Simple Event Tracking and Visitor Behavior Tracking for Google Analytics: SkyGlue

Demystify Google Analytics Visitors Flow

jzhao — Sun, 06 May 2012 22:51:47 +0000

We are working hard to improve SkyGlue website to provide our customer the best information. Here is one recent example that we are able to use SkyGlue to help ourselves to demystify the result of Google Analytics Visitors Flow.

Here we go, when we first looked at the visitor flow, we found the drop-off rate for landing page to “How it works” page was terrible, 91.4%. Our immediate reaction was “OMG, …”, then we looked at traffic entering “How it works” page from other pages, it was not that bad, the drop off rate was 39.4%. What is going on here?

We turned to SkyGlue for help, first, we created an new GA segment called “Landing Page – How it works” and digged out all the visitors using this segment. And we discovered top 2 users accounts for half of the visits.

Then we dived into each of the users and found the answer immediately, one user visited “How it works” 18 times and left without doing anything else…It clear that one user contributed to half of the drop off…

It is clear we should not take for granted the statistics reported in Google Analytics. Finding out stories behind is the key to guide you on actions!

Introducing Weekly and Daily Retention Report with SkyGlue

eric — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:31:16 +0000

The monthly retention report we introduced early has been well-received, as you can statistically measure user engagement and find out how sticky your site is.

But monthly retention does not seem to be enough for everyone. Some businesses want to see weekly or even daily retention, these are especially useful for PR agencies who need to measure campaign effect during a short period of time and gaming companies who are always keen to see if people come back to play the next day or not .

With these demands in mind, we are introducing the weekly and daily retention report. You now have more ways to measure the stickiness of your site.

Introducing Visitor Drill-down Report with SkyGlue

eric — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:45:25 +0000

Do you want to understand where users drop off on your site? Would it be great to have concrete examples to understand user behavior? Check out our new tool: User Drill-down Report!

With this report, you can view visitors in detail including visitor profiles and their activity timelines. Here is a screenshot demo: (http://skyglue.com/user-drill-down-report-demo/).

At a glance, you see how people navigate your site and gain the flexibility to drill down to individuals and trace back to aggregate, at any moment!

Here at SkyGlue, we are committed to bring actions out of your Google Analytics in the simplest way. Please give us feedback and let us know how we can help you.

How SkyGlue helped our own site – 3 (Why a visitor who seems interested in our content left the site?)

eric — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:07:33 +0000

Recently, by examining our own Google Analytics reports, we found quite some folks left the site after clicking on some of our custom report links and this became a pattern. For example, the following report shows a visitor stayed on our website for nearly 6 minutes, apparently he is interested in the content. However, he left after clicking the “Activity Log” link. This is abnormal since he should have clicked around to create other custom reports in Google Analytics. Why he left?



To figure out what was wrong, we went ahead performed the same actions our users did. What we found out is the reports links did not take us to the “Create report” page, rather, it took us to the profiles page in our GA account, where people got lost.

The reason is Google Analytics released its new version recently and our links were still set for the old version. These necessary changes are easy to be overlooked and would have caused quite negative user experiences. We cannot each time rely on users to tell us what went wrong. In this instance, this bug is so subtle that users may not even be able to realize this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Thanks for SkyGlue’s ability to track individual users’ on-page activities, we are able to find and fix the problem early on! We have added report offerings for the new GA environment as shown in the image below.



If you have a story as well on how SkyGlue helped you specifically, please share with us.

Thanks, Eric

Public Beta Announcement

eric — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:53:42 +0000

Happy New Year!

We have been quite busy developing the next release of SkyGlue for the past two months. Now, as SkyGlue enters into a brand new year of 2012, we proudly announce that we have opened up SkyGlue for public beta with features that are you have been waiting for. You no longer need to wait in line for a beta code.

Hopefully our public beta can make SkyGlue more readily accessible to folks who are struggling with their Google Analytics and folks who want to get more insights from their GA data.

Introducing the FIRST & ONLY on-demand retention report on Google Analytics

eric — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:55:56 +0000

SkyGlue is now is able to dynamically generate retention reports for you. This on-demand report is the first such report purely based on Google Analytics data. We have received many inquiries on how to produce high-value reports such as the retention analysis report from Google Analytics data. We understand it is such a valuable report and it helps you understand your user behavior and site performance, but the retention report is very difficult to create. Now SkyGlue can create this dynamic retention report for you based on your requirements.

Even to go one step further, if you want to create your own retention analysis chart, we have DIY video guiding you through the steps.

