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Whoever works with analytics on a day-to-to-day basis knows how important it is to have a continuity with the data. Any slip might be fatal: data can disappear, trends misunderstood and jobs lost. Losing data can have long-lasting consequences, as very often it isn’t possible to reprocess the data—so what is lost cannot be recovered.

For this reason, it is essential to have a place where you can test changes to your settings and configurations. It is also important to keep track of changes in a way that they can be used to provide a context for analysts, so that when you are looking at incomprehensible spikes in past data, you can check whether any changes were made to the data collection methods (or if an offline campaign was in place during the period analyzed). Having such a process in place will help to keep data safe from loss and clean from inaccuracies.

As Neil Mason describes on his presentation about Data Discovery: “all data is dirty and needs to be cleaned and transformed, this is the heavy lifting stage.” Below I describe four techniques that will help analysts and marketers to ease the burden of inaccurate data usage Google Analytics. I provide examples on how this can affect the data, and share tips on ways to make them happen.

Google Analytics Accounts And Profiles

The Google Analytics code site offers an in depth explanation of the hierarchy used by the tool to manage report access and data collection. There are three important levels that we need to be aware of:

1. Account: An account is the mother of all Web properties and profiles, and has a unique account ID that can be used to track multiple websites.
2. Web Property: The web property has a unique ID, which is a combination of the account ID and additional digits. Since different Web properties have different IDs, their data cannot be merged.
3. Profile: the gateway to the website reports. It determines which data from your website appears in the reports. Filters can be applied to profiles in order to segment the data; for example, it is possible to create a profile only with visitors from USA, only from new visitors, etc. Since profiles use the same account and Web property IDs, data for multiple profiles can also be seen in aggregate.

Below is part of the scheme provided on the code from the website mentioned above. The image well represents the possibilities of data collection and management.

Diagram showing the possible Analytics account configurations.

Important to note that Google Analytics still misses the mark on an important feature related to account configuration: report level access. This means that the lowest access that can be given to a user is a profile, so it is not possible to provide access to reports. As I wrote in an article about Google Analytics Perception & Reality:

As of today, Google provides just two options when it comes to providing access: Administrator (who can access anything in the account) and Viewer (who can access specific profiles). This division is far from good. In any mid-sized company, the data needs to be more modular (i.e. enable showing different reports to different people).

Creating an Analytics Staging Profile

Let’s suppose you read in a random blog that you should create a filter to lowercase URIs for all of your profiles (if you don’t have one yet, check point five on this implementation checklist). And suppose you have no idea how this can impact your data.

The best way to learn how filters affect your Google Analytics data would be to have two profiles with the exact same settings (the real profile, and the test profile) and apply a new filter only to the test profile. Once it is applied, you can check the data and compare the number to learn if anything went wrong. Here is an article from the Google Analytics Help Center on how to create profiles.

Creating an Analytics Staging Account

If you work in the Web Analytics field long enough, you have certainly experienced data loss as a consequence of bad implementations. It happens, and the best we can do is to have a Web Analytics Process in place that will help us avoid it. Not long ago, I implemented the _trackPageLoadTime() method (now deprecated) for a website, and as a result from a lack of attention, I lost six days worth of data (yes, I didn’t log in quite enough to Analytics during this week!) See graph below:

Example of how a bad Google Analytics implementation can affect data collection.

The story above illustrates the fact that code changes should be dealt with carefully. Since most websites do have a staging site where changes are tested before going live, I suggest having a different tracking code used for those environments to test code changes on the Google Analytics script (i.e. a new Google Analytics account). This technique is very similar to the one proposed above to check filter changes—it only goes one step further.

Tracking Profile Changes & Configurations

When it comes to both external and internal changes, context is one of the most important factors for analyzing data. For this reason, it is crucial to have a log of changes that affect your data, as well as changes in marketing campaigns and other company efforts. Below I present two ways to keep this data in an accurate and accessible way.

Keeping Track of Internal Changes

Changes are constantly made to Google Analytics profiles by users: website goals, improved filters, new features, and others. Every change may impact data in several ways, even when not expected. For this reason, I propose a method that will help to keep track of those changes, especially in large organizations where more than one person is involved with Google Analytics. Even when one person is involved, this is important as employees usually do not work with just one company “to infinity… and beyond!”

In order to make this task easy and centralized, I propose using a Google Docs form. Using such a form will facilitate the collection and sharing of the changes made to a Google Analytics account. The form should be created so that multiple teams will be aware of all changes. These will then be aggregated for historical knowledge that can be used by the whole team (and future teams members).

Below is an example of such a form with fields that you might want to create (learm how to build a Google Docs form).

Example of a Google Docs form that can be used to track Google Analytics changes.

