Steve McCabe: from island to island

West Park, Macclesfield

Visitor Flow shows you precisely how people move within your site, and is an awesome report, especially since you can not only select the dimension (answering the question 'When people find my via organic search, how do they move through the site?') but also lets you highlight traffic at a particular point of interaction (answering the question 'what number of people drop-off at page x?'). The Visitor Flow report can be found within the Audience menu.

If you take your social media seriously, then you'll need tools to monitor your - and others - output. Let's have a look at a few such tools. It's worth noting I particularly wanted a tool that can also monitor my Pinterest account. Cyfe.com The ‘All-in-one dashboard’. Shows key data, in a very pleasing layout. Social accounts are added as widgets, and the free plan allows for 6 widgets. What's great is that it can pull data form many social channels, including Pinterest. The Pro plan will cost you $19 monthly. Crowdbooster.com 'Analyse, Publish, Engage'. A focus on Facebook and Twitter, the Bronze Plan allows for one Twitter and one Facebook account to be monitored for $7/month. The Silver Plan is $31/month, allowing up to 10 social accounts. Mention Another FB/Twitter monitoring tool, and particualrly good at showing user engagement.  It lists (and email alerts) mentions of your chosen keyword, but Pro version also offers analytics...

Amazon have just launched an interesting new feature (in the US only though). Called Auto-Rip , it converts to MP3 every applicable CD you've ever purchased back to 1998. It integrates with their Cloud Player, and once you turn that on, the content of those CDs will appear magically as MP3s in your Cloud Player. Which is rather nice. Here's Amazon's press release on the service, and here's an interesting take on the service, (basically saying nice, but who buys Cds anymore?). Though that only amounted to 8 CDs for me, it did have me wondering: "What the?!" when I saw what I'd bought, way back when. The Barry White must (bold, italic) have been a gift; same for Santana. Bowie and The Stranglers were a nostalgia trip I still recall (nay, am still going through). Costello's 'Painted From Memory' is still one of my favourite Costello albums. But the two track Bach: Goldberg Variations mono recording from 1955? Help, my Amazon account'...

I was listening to a friend's support call to Yahoo when she'd been locked out of her webmail. Seems that although she'd never put in a security question, she was being prompted for it, and no amount of guesses would get her in. The people at Support were useless, and her attempts to log-in caused her account to be locked for 24 hours. At which point it occurred to me that there was one sure way to get into her e-mail: through an e-mail client. And indeed, by creating an account in Thunderbird and supplying her username and password, she could access her e-mail.

There's enough to do when re-launching a website. Making sure all your pages have GA code is a top priority (and adding custom code to your 404 page is another), but have you gone into Google Analytics to check everything else matches what might be a new URL structure? In looking at the analytics for a site I realised my Goals had not been changed, and reflected no-longer existing pages!

If your website gets any amount of 404 errors, knowing why is important. This blog gives the technical background to the topic, and how to modify the GA tracking code to track 404 errors with Events. When you've set it up properly, any 404s will show as Events, including the pages that referred traffic to the non-existent page. In the above page, you can see 404 tracking having been applied in the last couple of days, and clicking on the 404 Event will show actionable details of the broken links.

I've just passed my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) certification, something I've been wanting to do for a good while. While I've been using Analytics for almost a decade, I had been somewhat daunted by the example test questions at Googleanalyticstest.com . Not only were they often ambiguous, but they delved into parts of Analytics not often seen in your run-of-the-mill usage. But fear not - the actual exam is easier than the example questions. Here are a few tips. 1) You've got 5 days to complete the test from the moment you start, but you are limited to 90 minues in total for the 67 questions.  But don't worry, you can pause the test at any point, and take your time to answer. Put another way, over the five days you could do around 20 questions a day and still have a day or so to review your answers. Just don't exceed the 90 minutes. For example, I did the exam in two dedicated mornings, and still had about an hour left on the clock. ...

I wanted to add conversion tracking code to a 'thanks' page to track enquiries. It ought to be simpler than it is. You can't just add the javascript code in the HTML view of the specific page (it gets stripped out); an embed-script plugin is over two years since a last update; and the option of adding the code to the theme was a no-go, since it's the specific Thanks page I want to track, and only that page. But the solution is simple: create a new template, and add the conversion code within it. Specifically: 1. In your theme folder, make a copy of one of your pages. 2. Edit and add the conversion code anywhere within the body. 3. Add a line in the comments at the top to identify this template, e.g. ' * Template Name: Adwords Conversion Code' 4. Save it as say 'conversioncode.php. The new template with show in the list of available templates in the Page Options section.