I decided to ask web analytics authors Jim Sterne, Brian Clifton, and Steve Jackson three questions about their upcoming presentations at eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Stockholm, September 19–20.

What are you going to talk about?

Jim Sterne: Social media metrics are the mechanistic tabulation of online activity in a realm that is more social than it is media. Not only are we trying to capture numbers about human interactions, we then have to present those numbers to other people in a meaningful way. Both of sides of this equation requires a great deal of human understanding.

Brian Clifton: A couple of areas this time: “What GA can and cannot do”, and “Measuring Success in Social Media” (with Google Analytics). I am also interested in discussing the issues raised by the new EU Privacy law that came into effect on May 25th. This has a huge impact on how website owners handle visitor privacy, yet many are either unaware or confused with the poorly worded guidance issued so far by the privacy bodies of the EU member states.

Steve Jackson: What I’ve learned over the past 2–3 years and about how my role has changed since 2000. In the early days it was about improving the campaign funnel from acquisition to sales. Now it’s about learning about the whole customer life cycle and the variety of touchpoints (social, search, display, e-mail, SMS, MMS) in order to predict what the best channel is to attract the most loyal customers. I am now either developing or utilizing RF & RFM models on a daily basis across customer data as well as applying predictive analysis to plan marketing activities. It’s not about any single tool (like web analytics) anymore, it’s about being able to adapt and integrate a wide variety of tools and present information that works for the business.

Who should listen to your presentation?

Jim Sterne: Anybody who is engaged in social media for business and everybody who is trying to quantify the results of their social media marketing efforts.

Brian Clifton: Clearly my focus is on Google Analytics, though my methodologies for social media tracking are applicable to any web analytics tool. Historically, there have always been two types of people involved in web measurement—implementers (webmasters, developers) and end-users (marketers, PR professionals, content creators). What I attempt to do is bridge that gap by getting end-users to provide the direction for the implementors, i.e. work with them so each can make informed decisions. Not as easy as it sounds. Essentially, I am saying both types should come along and listen in!

Steve Jackson: Anyone who is struggling to make sense of multi channel and wants to answer the question “where is my marketing effective and why?” 

What role does eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit play in the field of web analytics and testing?

Jim Sterne: While social media lets us all engage from all over the world, meeting face to face is the heart and soul of human interaction. For many years, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit has been the gathering place of people interested in improving their online marketing—and now all of their marketing—through measurement. It’s the marketing analytics watering hole of record.

Brian Clifton: The key for any conference series in this field, is education. People, including myself, want to learn and grow their knowledge. From best practice tips and tricks, to learning by other people’s mistakes (showing mistakes as a learning aid, something that is often underrated by speakers, perhaps for fear of looking dumb—but it shouldn’t be). For new people to the web measurement industry, it’s often about being able to understand and set their own expectations. For example, what does a tool cost, how long does it take to install, what training do I need, when can I start getting insights, can I do this by myself or do I need a team? So it’s all about the learning..

Steve Jackson: For me it is the only event I regularly learn from in the industry. New ideas are presented here. New perspectives from strong practitioners who understand what they’re talking about. I have yet to see a presenter at the eMetrics flap over or avoid a question, there is always some form of answer, and if it’s not right there from the podium it is discussed in depth from the networking. Other events in my mind don’t hold the same form of prestige from a speaking perspective. From a learning perspective I would say the summit has a major influence worldwide on what is adopted and what goes by the wayside in terms of analytics and testing. 

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The entire conference will be held in English. Are you interested in web analytics, testing, conversion optimization, and increasing the ROI of your marketing efforts and website? Then this is the conference for you, no matter where you’re from. Why not combine the conference with some days off to explore the beautiful city of Stockholm?

Register now!

(the discount code INUSEINSIGHTS011 will get you a 15% discount)


Many editors feel that once content has been created and uploaded, their job is done. Wrong! The next step is to analyze how well that content is doing its job. Using a web analytics tool, you can measure its effectiveness. It is possible to measure how well the content is performing even for purely informational websites, including intranets, that are not supported by ad or product sales.

If you don’t measure, you can’t analyze. If you don’t analyze, you can’t improve. Get Google Analytics if you’re not already using a tool. It’s free, so there is no excuse not to use it. And, yes, it works for intranets, too.

One of the first things you need to do—a step that is easy to miss—is to make sure you filter out writers and editors from your stats. Otherwise you’ll get inaccurate data.

You are not allowed to store personally identifiable information (such as social security numbers or names) in Google Analytics. You may, however, store data that can group visitors together in different clusters. For intranets that may be things as divisions and departments. For websites it could be consumers and businesses. By using custom variables to group visitors together, you’ll be able to analyze how different groups of visitors behave.

Keep in mind that file downloads are not automatically tracked by Google Analytics. If you want to track, say, PDFS, you need to trigger a virtual page view when a visitor is clicking on links to them.

