5 Tips for Using SiteCatalyst Version 15 segments

With an ever increasing number of people going onto version 15 of SiteCatalyst I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity for me to write a blog post about segmentation, which is the major functionality improvement. It looks like it is something that should be easy to do, but if you follow my easy instructions below, you'll get the best out of it. Remember, the data you get from it is worthless if you don't do anything with it!

1. Page Views Based Segments

It seems to make sense to start with page view based segments first, because they are the lowest denominator in the world of web analytics.

But in the case of segments, I find these things the most difficult to deal with and I'll try and explain why in the hope that it will make it easier for you to understand, as perverse as that sounds.

The main reason that I have trouble with page views based segments is that I can't really relate them to visits, which is the metric that I use most frequently, but I think I have some diagrams that will help explain the situation:

I'll explain in a minute how to create the segments themselves, but lets get our heads around the values first. Your segment only includes a subsection of all the pages on your website. The visit and visitor do not get counted unless they land in your segment. This has a couple of implications:

• The entry page to the whole site may not be in the segment, so the segment's entry page will be the first page in that segment that the user arrives at
• This also means that the referrer when the user does eventually get to a page in the segment is going to be from an internal source (not the original entry source)
• The user may leave to pages outside the segment before returning - in pathing reports SiteCatalyst will not represent the leaving part
• The exit page to the whole site may not be in the segment, the exit page of the segment is the last page the user viewed in their visit in that segment
• A visitor may have visits to the site which don't touch the segment affecting the visit number reports - a New Visitor is only new to the segment

The best way to think about this is if you have two completely separate websites - one for your segment, one for everything outside your segment. If you were looking at analytics reports for one of the sites, you wouldn't expect any visits to the other to be included, nor would you expect to know about what the user did before getting to the website.

We have three ways that we can create segments:

1. Creating a defining rule to show a number of pages to include (or exclude)
2. Creating more than one defining rule to show a number of pages, of which the rules have overlap
3. Creating more than one defining rule to show a number of pages, some of which may not have overlap

Creating the segments is very simple itself. Once you've clicked the add segment button you get a screen a bit like the one below:

You just need to drag your container from the left hand side and put it in the box on the right hand side. You have two options here - you can either have an include or an exclude. If you use an include then it will only include pages that you specify in your filter, excludes obviously do the opposite.

One note - try not to have double negatives because SiteCatalyst doesn't like them.

You can then click on the 'Page View' or the little pencil icon in the corner to edit the details about your container to choose your options:

Here you have the choice of using any of your standard or custom traffic or conversion variables. Any pages where the values in these pages match your selected filter will be included in the segment (don't forget to give it a name!).

There are several options for how you set your filters:

• Use greater than and less than for numeric values
• Contains, starts with and ends with are great for situations where you want to do a search type filter
• is null is great for situations where you can't work out which pages don't have certain tags

2. Visit Based Segments

Visits based segments are much more intrinsically obvious. You deal with them all the time in the world. There the staple of Google analytics segments, so I won't dwell too long on them.

However there are some things that you should know about them. If you create a segment based on visits, then it will include the whole visit, not just from the point of that it qualifies for the segment.

The other thing to note is that this may affect the way that your conversion reports work. If your conversion report is set to a length of time different to a visit, then it's possible that your reports may be slightly misleading. Remember that in conversion reports, the value of the conversion is related to the time of the event, not of the time the value was written to the report. So you could have a report that is showing you values from previous visits in your report, if you event is included in the segment.

For example, my segment could be people who viewed the home page. But I didn't view the home page on my first visit when I came through a campaign, so my first visit isn't included in the segment. In the second visit, when I am included in the segment, my conversion on my campaigns report, set to 30 day time out, converts against the campaign from the first visit.


3. Visitor Based Segments

Visitor based segments work in a similar way to visit segments, but instead of including just the visit, they will include everything that the visitor has done. This leads to some interesting scenarios:

The visitor might have done the action that puts them in the segment during the time period of the report. For example I set up a segment for people who have bought one of my products as a visitor segment. If I am looking at a report for December 2011, it's possible that I am looking at visits and visitors where they bought that product in January 2012.

