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• What is Google Analytics data sampling and what’s so bad about it ?

  16 août 2019, par Joselyn Khor — Analytics Tips, Development
  What is Google Analytics data sampling, and what’s so bad about it ?

  Google (2019) explains what data sampling is :

  “In data analysis, sampling is the practice of analysing a subset of all data in order to uncover the meaningful information in the larger data set.”[1]

  This is basically saying instead of analysing all of the data, there’s a threshold on how much data is analysed and any data after that will be an assumption based on patterns.

  Google’s (2019) data sampling thresholds :

  Ad-hoc queries of your data are subject to the following general thresholds for sampling :
  [Google] Analytics Standard : 500k sessions at the property level for the date range you are using
  [Google] Analytics 360 : 100M sessions at the view level for the date range you are using (para. 3) [2]

  This threshold is limiting because your data in GA may become more inaccurate as the traffic to your website increases.

  Say you’re looking through all your traffic data from the last year and find you have 5 million page views. Only 500K of that 5 million is accurate ! The data for the remaining 4.5 million (90%) is an assumption based on the 500K sample size.

  This is a key weapon Google uses to sell to large businesses. In order to increase that threshold for more accurate reporting, upgrading to premium Google Analytics 360 for approximately US$150,000 per year seems to be the only choice.

  What’s so bad about data sampling ?

  It’s unfair to say sampled data is to be disregarded completely. There is a calculation ensuring it is representative and can allow you to get good enough insights. However, we don’t encourage it as we don’t just want “good enough” data. We want the actual facts.

  In a recent survey sent to Matomo customers, we found a large proportion of users switched from GA to Matomo due to the data sampling issue.

  The two reasons why data sampling isn’t preferable : 

  1. If the selected sample size is too small, you won’t get a good representative of all the data. 
  2. The bigger your website grows, the more inaccurate your reports will become.

  An example of why we don’t fully trust sampled data is, say you have an ecommerce store and see your GA revenue reports aren’t matching the actual sales data, due to data sampling. In GA you may be seeing revenue for the month as $1 million, instead of actual sales of $800K.

  The sampling here has caused an inaccuracy that could have negative financial implications. What you get in the GA report is an estimated dollar figure rather than the actual sales. Making decisions based on inaccurate data can be costly in this case. 

  Another disadvantage to sampled data is that you might be missing out on opportunities you would’ve noticed if you were given a view of the whole. E.g. not being able to see real patterns occurring due to the data already being predicted. 

  By not getting a chance to see things as they are and only being able to jump to the conclusions and assumptions made by GA is risky. The bigger your business grows, the less you can risk making business decisions based on assumptions that could be inaccurate. 

  If you feel you could be missing out on opportunities because your GA data is sampled data, get 100% accurately reported data. 

  The benefits of 100% accurate data

  Matomo doesn’t use data sampling on any of our products or plans. You get to see all of your data and not a sampled data set.

  Data quality is necessary for high impact decision-making. It’s hard to make strategic changes if you don’t have confidence that your data is reliable and accurate.

  Learn about how Matomo is a serious contender to Google Analytics 360. 

  Now you can import your Google Analytics data directly into your Matomo

  If you’re wanting to make the switch to Matomo but worried about losing all your historic Google Analytics data, you can now import this directly into your Matomo with the Google Analytics Importer tool.

  
  Take the challenge !

  Compare your Google Analytics data (sampled data) against your Matomo data, or if you don’t have Matomo data yet, sign up to our 30-day free trial and start tracking !

  References :

  [1 & 2] About data sampling. (2019). In Analytics Help About data sampling. Retrieved August 14, 2019, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2637192

• Your 6-step guide to increasing acquisition

  2 juillet 2019, par Matomo Core Team — Analytics Tips
  Your 6-step guide to increasing acquisition

  Want to save time and money, as well as increase conversions and acquisition ? Matomo Analytics is here to help with that !

  Let’s start by helping you create a website visitors’ acquisition strategy, without it you might be going in blind and missing opportunities that might’ve been easily found in your metrics.

  To help you craft a strategy for your site, check out the steps below !

  Step one : Get familiar with the Acquisition feature

  The easiest way is to start with Matomo’s Acquisition feature itself. Discover and take action on the marketing channels with the biggest ROI for your business. You’ll learn :

  How to get traffic from external websites : Find out who’s helping you succeed from external websites and convince them to do more of it. Get more traffic by proactively asking for : paid sponsorships ; guest blog posts ; or spending more advertising on the particular website.

  

  About Social Networks : Which social media channels are connecting with the audience you want ? Take the guesswork out by using only the ones you need. By finding out which social channels your ideal audience prefers, you can generate shareable, convincing and engaging content to drive shares and traffic through to your site.

  Campaigns : This helps you understand which marketing campaign is working and which isn’t. You can then shift your efforts to effectively gain more visitors with less costs. Keep track of every ad and content piece you show across internal and external channels to see which has the biggest impact on your business objectives.

