Visitor Insights

In our previous posts, we talked about how the Universal Tag can simplify your web analytics implementation and improve the web analytics process. In this post, we’re going to discuss another key benefits associated with the Universal Tag:

Universal Tag is about preparing for the unknown.

Let’s face it. Implementations change because requirements change. Traditional web analytics deployments require you to know your requirements well in advance before you start tagging. Your reporting requirements (how you want to see the data) will dictate how you tag your analytics solution.

Want to see the impact of site search on cart activity? You’ll have to tag for it.
Want to see the number of times people view a product before placing it in cart? You’ll have to tag for it.
Want to see the effect of white paper downloads on lead conversions? You’ll have to tag for it.

This is costly. And what makes the process more cumbersome is the fact that requirements change. The change can be part of the evolutionary process associated with web analytics, or simply because of unexpected consequences of your implementation. In this post, we’re going to discuss what happened to a major consumer products company and how the Universal Tag saved them from re-tagging.

In this specific scenario, the company just launched a virtual world promoting many of their different brands. The virtual world is built completely in Flash and in order to track the effectiveness of the on-site promotional offers, the company decided to track the promotions as on-site campaign impressions. In other words, as a new offer (internal ad) appears on the screen, an impression tracking is sent to the web analytics tool.

This measurement framework allows the company to measure the click-through rate of the internal offers (since impressions are being tracked). However, it also results in an unexpected side effect.

Assuming that upon each offer, an impression request is sent to the analytics tool, what happens if the visitor leaves his/her computer while keeping the browser open (say heads out to lunch)?

This implementation will result in many extra unwanted calls being sent to the vendor, which results in both artificially high number of server calls (cost to the customer), as well as engagement metrics in the form of time spent on site.

With a traditional web analytics deployment, the client will have to go back to the web development team and to add a logic within the content management system that caps the number of ad impressions being sent. However, with a Universal Tag deployment, fixing this is simply a matter of adding a new plug-in to the Universal Tag library. The plug-in automatically cuts off requests after a defined number of impressions. The web development team or the agency does not have to change a thing and web analytics practitioners can be in total control of how the data is sent to the vendor.

Web analytics implementations are not always easy. Often times, as you’re getting into advanced implementations, there’s a chance that you’ll see unexpected behaviors or side effects from the implementation. With traditional deployments, these require a re-tagging exercise. The Universal Tag on the other hand lets you deploy once and fine tune without having to re-touch your page tags every time, hence preparing for the unknown.

Universal Tag Universal Tag, Web Analytics

In our last post, we talked about the use of Universal Tag to improve your web analytics implementation. In this post, we are going to discuss another major benefit associated with the Universal Tag.

Universal Tag is about having a better web analytics process.

Web analytics is an iterative process. A typical web analytics cycle is shown here. First, users deploy their web analytics tool. From there, they analyze the data, and make changes to their sites based on findings. The cycle then repeats itself. However, in some cases, the findings may require users to look at the data in a different angle. Often times, the new angle will require a change in web analytics implementation, which means re-tagging the site.

To demonstrate this, we’re going to discuss an analysis that we recently did for a technology company. This client sells expensive enterprise software and uses a large number of white papers in order to educate its user base. As part of the analysis, the client wanted to know if white papers have a positive impact on site conversions, which is lead generation. The client’s tool of choice is Google Analytics.

To do the analysis, we used the “Visits with Conversion” segment and looked at the downloaded files for the segment. This will show us which files were downloaded during the same session where the lead was captured. The results were initially shocking. For this particular segment, we saw about 30% less white paper downloads than an average session. Are we to believe that converting visitors are less interested in white papers than non-converting ones? This meant that we needed additional information.

The next hypothesis was that visitors download the papers, read them and then come back to the web site and submit their information. In order to prove this new hypothesis, we had to make an implementation change since Google Analytics does not provide this level of cross-session analysis without customization.

The solution was to use a visitor-scope custom variable to capture the downloaded document and look at the “download” custom variable report for the “converting” visitors.

With default web analytics deployments, this requires editing the tagging within the download pages, which is a laborious process that will involve the web development team. However, through the Universal Tag, this process be can implemented without a single page tag change.

Following this change, the discovery proved our hypothesis. In fact, we learned that it takes an average of 2 days between a white paper download and a lead registration. This exercise clearly showed the dangers of relying only on session-level data when dealing with complex sales.

Universal Tag made this discovery possible without re-tagging. Because organizations can fine-tune their implementation without costly re-tagging exercises, they can learn faster and therefore get more value from their web analytics investment than those using standard tags.

Universal Tag google analytics, Universal Tag, Web Analytics, web analytics consulting

It has been a while since our last blog post. We’ve been busier than ever deploying the Universal Tag on client sites and I’m happy to say that the number of unique client deployments is approaching 50.

There’s more and more buzz around Universal Tagging every day and as a result, we’re getting the same questions from more people than ever: What is the Universal Tag?

In this multi-part series, we’re going to share our thoughts as to what the Universal Tag is and what it’s not.

In this post, we’re going to cover what we see as the first misconception about the Universal Tag.

