Absolute Unique Visit

Google Analytics, using javascript, will deliver a cookie to your browser that helps establish a session. For the purposes of unique visits, __utma is used. The __utma cookie expires in two years, meaning someone who visits the site every single day for two years will only be counted as one absolute unique visitor.

In reality, he or she will probably visit from several browsers (each maintains their own cookies) and will probably clear cookies several times over the next two years (or their anti-spyware apps will do it for them), but theoretically the above could hold true.

Visits

A visit is merely a “user session” and that is stored as __utmb, which has an expiration of thirty minutes. If a user visits your site and then does nothing for more than thirty minutes, then the cookie expires. The next time they load the page, Analytics will see that it has expired and write a new one, thus incrementing your visits by one.

It’s unclear how the two metrics are affected if users block the setting of cookies. I tried looking online but couldn’t find a definite answer but intuition would lead me to believe that a user who blocks cookies would always be counted as a unique visitor (and thus a visitor). You would lose tracking of their behavior, since there’s no session cookie to tell Analytics where they’ve been, but you’d have correct-ish visit counts. Fortunately the number of people rejecting cookies is fairly small.

Here is a detailed discussion of Cookies and Google Analytics, which should answer pretty much any question you could possibly have, and a fantastic primer on cookies and tracking overall.

Google Analytics Visit vs. Absolute Unique Visit is a post from: wangarific

So with that mantra always in my mind, I’m always striving to improve the user experience because I want to make the site the best it can be. That’s why I try to make it faster using tips from YSlow and why I, about a year and a half ago, decided to remove Google Adsense from Bargaineering.com’s homepage.

Metrics Don’t Lie

Metrics will always lead the way in any justification and this case is no exception. My hypothesis was that regularly readers were hitting the homepage and thus less likely to click on advertisements. Search engine and new visitors, those more likely to click on Adsense, would predominately be visit individual posts. Fortunately testing this theory was easy, I had separate channels for the two left sidebar skyscrapers on the homepage and for the two skyscrapers on individual posts. Each were the 120×600 blocks.

June 2008 was the last month I had Adsense on the homepage and CTR figures were (these are not the actual CTR figures but the ratios are correct):

• Upper homepage skyscraper – 2.56%
• Lower homepage skyscraper – 1.00%
• Upper individual skyscraper – 29.77%
• Lower individual skyscraper – 3.33%

Don’t focus on the numbers themselves because they’re not the actual CTRs, just focus on the ratios. One ad block did not get a near 30% CTR…

As you can see, the homepage ads performed horrible compared to the individual ads – as expected. In fact, the lower placed individual skyscraper beat the higher placed skyscraper on the homepage – further cementing the idea that homepage visitors simply don’t click on advertisements.

Revenue

When you looked at revenue, the difference was even more pronounced (again, no actuals but ratios):

• Upper homepage skyscraper – $2.89
• Lower homepage skyscraper – $1.00
• Upper individual skyscraper – $67.95
• Lower individual skyscraper – $14.00

If I had to keep only one adsense block, I’d keep the upper individual skyscraper. Fortunately, I can decide to keep them all and I made the decision that it was better for the user if I removed homepage ads. In the end, it wouldn’t cost me much and I felt it made for a cleaner experience.

Have you made the switch to an ad-free homepage? If so, did you do a similar analysis? It not, have you considered it?

Why I Dropped Homepage Google Adsense is a post from: wangarific

Incidentally, you can’t use this to split test Adsense because Adsense won’t let you track clicks in this way. To split test Adsense, using a simple rand() function and an if clause is sufficient.

There are three steps to the process:

• Post Modifications: This section will explain what you need to do on individual posts to get tracking enabled.
• Header Modifications: For the Optimization code to work, there is a javascript snippet you need to add to the header of each post. This snippet is custom to each test, so we need to pass some variable around to set the test number variable.
• Footer Modifications: Much like the header code, there is footer code that serves the same function.

Post Modifications

In the Custom Fields I create two new variables:

• showOptimizer – This will be set to 1 whenever I want the optimizer code to be included for a post. By default, when it’s not set, it’s a 0.
• GWOtestNumber – This is the Google Website Optimizer test variable number. When you setup your test, one of the steps will include all the code you need to put on your site. Look in the Conversion Script (the last block of code) for something that says _trackPageview(“/XXXXXXXXX/goal”); – that’s the number you set here.

These variables will tell other code snippets in your header.php and footer.php how to create the Control Script (header) and Tracking Script (footer).

Tracking User Actions: In the post itself, you need to add
onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/XXXXXXXXX/goal');"
to each click you want to track (without the carriage return/line wrap, it should be one line). Replace XXXXXXXXX with the GWOtestNumber.

For example, on a link the link will now look like this:
<a href="http://www.google.com" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/XXXXXXXXX/goal');">Google.com</a>

Identify Split Test page Sections: Finally, throw this code around the section(s) you’re going to be split testing. This goes in the beginning:
<script>utmx_section("Test Section A")</script>
And this goes after it:
</noscript>

Change the text (Test Section A) to something that makes sense to you.

Later, through the GWO system, you can create the other versions.

Header Modifications

The header is getting a modified version of the Control Script, with the underlined section of the original replaced with an echo of a post Custom Field. Confirm the code is correct with the code you get from Google Website Optimizer, they may have made some changes. You’re replacing the K test number value with the one you set as a Custom field, then adding some conditional code around it to only display this code if you are running optimizations on it.

<?php
$showOpt = get_post_custom_values('showOptimizer');
if ($showOpt) {
$GWOTestNumber = get_post_custom_values('GWOtestNumber');
?>
<script>
function utmx_section(){}function utmx(){}
(function(){var k='<?php echo $GWOTestNumber[0];?> ',d=document,l=d.location,c=d.cookie;function f(n){
if(c){var i=c.indexOf(n+'=');if(i>-1){var j=c.indexOf(';',i);return c.substring(i+n.
length+1,j<0?c.length:j)}}}var x=f('__utmx'),xx=f('__utmxx'),h=l.hash;
d.write('<sc'+'ript src="'+
'http'+(l.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+'.google-analytics.com'
+'/siteopt.js?v=1&utmxkey='+k+'&utmx='+(x?x:'')+'&utmxx='+(xx?xx:'')+'&utmxtime='
+new Date().valueOf()+(h?'&utmxhash='+escape(h.substr(1)):'')+
'" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></sc'+'ript>')})();
</script>
<? } ?>

Footer Modifications

The footer is getting a modified version of the Tracking Script, with the bolded section of the original replaced with an echo of a post Custom Field. Again, confirm the code is correct with the code you get from Google Website Optimizer, they may have made some changes.

<?php
$showOpt = get_post_custom_values('showOptimizer');
if ($showOpt){
$GWOTestNumber = get_post_custom_values('GWOtestNumber');
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+
(document.location.protocol=='https:'?'s://ssl':'://www')+
'.google-analytics.com/ga.js"></sc'+'ript>')</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker=_gat._getTracker("UA-4422524-4");
pageTracker._trackPageview("/<?php echo $GWOTestNumber[0];?> /test");
}catch(err){}</script>
<?php } ?>

It sounds complicated but if you walk through it step by step, it should work. Now, whenever you want to do some GWO testing on a particular page, add/set showOptimizer to 1, add the GWOtestNumber, and set the brackets around your test area and you should be ready to go.

Let me know if you run into any problems or see an error in the code snippets.

Tutorial: Integrating Google Website Optimizer and WordPress is a post from: wangarific