  Enhanced SEO : Every acquisition plan needs a focus on maximising your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. When it comes to getting conclusive search engine referrer metrics, you need to be sure you’re getting ALL the insights to drive your SEO strategy. See keyword position rankings, integrate Google, Bing and Yahoo search consoles, and no longer be restricted with “keyword not defined” showing up in your keywords reports.

  >> Watch Acquisition introduction video (playtime : 2.54 minutes)

  Step two : Set your goals and monitor conversion funnels

  Let the Goals feature guide you

  Goals are essential for building your marketing strategy and getting new customers. The more goals you track, the more you learn about behavioural changes and modify pathways to impact acquisitions over time. 

  Are you checking :

  • Which channels are converting the best for your business ?
  • Which cities/countries are most popular ?
  • What devices will attract the most visitors ?
  • How engaged your visitors are before converting ?

  This way you can see if your campaigns (SEO, PPC, signups, blogs etc.) or optimising efforts (A/B Testing, Funnels) have made an impact with the time and investment you’ve put in.

  >> Watch Goals introduction video (playtime : 2.04 minutes)

  The Funnels feature leads you to success

  Conversion funnels give you the big picture on whether your acquisition plans are paying off and where they may be falling short. If the ultimate goal of your site is to drive conversions, then each funnel can tell you how effectively you’re driving traffic through to your desired outcome.

  >> Watch Funnels introduction video (playtime : 2.29 minutes)

  

  Step three : Measure the success of every touchpoint in your customer’s journey

  Multi Attribution feature

  Accurately identify channels where visitors first engage with your business, as well as the final channel they came from, before purchasing your product/service. This helps you make smarter decisions when determining acquisition spend to accurately calculate the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Here you no longer falsely over-estimate investment in failing marketing channels.

  >> Watch Multi Attribution introduction video (playtime : 2.28 minutes)

  Step four : For ecommerce sites, understand who your customers are to increase sales

  Ecommerce feature to significantly increase $ potential

  If your website’s overall purpose is to generate revenue, the Ecommerce feature gives you comprehensive insights into your customer’s purchasing behaviours.

  This heavily reduces your risks when marketing products to potential customers as you’ll understand who to target, what to target them with and where further opportunities exist.

  >> Watch Ecommerce introduction video (playtime : 2.04 minutes)

  

  Step five : Make sure the forms on your website are easy to complete

  Form Analytics feature

  Once you get visitors through the funnel, the forms on your website are the final step to conversion and need special attention. If not done right, you could be missing out on converting a large portion of your visitors.

  Thankfully, you can now identify and fix pain points on the forms that are most important to your business’ success.

  >> Watch Form Analytics introduction video (playtime : 2.39 minutes)

  

  Step six : Discover what a customer journey looks like on a user-by-user basis and bring in key acquisition elements to your strategy

  Visitor Profiles tell you each visitors’ history

  The Profile feature summarises every visit, action and purchase made.

  Better understand :

  • Why your visitors viewed your website.
  • Why your returning visitors continue to view your website.
  • What specifically your visitors are looking for and whether they found it on your website.

  The benefit is being able to see how a combination of acquisition channels play a part in a single buyer’s journey.

  >> Watch Visitors introduction video (playtime : 1.46 minutes)

  

  To summarise

  This guide will set you on a path to creating a well-planned acquisition strategy. It’s the key to attracting and capturing the attention of potential visitors/leads, and successfully driving them through a funnel/buyer’s journey on your website.

  Because of Matomo’s reputation as a trusted analytics platform, the features above can be used to assist you in making smarter data-driven decisions. You can pursue different acquisition avenues with confidence and create a strategy that’s agile and ready for success, all while respecting user privacy.

• How Media Analytics for Piwik gives you the insights you need to measure how effective your video and audio marketing is – Part 2

  
  2 février 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  In Part 1 we have covered some of the Media Analytics features and explained why you cannot afford to not measure the media usage on your website. Chances are, you are wasting or losing money and time by not making the most out of your marketing strategy this very second. In this part, we continue showing you some more insights you can expect to get from Media Analytics and how nicely it is integrated into Piwik.

  Video, Audio and Media Player reports

  Media Analytics adds several new reports around videos, audios and media players. They are all quite similar and give you similar insights so we will mainly focus on the Video Titles report.

  Metrics

  The above mentioned reports give you all the same insights and features so we will mainly focus on the “Video Titles” report. When you open such a report for the first time, you will see a report like this with the following metrics :

  

  • “Impressions”, the number of times a visitor has viewed a page where this media was included.
  • “Plays”, the number of times a visitor watched or listened to this media.
  • “Play rate”, the percentage of visitors that watched or listened to a media after they have visited a page where this media was included.
  • “Finishes”, the percentage of visitors who played a media and finished it.
  • “Avg. time spent”, the average amount of time a visitor spent watching or listening to this media.
  • “Avg. media length” the average length of a video or audio media file. This number may vary for example if the media is a stream.
  • “Avg completion” the percentage of how much visitors have watched of a video.