Misconception: Universal Tag should be used by those that are in the process of switching vendors.

Fact: Based on two years of experience, we can categorically say that this is not the primary benefit that Universal Tag provides to clients.

Universal Tag is about fixing your current implementation.

That’s right. Out of almost 50 deployments of Universal Tag, only two clients have signed up in order to switch vendors. The large majority has no plan to switch vendors. Yet they recognize that their implementation can be vastly improved. Universal Tag provides them a platform to do just that.

The reason is because the Universal Tag provides a simplified platform for tagging compared to traditional vendor tags. It also changes the best practice implementation considerably. Today’s web analytics tools require you to think well in advance about the different types of reports that you want to get from the solution. Only after you have a good understanding of what your reporting needs are can you start the tagging process.

The Universal Tag framework changes this by letting you send generic data and map it to vendor-specific syntax at any time. This changes best practice implementations in that it lets you just send the data. The rest can be handled through the Universal Tag.

Here is a real-life example that helps demonstrate the point.

Example: Product Syntax

Consider a scenario of a product page. Within the page, you’d like to capture several components, including the product name, product size, color, and number of ratings received. As far as reporting is concerned, you’d like to get reports on top products viewed, top colors and sizes viewed, as well as average ratings of products (a numerical report) and a histogram or bar chart report of reviews (how many views for products with rating 1, rating 2, …).

Sounds simple, huh? Lets look at how you would go about implementing this with the two most popular tools on the market: Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst. The examples that we’ll use will be for a cotton shirt, color: white, size: large and a rating of 4.5.

First Google Analytics. We’re going to use custom variables to capture product name, size and color. The challenge here is that not only your developers have to know about the specific syntax, but they should also be aware of the fact that you can have visitor, visit or pageview-based custom variables. Now there’s no such thing as a numerical custom variable in Google Analytics, so you’ll have to use the event tracking feature in order to get your numerical ratings report. The implementation syntax will look something like this

pageTracker._setCustomVar(1,"product view","cotton shirt",3);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(2,"color","white",3);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(3,"size","large",3);
pageTracker._setCustomVar(4,"rating","4.5",3);
pageTrack._trackPageview();
...
pageTracker._trackEvent("product view","cotton shirt","rating","4.5");

Let’s try the same thing with SiteCatalyst. We’re going to assume that we’ll use prop1 and eVar1 for size, prop2 and eVar2 for color, prop3, and eVar3 for rating and event1 as the numerical event used to measure the average rating. The implementation syntax will look something like this:

s.events="event1,prodView";
s.products=";cotton shirt;;;event1=4.5;evar1=large|evar2=white|evar3=4.5";
s.prop1="large";
s.prop2="white";
s.prop3="4.5";

Again, you’re requiring your development team to know what different props, eVars and events are as well as the exact syntax which should be used (for example using lower case evar for merchandising).

Now let’s look at what this same implementation will look like with the Universal Tag. Here’s an example syntax:

yourdata.product="cotton shirt",
yourdata.size="large",
yourdata.color="white",
yourdata.rating="4.5",
yourdata.page_type="product view",

Now what if you wanted to deploy both SiteCatalyst & Google Analytics? No changes. The implementation will be the exact same.

This simplified implementation has several benefits. The one that’s clearly being addressed in this post is that it simplifies implementations and vastly reduces the deployment cycle. Your development team no longer has to master the analytics tool being used and can concentrate on sending the data through the simplified tag. Your business team or analytics department can then translate this data into vendor-specific syntax.

In future posts, we will share some of the other benefits that we’re seeing with the Universal Tag. Stay tuned.

Universal Tag google analytics, sitecatalyst, Universal Tag, Web Analytics

We are pleased to announce the availability of version 2 of Tealium Universal Tag. The new version provides many new enhancements following several enterprise-level web analytics deployments with large number of platforms, including SiteCatalyst, Omniture Insight, Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Unica NetInsight, Webtrends and Coremetrics, as well as a number of digital marketing solutions such as DoubleClick, Atlas, ForeSee Results and more.

Some of the new functionality include:

• Improved multi-vendor support: the new version provides a superior method for complex implementations with multiple vendors. For example, non-technical users can map page tag values differently into various web analytics solutions, while also mapping them to their PPC bid management tool.
• Attribution management: designed specifically for clients using multiple affiliates, version 2 of Tealium Universal Tag has the ability to conditionally send data only to the winning affiliate(s).
• Multi-currency support: the new version of Universal Tag supports transactions in multiple currencies for digital marketing vendors that do not provide such support by conducting on-the-fly conversions to the supported currency.
• Universal data capture: this feature allows non-technical users to automatically capture data elements from the page and map them to their web analytics and digital marketing solutions. Examples of such data elements include microformats, meta tags, in-page style elements, query parameters, cookie values, etc.

We’ll be publishing a number of case studies on Universal Tag deployments soon. In the meantime, to see Universal Tag in action, please contact us.

Web Analytics Implementation google analytics, hbx, sitecatalyst, Universal Tag, Web Analytics, yahoo web analytics