In this post, we will cover the most important Excel features and tricks to improve the web analytics productivity.

Tip#1 Correlation Analysis

Web data analysis comes with its own set of data inconsistencies and irregularities that cannot be explained by simple math. Sometimes you may notice that your website bounce rate changes with the day of the week, and sometimes the conversion rate will change with traffic. This happens when one data set (visits) shares positive or negative relationship with another data set (conversion).

Pearson’s correlation is the best way to measure the positive and the negative correlation of data to rule out the data inconsistencies and establish a baseline.

MS Excel 2007 is equipped with Correlation function and can be used to perform a quick analysis.

Let’s assume that we want to see the relationship between the daily visits and the website conversion.

a. Enter the visit and the conversion data on the Excel spreadsheet.

b. Place the cursor on any empty cell in the spreadsheet. This cell will be used to display the Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Press F2 to enter the formula for correlation and type “=Correl” and hit Tab key.

c. Once you hit the Tab key, the cursor will be placed in the bracket, and you will be allowed to select the array data. Select your first data column (avg. daily visits) for the array1 and second data column (avg. daily conversion) for the array2. Close the bracket and then hit the Enter key.

d. The value displayed in the cell (0.963240336) will be the correlation between the avg. daily visits and avg. daily conversion. In this case, the daily visits show a high positive correlation with conversion (greater than zero is positive and less than zero is negative. Zero is no correlation).

Tip#2 Control Limits

We have discussed control limits on this blog before, but I could not resist talking about it once again because it is extremely important. Establishing control limits for your data set allows you to measure the trends in your web metrics effectively.

Your website traffic/conversion/bounce rate can fluctuate due to multiple uncontrollable environmental factors. You could see a spike in traffic due to a viral campaign or see a drop in conversion because of shopping cart errors. In any case, your job as a web analyst is to identify a true trend and eliminate noise from data.

Calculating the upper and lower control limit (UCL & LCL) using Excel will allow you to establish a trend benchmark for your key metrics. Using this data, you can focus on when to take action about the data.

Here are the steps to calculate the UCL and LCL for web traffic data.

a. Enter the ninety day daily visits day on the Excel spreadsheet and calculate the Standard Deviation in an empty cell. (hint: For accurate UCL and LCL calculations, it is advisable to have atleast 90 data points).

Excel Standard Deviation formula = STDEV(number1,number2,..,numberN)

b. Calculate the Mean for the data.

Mean = Average(number1,number2,…,numberN)

c. Finally, calculate the upper and the lower control limits. The control limits can be later applied to the weekly/monthly trend graph.

Upper Control Limit (UCL) = Mean + Standard deviation

Lower Control Limit (LCL) = Mean – Standard deviation

Tip#3 Data Comparison using Vlookup

VLookup is one of the most powerful Excel functions that you can use to match / compare data between two Excel sheets. Vlookup can be used to match/compare the data between either the same or across different Excel spread sheets. The possibilities of using Vlookup function are endless. You can pull data from different sources and populate the fields based on a matching column. For example – data from your CRM solution can be connected to the data from web analytics provided you have one common column (visitor id) between the two spreadsheets.

Here is a short Youtube video that shows how to import value from one spreadsheet to another using Vlookup.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: Youtube user smbst58

Tip# 4 Pivot Tables

Summarizing data from a large Excel spreadsheet is extremely difficult when dealing with multiple variables and filters. The excel Pivot Table feature allows you to summarize the data really quickly. The filter functionality of the Pivot table can be used to filter the data for multiple values, i.e. lead type, date, campaign source, campaign medium.

There are two ways to create a Pivot Table in MS Excel. You can either add the Pivot Table on the same spreadsheet or create the table on a new spreadsheet. I prefer creating the table on a new sheet because it is clean and easier to sue. To create the Pivot Table on a new sheet, open the Excel data file, place the cursor on a filled data cell (placing the cursor on an empty data cell will add Pivot Table to the same sheet), click “Insert” tab and then click “PivotTable” button in MS Excel 2007.

The Pivot Table action box will popup, and the “Table/Range” field will be automatically prepopulated with the table range.

Click “OK” and you will be taken to a new sheet with the Pivot Table.

Pivot Table consists of three sub sections.

a. PivotTable display area – Empty area on the left where the Pivot Table will be displayed.

b. Pivot Table field list – This is the list of the columns from the data spreadsheet.

c. Table customization areas – Table customization consists of four areas -

1. Report Filter: Report filter allows you to filter the table using any column. In this example, you can filter the table by Date, Day, Campaign source and Lead type. Simply, drag and drop the column from the field list to the filter area.

2. Row Labels: This area allows you to add the rows for the Pivot Table.

3. Column Labels: This area allows you to add the columns for the Pivot Table.

4. Values: This is where you can add the amount of the total sales and any other calculation you want to look at.

Once you drag and drop the columns in the respective areas, here is how the final table will look like. You can then easily filter the table by date, day or lead type.

Tip#5 Unique Records Advanced Filter

This is the easiest of all the Excel tricks and one of the most useful. As a web analyst, you will constantly come across multiple visit data for the same visitor in any given period of time. Unique record filter allows you to filter out the duplicate records from the data.

Here are the steps to use the unique record filter to remove the duplicate visitor ids from the sample data -

1. Select the column with the duplicate records (Visitor id)

2. Click the “Data” tab in MS Excel 2007

3. Click “Advanced” in “Sort & Filter” section

4. Click “Unique records only” check box and hit “Enter”.

The final data will only show one instance of the Visitor id.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below. Your feedbacks are helping me become a better blogger. Thanks!

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
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Top 5 Power User Excel Tips & Tricks for Web Analytics Productivity is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

In this post, we will discuss 100% free on and off site analytics tool that can provide you detailed insights about your customers and prospects.

