• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

Without hesitation, here is an overview of the new reports that will appear in Google Analytics over the forthcoming weeks:

Overview Report

One of the fundamental additions is the introduction of an Overview Report for social traffic. This allows you to see the conversion value that is generated from social media sites. This is most certainly a worthy addition as it allows you to specifically distinguish between total conversions, assisted social conversions and last interaction social conversion.

To define this in greater detail – a visit from a social referral may result in conversion immediately or it may assist in a conversion that occurs later on. Referrals that lead to conversions immediately are labelled as Last Interaction Social Conversion. If a referral from a social source doesn’t immediately generate a conversion, but the visitor returns later and converts, the referral is included as an Assisted Social Conversion.

Conversions Report

The Conversions Report enables you to see each individual social source that drove a conversion on your site and the value that was generated. This differs to the Overview Report in that it differentiates between sources rather than clustering them within the three categories provided in the Overview Report.

In addition, it is possible to see the effect that a latest tweet, blog post or status update had on goal defined conversions by viewing Goal Completions via Social Referral and whether it peaked after said content was published.

When coupled with real-time analytics, it will now be possible to gauge how well users react to, say, your latest blog post or tweet with immediate effect. All of these tools allow you to determine the social impact to your business at a higher degree than ever before.

Social Sources

The Social Sources Report enables you to view overall traffic on your site referred from social sources and which content users are interacting with. This enables you to see traffic from individual social sites using engagement and conversion metrics.

Social Plugins

The Social Plugins Report makes it possible to see the amount of time content is shared via re-tweets, +1’s, etc. I personally find this to be an excellent report, providing useful statistics into article and blog post performance. You can then use this information to produce more content that is popular with your audience for a greater social presence.

Activity Stream

The Activity Stream report allows you to see how users are engaging with your content offsite. Content that was publically shared (Google+ reshares, for example) displays the URL that users have shared, the source, the time, the user’s name and any comments provided. Currently, the only sources that are featured are from Google Analytics’ Social Data Hub partner list, but this continues to grow rapidly and contains some large social brands, such as Badoo and Reddit.

It is said that these new social reports will be available to users over the next few weeks and can be found under the Standard Reporting Tab.

More information regarding this can be found on the Google Analytics’ Blog here.

Any questions or feedback, please feel free to ask in the comments section below – we like a good ol’ Google Analytics discussion!

SiteCatalyst provides an out of the box ‘custom link tracking’ functionality, which allows you to track clicks on elements within a page. Put simply, a snippet of code is placed on each link/button which you wish to track as an onClick event:

var s=s_gi('rsid');
s.tl(this,'o','Link Name');

(where ‘rsid’ is your report suite ID, and ‘Link Name’ is the description you wish to see in the report).

These links will then populate the ‘Custom Links’ report, in the following location:

Site Content -> Links -> Custom Links

Whilst this solution may suit your basic needs nicely (i.e “how many clicks have each of my custom links received”) you are limited in terms of what other analysis you can perform, and the subsequent insight available.

Consider an example below, where you may have an accordion type form on a page:

You may wish to put custom link tracking on each of the ‘next’ buttons to track how far a user progresses through the form. However, the limitation arises when you attempt to view this data within the Fallout report builder.

The Fallout report builder in SiteCatalyst can build reports solely based on ‘pages’, but, a custom link track does not pass the ‘pageName’ variable. Therefore, these custom links aren’t classed as ‘pages’, and cannot be used within the Fallout report builder as standard.

To get around this issue, it’s possible to modify the “s.tl()” code to simply “s.t()”. This has the effect of re-firing the image request and allows you to set the pageName variable for subsequent use in the Fallout report. You won’t, however see this item within the ‘Custom Links’ report anymore (it’ll be in the Pages report instead) and this will also increase your Report Suite page view total by one each time (Custom Links do not count towards this).

So to summarise, if you have a desire to track clicks within a page and latterly display these within the SiteCatalyst Fallout report builder, Custom Link Tracking won’t work, and you’ll need to explore a solution which passes pageName instead.

Facebook has had a bit of bad press over this as many users were not happy with this new feature as it contains data from day one of the users Facebook life. Many users did not want this information displayed publicly again. Personally, I like the new timeline feature as it’s similar to that of a life’s diary. If you have a bad memory like myself, you can look at the timeline to see when you did something or where you were at a specific date; that is if you ‘tagged’ yourself or made a ‘status’ update.