Keeping Track of External & Overall Changes with Annotations

Back in 2010, The Analytics team had announced a feature which in my opinion is one of the most important features of the tool: Google Analytics Annotations. This feature allows website managers to provide context for where the numbers live (the graphs on the interface), allowing for richer analyses. Here are some important occasions when you should use this feature:

• New offline marketing campaigns (e.g. radio, TV, billboards).
• Major changes to the website (e.g. design, structure, content).
• Changes to tracking (e.g. changing the tracking code, adding events).
• Changes to goals or filters.

While annotations can—and should—also be used for technical changes to the website (as mentioned above), it is important to keep them at a high level. This means that you shouldn’t add too much information about your changes, just the overall picture; otherwise the annotations will quickly become overcrowded. Therefore, the use of both methods described above (form and annotations) should create an optimal mix. Below is a video explaining how to use the Annotations feature:

Video explaining how to use the Google Analytics Annotations feature.

Closing Thoughts

In this post we discussed ways to avoid bad implementations—by putting into place a process that requires users to report on changes made to their Google Analytics accounts. This not only helps in avoiding mistakes, but also helps find the source of problems, and solutions for fixing them quickly.

Google Analytics is a great tool, and one of its greatest qualities is that it makes Analytics ubiquitous—most people in any organization can use it; from Management to Marketing to IT. This means that many hands must deal with the tool, which requires an easy way to deal with the changes to those tool settings and configurations. Hopefully this post has provided some ideas on how to do it.

Please comment with any additional ideas on how to keep Google Analytics data safe and clean.

(jvb) (il)

© Daniel Waisberg for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

In this article, we’ll review a few techniques that will help Web designers and UI professionals improve their error pages in order to engage visitors and improve the experience. As C.S. Lewis said, “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.� Website designers should take this to heart.

We’ll focus on error and maintenance pages, from both a tracking and usability perspective. You’ll find examples on how to use analytics and defensive design in order to optimize the user experience on those pages.

First, let’s go over error pages and how to optimize them. We’ll try to answer the following questions:

• Does your 404 page succeed in engaging visitors, who are already frustrated from not finding what they came for?
• How do you decrease the number of people who arrive on your 404 page?
• How do you monitor 404 page traffic efficiently?

After, we’ll discuss techniques for improving conversion rates, even when the website is under maintenance. Here are some of the questions we’ll consider:

• How to time maintenance periods wisely?
• How to increase visitor engagement using a maintenance page?

Optimizing 404 Pages

The topic of improving error messages was thoroughly covered in Defensive Design for the Web, a book written by the 37signals team. They go over 40 guidelines to “prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown does occur.� In guideline 16 (page 93), they advise us to customize our “Page not found� error pages, and they offer interesting insight into how to create error pages:

Instead of merely saying a page is not found, your site needs to explain why a page can’t be located and offer suggestions for getting to the right screen. Your site should lend a hand, not kick people when they are down.

Smart things to include on your 404 page:

1. Your company’s name and logo;
2. An explanation of why the visitor is seeing this page;
3. A list of common mistakes that may explain the problem;
4. Links back to the home page and/or other pages that might be relevant;
5. A search engine that customers can use to find the right information;
6. An email link so that visitors can report problems, missing pages and so on.

A while ago, I came across the great examples shared on Smashing Magazine (part 1 and part 2) and was inspired to create my own 404 page. But because understanding and analyzing online behavior is so important, I asked myself, Is what I’ve come up really good? How can I make it better? Below we’ll go over a few techniques to both monitor and optimize 404 pages.

If you do not have a customized 404 page, please refer to this simple explanation of how to set one up.

Monitoring 404 Page Traffic

How often do you check the traffic to your 404 page? Most of the companies I have worked with never did, even once. Yet it is hard to overemphasize the importance of consistently monitoring it. For example, if a prominent blog links to your website but the link is broken, this will make for a very poor experience for users (who will not find what they expect) and for search engines (which will not crawl the right content). Below are a few tips on tracking those pages seamlessly using Google Analytics. (The screenshots were taken from the new Google Analytics version, which is still in beta, so your mileage may vary.)

Create an alert on Google Analytics.
As seen in the screenshot below, you can set Google Analytics to alert you each time 404 traffic reaches a certain number of visits a day. This way, you have to do the work only once, but you’ll be alerted every time there is a problem.

This is where you create a custom alert to track 404 page views.

Track your 404 page as a goal.
Setting the 404 page as a goal on Google Analytics will yield important (and otherwise unattainable) information. For example, you’ll be able to see the three steps that visitors took to get to this page. In addition, setting this goal makes it easier to find traffic sources with broken links.

Create a goal to track 404 page views in your reports.

