Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with googleanalytics

A Strange and Mercurial Beast

Scattercat — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:58:30 -0800

I use Google Analytics to track traffic to my crappy little writing blog. On Wednesday, I had 20 visits from 13 visitors. On Thursday, I had 99 visits from 89 visitors, of whom 95% were "direct link" visitors. This is obviously nonsense. What on Earth happened? Likewise, GA insisted two weeks ago that I'd had upwards of forty unique hits from a particular site which, when investigated, proved to be a blog in Portuguese with only two entries, both dated 2007, in which the author appeared to be reviewing brands of laptop. There were no other posts and no other links visible. Was this related or a whole new brand of wacky problem?

Please bear in mind that my knowledge of computers is only marginally more advanced than, "Ug like magic box. Magic box make pretty talky-pictures and words."

Could the new google analytics be causing my SSL to be insecure?

TrueVox — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:01:06 -0800

Anyone familiar with making SSL work with Google Analytics and Drupal? I'm currently working on a website for work. I have my SSL cert installed, but when I try to connect securely, it keeps complaining that a part of the site is insecure. I finally think I've narrowed it down to the Google Analytics code we're using (it's the new, supposedly self switching code, not the old manual code). Is it possible that it's causing trouble because I have it in the "footer" section of my Drupal UI? If so, how else do I install it? Or am I WAY off base, and it's actually an issue some where else?

The site, for reference, is www.mailritevt.com.

Thank you in advance!

Goo Goo Ka Google

spicynuts — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:40:06 -0800

Need recommendations for the best two or three books on Google Analytics from both a programming perspective and a biz/marketing person's analysis perspective. I need to some recommendations on books that can help in both of the following areas:

1) how to implement necessary code throughout an ecomm site to leverage full capabilities of google analytics to track and understand usage

2) how to interpret, analyze and understand the results/data that comes back from google analytics

Percentage breakdown of major Flash versions in GA?

gwint — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:28:07 -0800

Easy way to determine major Flash version percentages in Google Analytics? GA provides a breakdown of Flash versions for all users, but each sub-version is listed independently. This makes it difficult to get a quick list of percentages for the major versions. Is there some preference I'm missing? Alternatively, would there be an easy way to tease out this data if I export to, say, Excel?

So instead of getting something like:

9.0 r124 55.56%
10.0 r12 16.13%
9.0 r115 14.24%
9.0 r47 11.57%
9.0 r28 5.12%
8.0 r22 3.73%
9.0 r19 2.33%
etc.

I want:

10 12%
9 55%
8 22%
etc.

Help me analyze how much time you spend looking at my stuff!

twiggy — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:26:47 -0800

Help me become a master of Google Analytics - especially as it pertains to time spent in sections of a site, etc... I'm a little confused with Google Analytics, and I'd love some insight. Googling around hasn't really answered my question...

What I really want is to be able to track the average time spent within a section of a site, not just a page.

So, let's say I've got 10 pages within a subdirectory of a site. We'll call them /content/1.html through /content/10.html, I can click on "Content" in google analytics, and narrow the results to these pages by searching for the string "/content" .. awesome!

Here's where I get a little confused: I see the average time spent on each page, and that makes sense. But I also see an average time spent up top, where it's summing up the number of visits. Is this just an average of the averages listed below, or is it really an average time spent on that whole section? So if someone viewed 1.html, 3.html, 8.html for 1 minute each - does google call that 3 minutes spent in /content? or can google not even do that?

In reality, I'm doing this with flash applications, so I can make up any hierarchy of paths I want, and there don't really have to be files there -- I'm just looking for an accurate way of tracking how much time a user is spending doing something that may involve several hits to google analytics "in the meantime"...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop.

Milkman Dan — Wed, 16 May 2007 10:53:16 -0800

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop. For a few months now, my referral log has been flooded by mildly amusing, but mostly annoying, porn site URLs. These sites are throwing off my data entirely, filling the log with anywhere from 1 to 200 hits each. Almost all of them are over-the-top porn URLs. I want it to stop.

I know what the phenomenon is, and I’ve read all the other AskMe threads about it. I’m not interested in diagnostics, I want to know the cure. I run WordPress, and I’m currently running the Bad Behaviour plug-in, and have been for two months, but the problem has remained. Yes, I run Google Analytics as an alternative, but I’d like to solve the problem within this stats program (Webalizer Version 2.01), too.

Clear, step-by-step instructions would be most helpful, but any suggestions would be much appreciated. Oh, and you can click here to view my referral log from May.

google analytics goals

FidelDonson — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 02:36:07 -0800

Ive just begun using google analytics with different flash-sites. Now how do i set up goals in the admin-system and have them correspond with the names i set up in the flash files? (I cant use URLs because i use a single flash-file for the whole site)