Anyway, that’s now in the past. Facebook have now launched a new timeline and other such features to their business pages. This change was always going to happen since the release of the timeline for user profiles. It was just a matter of time.

It’s basically a revamp of the old business page that gives you more control over the look and feel of your company’s page. You can interact more easily with your Facebook fans by enabling enhanced graphics. There is also the capability to feature your top posts and even a message section where you can private message any one of your fans.

With the launch of the new business page going live on 30^th March 2012, I have jotted down the key features to look out for to entice those fans even more.

Cover/banner photo

As expected, Facebook have added the cover photo to all business pages. This is exactly the same as the cover photo for your normal Facebook profile.

The cover displays a huge 851 x 315 pixel banner across the top of your page. As this is the first thing that will catch the user’s eye, you might want to have an eccentric cover that will grab the user’s attention.

Facebook states that cover image must not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”.
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your page’s ‘About’ section.
• References to user interface elements, such as ‘Like’, ‘Share’, or any other Facebook site features.
• Calls to action, such as ‘Get it now’ or ‘Tell your friends’.

Other than that, you can upload any image you like!

Milestones

Milestones are constructed to provide reference points along the road (or timeline as we know in Facebook).

Now you have the option to create milestones on your timeline, which gives you an easy way to translate company history to Facebook. For example, you could have a milestone to display when the business was opened or when the business offers a new service, etc. You could even add a milestone for every day the business stays open as these milestones are limitless. However, it’s better to add them to significant moments in your company’s history to emphasise important events.

To create a milestone simply click the ‘Milestone’ tab above the status field and follow the onscreen instructions.

Private messages

Now you can even send and reply to private messages from your fans or brands. This is a new feature which lets you have a one to one conversation with a fellow company or fan.

This new message service lets you speak to the user directly rather than having to discuss matters on your pages wall/timeline. This means you can take the conversion offline if the user is giving your business bad publicity, etc.

Note: you can only reply to users, so you would have to ask the user nicely to send you a message as you can’t directly send them one.

Pinned & highlighted posts

I think another great feature of the new timeline is that you, the company’s administrator, can ‘pin’ or ‘star’ posts.

You can pin a post (your posts and not other user’s posts) to the top of your timeline so that it’s one of the first posts a user will see. You can also make them cover the whole width of the page. You should do this if you want to highlight a popular post, event or even a special photo. However, pinned posts only stay ‘pinned’ at the top of your page for seven days. To make the most of this be sure to keep a post/photo pinned at all times and rotate it once a week to drive your traffic to different events each week.

Pinned post:

You can also ‘star’ a post; this is where you highlight a particular post in your timeline. An advantage to highlighting posts is that you can highlight a user’s post, not just your own. This way you can make user’s positive feedback more visible by staring a post. This will make the post the same width as the page. However, the post stays in same location as when it was posted in your timeline and does not move to the top like pinned posts do.

Tip: Every month or so, crawl through your timeline and highlight all of your best comments and photos etc.

Admin panel

At the very top of your new business page is the admin panel. Rather than sending admins to a separate interface, the new admin panel sticks to the top of your page. This admin section displays latest notifications, latest likes, messages and your analytical insights. You can click each of the sections to dive even further into them, such as ‘insights’ as it only shows a graph on the page. Insight data includes volume of your own posts, total number of likes, number of users ‘talking about this’ and all notifications. While an insight isn’t new, its integration with the admin panel makes it more accessible.

A ‘manage’ button on the admin panel reveals the ‘edit page’ option where you can configure your entire page’s settings, including whether fans can post to your timeline and who can see those posts.

Next to the manage button is a ‘build audience’ button where you can share your page to your own timeline or a friends page. You can also invite contacts from your email or other sources to join Facebook and visit your page.

All business pages will be upgraded to the new timeline automatically on March 30^th 2012, as will all user profiles on a specific date. To see what your new page will look like, click the preview button at the top of your current company’s page. If you like it already, you can publish your page today rather than wait a month. Be sure to make some tweaks before you put it live, and you can even delete negative comments from your page (if in fact there is any!).

Below is an example of the new business timeline page:

http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages

Feel free to ask any comments in the section below.

So Google Analytics now has real-time reporting functionality in place. This is currently in beta and allows users to see live data as to how many people are currently present on the site. Here at Yard we’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on the beta upgrade, so here’s a little overview as to what has changed in this latest pending release.