It's also worth remembering that the rules for the custom conversion reports still hold - if you create a visitor segment based on the value in one of your eVars, but the time out for that report is set for visits then subsequent visits by the visitor will convert against the value for that visitor.

This has some good effects. If you create a segment for people who come to the site through Facebook, you can look at the referring domains report to see what started the visit that actually caused the conversion. Don't forget that this visit from Facebook could have been after the conversion.


4. Event based variables

You can also add events in as your containers. This sounds a little odd, but remember that you can set events on any pages (or on clicks) that you like, so creating something that only shows when the event occurred could make sense, although it does bring us nicely into the next section...


5. Combinations of the above

Event based segments only really work where they have one of the other three containers involved first. You can add a container that is for visits and then specify that the only visits you want are the ones where they had an event in them. This is great for looking at just those that bought something or those who signed up to emails and so on.

Obviously you can also have visitor segments which only look at particular visits or particular pages and you can have visit segments that only include a number of page views.

However they don't work the other way around, you can't specify a subset of pages and then say only give me visits who came from search engines. Follow the heirarchy and you'll be fine.

2011's Predictions Revisited - How Wrong was I?

At this time of year, it is traditionally that people write their predictions for the year coming up. They usually make a series of bold claims that subsequently start to look ridiculous or they make a series of claims that are so mind numbingly obvious that everyone gets bored after a couple of seconds. Of course the next year nobody bothers to check on their predictions to see whether they were wildly off or particularly astute. Given that I did the wild predictions last year, lets revisit those claims and see how stupid I really was.

1. The Fall of Google

Ah.

This is going well already, isn't it?

So Google didn't fall last year at all, in fact, it went from strength to strength. It is still the number one visited website according to anyone that matters (Alexa, Compete, Comscore, etc).

But it hasn't all been going Google's way. Why did I think that it would be their downfall last year? The reason I thought was spam. Particularly I was looking at spam that was 'user generated content' within affiliate websites. Sites which offered 'reviews' to give value add, which were becoming increasingly nonsense and no use to the user at all. I thought that users would soon start switching off because of this.

However what I didn't foresee was Google making some major updates to the way that the algorithm worked:

• Google Panda was an algorithm update in February. One of the main differences was that newer content hit the top of the rankings sooner and pushed older content further down the rankings. It also seemed to adversely affect affiliate websites and websites that do scraping of content. It also reduces the impact of mass produced pages.
• Google Plus and Plus one is the start of a major change to the way Google creates its personal algorithm. Individual users are going to have their own personal algorithm based on what their contacts have been doing.
• Google changed the default search to secure. This will mean that they can transition those who have Google accounts to use their personalised data for search. Particularly this will impact those who are using Gmail, Google Plus and other systems that frequently run in the background.
• More Personalised Paid Search. Whilst all the organic updates were going on, one big change that was often missed was the move towards personalised paid search. This was always the fall back of those sites with poor reputations, but it may not continue in that way as users push down the paid search ads from undesired websites.

So Google certainly haven't been quiet this year in making sure that my prediction hasn't come true. One could argue that they've made themselves much, much stronger than they were in the past (which was pretty damn strong).

2. The Death of Online Newspapers

Erm...

Yes...

I'm going well so far.

So it turns out it wasn't the death of online newspapers. The MailOnline hit 80m unique browsers in a month in November 2011. This is up 73% on the previous year. The Guardian was up 59% and the Independent was up 36%. So how did they do it?

Well the Mail decided that rather than being niche it was going to go as mainstream as it possibly could. 55% of their unique browsers now come from outside the UK, although 67% of their page impressions come from inside the UK suggesting that they are attracting a lot of people who are just floating past (probably through search). This is a pattern that is matched at the Guardian.

