We knew the day would finally come and today it has. Google Analytics is now letting users opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics. It also works in all major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. The beta version of the opt-out app can be downloaded here. This is a double whammy when you consider Google has also just released SSL search which is the start of worrisome trend for the analytics professional and webmaster: The death of the referrer. Danny at SearchEngineland has a good take on it and its hard to see where this will end. What if analytics as we know it go back 15 years to just hits.

I can’t blame people for wanting privacy. Besides if you’re tech savy, you can block any web analytics easily. Heck, you don’t even need to be that technically inclined. There are dozens of plugins to make this happen. The concern I have is this: Google with their impressive trustworthy brand has just lowered the barriers for people who wouldn’t normally bother. They will get the kind of press and coverage any plugin developer would dream of. The result of which could be a mass of users who might not understand why or what they are blocking. They won’t even consider the consequences of blocking Google Analytics will have on their favorite websites. In case you aren’t aware, analytics are gold to webmasters. It is an essential tool to ensure the content created is popular to their audience. Analytics are used to sell ad space to potential advertisers and to set rates. Most importantly, analytics are used to make sure users have the best experience possible on their site. Now this can all come into jeopardy.

So what can you do? There are a couple of options. One is to pray that this announcement goes the way of Google’s other privacy tools, hidden in the Google Dashboard and hardly anyone notices or uses it. The second is to deploy another analytics program, such as Piwik or these alternatives . The last option is to consider the BETA solution called YMMV Real Websats to keep an eye on your Google Analytics Accuracy.

In the end, there is no need for panic. We have to remember that for us, these types of issues seem larger then they really are to the public at large. This does not mean we can ignore them. We just need to keep it in the back of our head: Google Analytics opt out is another variable to consider when you analyze your analytics.

Google Analytics Opt-Out Plugin and Analytics Accuracy is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

A couple of weeks we asked the question about Google Analytics: Is The Party Over When Everyone Opts-Out? Google announced the ability coming for users to “block” Google Analytics. Those using Google Analytics already have plenty to be concerned about. As Mozilla Firefox takes more share from Internet Explorer and more users install Adblock, No Script and other plugins, the quality of web stats has declined. You can deny it all you want but as more users choose to remain invisible, your Analytics numbers will become less accurate.

Its not hard to understand in a time where privacy is a great commodity, why people are choosing to hide themselves. At the same time, though, Analytics are essential to any serious webmaster who wants to cater to their audience. For those that don’t know, Analytics is more then hits. Analytics tell a story. They can play a big part in how a website operates. The information lets a webmaster know what topics/products are popular. It lets a webmaster know which pages work and which ones fail. And in some cases the ad rates a website can command is dependent on the amount of traffic it receives. So where does this leave the webmaster facing an accuracy issue?

There is a new tool that answers the challenge which we recently discovered called YMMV Real Web Stats created by Adrian Speyer. Its an open source PHP script using flatfiles, that gives you a new insight into your Google Analytics. Below is an image from a small test we ran (click for larger image):

In the example run on a sample page for during the week, we got 71 pageviews according to Google Analytics. According to YMMV Real Webstats, we really got 77 pageviews, with 6 pageviews blocked by Google Analytics. Also we learn 9 users blocked ads, and 4 had No Script. According to the tool, our Google Analytics is 91.31% accurate. While this tool is not super detailed it gives you some interesting information nonetheless. What I liked about it is it quickly gives you an idea of what plugins are used by your visitors and potentially how much info your webstats could be missing. What will be interesting to see is if they can develop the tool to take account of unique visitors, rather then page views and include an easier way to drill down to the page level. In the meantime, YMMV does give you access to the raw data (they need to work on this a bit more) so should you can use the data to make some deeper assumptions on your own.  We hope to see its development continue and look forward to seeing what the future has in store especially as Google Analytics accuracy continues to be threatened.

Now for an experiment of interest:  We’d love to see some other people download YMMV Real Webstats and share their data. Once you have a chance to deploy it, come back and post your stats, your url and the audience you’re after. It will be interesting to know how accurate everyone’s Google Analytics actually is and if certain verticals have a major Analytics crisis.