There is a new Real-Time (Beta) portion of the interface which allows you to access all of the real-time data.

Within this section, you can see how many users are currently present on the site. At current, all of the sub content groups contain information provided in the Overview section. More functionality will most likely be added within each of these sections at a later date.

The Overview contains the following statistics:

Users currently on the site:

To me, this is the most beneficial metric available with the new release. We have tried this ourselves and can confirm that me, the active user, was detected almost immediately with only a delay of just a few seconds. The Google Analytics beta has been implemented for our new Yard Digital site, hence the low volume of data in the screenshots, so apologies to those looking for some rather impressive six-digit figures!

The referring source that users have entered from:

This will provide you with real-time data for the top referrers to your site, such as Google, Bing, Twitter, etc.

The amount of pageviews per minute/second:

The amount of pageviews per minute/second users has navigating through. This is beneficial to see how many users view, say, 1 article after a blog post has been Tweeted or whether they linger on the site for some time after.

Top keywords used by visitors:

This metric will be extremely beneficial for things like new Ad-Word campaigns. How well are they doing in a short space of time? Questions like this can be answered.

Top active pages on site:

Again, how many users have come to view that new blog post that has been Tweeted? This metric will prove to be extremely beneficial when gauging performance of social media posts.

Top locations (geographically):

This will enable you to see the primary location of users accessing your site and to how far your audience extends. I can’t really see how this will prove to be beneficial in a real-time format, but hey, more information can’t be a bad thing, right? Of course, if you’re targetting a specific region with a campaign, this can prove to be extremely useful.

The Benefits of Real-Time Analytics

The main benefits I see with this are the immediate impact of a campaigns and social media. How much traffic has my latest tweet brought in and how fast? Are my latest front page Facebook ads proving to be beneficial in a short space of time? Some of these questions can be answered with real-time analytics as you’re able to monitor traffic immediately.

All in all, this provides some excellent information if you require data on demand to make informed decisions. There is a little trick we use here at Yard to provide real time analysis from Google Analytics in its current form, and that’s by dragging the timeline date range slider completely to the right – this provides more up to date data before an analysis cycle has taken place.

This, however, pales in comparisons to Google Analytics’ new real-time functionality as you’re unable to see just how many users are actively navigating through the site in a real-time format.

Beta Sign-Up

As far as I am aware, this will be rolled out to all Google Analytics users in the future, but if you would like to get your hands on the new beta functionality, you can sign up here:

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments section below.

To get started, sign up for Google Analytics at: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Once signed up, in the accounts interface (on the new version), select the cog in the upper right hand portion of the screen and select ‘+ New Account’.

Once you have specified the account name, URL and timezone, Google Analytics will generate some JavaScript code generally known as the ‘base tag’. This needs to be entered on every single page on your site to allow Google Analytics to capture user data and direct it to the appropriate account. Once this is generated, select whether this is a single domain, single domain with multiple sub-domains or multi top level domains. In this example, I will be using a single domain. You can also select here whether you are tracking via AdWords campaigns (this can be enabled at a later time however).

You will now need to copy all of the base tag code (paste it somewhere you can easily access like Notepad). As mentioned earlier, WordPress primarily deals with PHP functions and templates, so this code won’t be implemented in the usual <Head> tag of a HTML page. Instead, you will need to place this in the following location on the server that hosts your WordPress site:

wp-content > themes > theme currently used > footer.php

Note: ‘theme currently used’ should be replaced with the theme you have enabled in the WordPress interface.

The base tag code should be pasted directly before the closing of the </body> tag in the footer.php page.

Once this has been saved, you can open up any page of your WordPress site, view the source and you should see the Google Analytics base tag present on bottom of each page containing that WordPress template. After a short time, Google Analytics will propagate and start receiving data for your site. You can see whether data is being received by a small green tick under the ‘Status’ column in your website’s Google Analytics account.

Please note that this process will need to be repeated for every template you wish to use.

There may be alternative methods of implementation via the dashboard, but this is the method I used to enable Google Analytics tracking on my personal WordPress blog.

What are these types of tracking?

Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews allow the user to track events that aren’t normally captured by the Google Analytics web model as they don’t generate a new page view. These kinds of events can come in the form of Flash web pages, video, game and music players, AJAX events, file downloads and external links. By tracking these kinds of events, more valuable and accurate data can be captured and utilised.

