Three Is a Magic Number

Three years ago Yahoo! Web Analytics was born out of Yahoo’s acquisition of Indextools.  During that time we have steadily worked to establish YWA as a leading enterprise web analytics solution.  This week’s 10.1 release of YWA continues that trend and the response has been tremendous!

We would like to thank all of our clients and partners for their continued support over the years.  Additionally we would like to thank all of the Yahoo! employees that have diligently worked behind the scenes on YWA.  These Yahoo’s are located throughout the world, from offices in Budapest, NYC, Boston, Hillsboro, Sunnyvale and Carlsbad.  Without their passion and dedication none of our success would be possible.  Happy Birthday to us!

YWA Version 10.1 Has Been Released

We are proud to announce that version 10.1 of Yahoo! Web Analytics is now live on all accounts.  This release of YWA includes a number of new features and enhancements.  For starters, you will see the new version listed next to your active projects in the Control Center of your account:

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Online Marketers Listen Up. There’s Gold In That Data!

Note: This is a cross-post originally from Matt Lillig’s personal blog, Matt is the Senior Analytics Lead at Yahoo!

It happens way too often and it’s painful to watch.  Extra revenue being flushed down the toilet because online marketers aren’t taking a close enough look at what their web analytics reports are telling them.  They’ve spent the time to properly implement their tracking solutions but they aren’t spending enough time in their solution looking for insights.

For online marketers, there could be a whole slew of reasons as to why they’re not paying closer attention to their web analytics data:

• Perhaps a new rep was hired and he/she didn’t realize they had the data available
• Perhaps they have a 3rd party agency managing their data for them
• Perhaps they don’t know how to analyze the data and need a consultant
• Perhaps they’re just lazy and don’t care

While there’s always reasons why one hasn’t looked closely enough, the bottom line is that you have to pay close attention to what your data is telling you so that you can capitalize on it!  Web analytics data isn’t just a bunch of numbers on a page (though it may look like it to some).  Web analytics data provides you with insights such as: who your target audience is, where your roadblocks are, whether or not you’re turning a profit, and who you should be spending your online budget with.

With that said, I want to introduce you to a good example of an online marketer who hasn’t been paying close enough attention to their search engine referral report data.  And because of this, they’re missing out BIG TIME on driving additional revenue to their bottom line.

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Yahoo! Sponsors Web Analytics Wednesday

On March 30th 2011, Yahoo! Web Analytics sponsored a Web Analytics Wednesday event for the very first time.  The event took place in the Yahoo! office in Budapest, Hungary and was host to a couple of “firsts” in web analytics social networking.

Web Analytics Wednesdays were founded in 2005 by  Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, and have become very popular in the digital measurement sector. They are organized by local hosts, paid for by generous sponsors, and enjoyed by over 10,000 people worldwide.

Speakers

Emer Kirrane, a manager at Yahoo!, spoke about community efforts in the Web Analytics industry, specifically the Web Analytics Association (WAA) and the Analysis Exchange.
Yahoo! is a founding member of the WAA, which supports education through a certification program and discounted university courses.  It also helps to drive standards and help the community shape the industry.
The Analysis Exchange works to provide free on-the-job experience to students of web analytics, or to those who want to get more experience in gaining insights from web measurement. This is done by providing free website analysis to not-for-profit organisations while the students are helped by experienced mentors.

Lefty Balogh, an SEO and PPC manager at Synchronica, spoke about mobile tracking, stressing that, with mobile becoming such an integral part of our lives, it is very important to investigate mobile measurement and supporting mobile visitors to websites.
Lefty also spoke about finding new ways to report findings to upper management – for example, have you ever considered presenting a video report?
Finally, he touched on the importance of training and gaining experience in the web analytics industry.

Áron Szanitter, project management lead at Allegroup, presented a case study on improving customer service through various web analytics tools and techniques.   He showed the attendees various ways of looking for answers to such questions as:
“How effective is each help page and section – how can we improve them?”
“Which pages and features generate the most visits to help pages – which of those visits end on the customer service online contact form?”

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Adding Customization to Actions in YWA

The following post is by Yahoo!’s Tim Hampshire, he is a YWA Account Manager and Support Specialist.

Actions are a powerful feature of YWA that allow you to track conversion events that take place on your site.  Currently YWA allows you create up to 50 of these custom actions which you can quickly run out of if you do not define them with care. In this post we will demonstrate how to use Custom Fields to store additional information about your actions in order to avoid overusing the limited number of  actions available in YWA.

How Not To Use Actions in YWA

Let’s suppose we are working on setting up YWA on a cooking site where the users can view flash video presentations for each of the recipes on the site.  For the reporting, we are interested in seeing how often each one of these videos are viewed.  One way of accomplishing this would be to define an action for each individual video:

• Action 11: “apple pie desert recipe video view”
• Action 12: “strawberry pie desert recipe video view”
• Action 13: “custard pie desert recipe video view”
• Action 14: “blueberry pie desert recipe video view”
• Action 15: “raspberry pie desert recipe video view”

The number of actions used could also get compounded by cycling through the various forms of each recipe:

• Action 16: “apple flan desert recipe video view”
• Action 17: “strawberry flan desert recipe video view”
• Action 18: “custard flan desert recipe video view”
• Action 19: “blueberry flan desert recipe video view”
• Action 20: “raspberry flan desert recipe video view”

Using this method of defining actions we would very quickly find ourselves running into YWA’s limit of 50 custom actions. We also might find that adding extra categories to these actions would be laborious and potentially error prone.

The Correct Usage of Actions in YWA

When creating actions in YWA, you will want to define them as broadly as possible so that they can be used on multiple locations of your site.  We can then use Custom Fields to capture detailed information about the specifics of the action performed.  Using Custom Fields with our actions in this way will add the detailed classification and grouping information we are looking for when running granular reports in YWA.

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