Some of the topics discussed in this podcast:

• Where should someone new to testing begin?
• Does method matter?
• Is suboptimization a risk?
• Can we trust the statistics behind tools?
• What test result has been the most surprising?

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The panel in this podcast about testing:

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of several best-selling books: Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?, and Always Be Testing. He is also the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of several venture capital backed startup companies (such as Bazaarvoice, iPerceptions, UserTesting.com, and ClickEquations) and is on the board of trustees of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation.

Lance Loveday is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing. His company has become highly sought after, serving a wide array of clients—from startups to big brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, and Lockheed Martin. Lance is co-author of the book Web Design for ROI.

Anne Holland is the publisher of WhichTestWon? and president of Anne Holland Ventures Inc, an online business media company. She is the founder and former president of MarketingSherpa, and has for more than 20 years been conducting tests and research into what works best in marketing.

Chris Goward is the CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization and an expert in website conversion rate optimization. Chris has been optimizing online and offline marketing for companies such as eBay, Epson, SAP, Getty Images, BabyAge.com, Rudder.com, Outrigger Hotels, and Google.

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I therefore decided to give BAM Analytics Pro a second look, and I must say I am particularly fond of being able to apply segments to reports. I am still not sure about browsing through a ton of reports that I don’t want to look at when I’m on the go, but I must say that Blast Advanced Media has done a very nice job.

One thing they may want to consider adding is the possibility for a user to select which reports should be listed when opening the app (that is, some sort of custom list). Maybe bookmarks?

Some screenshots showing how you can create custom reports and select advanced segments:

Features added to BAM Analytics Pro:

• Custom reports were added about a month ago
• Advanced Segments were added last week
• Report drill-down was just added

Previous blog posts about iPhone apps for Google Analytics:

Analytic, Cracklytics, and AnalyticsPro (March 9, 2010)

Analyze This!, Visits, Pocket GA, Touchlytics Lite, BAM Analytics, Analytics Agent Free, Analytics App, and Ego (January 1, 2010)

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Analytic (free)

This app is very basic and possibly a very early release. It’s confusing to understand which date range you’re analyzing, and the graphs are not very informative. For some reason the developer thought that it’s most important to know which web browsers visitors are using. While I applaud there being a big selection of Google Analytics apps on App Store, it’s hard to see which gap this app is currently supposed to fill. I am, however, looking forward to a much-improved release from the developer.

This app has three views:

• Dashboard > Page Views, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time, New Visits, Pages/Visit (graphs lacking dates)
• Visitors > Browsers (no values, just a pie chart)
• Traffic Sources > A basic pie chart and graphs showing Direct Traffic, Referring Traffic and Search Engine Traffic

[ Download from App Store ]

Cracklytics ($0.99)

Viewing stats for different profiles is kind of like flipping through a stack of cards. You can choose between today, yesterday or last month and look at graphs for Visits, Bounce Rate, Page Views, and Pages/Visit. You may not base any decisions on the data presented in this app, but it’s quite appealing in its simplicity and clean design. I don’t get the choice of name though.

[ Download from App Store ]

AnalyticsPro ($6.99)

This is currently the most extensive Google Analytics app for iPhone. What its focus is? There is no focus, instead the developers have tried to cover as much of Google Analytics as possible. I think this one is a worthy challenger to Analytics App. In fact, I think I’d pick this one.

What it has:

Summary Report: Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Page Views, Average Page Views, Time On Site, Bounce Rate, New Visits, Traffic Sources, Referral Sources, Top Content, Top 10 Countries and Operating System.

Report sets: Summary Today, Summary Yesterday, Summary 7 Days, All Visitors, Countries, Location, Language, Visitor Loyalty, Browser, Operating System, Colors & Resolution, Flash Version, Java Support, Network Domain, Network Location, Hostname, Connection Speed, Traffic Sources, Search Keywords, AdWords Campaigns, Keyword Positions, Campaign Performance, Ad Versions, Top Content, Content By Title, Top Landing Pages, Top Exit Pages, Site Search Keywords, Site Search Categories, Event Categories, Event Actions, Event Labels, Event Trending, Goal Completions, Goal Starts, Goal Value, E-Commerce Summary Today, E-Commerce Summary Yesterday, E-Commerce Summary 7 days, Transactions, Revenue, Products, Product SKU, and Product Categories.

[ Download from App Store ]

Oh, and in case you’re looking for a Google Analytics app for Android, have a look at June Dershewitz’s blog.

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Do you know how to interpret a site overlay? If you think that it shows how many times visitors have clicked the links on the page you’re looking at, guess again. That is actually only the case if all the links on a page are leading to different pages. If you have two links leading to the same page, your site overlay may be fooling you.

If we take the Site Overlay function in Google Analytics as an example, it shows you how many times a linked page has been visited, not how many times someone has clicked the specific link leading to that page. If you have three different links leading to the same page, all three links will have the same value in Site Overlay. It looks only at which page you visited after you clicked, not the click itself.

See this example where I created a very basic page containing eight links leading to the same page. I clicked one of the links seven times. If you look at the example, you may think that Site Overlay is suggesting that I clicked each individual link seven times. That’s not the case.

Check what the site overlay function in your web analytics tool is actually telling you!

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Say you let visitors rate a page and that −10 equals “very unhappy,” 10 equals “very happy,” and 0 equals “no opinion”. If you have three votes and one is for “very happy,” one for “very unhappy,” and one for “no opinion,” the “very happy” and the “very unhappy” votes would cancel each other out. Now, if you’d have two votes for “very unhappy” and one for “very happy,” you’d get ((−10×2) + 10) ÷ 3 = −3.3. You would instantly be able to tell that there are more “unhappy” than “happy” votes.

Now, you should be looking at “Avg. Value” and not “Site Avg.” in the Event Tracking-Actions report.

In this example code, you should replace “My page” with the name of the page the visitor is rating:

pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Rating’, ‘My page’, ‘Very unhappy’, -10);
pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Rating’, ‘My page’, ‘No opinion’, 0);
pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Rating’, ‘My page’, ‘Very happy’, 10);

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