Virtual Pageviews

By using a Virtual Pageview, the user is telling Google Analytics to register a page view even though no page has actually been loaded. This gives the user the ability to track nearly any kind of event or activity on their web site. However, because the page views appear alongside the standard page views, users may wish to create a duplicated profile where the Virtual Pageviews are filtered out.

To create a Virtual Pageview, you call _trackPageview() and provide any name you would like as the argument, but try to keep it appropriate to what you are doing. An example of the tagging code:

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', 'virtual_pagename']);

Where ‘virtual_pagename’ should represent the name of the virtual page you wish to be tagged.

Event tracking

The second way to track none-page view interactions is via Event Tracking. The difference between Event Tracking to Virtual Pageviews is that no extra page will be generated when the code is fired. It is also easier to organise events into categories, actions, provide labels and add values to each event that is being tracked.

The Event Track tag contains four different unique elements:

1. Category (what is being tracked e.g. video, game, music player).
2. Action (the event being tracked e.g. play, pause, back, forward, submit).
3. Label (possibly the name of the video, game or document. This is an optional element and doesn’t need to be included).
4. Value (integer to assign a value to any tracked page object. This is another optional element and is not needed to function correctly).

An example of code:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'category', 'action',  'label', integer_value]);

As mentioned above, ‘Label’ and ‘Value’ are optional elements and are not needed for the event tracking to function properly.

Virtual Page Views vs. Event tracking

Both Virtual Pageviews and Event Tracking have their own strengths and weaknesses:

With Event Tracking it is possible to track event based actions in much more detail than is possible with Virtual Pageviews. An example of this would be using Event Tracking on a music player – it is possible to find out how people use the music player and see how different events compare with site usage. Also, as mentioned above, Event Tracking doesn’t generate a page view when it is fired, so your total number of page views won’t inflate.

When using Virtual Pageviews, it is possible to create and assign goals, which isn’t possible with Event Tracking. An example of a goal would be when a user clicks three or more videos during a single visit.

Hopefully you have gained some insight into differences between both Virtual Pageviews and Event Tracking. However, it should be noted with the introduction of the new Google Analytics beta, users are able to define goals via event tracking. This is a big step forward as many users have been requesting this feature for quite some time. It seems that virtual page views may become obsolete once this is implemented. This new feature will be known as Event Goals and you can find out more about it from here.

It is the need for monitoring the impact of marketing tweets, posts, video, and their sentiment that provides the biggest opportunity for businesses.

SocialAnalytics is software giant Adobe’s latest product within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite and provides analytics data to measure the impact of social media on business.

Adobe has been in the analytics game since it acquired web analytics specialists Omniture in 2009 for $1.8 billion. It now offers a range of analytics, research and optimisation products under the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite title.

In the past, marketers haven’t been able to easily, or definitively, analyse the business impact of social media. Although it is obvious social media now plays an important part of a marketing strategy, it has been difficult to answer hard and fast questions regarding its effect.

For instance, a recent post by a company on their Facebook page may have received several “likes” , but this has been difficult to translate into resultant conversions or return on investment statistics.

SocialAnalytics offers marketers an all-in-one tool to monitor and measure their efforts towards social media activity. The concise reporting that web analytics provides enables faster decision making for marketers who can then engage stop losses or capitalise on the provided data.

Although the immediate focus for marketers will be to show the link between social media and it’s effect on conversions and profit, it is insight into sentiment which may prove to be the more interesting data to analyse. After all, we tend to buy from business we like and trust.

It is still early days yet for online social media, though no one can deny it’s huge impact on sentiment towards a business. Although we may never truly be able to measure the “love” of a brand or company, analytics solutions such as SocialAnalytics are bringing us one step closer.

After initial diverse exposure to the company’s various digital services it offers its clients, I found web analytics best suited my frame of mind. As I was formally an electronics technician, I enjoyed the technicalities, fault finding and solution process involved in web analytics. From here I was encouraged to sit the Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam.

Study

I watched and studied the Google Conversion University on-line training videos and toyed with a few sites I was kindly offered access to. After a month’s study, I sat the exam in an empty, quiet office on a Sunday morning.