  If you are not sure what a certain metric means, simply hover the metric title in the UI and you will get a detailed explanation. By changing the visualization to the “All Columns Table” in the bottom of the report, you get to see even more metrics like “Plays by unique visitors”, “Impressions by unique visitors”, “Finish rate”, “Avg. time to play aka hesitation time”, “Fullscreen rate” and we are always adding more metrics.

  These metrics are available for the following reports :

  • “Video / Audio Titles” shows you all metrics aggregated by video or audio title
  • “Video / Audio Resource URLs” shows you all metrics aggregated by the video or audio resource URL, for example “https://piwik.org/media.mp4”.
  • “Video / Audio Resource URLs grouped” removes some information from the URLs like subdomain, file extensions and other information to get aggregated metrics when you provide the same media in different formats.
  • “Videos per hour in website’s timezone” lets you find out how your media content is consumed depending on the hour of the day. You might realize that your media is consumed very differently in the morning vs at night.
  • “Video Resolutions” lets you discover how your video is consumed depending on the resolution.
  • “Media players” report is useful if you use different media players on your websites or apps and want to see how engagement with your media compares by media player.

  Row evolution

  At InnoCraft, we understand that static numbers are not so useful. When you see for example that yesterday 20 visitors played a certain media, would you know whether this is good or bad ? This is why we always give you the possibility to see the data in relation to the recorded data in the past. To see how a specific media performs over time, simply hover a media title or media resource URL and click on the “Row Evolution” icon.

  

  Now you can see whether actually more or less visitors played your chosen video for the selected period. Simply click on any metric name and the chosen metrics will be plotted in the big evolution graph.

  This feature is similar to the Media Overall evolution graph introduced in Part 1, but shows you a detailed evolution for an individual media title or resource.

  Media details

  Now that you know some of the most important media metrics, you might want to look a bit deeper into the user behaviour. For example we mentioned before the “Avg time spent on media” metric. Such an average number doesn’t let you know whether most visitors spent about the same time watching the video, or whether there were many more visitors that watched it only for a few seconds and a few that watched it for very long.

  One of the ways to get this insight is by again hovering any media title or resource URL and clicking on the “Media details” icon. It will open a new popup showing you a new set of reports like these :

  

  The “Time spent watching” and “How far visitors reached in the media” bar charts show you on the X-Axis how much time each visitor spent on watching a video and how far in the video they reached. On the Y-Axis you see the number of visitors. This lets you discover whether your users for example jump often to the middle or end of the video and which parts of your video was seen most often.

  

  The “How often the media was watched in a certain hour” and “Which resolutions the media was watched” is similar to the reports introduced in Part 1 of the blog post. However, this time instead of showing aggregated video or audio content data, they display data for a specific media title or media resource URL.

  Segmented audience log

  In Part 1 we have already introduced the Audience Log and explained that it is useful to better understand the user behaviour. Just a quick recap : The Audience Log shows you chronologically every action a specific visitor has performed on your website : Which pages they viewed, how they interacted with your media, when they clicked somewhere, and much more.

  By hovering a media title or a media resource and then selecting “Segmented audience log” you get to see the same log, but this time it will show only visitors that have interacted with the selected media. This will be useful for you for example when you notice an unusual value for a metric and then want to better understand why a metric is like that.

  

  Applying segments

  Media Analytics lets you apply any Piwik segment to the media reports allowing you to dice your visitors or personas multiplying the value that you get out of Media Analytics. For example you may want to apply a segment and analyze the media usage for visitors that have visited your website or mobile app for the first time vs. recurring visitors. Sometimes it may be interesting how visitors that converted a specific goal or purchased something consume your media, the possibilities are endless. We really recommend to take advantage of segments to understand your different target groups even better.

  The plugin also adds a lot of new segments to your Piwik letting you segment any Piwik report by visitors that have viewed or interacted with your media. For example you could go to the “Visitors => Devices” report and apply a media segment to see which devices were used the most to view your media. You can also combine segments to see for example how often your goals were converted when a visitor viewed media for longer than 10 seconds after waiting for at least 20 seconds before playing your media and when they played at least 3 videos during their visit.

  Widgets, Scheduled Reports, and more.

  This is not where the fun ends. Media Analytics defines more than 15 new widgets that you can add to your dashboard or export it into a third party website. You can set up Scheduled Reports to receive the Media reports automatically via email or sms or download the report to share it with your colleagues. It works also very well with Custom Alerts and you can view the Media reports in the Piwik Mobile app for Android and iOS. Via the HTTP Reporting API you can fetch any report in various formats. The plugin is really nicely integrated into Piwik we would need some more blog posts to fully cover all the ways Media Analytics advances your Piwik experience and how you can use and dig into all the data to increase your conversions and sales.

  How to get Media Analytics and related features

  You can get Media Analytics on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about this feature, you might be also interested in the Media Analytics User Guide and the Media Analytics FAQ.