Web Analytics Class Blog - 02/27/07

How did the Omniture Web Analytics Competition Go?

Great

Asked good questions

Not a lot of time to present (only 6 minutes)

Should a written deliverable be turned in along with your presentation?

We are not meeting for class on Thursday... go to the Web Analytics Competition on Friday.

Any Recent Readings:
Mod_Rewrite - Nate Skousen's Blog
Page View Metrics - Ben Robinson

Wrap up on WebLogs and AW Stats:

- A job has to be setup to calculate all the stats based on the weblogs.
- That means that AW Stats will only be updated when you tell it to using something like a CRON job.
- Logs are temporary... so to get historical data, you need to capture AW Stats data periodically.
- Why should you use AW Stats vs. Google Analytics? It might be good to have both. AW Stats uses Web Logs and JavaScript.
- AW Stats has various plug-ins that you can use. For example GEO Locations.

So to get AW Stats up and running you need:

A CRON job or equivalent

Code beacons in your pages

Configuration

- Some AW Stat benefits might include having data on files, and having data on your own server.
Now on to Google Analytics:
- You can export data to Excel!
- You have to set up a web beacon in every page that you want tracked. Google Analytics will provide this code.
- You need to have an account code... again Google will provide you this when you sign up a new site to Google Analytics. It is a tracking code for a specific site.
- You can set up goals with Google Analytics - you need to know which variables to set in the beacon code or you can set them up in the Google Analytics interface.
- You can also set up funnel reports and goals.
- We then implemented Google Analytics on ebiz.byu.edu