How Accurate Are Your Google Analytics? is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

As you know we are great fans of Google Analytics, naming it the best free analytics package in our test of free analytics vendors. Now comes the word that the party may be over. On March 18th, the Google Analytics team made the following announcement on their blog (our emphasis in bold):

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

Obviously it is hard to comment without more details, but this is another example where using third party software can leave you out in the cold when they decide to change the rules. We know users have for years used no-script and Adblock to block analytics packages, but a browser plugin could spread this to more non-technical users. Time will tell what happens, but we feel your web analytics are too valuable to wait. You need to evaluate your options.

Thankfully there are many options to choose from. To help here are our choices. It is not an exhaustive list, but it might help you start your search:

Best Free Alternative to Google Analytics: Self-Hosted
There are many good free webstat tools, like Statcounter, what we are looking at are Analytics tools, which provide a bit more info such as goal and campaign tracking.We are also not looking at free hosted solutions because those can disappear over-night. Our vote goes to Piwik.org which we profiled at version 0.2.3.4 and have seen lots of great improvements since. To us it’s the most like Google Analytics, so the transition will be easy. They also get extra points for the fact they are self-hosted. The other free alternative we suggest you consider is Advanced Web Stats. Both options require self hosting.

Best Value for Money Alternative to Google Analytics: Hosted
To us, the best value for the money alternative to Google Analytics is GetClicky. A quick look a the comparison chart shows why we choose getclicky.com is a great alternative. The best part is the fact, they are one of the few services that supports Google Analytics campaign tags. That means if you have historical campaigns set up with Google Analytics, you can still capture the info with GetClicky. Its also a great way to check your “Google” numbers. Their price is under $120 for the superpro package.

Best Enterprise Alternative to Google Analytics:
This is a hard one, there is a lot of competition in this sphere, but if you have a site with a million pages a month, there are not many services that can handle you. Furthermore, the reality is at this level if your analytics are business critical, you really shouldn’t be using a free solution. It really gets down to what you need and what you are comfortable with. In our view Yahoo! Web Analytics is a great choice (see a good comparison here to Google. Keep in mind Yahoo! is has recently released a new version which added even more features. If you or your company decides to really spend some big bucks, you can also check outWebTrends as a robust Enterprise solution.

In conclusion, some have noted the opt-out will not have an impact. Personally, I am not sure — it depends on the simplicity of the opt-out and how much press it gets. If opting out of Google Analytics is really simple, adoption rates could be high. I also think it makes sense to start considering alternative analytic packages you can facilitate a smooth transition should you need to make it. It never hurts to have a “back-up” plan. Most importantly, you need a benchmark to watch your site to see if a significant delta arises in your Google Analytics and the secondary vendor you choose. To stay updated on the latest Google Analytics opt-out developments we welcome you to subscribe to our blog via email.

Google Analytics: Is The Party Over When Everyone Opts-Out? is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

You might have heard of Click Tale. It’s a great product which offers some unique tools not offered by any major analytics vendor in such a complete package:  Visitor Recordings, Mouse Move Heatmaps, Attention Heatmaps and more. They also have a free lite version which is a tad limited, but will give you a wonderful taste of the tool (scroll to the bottom of the page to find it).

Do not take this as an ad for ClickTales, because its not – we just wanted to point out an overlooked tool if your have the budget for it. For those that don’t have a major budget and might be using Google Analytics or Piwik, there is now an option. It will require some work on your part (but not much), but it will allow you to get some of the features found in ClickTales. Its an open source script called Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) from Luis Leiva which allows you to record mouse activity on Web pages and replay mouse activity in real time. Below is a screen shot of the data you can record for each visitor (but you can aggregate it, if you choose):