Exam

To the point, it’s not easy. Unless you are Avinash Kaushik or Batman you will find this exam a challenge…
You are given 90 minutes to answer 70 multi-choice and multi-answer questions. A mark of 80% is required to pass. Although you can pause the exam at any stage, the page redirects and you need to re-open the exam to continue. This along with the fluffy way the questions are asked makes it very hard to “copy and paste” questions into a search engine.

Questions

The questions cover a broad range of topics from the user interface to some very tricky custom campaign-tracking questions. What I found most difficult was the fluffy way the questions were asked; often needed to read the question several times to understand it. This is most likely done to make a copy‘n’paste into a search engine return unhelpful results. You really need to know your stuff first.

A brain frying 90 or so minutes later I was given a pass mark at 80%. I was honestly expecting much higher, but I was happy enough with the result.

Tips

Have the following tabs open:

Google Analytics IQ Lessons
Analytics Help
A Google Analytics administrator account
Regex IP address range excluder
Google
URL Builder

Other than that, all I can recommend is you watch every video in the Conversion University twice, and get as much experience on an ecommerce site prior to the exam.

Good luck!

The image-less iPhone 4 image.

The background story about the iPhone idea

I came about this project by accident whilst designing custom navigation page for a website. The idea was to have a series of floating panels that showcased various assignments, however after applying a border radius to each corner, they resembled a series of ghostly iPhone silhouettes. Thinking this would be an even cooler way to navigate a web page, I set upon creating an iPhone purely from CSS and HTML divs. A few hours later I had what you see above. There are no images used in this iPhone picture. Just HTML and CSS.

I’m sure the sceptics have already checked the source code and noticed the in-line CSS. This was the best way to insure the iPhone rendered correctly in a self contained article.

Since an iPhone is just a series of basic rectangular shapes it wasn’t all that difficult once I got my head around it. In case you are interested in having a go yourself…

Here’s the steps I took.

1. Obtain the design drawings of the object you wish to replicate. I found the iPhone 4 design drawings here.

 

2. Convert the measurement units to pixels, I did this by multiplying the units by five and rounding to the nearest whole number.

 

3. Examine the object to be coded for basic geometric shapes and create a div for each in HTML. Start from the outer left and work your way to the inner right. Remember that some shapes lie inside others and your markup should reflect this. Keep visualising the markup you have written. Below is the code I used.

 

iPhone HTML code

<div id="case">
<div id="earsection">
<div id="camera"></div>
<div id="speaker"></div>
</div>
<div id="screen"></div>
<div id="button">
<div id="buttonsquare"></div>
</div>
</div>

4. Create a style sheet for the divs you have created and apply the measurements in the drawings to the widths and heights of the divs. At this stage I created a wire frame first using borders before applying color and effects. Rounded corners and circles were created using the border-radius element.

 

iPhone CSS code

#case {height: 560px; width: 277px; border-radius: 40px 40px; border: 1px solid #000; margin: auto;}
#earsection {margin-top: 36px; margin-left: 72px; height: 16px;}
#camera {float: left; width: 16px; height: 16px; border: 1px solid #000; border-radius: 9px 9px;}
#speaker {float: left; width: 54px; height: 5px; margin-left: 15px; border: 1px solid #000; border-radius: 7px 7px;}
#screen {clear: both; width: 250px; height: 374px; margin: auto; margin-top: 35px; border: 1px solid #000;}
#button {height: 56px; width: 56px; border: 1px solid #000; border-radius: 28px 28px; margin: auto; margin-top: 22px;}
#buttonsquare {height: 17px; width: 17px; border: 1px solid #000; border-radius: 5px; margin: auto; margin-top: 18px; }

5. If you haven’t been cheating with a WYSIWYG, now is a good time to view the page in a web browser. Hopefully all your coding is correct and you’ve floated any necessary divs.

 

iPhone 4 Wire-frame

 

 

6. Now comes the colourful part. I decided to cheat a little here and use an online css gradient generator to get the effect I wanted. This made it a lot easier to mix the colours in a more life like way. Check out Colorzilla for an easy to use gradient tool. Just keep playing with and tweaking the gradients until you get your desired effect.

 

7. Now for the final touches. Pay careful attention to border widths, type and colour, you can achieve cool lighting effects by subtly changing the colours each border side. Add shadow to help create the three dimensional illusion.

If you’ve done it right you can achieve some pretty cool, near photo realistic creations!

The full style sheet including gradients can be downloaded here.

iPhone copyrighted by Apple.

