources, segmenting the goals data can help understand those behaviors and hence find better solutions.

Here are the steps of setting up advanced segmentation of goals (take my client’s data as example)

Avinash Kaushiv is one of the most famous Web Analyst in the world, you can always find best knowledge and latest technology of Web Analytics World in his blog. Not even to mention his two great books, “Web Analytics 2.0
” and “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day“, which provide some of most enlightening points of view and best practices. However, this post is NOT a review of his books, it’s about how I won a copy of “Web Analytics 2.0″ from Avinash Kaushiv and how possibly you can win this copy from me.

how to win web analytics 2.0 from avinash

We all know that Google did a good job on collecting user data in order to improve user search experience, I am really appreciated their work. But from point of view of a company who has large user data, there is a big concern that Google can somehow collect these data. Is Google really instrusive to other companys’ user data?  Or we are just worried too much.

Is google intrusive to user data?

Recently, I was trying to convince one of my clients to implement Google Analytics code as an additional tracking solution to the existing third-party tracking application, as I was not familiar with that third-party application and I was really keen to use Google Analytics for analysing user search behavior accurately.

But their director of IT was very cautious about Google because he read something negative (I don’t know what it is) about Google in terms of data collecting and hence he felt Google is intrusive to precious user data of the company (few millions).

I did a bit of research on searching anything negative about Google data collecting via Bing.com but didn’t find what I was looking for. So I posted this question on Linkedin, here is the original copy:

This is a post about paid search in SEM. How do you know if your paid search keywords are really used by customers? Do you know there is a big chance that you are wasting money on Google Adwords for useless keywords and you don’t even know? You might say this to against me, “We have well-organised Ad groups with two-words and three words phrase-match keywords that have high quality scores. We also put some negative keywords that prevents irrelevant clicks, the Return-on-Investment(ROI) is positive, therefore we are satisfied.” Well, you did a good job, but you could do a BETTER job if you know exactly what your targeting audiences are searching.

customer's exact google search query

Most of the Google Adwords advertisers have two things in common:

1. Start a new campaign with Brainstorming some keywords and then use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to expand the keywords list, it will more or less contain some guesses even if they are experienced. (I will explain why experience is not always working later)

2. Don’t know how to track exact paid keywords that customers use.

In order to better target right audiences and understand their search behaviors, you have to know what search queries your customers type in search engines.  So let us resolve these two problems one by one.

It is nearly two years since I first touched Google Analytics and I’ve been in search engine marketing industry for approximately one year. I never call myself a Google Analytics expert, not only because I am not experienced enough in online marketing industry, but also due to massive data it provides and there are so many ways to analyse.

mess up google analytics

Today I want to sum up some problem I met and few mistakes I made using Google Analytics once I just started my career as an online marketing consultant. This entry is to share my experience in the past, and also, remind myself there is still a long way to go and I have to keep hard-working.