Misunderstood Metrics #1: GA Attribution (or how someone came to your site today from that email you sent out 4 months ago) GA does a great job of making web data accessible and intuitive but there are a few dimensions and metrics that tend to trip up users, including marketing sources. Users visit your site ... Read more
This post shows how to set up 301 redirects to track vanity URLs in analytics tools like Google Analytics and IBM Digital Analytics (Coremetrics). This will ensure marketing query strings are appended to the destination page, so that marketing sources can be correctly tracked. Vanity URLs for Marketing Adding tracking parameters to URLs is an ... Read more
Update: in 2014, Bing enabled auto-tagging: https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/june-2014/auto-tagging-of-destination-urls-in-bing-ads. So this old post is only for reference, to remember how hard things used to be 😀 When Google Analytics tracks traffic coming in, it looks at the referring URL structure to determine if it is a search engine. This referring URL looks something like https://www.google.com/search?q=analytics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a. By comparing this ... Read more
Coremetrics lets you track marketing campaigns via a 2 step process: 1) append "cm_mmc” link tags to URLs (similar to the “utm” tags in Google Analytcs). 2) sort these marketing programs into Marketing Channels (the highest level of traffic categorization) via rules This post will give my thoughts on the best way to track ... Read more
This is a followup to the post on debugging Coremetrics without TagBar. In that post we walked through how to access and understand the query strings that get sent to Coremetrics servers while a user clicks around a website. These query strings populate the tags that get set on each page to identify user actions. ... Read more
For the past few years we've seen increasing numbers of content and ecommerce sites come together into some kind of hybrid. Online magazines hunting for new revenue streams add event tickets and product guides with click-to-buy functionality, while retailers looking to build engagement add blogs and editorial features. While the logic behind these approaches make ... Read more
In Coremetrics you can analyze specific kinds of visitors by applying Report Segments. For example, you can make a segment for visitors from a certain marketing channel or who made a certain kind of purchase. I like using Report Segments because you can browse nearly the full set of standard reports for your segment, while ... Read more
Setting a time frame in reporting is usually where any kind of analysis starts. You need to view trends over time, or compare to some time prior periods as a benchmark. I personally like to get tons of metrics -- visits, revenue, conversion rate, etc -- all laid out by day or even hour ... Read more
Updated: Feb 26, 2013 I'm frequently asked about the big three web analytics tools: Google Analytics, Omniture, and Coremetrics. While the question is frequently posed as "which one is the best?" I also hear "how are they different?" So in that spirit I'm putting them head to head and giving my honest and quite comprehensive ... Read more
HTTP SNIFFING FOR WEB ANALYSTS - WHY? As web analysts we need to be able to see and test the technical details of tags, so that we know exactly how the data is being collected. For Coremetrics, however, one thing that can be difficult about viewing and debugging tags is that the official Coremetrics tag ... Read more
