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In this post I will show you an example that you might found very useful.

A little bit of background
If you were using Google Analytics utmSetVar() to set a user defined variable in order to segment your traffic and also were working with profiles and applying filters the chances are you experienced some of the following situations on your reports (Look from October 2007 till the day you switched to the new Google Analytics tracking code ga.js).

1. Unexplainable increase in visits and consequent effect on some other metrics

In this report visits increase between a 10% to 15% on October 2nd and keep that way without a logical explanation.

2. Visits with less than one page view

For this profile we had a significant amount of visit with less than 1 page view. Clearly a sign that something was not right.

3. More visits than page views. At this time I don’t have any report to show this case but if you go to the unofficial Google Analytics Support Group on Google Groups and search for “more visits than page views” you’ll find users that have experienced this.

The motivation

Since I had some customers that had experienced this issue for several months. When Advanced Segments were announced I started thinking on how to use this feature to obtain a historic visits trend for 2007-2008 without the presence of the over counted visits that I decided to call ghost visits, that was the easiest name to explain management that those were not real visits (Spooky, I know…).

The solution, in 2 easy steps

1. I created a very simple Advanced Segment, which I named without ghost visits. The condition is quite straightforward, include visits with Page Depth Greater than or equal to 1, this will exclude all visits with less than 1 page view.

2. I applied the Advanced Segment to Reports and enjoyed my reprocessed data!

This figure shows the corrected visits per week graph.

In this case the corrected Average Page views per visit. (It seems there is a small bug in the GUI, for this case the graph doesn’t show the weeks.
 

 
And finally the modified depth of visit report.

As you can see, the Advanced Segments feature gives you a great opportunity to look back into your data in a different way. I’m sure you can think of more scenarios where this look-into-the past and segment your data ability can be really useful.

In the last weeks two things happened that make me think of how we segment visitors, measure engagement and how it contributes to a web’s porpoise or revenue.

1. Eric Peterson wrote an article on audience engagement, explaining his work with comScore, which made me revisit his paper on visitor engagement.
2. Google Analytics released a new feature, Advanced Segments.

The paper proposes a formula for visitor’s engagement that considers several components

As I posted before I wasn’t quite comfortable with the proposal and after some thoughts I finally realized why. The main two reasons are:

1. It puts all in the blender (weighted average of factors)
2. It mixes conversion, “the holy grail of engagement”, with the other terms

I proposed an alternative approach to analyze your visitors engagement that consider three axes Awareness, Amusement & Addiction each of them is build from factors considered in the original paper. Each of these segment can be computed using GA’s Advanced Segments feature, as well as the intersection of any two and the three segments.

Aware visits:

Visits that find your site through brand keywords or write your site’s URL directly on the browser or click on your loyalty campaigns (newsletters, subscribed RSS feeds), shortly visits that already know or are Aware of your site and brand.

Amused visits:

Visits that take their time on your site, that are interested and Amused by your content and product offer. The advanced segment is defined as visits how viewed at least a certain number of page views and spend at least a certain amount of seconds on your site.

Addicted visits:

This segment traces visits from users that come regularly to your site or are Addicted to it by specifying a minimum amount of visits and a threshold on the visit’s recency (the day since the last visit).

Using the advanced segment feature we can know the contribution of each segment (Aware, Amused & Addicted) to visits, page views, conversions and revenue allowing us to understand our audience distribution and which visitors segments are driving revenue.

Additionally since we are using 3 segments we can actually plot the overlaps using venn diagrams for any metrics we choose (visits, page views, conversions & revenue).

Venn diagram for all 3 segments visits and overlapping.

I really like this analysis because it allows you to see which traffic is driving the most conversion (separating conversion from engagement). Additionally you could have three levels and different flavor of engagement. Visitor on visits that match aware and addicted but not amused, visits that match all three criteria and so on.

Last week I travel from Barcelona to Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) to teach a two day Seminar on Google Analytics at UNIBE. Along came Enric, the best partner I could have for this event. The seminar went great because everyone involved on the organization gave their best effort and mainly because we had the luck of having a great audience (approximately 30 people) that shared with us their incredible energy and motivation.

The first day we covered some general concepts of web analytics and how to use Google Analytics reports. In the afternoon Santiago Andrigo, Adwords Product Specialist for LATAM, join us via video conference and explain the importance of developing a well planned Adwords campaign and some highlights on how Google Analytics helps us achieve this. Finally the first day finished with a Bonus Track, a workshop on how to increase your conversion rates with Google Website Optimizer.
Later that evening some of the seminar attendees, hosts and us gathered for the first WAW (Web Analytics Wednesday) in Santo Domingo, maybe even the first in the Caribbean.

We enjoy some local beer, Presidente and Ambar, and discuss local Internet development, personal projects and web analytics.
 

The second day was the turn to go deep into Google Analytics tagging, account configuration, profiles, filters and goals.
The day finished with session on Persuabilidad by David Boronat, CEO of Multiplica.
 

I will like to thank Victor and Yanina from Certifica/BlueFreeway Caribbean, Fabricio, Benjamin and the rest of Unibe team and all the attendees for contributing to a great course atmosphere and providing the best possible logistics and hosting. Thanks!