So maybe some more newspapers have gone behind a subscription model? Well if anything it has gone the other way around. The News of the World was News International's attempt to see if it could make a tabloid work behind a subscription model after moving the Times there. Unfortunately that experiment went by the wayside as they were forced to close amid a huge hacking scandal that hasn't quite reached its zenith yet. It remains to be seen whether the Sunday Sun will follow the same route when it arrives.

3. The Mobile Web's applications find wider use

I'm on safer footing with this one at least. This was an important year in mobile application building for one big reason. The big reason is that Adobe decided that they weren't going to update their Flash for mobile browsers. This doesn't sound like a particularly exciting move to the average bystander, but it has far reaching implications.

Firstly this is an admission by Adobe that they'll never get Apple to have Flash in Safari on the iPhone, therefore missing out on one of the biggest markets in mobile. Notably they are going to continue to help developers with Flash on applications.

Secondly they are going to start helping developers work towards developing for HTML5, which is standards compliant. This means that as mobile browsers get more sophisticated they will be starting to show what is on the actual web page, rather than developers having to code for different devices.

It's an interesting move because the shift in the mobile world is a significant one at the moment. The growth in the Mobile market over the last twelve months has been to Android:

Data from Comscore via fiercemobilecontent

Android of course being open source means that you can develop any applications you like for it and do whatever you want with it, including creating new browsers. My current browser of choice on the mobile is Dolphin.

4. The boom of use of Analytics tools

Last year at this time I said that there were 94 jobs in the UK for Web Analytics on Total Jobs. This year there are 119. Is that evidence of an increase in use of Analytics over the last year?

There was a continuation of the acquisitions, most notably as Adobe started buying companies that not only had technology, but also did consultancy. Google also introduced a 'Premium' version of the tool, which you can pay for to get support.

Who knows what will happen, but the industry is facing a major crisis in the coming year. As the rest of the world watches, Europe is introducing new regulations on cookies as the US watches on. If the US follows the EU example then it could well spell the end of Web Analytics as we know it. If the EU experiment fails then we're likely to find hundreds of US websites flooding the area that the EU companies lose competitiveness in.

Certainly it is an interesting time to be part of the industry! It's make or break time.

Time is running out: get your cookie policy right

Yet again I am sitting here writing another post about cookies, when I'd much prefer to be out eating some. I think that this will eventually get me down to the point where I will just flop on my keyboard and the post will just a be a garble based on what my ear lands on and where I dribble. But we should at least try and look at this in an objective manner, because the ICO has been issuing more guidelines this week on what we should be doing to comply with the cookie laws that the UK has been handed by the EU.

Just a recap for those of you interested: In July 2010 the legislation was ratified at an EU level to make it so that cookies had to be opt-in. The IAB and the web analytics association decided to look into what the new cookie legislation meant with the hope that it would go away. Meanwhile companies were coming up with new ways of doing tracking of users (such as the one that I work for). Then in May this year, the ICO confirmed what the new laws meant, the press reaction was not pretty. Nobody really wanted to do opt in (I even offered my own solution!), when in fact it looks suspiciously like the ICO is missing the point of data privacy as it fails to prosecute those who break regulations.

So where does the new documentation fit in?

Christopher Graham at the ICO says:

This report is to be read alongside an updated version of our advice (the earlier version was published in May this year).

You can find the report linked to in the report by Christopher, but the long and the short of it is that this is regulation already and having a 12 month window until May 2012 doesn't mean you can just ignore it an it will go away. Six months in, he says:

The report can be summed up by the schoolteacher’s favourite clichés: “could do better” and “must try harder”. A report that listed the URLs of sites that were perfectly compliant from day one would be very short indeed. 