Add the 404 content report to your dashboard.
Every report in Google Analytics can be added to the dashboard. By adding the 404 page, you will be able to constantly monitor visitor trends on the page.

Add a 404 goal to your dashboard.

Check your navigation summary report.
This will help you understand what visitors do upon leaving this page, which is important for knowing how to optimize it.

The navigation summary for a 404 page on Google Analytics.

Track internal searches from this page.
If your 404 page does not have a search box, seriously consider adding one. From searches performed on this page, you will be able to understand what people were expecting to find, and you will get an idea of what links to add to the page. Below are the metrics you will be able to track with this feature:

1. Total unique searches
   The number of times people started a search from the 404 page. Duplicate searches from a single visit are excluded.
2. Search result page views after searches
   The average number of times visitors viewed a search results page after performing a search.
3. % search exits
   The percentage of searches that resulted in an immediate exit from your website.
4. % search refinements
   The percentage of searches that resulted in a new search using a different term.
5. Time after search
   The average amount of time visitors spend on your website after performing a search.
6. Search depth
   The average number of pages that visitors viewed after performing a search.

Decrease Your Errors (Fixing Broken Links)

Monitoring 404 pages is important, but that alone won’t do you any good unless you act on it. Taking action means doing all you can do to decrease the number of people who reach the 404 page and improving the experience of users who do reach it (see the next section). Below are a few tips on finding and fixing both internal and external broken links.

Check the navigation summary report.
This will show you the route that visitors took on your website to get to the 404 page (and thus tell you which pages contain broken internal links). You will see the percentage of visitors who arrived on this page from internal sources as well as from external sources; and the internal sources will be listed in this report (see the navigation summary screenshot above).

Check the sources of traffic that lead to the 404 page.
This will clearly show which websites have broken links to your website. With the list, you should either contact the sources or create 301 redirects to the correct pages.

Traffic sources that lead visitors to a 404 page.

Usability Tips to Improve 404 Engagement

Basically, usability practices for error pages are not much different from general usability practices. Below are a few tips to help you increase the conversion rate of your 404 page. For our purpose, conversion is essentially the click-through rate (CTR), because our main objective is for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

1. Be simple and focused.
   Appealing images and an original design are important, but a clear focus is critical. Users are already disoriented from landing somewhere they were not expecting, so make their lives easier by presenting a clear action to take.
2. Know your visitors.
   Many 404 pages use humor, including geek humor. Keep in mind that you are not your visitor, and jokes can be misunderstood, so use humor wisely.
3. Let the visitor decide.
   As I said in “Web Analytics Process�: “Customers should tell us what to do, not consultants, friends or feelings; data and online surveys are the place to look for customers’ needs.� The best way to understand what works for visitors is to present a few page versions and let the best one win. (See the review of advanced A/B testing techniques by Paras Chopra.)

Optimizing Maintenance Pages

Not long ago, I worked on a website that had weekly downtime for maintenance, about one to two hours a week. The owners chose the day with the least traffic for maintenance, but I believe they did not completely understand how this affected the website and, more importantly, how they could have optimized the user experience and taken advantage of the downtime. In a post on Smashing Magazine, Cameron Chapman provides a good checklist for designing effective maintenance pages:

1. Keep the maintenance page simple and useful.
2. Realize it’s an inconvenience to visitors.
3. Don’t be afraid to use humor.
4. Give the page the same look and feel as the rest of your website.
5. Let visitors know when the website will be back up.
6. Recommend content.
7. Invite visitors to return when the website is online again.
8. Inform visitors about the progress of the maintenance.

Two other rules are especially important to satisfy and engage visitors…

Time Maintenance Periods Wisely

Common practice for timing maintenance is to choose the time of day or day of week that has the lowest traffic. But this overlooks an important point: websites should be optimized for performance, not for traffic. By choosing the maintenance time based on visitor count, you could be optimizing for traffic and not for dollars. A better way to decide would be to run an hourly report and check what time of day or day of week has the lowest conversions.

Increase Visitor Engagement Using Maintenance Pages

Increase visitor engagement while the website is in maintenance mode? Yes, you read that right. While in maintenance, you have a great opportunity to promote your other marketing channels: offline stores, Facebook fan pages, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts.

The maintenance page for Online Behavior.

Parting Thoughts

Errors happen, and we must be prepared for them. We must lend a hand when visitors are most frustrated and make them feel comfortable again. People’s patience and understanding are decreasing, and users have a world of choices just a click away, so website owners cannot let one small error get in their way.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Feel free to share them with us in the comment section below!

(al)

© Daniel Waisberg for Smashing Magazine, 2011. | Permalink | Post a comment | Smashing Shop | Smashing Network | About Us
Post tags: 404, errors, maintenance, navigation, optimization