Trending Upward

On Monday, Joshua Ellis (a co-worker and Google Analytics guru — and someone I’m hoping to get to guest blog here soon!) and I presented at the Penn State Web Conference. Our presentation was called Actionable Web Anaytics for Higher Education.

As attendees started asking question during and after the session, a theme developed – a theme that we are all familar with and is consistently brought up (especially in higher education).

Common Theme - I/we have issues with our analytics set up/implementation/limitations – what do we do? Help!
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Whether you run an admissions, alumni, athletics, or any other university Web site, chances are you’ve run *some* type of marketing campaign.

The medium doesn’t matter – emails, newspaper ads, banner ads, search engine paid keywords, TV ads, the list goes on and on.

Let’s take email, for example. Do you send emails to students, applicants, or prospects? Alumni? Faculty? Staff? Do your emails have links back to your Web site? It could be reminders to register for classes, pay a bill, buy football tickets, whatever. If there is a link back to your Web site, that is an email that can be tracked and later, using the data, optimized (improved!).

Ok, so you’ve created a fantastic email (or series of emails) and are ready to send it (them) out.
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Google has started testing using Ajax to power their search. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is for those who care about web analytics. Why? It completely breaks the way web analytics tools tracks keywords from Google.

How?

If someone searched for this blog on Google in the past, the search string would look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trending+upward&btnG=Search

Today, it looks like this:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=trending+upward&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=trending+upward&fp=3WTwdsC3GPc

Notice the difference? The second one uses a hashtag (#) instead of the more familiar “search?.” The problem lies in the fact that nothing after the hashtag is passed through to the analytics tool, so your referrals look like they’re from http://www.google.com instead of the actual search string. This also means that there are no search keywords associated with it. Not good. How do we know how users are searching on Google to find us?

From what I’ve read, this is just a test, but who knows how long it will go on?

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