You can download Simple Mouse Tracking (SMT) here or check the demo here.The requirements to get SMT for yourself are really basic, like it should be for all open source projects. All your Web server needs is a MySQL 5 database and PHP 5 installed with the cURL and JSON libraries. These settings are very common on most Web servers. The install process is also very easy much like WordPress, just follow the steps in the readme file. Once you are up, you will need to add the following to the head of each document you want to track:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-aux.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="/smt2/core/js/smt-record.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  try {
    smt2.record({
      recTime: 300,
      disabled: Math.round(Math.random()),
      warn:true,
      warnText: "We are going to record your mouse movements for a remote usability study."
    });
  } catch(err) {}
  </script>

Modify the code as necessary. For example you can change the warn text to something like:

warnText: "We'd like to track your mouse activity\nin order to improve this website's usability.\nDo you agree?",

Or you can change the randomness of the visitors recorded, the amount of time visitors are recorded etc.

As you can see this is a very powerful tool, but this does not replace a fully integrated system like ClickTales. Nevertheless, for the more adventurous this could be a great add-on to free solutions you are currently using. Also being it is open source and actively developed, who knows if maybe in the future some plugins will be created to make it easier to integrate with Piwik, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other CMS systems.

Mouse Tracking, Heat Maps & Record Visitors For Free! is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Statcounter announced a couple of weeks ago an update on their newest version of their tracking software. The SC4 update added two major changes. The first allowing for exit link tracking, or in other words, track the destinations of visitors leaving your site. The other was the ability to compile, download stats, as in track stats for pdf and other files available on your site. This got us wondering, what igf you were in a situation where Statcounter was not an option, and why Google Analytics did not offer something similar out of the box. In our search for answers and we found  an essential add-on for any Google Analytics implementation. Immeria started the ball rolling, with a script to to track outbound links and downloads which has now morphed into a wonderful open source project. In short, gaAddons Google Analytics implementation. Best of all, its easy to implement. The first step is download the code (we have linked to the SVN, the most up to date code). Place it in a folder and call it after the main Google Analytics script. Below is an example code, you will need to add your Google Analytics Site ID.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-XX");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/gaAddons.js"></script>

That’s it. Now just wait 24 hours, for the first couple of event to take place, and then it will appear in your report under Content >> Event Tracking. The results, will look like something below:

In short, this is an essential script for any site using Google Analytics that needs to know where users go after they leave their site, and what information they download.

Please note: gaAddons is not compatible with the new Google Asynchronous Tracking method. As Stephane Hamel pointed out earlier this year on his blog: “I intend to do a complete rewrite in a more object-oriented form that will easily support async-calls. However… this being an open-source/free project, it tends to fall lower in the list while I focus on consulting, teaching & speaking ”

Track Outbound Links and Downloads with Google Analytics is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

The other day we wrote about page speed and its importance. Mark8t too has  finally completed their own speed enhancements (hoped you notice). One of the things we did to change things was to upgrade our Google Analytics code to the new Asynchronous Tracking code. What is the benefit of upgrading your code? Well from what Google tells us and from what we saw you get the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded

Although it is the new Google asynchronous tracking code is Beta we have had no issue and have seen some page speed benefits.  Please note using the new tracking code is optional, so don’t worry. Your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to try out the new Google Analytics code you will need to delete your old code first.  You can get started with the new asynchronous tracking by downloading it here or read the full usage guide first to see if its worth. We think you’ll agree it is.

New Google Analytics Code is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More

Imagine you have two Google Analytics accounts, and you don’t wish to share profiles. Recently we came across this situation. We also learnt having two copies of the Google Analytics code on a page will not work. Eventually we stumbled onto a simple solution with the code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://
ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-
analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var firstTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1x");
    firstTracker._initData();
    firstTracker._trackPageview();
    var secondTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-2x");
    secondTracker._initData();
    secondTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Make sure your firstTracker and secondTracker are in a separate <script> tag from the the first part (with the document.write). Replace UA-XXXXX-1x and UA-XXXXX-2x with the two accounts to have data sent to. Voila, a simple solution–hope we saved you some time!

Two Google Analytics Accounts, One Website is a post from: Mark8t: SEO, SEM, E-Marketing And More