Google Insights for Search – The only tool on the web that allows you to predict the future traffic volume of keyword and location based insight. You can use insights to identify the keywords that are trending down and will virtually become extinct and keywords are new and growing faster.

A super cool feature “secret” feature of insights is it can sometimes be used to identify investment opportunities. You can quickly compare real estate markets in Florida and Texas and identify better performing markets.

Quantcast – A pretty cool tool that provides quick demographics and traffic estimates on most websites. The key usage for the site is to find the right audience for marketing. Quantcast collects the log data from the websites that participate in their measurement program. The data collection is based on third party cookies.

Compete – Compete is a top competitive analysis tool that allows you to spy on your competitor traffic and search analytics. The traffic estimates are far more accurate in comparison to Quantcast. Their data collection method is based on daily browsing activity of their panel of 2 million panelists.

Compete’s search analytics data is fairly usable, and you can instantly get the share of the search visit for any keyword.

Twitter Analyzer – Measuring twitter conversations has become extremely important for every organization. Twitter analytics provides great details on the offsite customer / visitor behavior. Twitter Analyzer is a must use extremely powerful Twitter analytics tool. It not only measures the growth rate of your follower and friends but also provides detailed measurement of chats, popularity, reach, links, hashtags, follower geo location, groups and more.

Bit.ly – Bitly was originally designed as a url shortener but it is now commonly used for real time click tracking and campaign measurement. Bitly is the hottest social media url shortner and campaign tracking tool. One of the coolest features of bit.ly is it allows the tracking of competitor campaigns.

To perform a competitive analysis simply find your competitor’s bit.ly url from Twitter search or Facebook pages and type bitlyurl+ in your browser window. Voila! You now have real time insights into your competitor’s campaigns.

Google Ad planner – Google Ad planner is similar to Quantcast. but it offers additional data like ‘audience interest’, ‘keywords searched for’ and sub domain level tracking.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Admob Mobile Analytics – Google recently acquired Abmob, a company that is specialized in mobile ads and analytics. Admob analytics allows the user to install code on their mobile website and get detailed analytics reports. Users can instant access all web analytics reports like visitor location, mobile device types and time spent on the mobile site. The analytics package is completely free because the company makes money by selling ad space on mobile sites.

Open Site Explorer – Open site explorer is the best link analytics and seo metrics tool on the planet. The free version allows you to download data for up to 1000 links. You can perform advanced seo competitive analysis and compare data between two sites. Data can be exported in CSV format for further segmentation and pivoting in excel.

Pear Analytics – Pear Analytics offers a complete SEO scan of your website and provide insights on how you can optimize your site for search ranking. The analytics engine is powered by some of the most popular search ranking factors. The software is capable of identifying 404 issues, title and meta issues, css and missing sitemap issues.

Google Analytics – The #1 free web analytics tool is becoming the biggest competitor to enterprise analytics. With new features like mobile tracking, advanced analysis tools, and analytics intelligence more businesses are thinking twice before investing in paid solutions.

Google analytics recently added asynchronous tracking that loads the analytics code in the backend improving the site load time.

Hope you enjoyed the post. Please share your thoughts, feedbacks and comments on what you think are some of the top analytics tools.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -

Top 10 Outrageous Web Analytics Myths..Debunked
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Top 10 Absolutely Free Web and SEO Analytics Tools is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

It is interesting that web analytics is all about data but very fewer infographics have been created on web analytics concepts. Here are some of the most popular web analytics and seo infographics.

#1. Unica Anlaytics – The top in the category of the web analytics infographics, this Unica infograph explains the web analytics process and how use it for campaign optimization.

Source: http://lp.unica.com/infographic/

#2. UXD Stress Fields – A super cool way to show how tech, web development and business decision makers can work together. Web analytics cannot operate in a silo, and it is absolutely important to connect your tech and web development team with the business analyst.

Source: http://informationarchitects.jp/the-spectrum-of-user-experience-1/

#3. SEO FAQs guide – This highly popular seo infographic can be used to learn the basics of search engine optimization in few minutes. Kudos to the designer who has incorporated the small on and off page optimization nuances with such clarity.

Source: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2010/04/13/seo-in-pictures-our-seo-infographic/

#4. Actionable Analytics - Here is a simple display of web analytics measurement framework. The designer has captured all the facets of buying cycle and connected it with the web measurement strategy.

Source: http://actionable-analytics.com/2009/07/how-to-build-a-digital-measurement-framework/

#5. Google’s Analytics - A dark humorous way of showing how much data Google captures through different analytics measurement techniques. Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics software and is one of the key tools of Google’s data capture portfolio.

Source: http://smashingcrunch.com/images/fear-google-true-power-of-analytics-user-data-infographic

Original Source: Onlineschools.org

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

Here is a list of the related top blog posts on this blog -
Ultimate Web Analytics Training Guide: From Click to Close
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Copy My Actionable Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Top 3 Worst Web Analytics Metrics & Reports

Top 5 Amazing Web Analytics and SEO Infographics is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog

Here is a quick snap shot of all the beta release to date. Feel free to share your comments, insights and thoughts to improve this free web app.

Beta 1.3 – Released 3/17/10

* Full support for Omniture Analytics
* Bug fix with certain pages not being scanned for Google Analytics
* Few small bug fixes

Beta 1.2 – Released 02/28/10

* Added excel download option for download reports
* Added email delivery option for getting reports delivered by email once the scan is complete

Beta 1.1 – Released 02/22/10

* Frist beta release with support for 5 analytics software (Google, Omniture, Coremetrics, Yahoo and web trends)

Web Analytics Scan Update is a post from: Key Web Metrics & Web Analytics Blog