So you don't have to read it, I'll help you with some of the summaries. Dave Chaffey over at Smarter Insights has a very useful piece showing what he thinks will be allowed and what won't be allowed under the new legislation. The long and short of it is that things that won't be exempt:

• Analytics cookies - you will have to ask users if they want to opt in (don't forget that the ICO saw a 90% drop in their traffic when they implemented theirs).
• First and third party advertising cookies - you will have to ask users to opt in to your advertisers if they do any tracking of their ads (or somehow get them to in ad).
• Affiliate cookies - you will have to ask users before putting these on their computers

Of course this is all a bit ridiculous because of the following situation. You visit Facebook and get a cookie when you log in. This cookie follows you around the web when you look at a page with a 'like' button. You've already accepted it, so there is no reason for them to prompt you to accept again. Facebook can continue providing all the tailored adverts that they like. Even if you log out, you still have the cookie.

This is of course true for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. So anyone who issues a first party cookie on their site when you log in to one of their services suddenly has a massive advantage in providing tailored content. Your Publishers will just switch to these companies and the users will be no better off.

The key point is not who obtains the consent but that valid, well informed consent is obtained.

The report also doesn't state where the users should get consent - presumably that is at the point of setting, not the point of accessing (otherwise you'd have to get consent on every single page, which would be a nightmare for website and user):

An organisation with several connected websites could in theory obtain consent for cookies set on each site in one place, for example when the user logged in on one site. In order for this consent to be valid it would have to be absolutely clear which websites the cookies in question were set on, what those cookies were used for and exactly what the user was agreeing to.

So the point of the process is twofold. Firstly you should aim to give users more information about cookies and this seems obvious. Privacy policies have long been vehicles to get you out of trouble legally, rather than to inform users. Creating a page about cookies and how you user them would seem a simple task, as would making it prominent on the page.

However I disagree with the assertions of the document. Even if it is more prominent on the page, it doesn't mean that people are more likely to read it, especially given their four solutions:

For those of you who can't read that - they suggest you make it a different colour or give it a different name, but effectively keep it hidden out of the way.

So lets look at the techniques for getting opt in consent that they suggest:

Pop ups and similar techniques (such as message bars and splash pages)

You'll be reminded, of course, that the ICO itself uses this method on their website - their is a little message bar at the top of the page:

This was so successful that 10% of the visits actually signed up to it.

Personally if I was going to suggest one of these, I would go with the splash page. Many advertisers do it and actually it would be a relatively simple implementation. You could add a bit of JavaScript to the bottom of the page that would load on the first page view to cover the whole screen and invite the user to accept cookies.

Get Consent when the User Signs Up or Buys

This of course seems a bit late in the process. You've already lost your users information about how they got to the site, what caused them to sign up, or buy. You won't be able to make any marketing decisions about this user from how they got to the site. You're adwords data is effectively useless now because you don't know what the return on investment is (unless of course you've got a Google Conversion tag on your conversion page, the user already having signed up to Google's cookies just by viewing Google).

Settings Led Consent

For websites where the user can make some settings that personalise the website for them, this is an option. When the user says "I live in London" you can tell them that to remember this, you are going to store it in a cookie and that you are also going to use the cookie to track the user across the website to make it easier for them to use.

It's interesting to note that the ICO has repeatedly responded to arguments that this isn't practical:

People say this law just isn’t practical – what happens if I do nothing and wait for it all to go away?This isn’t going away. It’s the law. The UK Regulations come from a European Directive that was passed in 2009. The requirements cannot easily be changed and cannot just be ignored. Many organisations are making a lot of effort to comply. The Information Commissioner has been clear that he will take a practical and proportionate approach to enforcing these rules where organisations are making the effort to comply.

Personally I see only three options for you and your website:

1. A Splash screen asking the users to accept cookies. I don't see this as a good option for users or website owners: users universally hate splash pages and won't know the difference between this and an advert.
2. Ignore your analytics and remove your competitive advantage over non-European websites.
3. Ignore the ruling and hope everyone else does too. The ICO can't fine everyone, right? RIGHT?

There is lots of data to analyse despite Google's Secure Search update

A lot has been written recently about the introduction of Google secure search means for websites. In fact, I've been at the fore of writing about it myself on the Digital Transparency blog that I've been contributing to recently, so I know all about the subject. Well, I know a little bit about it, which is what I'm going to share with you now.