Here at SkyGlue, we are committed to bring actions out of your web analytics data in the simplest way. Please give us feedback on SkyGlue and let us know how we can help you.

Eric

Google Analytics premium vs. Google Analytics standard

eric — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:25:20 +0000

Great News! Google Analytics just made two big announcements:

1, Google Analytics premium now available for enterprise customers

2, Real-time feature available for both free and paid version

We feel this is an exciting move for Google Analytics. It is acting to meet the needs of enterprise customers who want customer support and guarantees. In the meantime, Google makes it free version even more attractive (already the most poplar engine in the world) by letting people see real-time data.

This is a huge momentum, we believe more and more clients to moving towards choosing Google Analytics over other solutions as Google Analytics covers most of what other solutions offer, if not more.

Here for your convenience, below is a comparison chart for Google Analytics premium and standard version.

	GA Premium	GA Standard
Cost	$150,000.00	Free
Processing power	1 billion hits per month Freshness – report data is guaranteed to be no older than 4 hours Table aggregtion set at 1 million rows 50 custom variables Unsample report downloads	10 million hits per month (above this data is sampled) Freshness – no guarantees, though for sites with between 50k – 1m hits/day, freshness is typically 3-4 hours. Above 1m hits/day, reports are processed once per day Table aggregation set at 50,000 rows 5 custom variables Table data sampled when more than 500k visits are processed for a web property
Exclusive Features	Big query integration – run SQL queries against your data DoubleClick Integration – impression, cost, view-through data, re-marketing information Multi-channel attribution modelling 3 year data retention Real-time data	N/A N/A N/A 25 months data retention Real-time data
Service-Level Agreement	Yes Data collection uptime = 99.9%, Reporting uptime = 99% Data freshness = 98% Client formally owns all collected data i.e. ring fenced system	No No guarantees Data ownership is a gray area as data is replicated and distributed over the entire “cloud” i.e. not possible to isolate a particular dataset
Services & Support	Included with fee*: Implementation Training Dedicated account management Support – Telephone & email 24/7 support emergency escalation Provided by official authorized Google Analytics Certified Partners only.	Open market – users may purchase professional services from whom they wish Third party network of over 200 Google Analytics certified partners

source: http://twitpic.com/6shv6f

SkyGlue event tracking basics – Part I

jzhao — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 05:04:06 +0000

We got several questions on how Google Analytic event tracking category, action and labels are used in SkyGlue. This post will explain this in details.

The Google Event Tracking data model has the following components which map directly to elements in the Analytics Reports interface:

categories
actions
labels
values
implicit count

Here is the definition of the event field in SkyGlue. Once you understand the meaning of those, you can create your own customized reports in Google Analytics, you can also follow the links (under the Reports tab in your management portal) to create pre-defined reported created by us.

Field	Required	Google Definition	SkyGlue Definition
category	required	The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.	Activity of the user. For example:
action	required	A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.	Time-stamp + activity. For example:
label	optional	An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data	User identification. This is a hashed value of the user id on your website. For example:
value	optional	An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event	Not used

How SkyGlue helped our own website – 2 (Deeper understanding of visitors)

eric — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:16:34 +0000

SkyGlue helps you get deeper understanding about your visitors. Here is an example how SkyGlue helped us own engaging with our visitors better.

we used to have only one image (the first one) in the image gallery at our home page. Since we are using SkyGlue ourselves, we found many people clicked the “next” arrow on the image bar and couldn’t find more images and then they left. After adding more images, the bounce rate dropped significantly. Without SkyGlue, we wouldn’t have known that image gallery click is even an issue.

SkyGlue helped us reduce bounce rate!

If you have a story as well on how SkyGlue helped you specifically, please share with us. Your findings could potentially benefit other SkyGlue users.

Cindy

How SkyGlue helped our own website – 1 (find website bugs)

eric — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 04:00:52 +0000

As our users increase, we feel it is vital to let people know in a more direct way what benefits SkyGlue actually brings them. We are working on setting up some tutorials.

Firstly, we like to share with you a few examples how SkyGlue helped ourselves. Yes, we are using SkyGlue on our own website!

A few days ago, we found some people contacted us through the “Contact us” form on our website. However, the form is no longer working even though the message said the email has been sent.

SkyGlue actually helped us notice the problem. We can see the visitor clicked the form fields and hit the submit button, but we did not receive any emails. We then verified the form indeed was not working. Without Skyglue, we would not have found it out. SkyGlue can help you find what’s not working on your website besides collecting more data for analytics purposes.

SkyGlue helped us find bugs on our own website!

Cindy