Urchin vs Google Analytics

johnegood · 03-01-2008, 02:57 PM

My hosting company provides urchin as part of my package. I mostly use it to track traffic, bounce rates on different pages, which pages are pulling traffic from the search engines, and which of my advertisements produce visitors.

I'm not able to track conversions into customers by page of entry or advertisement.

I also have google adsense set up so that I can track by google PPC campaigns effectiveness by different landing pages and different keywords.

I'm thinking of switching to google analytics (which is based on urchin) and putting some javascript code on each page so that I can get better analytics from my non PPC traffic.

Q1 - Does google analytics integrated with google adsense ppc?
Q2 - Do I really have to put something on every page of my site?
Q3 - Is the implementation of this something that one web designer can do or does it require real programming skill or experience with analytics?

Any other hints or direction in this area would be appreciated.

impius · 03-05-2008, 05:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnegood

Q1 - Does google analytics integrated with google adsense ppc?
Q2 - Do I really have to put something on every page of my site?
Q3 - Is the implementation of this something that one web designer can do or does it require real programming skill or experience with analytics?

Any other hints or direction in this area would be appreciated.

Q1 - Yes
Q2 - Yes, unless you use templates
Q3 - It is as simple as adsense, you simply copy and code and paste it to the bottom of your page before /body

Other thoughts:
Make sure you put the code at the bottom, your page could load slow if you don't.

I really like it, it is very impressive for a free stat tracker. You can set goals and measure goal conversion, which is a noce feature.

Everything is exportable to excel.

You could just do your index page and check out the features.

johnegood · 03-05-2008, 05:31 AM

Thanks. I'm beginning to look at it. I'd appreciate more answers.

1. Can I get a savvy web designer to implement it or is there anything tricky?
2. If I want to track conversions (to my "thank you for paying page") by:
a - Page of entry
b - Keyword search on that page of entry
c - Advertisement (or other sites)
d - email
Is this all part of google analytics?
3 The set up only involves putting some code on each page of my site? I don't have to put it on all my ads elsewhere, do I?

impius · 03-05-2008, 05:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnegood

Thanks. I'm beginning to look at it. I'd appreciate more answers.

1. Can I get a savvy web designer to implement it or is there anything tricky?
2. If I want to track conversions (to my "thank you for paying page") by:
a - Page of entry
b - Keyword search on that page of entry
c - Advertisement (or other sites)
d - email
Is this all part of google analytics?
3 The set up only involves putting some code on each page of my site? I don't have to put it on all my ads elsewhere, do I?

1.You copy about 5 lines of code from google and paste it into the code of your webpage, it is about as simpel as it gets, but yes you could hire someone to do it for you.
2. a. Yes
b. yes, kinda. You can see the keywords for the whole site and then drill down in the specific keyword to see which pages were visited.
c. You can see conversion rates, bounce rate, time spent on site and page views and more on adword campaigns
d. not sure what you mean by email...You can see when a visitor comes from an email link but sometimes they are hard to identify...for example someone who clicks on your site link from a yahoo email will show as mail.yahoo.com as the refering site.
3. The code just goes on the bottom of each page.

johnegood · 03-05-2008, 06:40 AM

Great. I guess we'll try it. Here's my assumptions.

1. The same code goes on all pages (except the thank you page). Since most of the pages on the site use includes, we can just put it on the includes.

2. There's a difference between putting google analytics on the top and bottom of a page. The top of the page measures that page as a hit when it starts to load. The bottom of the page measures that page only if it gets fully loaded.

3. Having flash on the page will totally screw up the analytics. I base this on the fact that with urchin, our pages with flash movies that play immediately upon arrival get a 0% bounce rate. This is a weird thing which nobody has been able to explain. I should research this by starting a thread on flash and analytics.

4. Installing google analytics will mess up our existing Google adwords data since everyone talks about them being integrated.

5. I'll be able to find out (based on what you say) easily:
- conversion rate by keyword, page of entry, referral

6. I will only with some difficulty be able to cross reference keyword by page of entry and find the conversion rate. I know this sounds confused but I have built a pretty cool natural search system looking at the long tail and thinking about ways of combining words. For instance:

used vs new vs refurbished
sedan vs van vs truck vs convertable
different years

These words could be combined in lots of variations such as:
used 2000 sedan
used 2000 van
refurbished 2001 truck
etc etc
so i get keywords that are nearly identical going to different pages. In fact, I do get identical keyword combinations on the same day from the same search engine (google) going to different pages. I guess its from different googles. Go figure.

PS - this is a hypothetical example. I'm not in the car business.

thanks for the advice. Comments appreciated on my assumptions. Very much so.

impius · 03-05-2008, 08:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnegood

Great. I guess we'll try it. Here's my assumptions.

1. The same code goes on all pages (except the thank you page). Since most of the pages on the site use includes, we can just put it on the includes.

2. There's a difference between putting google analytics on the top and bottom of a page. The top of the page measures that page as a hit when it starts to load. The bottom of the page measures that page only if it gets fully loaded.

3. Having flash on the page will totally screw up the analytics. I base this on the fact that with urchin, our pages with flash movies that play immediately upon arrival get a 0% bounce rate. This is a weird thing which nobody has been able to explain. I should research this by starting a thread on flash and analytics.

4. Installing google analytics will mess up our existing Google adwords data since everyone talks about them being integrated.

5. I'll be able to find out (based on what you say) easily:
- conversion rate by keyword, page of entry, referral

6. I will only with some difficulty be able to cross reference keyword by page of entry and find the conversion rate. I know this sounds confused but I have built a pretty cool natural search system looking at the long tail and thinking about ways of combining words. For instance:

used vs new vs refurbished
sedan vs van vs truck vs convertable
different years

These words could be combined in lots of variations such as:
used 2000 sedan
used 2000 van
refurbished 2001 truck
etc etc
so i get keywords that are nearly identical going to different pages. In fact, I do get identical keyword combinations on the same day from the same search engine (google) going to different pages. I guess its from different googles. Go figure.

PS - this is a hypothetical example. I'm not in the car business.

thanks for the advice. Comments appreciated on my assumptions. Very much so.

Pretty Much...

#2...Don't worry about this one...just put it at the bottom...your pages probably load in a fraction of a second and it will cacth 99.9999% of visitors...Total Hits are not that important and not recorded in analytics (each image, frame etc is a hit, doesnt matter)...Just visitors and unique visitors. If you put it at the top and there is a google issue it will freeze your page, the worst that could happen at the bottom is analytics doesnt load.

#3...Flash will not affect analytics in total visits to the page...It will still read visits it may not read stuff on flash menus (not sure about this one)

#4...I assum you left out "not"...it will not mess with your existing adwords.

Everything else you are correct on...One note...It will pick up your different adwords campaigns, so for further detail you could target each campaign to a keyword and then see teh results in Analytics.

Hope that helps.