In case you've missed the memo, Google recently changed the way that it did search quite drastically. They now make it so that if you are logged in to one of their products then your search will be done through a secure environment. You may remember that when Google plus first came out I theorised that they were going to use it to make search more personalised based on what sort of stuff you have plus oned. I still think this will happen, but the first thing that Google needed to do was obfuscate the url in the search bar, as this is the way that they are going to make it personal. If you put it in the url then you decrease the security for the user because this information gets passed over when you click on a link. They obfuscated it by making it so that the referrer doesn't have a search term associated with it at all.

So what does it mean? Well it means that in Google Analytics you now have (not provided) as a search term and in SiteCatalyst you have Keyword Unavailable.

In fact if you look at the graph above, it is quite a lot of visits that it is providing - up to 10% of the search visits for this blog, but many others are seeing more and it does really depend on your audience. My audience is slightly more technical (I think!) and more likely to be logged in to something like Google Plus or Gmail than 'average' audiences. But remember that no audience is average and the figures you are going to get will vary.

As Avinash Kaushik points out in his blog post on the subject - there is a wealth of information that you can find out about the (not provided) data in Google Analytics. In fact there is a wealth of information that you can find out about the visits from all your tools. You can find out exactly the same set of information about the visits as you would be able to from any other segment of visits.

Of course one of the points that Avinash makes is that it seems like it is a large value because it appears near the top of your keyword list, but it isn't actually because it is comprised of lots of small keywords. It is worth remembering though that this data could be slightly biased because of the segment of the users. This is called 'sample bias' and is something that you should all know about.

Of course this isn't the information that we want from the data. We want the original stuff back. Analysing it in this manner is useful, but it is only providing a bit of detail that we knew we could get anyway.

Given that we're not going to get the original stuff back, what else can we do? We can still use the data that we have to continue doing conversion analysis (with the data bias assumed) as Avinash says. We can do it for the terms that we have and we can do it for those that we don't have.

What we can do is start looking at how we combine together some different data sets. A recent change to the way that Google Analytics works was an introduction of some of the web master tools reports. You may be sitting there and thinking 'So what' at this point, because this is data that you already had, but this isn't quite true. In webmaster tools you only get one months historical data, whereas in Google Analytics it will be for as long as your connection has been set up.

This much longer data set means that you can compare it to your visits in a much more efficient manner. For example I can see here that the number of queries that my search terms appear in doesn't seem to have gone down recently, despite a small dip in the number of visits from searches.

The other advantage of this is that you can filter the reports by your search terms as well to produce some graphs showing the data for just a sub set. You can try to improve for a particular search term and then see how often you appear in results because of that. You can also see the effect of news or changes in search popularity.

The advantage of these reports is that I can quite handily also look at not just keywords, but also of the pages and how often they appear. This can provide me useful information on which types of story are generating search terms over a period of time. Those that are doing well can have more posts written about them and vice versa. This is useful when writing new posts - I can tell if they are gaining traction in search engines or not. My last post on Conversion Funnel Analysis in Google Analytics didn't seem to be getting much search traffic to start with, but I can see with this report that it is starting to appear in search queries now.

But of course you shouldn't treat these reports in isolation. What search terms are generating queries to a certain page? Well Google Analytics has hit its limits here, but you can go back into your webmaster tools and start looking at that data too. This has the ability to break the search phrases down by page or vice versa (over a smaller time period):

So we have two different data sets that will give us lots of different bits of information that we can use in lots of different ways. It is a shame that we've lost some data, but there is still loads for us to analyse.

How to do Conversion Funnel Analysis in Google Analytics

Last time I suggested that I should write a blog post about funnel analysis in Google Analytics, because all my conversion funnel analysis blog posts had been successful. So this week I am writing a blog post about conversion funnel analysis. It's almost like this blog has a plan week on week, isn't it? It doesn't, I can assure you that next time I'll be sitting with the computer in front of me wondering what on earth I should be writing about again, but there you go!