Detailed below are some of the basic checks we regularly carry out:

Base tag setup

The Webtrends base tag is the single most important part of your analytics setup – it allows you to capture vast amounts of data from the user’s visit which will then be passed through to your reports. Therefore, any issues in this area will transcend through and have an impact on the data you see in the reports.

Common problems include:

• Base tag positioning – best practice states that the JavaScript block should be placed directly above the </BODY> tag, thus ensuring that it is only activated once the page has fully loaded. In some instances, this advice is ignored and the base tag is one of the first items on the page – as a result, Webtrends will count page views far more easily. Imagine a user who quickly clicks through several links, moving onto a new page before the previous one has had chance to load fully. If the base tag was at the bottom of the page, this wouldn’t have time to fire, but if it’s at the top, it would be sending data through to Webtrends every time.

• Tag version – the latest base tag is currently v9.4.0, however many websites are still using out-dated versions. It’s always a good idea to ensure that the webtrends.js file is kept up-to-date – this is quick and easy to do using the Tag Builder tool (https://tagbuilder.webtrends.com/)

• DCSID – each base tag must reference a DCSID – this is the unique identifier generated when you create a data source within Webtrends. Some websites may use several DCSIDs (for microsites or subdomains particularly) and this reinforces the need to verify that the correct DCSID is in the base tag. Additionally, the DCSID is contained within the <noscript> tag (for visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled) so this should also be checked.

Visitor tracking validation

The primary method of tracking visitors within Webtrends is by using first party cookies. Initially, it’s important to check that the cookie is being set on the site – as seen in the below screenshot, the name of the cookie is ‘WT_FPC’:

However, the presence of the cookie on the website alone does not necessarily mean that visitors are being tracked using this method. It is also necessary to ensure that each profile is correctly configured to track sessions using cookies.

As a further check, and to provide peace of mind, the ‘New vs. Returning Visitors’ report in Webtrends details the percentages of users who are rejecting cookies. We would typically expect to see rejection rates in the region of 3-4%, so further investigation was required in the example below:

Table limits

Webtrends stores data in tables – each report or profile has their own designated table, each with its own predefined size. To prevent reports from becoming too large, and thus consuming more memory during analysis, Webtrends limit the size of these tables.

Table limits are commonly reached in the ‘pages’ report, where you may potentially see something like the below:

In this example, there were 15,369 visits to pages which ‘didn’t make the cut’ and were omitted from the report by the table limits.

To double check this, you can view the table limit status of reports from within each profile. The red status in the screenshot below indicates that the limit has been reached, and that new pages will only be shown in the report if they reach a certain popularity (i.e more visits than the previous least popular page in the report):

Table limiting issues are the root cause of questions such as “I’ve added a new page to my website, it’s tagged, but I can’t see any statistics on it in Webtrends.”

Whilst software/on-premise customers are able to manage their own table limits, and can increase them as necessary, On Demand customers will need to contact Webtrends technical support in order to request a table limit increase.

Filtering and traffic exclusion

Another common question is along the lines of “my backend system reports 3,000 sales, whilst Webtrends only reports 2,500.” While there will always be a certain margin of discrepancy between different reporting systems, this can be minimised by carrying our several key configuration procedures in Webtrends.

I often find that one of the main causes of mismatched data is the fact that people are not comparing like-for-like. For instance, the backend system mentioned above may be excluding internal traffic, and data from the beta/development environment.

In order to ensure that data is as accurate as possible, the following are always recommended:

• Profile level filter to exclude internal traffic
• Profile level filter to exclude spiders and bots
• Profile level filter to exclude development/beta environments

Language / locale / currency settings

At first glance, you may think that the below screenshot is trivial, and that a UK user should not be too worried if their language/locale settings are set to US.

However, if you then consider the below screenshot, you will see the massive impact that such a small configuration error can cause. Webtrends now thinks that the home country of the website is the US (in actual fact it was the UK) and therefore reports all visits from the UK as being international.

The checks listed above are just a few of the most basic and routine checks which we initially carry out, but are a good starting point and can have a huge impact on the accuracy of your data. More advanced health check components such as custom report audits and custom tag/dcsMultiTrack validation is dependent on the specific needs of the client, and is difficult to discuss here. If you would like to arrange a Webtrends healthcheck, contact one of our experienced Webtrends consultants for more information.