Lukas Oldenburg

Improving Product Performance with Adobe or Google Analytics

February 23, 2016 by Lukas Oldenburg Leave a Comment

Image of shop with text "Using Google or Adobe Analytics to Improve Product Performance by Lukas Oldenburg" For a Category Manager of an online shop with hundreds or thousands of products, it can get difficult to find those products that are performing poorly AND are worth optimizing.

You cannot simply work on all products that did not sell well last week, there are just too many. Focusing on only those products with high margins is not going to help much either.

Here are some helpful performance metrics you can create in Adobe Analytics (formerly SiteCatalyst) – and partially also in Google Analytics.

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Adobe Analytics: No Need to “Break Down” Thanks to Revamped Calculated Metrics

June 30, 2015 by Lukas Oldenburg 1 Comment

German, French and English Visits, Internal and External Visits – all in one Report as neat, compact metrics. All this without having to spend a lot of time with tedious breakdowns and segments (and still not getting what you’d really like to). That’s what an Adobe Analytics client needed. The new “Unified Calculated Metrics” now make this possible – something that you can’t do in Google Analytics by the way.

The “breakdown” is something so essential to Adobe Analytics that you can hardly do any real analysis without breaking down. Breaking down is sort of a combination of what Google Analytics users know as Drilldowns and adding a second or third dimension to a report. When you break down with Adobe, you break down one dimension by another one, e.g. the Campaign Name by the Device and that by the Browser and that by the Browser Version and that by the Entry Page and so on… You can get as granular as you want and never have to fear sampling like in GA!

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Why Google Analytics needs to fix its Sessions

April 14, 2015 by Lukas Oldenburg 3 Comments

More Users than Sessions? Impossible! 172 Pageviews, but 0 Sessions? Probably an issue with the implementation. Unfortunately, it is the weird way in which Google Analytics, to this day, interprets Sessions, formerly known as Visits.

I was about to finish the second part of my Comparison of Custom Variables in Adobe, Webtrends and Google Analytics, but now this has to wait a bit. While writing about GA’s Custom Dimensions, I kept stumbling over the one reporting issue (besides sampling) that has been hounding and annoying me for years.

Since this issue is a bit complex, I decided to dedicate an entire article to it. I am talking about the weird Sessions metric in Google Analytics (formerly “Visits”, but with the same deficiencies).

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Custom Variables in Google vs. Adobe vs. Webtrends Analytics – Part I

March 3, 2015 by Lukas Oldenburg 2 Comments

A Visit-based dimension in Webtrends is an eVar in Adobe Analytics, right? And Visits for a Page in Adobe Analytics will yield the same result as Sessions for a Page in Google Analytics, no? Beware of false friends! This article series shows you the nuts and bolts of Custom Variables, holders of your most precious data – by comparing Google, Adobe, and Webtrends Analytics.

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Advanced Analytics Debugging: No Code Access? – No Problem!

May 27, 2014 by Lukas Oldenburg 2 Comments

A typical day in the life of a Web Analyst: On a certain web page, something is not being tracked the way it should. Looking at the source code, you are almost certain that adding, deleting or rewriting just that one line of Analytics code would make it work. But how do you verify that if you cannot change that code yourself?

Web Analysts are usually not developers and often have to find errors in systems where they have little to no access to the code base or the server-side templates where the HTML and JavaScript code comes from. You can make hypotheses about how to solve these errors, but in order to test these hypotheses, you often need a developer to update the code first according to your hypothesis.

Say hi to Fiddler, the browser-independent HTTP debugger and manipulator

To get the testing job done without the developer help, you first need Fiddler, a free HTTP debugging and traffic manipulation tool. Remember that, unlike browser-plugin-based debugging tools like Chrome GA Debugger (see my article here), the very basic Google Tag Assistant, or the flashy WASP, the basic advantage of Fiddler is that it is browser-independent. This is important since there are still many bugs that only happen in Internet Explorer or Firefox for example. With Fiddler, you can even debug your iPhone apps or anything else that does not run through a classic browser. And you can manipulate the web pages and files that you up- or download from the web before they render in your browser – and thus, as if they had come like that from the server itself. [Read more…]