What if visitor counts are inflated

There has been some research recently suggesting that monthly unique visitor counts for a website are inflated by 2 to 4 times.  This means that if your web analytics tool is reporting 1.6m visitors for the month, the actual number of people who visited your website is between 400k and 800k.  Details of this research [...]

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Getting more data out of the Google Analytics API

One of the good aspects to working in a consultancy is you don’t have to be good at everything.  I would like to think I can read GA code ok, am pretty good at configuring profiles, very good at analysing the data and with all this, quite happy to get someone else to work on [...]

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New or returning, visits or visitors

Everyone likes to know if the people visiting their website are seeing it for the first time or are regulars.  This is even more important when they are paying for the traffic, if the money is going on acquiring new visitors (potential new customers) or is it just providing a convenient entry point for people [...]

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Back writing about web analytics

I blame running a footy club.  Too much of my spare time went into not only playing and training for sport, but organising and calling and arranging, that I found writing blog posts too much work.  But the season is over, the presidency will soon be passed on, and it is time I found time [...]

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New position with Logan Tod

It appears I have been out of action for the last couple of months on the blogging front.  I spent a fair amount of time setting this blog up and writing my first few posts so I am not going to give up, I have just been a bit busy with a new job and [...]

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Making Web Analytics Actionable for Universities

A few weeks ago I was invited to talk at a meeting of Scottish Web Folk (web managers at Scottish Universities) on web analytics.  The actual topic was my choice, anything that I considered useful and relevant given my knowledge and experience with web analytics.  I sent around a short questionnaire trying to understand what [...]

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Removing Daily Seasonality from Web Analytics Data

While I generally begin to look at web analytics data at a weekly or monthly level, there are times when it is useful to drill down to daily numbers.  This can be when examining the reason for a change in the data or simply to review the previous day’s performance.  But an issue arises which [...]

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Measuring the Value from your Investment in Social Media

One of the hot topics around social media is how to calculate the ROI from it. Alternatively, should you be trying to calculate the ROI of your social media efforts? And taking it to another level, should you even be trying to get a return from your investments in social media?
Social media consists [...]

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Types of web pages

I have recently been working on a project with Bowen Craggs for a client’s corporate website, defining the value of the website to the client using a Balanced Scorecard. This includes assigning values to specific pages within the website based on how well they are performing using web analytics data.  Before the project could proceed, [...]

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Tracking the online buzz around SocialMediaCampLondon08

While I met some interesting people at SocialMediaCamp in London on the 4th Oct, one of my more useful conversations started after the event.  I got in contact with Matthew Brazil from 6Consulting (who are the UK sales agent for Radian6) who gave me an online demonstration of the tool.
This tool offers a means for [...]

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