webanalytics.cl

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.