In case you've never come across this blog before, one of my early blog posts was on conversion funnel analysis: When, How, What, where I discussed what conversion funnel analysis is and what you should do with the data. I then followed it up with a post about how you do conversion funnel analysis in SiteCatalyst, which not only showed you how to do it in SiteCatalyst using fallout reports and so on, but it also expanded a bit on the principles to show that it wasn't as simple as it may seem. If you are interested, I also wrote a blog post on the sister website to this one, Digital Transparency, on how conversion rate analysis is about targeting as well as testing, which touches briefly on funnel analysis.

How To Create Funnels In Google Analytics

Creating funnels in Google Analytics is relatively easy. Relatively easy in the sense of the process is easy to set up, but it does require a little bit of thought. More of that later. Firstly though - this is how you set it up:

• Click on the settings button in the top right hand corner of your page
• Click on Goals in the second horizontal menu (next one to assets)
• Click on one of your free 'goals'
• Choose URL destination
• Check the box for the funnels at the bottom
• Add your goal and funnel stages

This process means that you need to set up your goals and funnels in advance and you need to think about the funnels that you are going to want. There is no retrospective data processing involved in this.

Note that you will be asked whether you want the first step in the funnel to be compulsory. If you check this box it effectively means that the goal will not convert unless the user has gone through this step before converting. It's a bit of an oddity, because whilst the users have to go through step one to get to the goal, they don't have to go through step two or step three. This is a vital bit of information because it relates to not just your conversion funnel but all your goal reports as well. As we'll see in the next section it isn't vital that you do it for your conversion funnel.

What Do The Reports Look Like?

Getting on to the more exciting part, you really want to know what the reports look like. Well you can access them in the left hand menu in the Conversions tab.

So these reports don't really visually represent the way things move through in the way that SiteCatalyst's fallout report does, but it does give you some interesting information. Because I didn't select that my steps were required in the report we have the options of seeing how many visits enter into the process halfway through as well as how many drop out halfway through. 

This relates back to our option for having the first step as compulsory. If you selected it then your process will be limited to just those who also went through the first as well. The second step in this case will only include those that went through the first step. An oddity of how the funnels works means that your second step could quite possibly be lower than your total for the goal (if the users bypass it).

This is an interesting concept that I expanded upon on in my last post on Conversion funnels. Not all those visits that get to the goal will have come through your funnel route. This is especially true where there are large volumes of content that your users could arrive at halfway through.

But this process is very useful when you have a payment process (shopping cart, credit card details, delivery address, confirmation, etc) to be able to look at how people drop out of your process. This can help inform you where in your process people are dropping out and you can look at improving this and monitoring it over time. This is the vital part of the process - you need to change something and monitor how it changes over time.

What Should You Do With The Reports?

Well normally I'd sit here and tell you to segment, segment and segment some more, but in this case we can't do that because there isn't an option to put your advance segments on here. What we can do though is put in some custom filters to create alternative reports. It's a bit of a fix for something that should be done automatically in Google Analytics.

So if you create a new profile in Google Analytics for the top segments that you are going to be interested in using the profile builder. Don't forget to make sure that you have a standard filter that doesn't exclude any of your data, otherwise something may go wrong and you won't have the raw data in the background.

Using a profile of your data is important when looking at funnels. Each of your segments is likely to react in a different way when going through funnel and one of your jobs is to try and work out a way of getting each of your segments to get through the process as best as possible. This may mean that you need to have more than one process for each of your segments, but this is all about targeting as well as testing.

I'd also recommend creating a diagram like the one I suggested in my last post on this subject:

Creating a visualisation like the above will allow you to work out if there are steps in the process that you are ignoring. Are people moving in and out of the process all over the place or is it really a traditional funnel? Does one of your sources into your goal provide more of the traffic than others. Should you be focussing on a different journey for your users or the one that you've set your funnel up for?

Don't forget that you can set up several funnels for the same conversion point (if you have enough spare goals). Don't be afraid of setting up more than one that are very similar. You'll get lots more data that will give you a better clue as to what you should do to improve the process.