Six measurements to maximize the impact of your content
Here are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track to see how well your information is performing. There are many different things that can be measured—which KPIs are best to track varies from company to company, site to site. If you feel uncertain, talk to a web analytics consultant.

Too many pages and don’t know where to start? Prioritize which pages to optimize by looking at such things as bounce rate, read rate, $-index (monetary or goal value contribution) and satisfaction. Also check page view volume (tells you something about impact) and number of entrances (tells you how relevant the bounce rate is). Some of those metrics require additional configuration and JavaScript code on your website.

1. Readings per writer and writer impact
Find out how many times articles by a particular writer are being read, the number of conversions that happened during visits where the writer’s content was read, how long those visits lasted (best measured in intervals, use the Length of Visit report under Visitor Loyalty), and more. This is done by segmenting and creating custom reports based on a custom variable, as described below.

How to measure it: You need to edit the tracking script on your website that is used by Google Analytics. Trigger a page-level custom variable after a certain number of seconds on a page. Base the timer on a reasonable amount of time it takes to read an article. Add the name of the writer to a custom variable and the URL + “(read)” in _trackPageview(). This will result in the writer’s name being tied to the page and the page being marked as read. In “Top Content” you’ll have two entries for article1 looking like this: “/article1/index.php” and “/article1/index.php (read)”. You can filter the Top Content report by “(read)” to see how many times different articles have been read. If you only want to look at articles by a specific writer, use an advanced segment based on the custom variable containing the writer’s name.

Keep in mind that triggering an extra page view, as will be done above, will affect other metrics such as number of page views, page views/visit and bounce rate.

2. Page impact
If you have configured goals, you can find out how frequently visits, during which a certain page was viewed, led to goal completions and what the total goal value was for those visits. How well have those visits performed compared to other visits?

How to measure it: Create an advanced segment including only visits during which a specific page, or a certain group of pages, has been viewed.

3. Satisfaction
Measuring visitor satisfaction per writer and page adds an important extra dimension to your analysis. Imagine if you could find out how satisfied readers of specific writers are? Well, you can!

How to measure it: There are two ways. You can incorporate the possibility to give a rating for an individual page, or you can trigger a survey after the user has done certain actions, spent a certain amount of time on the site, or left the site. The key is to store the grade in Google Analytics. By combining behavioral and attitudinal data in Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see how frequently certain pages, or writers, have been involved in high and low satisfaction visits. Survey data can be stored as custom variables or virtual page views depending on what works best for you.

4. Time spent writing vs. reading
This measurement can tell you if there are pages that readers spend less time reading than the writers and editors spend creating. It is particularly valuable for intranets or websites with low traffic. If you spend a lot of time on an article and few people read it you’ve either failed at marketing the article or it’s simply not appealing to readers. Besides learning what content works best, this KPI will let you know how well writers are spending their time.

How to measure it: This requires a CMS hack.

Caveat: It will paint the true picture only if all writing is done directly in the CMS.

5. Unread pages
Pages need to generate at least one page view to be included in Google Analytics. Pages with no views won’t be listed. If you do not track unread pages, you won’t be able to accurately measure the average amount of page views per article or the average amount of readings per article. Both of those metrics are valuable to look at to evaluate content.

How to measure it: To find out which pages did not generate a single page view or reading, you need to match a list of pages from your CMS with page view data from Google Analytics. I recommend using Excellent Analytics, a free plug-in for Microsoft Excel, when combining data from Google Analytics with data from other systems. You can download it for free from: http://excellentanalytics.com/.

6. Cost per reading
Some organizations have goals stating that writers need to produce a certain amount of articles per week. I believe that it is more important to measure the impact of a writer’s articles.

How to measure it: Cost per reading = writer cost/number of times the writer’s articles have been read.

Better articles should generate more readings. Writers should strive to achieve a low cost per reading and a high satisfaction score.

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Note: I originally wrote this article for Website Magazine in March. As a favor to them they got to use it exclusively until now.

Thinking about making a Google Analytics app for iPhone? Why start from scratch when you can build on free code?

Analyze This! was a free Google Analytics app for iPhone developed by Mark Red. When EDB decided to discontinue the use of several brands, including Mark Red, Christoffer and I, the two web analysts at Mark Red, decided to leave and found inUse Insights and Ampliofy.

Since we saw no real option in continuing to develop Analyze This!, together we suggested to EDB that the code should become public domain, and they generously agreed.

Anybody may base new apps on the code, and if you do so, there is just one thing you must do. You have to mention somewhere in the app that the original code on which you based your work was developed by Mark Red/EDB. That’s all. Apart from that, you may use and modify the code. You may change the design, and everything. Just remember to give some of the cred to Mark Red/EDB. Of course you should get most of the cred if you have made big changes and taken the code to the next level.

The code can be downloaded for free below, and the password needed to open the file is:

i-will-mention-mark-red-edb

> Download the code now! <