Hello, I am Jigar Mody a Program Manager on the adCenter Analytics engineering team based in Redmond. Our team was very happy to bring a new beta refresh of our analytics service to you a few weeks ago. This release has many new features and significant performance improvements, and it incorporates a lot of functionality requested by our customers.
We Heard You!
Here are some of the new features/enhancements that were made based on the feedback we received from our customer:
Tag Me, Please
You told us that tagging your websites manually is the biggest cost you had in instrumenting your site. So we've incorporated the Site Auto Tagging feature that will make this tedious and time consuming process easy. Now you can reap the benefits of web analytics without going through the pain of manually inserting the script on each of your existing pages. Here is a screen shot of the tool.
I have used this to tag 2 sites for my friends recently and I absolutely love it. It is way better than manually inserting script on all the web pages that I did for my site before. This tool only compatible with Internet Explorer at the moment but will be available on other browers by the time we come out of beta, if not before.
Stand alone adCenter Analytics account
You told us that you did not like signing up for adCenter just to use the analytics service. With this refresh you can sign up for an analytics only account. We would encourage you all to check the adCenter offering, as it has some cool functionality for the advertisers.
How do I compare my traffic for different time periods?
Another common request you had was how to quickly and easily compare site traffic for two different time periods. We have a new feature that allows you to do just that. Here is an example for comparing data from a site between 2 weeks.
To be honest, I was a little skeptical when I had first heard about the little arrows to quickly show the trends. Well now when I see it in action I am amazed on how effective they are.
How can I find what portion of my traffic is Male in age range 25 and 34?
You asked, “How do I view my traffic data that is segmented with two attributes age and gender?” We have introduced new functionality in this refresh that allows you to view you data segmented by both age and gender.
Here is an example:
This is one of my favorite functionalities as it helps a richer drill down, and correlation across the site data. To get to this you will have to go to the standard segmentation view (same as previous beta) with either age or gender. Now you can re-segment the report based on the other attribute. In the above example, I first segmented the report with Gender, than I further segmented the Male segment with Age attribute.
Other New features?
My Campaigns
This refresh has many new reports that allow you to focus on your ROI. There are several features that allow tracking and reporting for ecommerce, advertising spend, site and content, goals and ROI tracking and reporting. For example, if you are an adCenter PPC customer, you can link your analytics account to your paid search account – this will automatically import your campaign and performance data and associate that with your analytics for enhanced conversion tracking.
There is also support for importing other campaigns including Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, as well as email, banner, and offline campaign data. This allows for a unique view of all of your campaign data in a unified UI and report.
Here is an example of the Campaign Report:
Campaigns include cost information which allows CPA to be calculated on conversion. Furthermore, the conversion reporting for these campaigns and ecommerce now include the ability to add the value of a conversion for each conversion, allowing for reports on total revenue, average purchase value, and ROI.
TreeMap for advanced visualization
In many cases, it is difficult to determine what pages are important, or to view more than one attribute at a time. One of the advanced visualizations in this release is the TreeMap report for viewing pages. Here is an example where page views are shown with shading from bounce rate. In this example, it is easy to tell that the profile.aspx page is the only often viewed page with a high bounce rate.
There is a similar view for referrals which is very useful in determining which referrers are leading interested customers to your site and which are bringing folks that exit right away.
Engagement by the numbers
There are series of new loyalty and engagement reports in this release. They include New and Repeat Visits, Visitor Loyalty, Depth of Visit, Length of Visit, and Recency of Visit. Some of these reports are broken out in to buckets to make is easier to understand.
This is an example the Length of Visit Report:
The Depth of Visit Report:
These reports help you in measuring Visitor Loyalty and Engagement.
Do check back next week when we'll start diving a little deeper into all this great functionality......
Thanks - Jigar