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
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
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
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
This is a tip specific for Coremetrics. Frequently you want to understand where traffic to a specific page came from. You see a spike in page views and want to understand it, you suspect a blog post may be sending traffic, etc. There's no default report in the Coremetrics Analytics interface that shows you this, so ... Read more
During a web analytics implementation, or while tracking down the source of tracking errors, it's important to check what's being sent to the analytics servers. Coremetrics provides 3 ways to debug or QA an implementation: 1) The Coremetrics TagBar. This is the everyday staple of QA'ing. It's an Internet Explorer/Firefox browser plug-in that shows ... Read more
