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Long term metrics, and other goodies
Our newest update is all about the long term, and it's one of the best things we've ever done. I'd recommend grabbing a fresh pair of pants before reading on because you're going to need them before you're done reading this.
It all started out innocently enough: A fairly simple update to goals that before I knew it had morphed into something else entirely. 80% of the stuff in this update was never planned, all of these ideas just starting coming to me as I kept working on it. "Hmmm this would be sweet, oh this too, oh and this…" Within days my bullet point todo list for this update was ridiculously long and ended up taking almost 3 weeks to complete. But that's the way it usually goes when I feel I'm on to something good.
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Count your chickens while they're still hatching
About 3 months ago, Google announced that all users logged in to their Google account, their search terms would be hidden from the referrer string when they clicked through. Net result is no trackers can see these search terms (surprisingly, this includes Google Analytics). Google says this is for privacy reasons. That's great, but I've said a thousand times, search analytics is one of the best reasons to run analytics in the first place so it sucks for site owners.
Anyways, the way our code processed blank search terms, they would show up like this:
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Google search rankings :D
Considering how much Google has been playing the privacy card recently, I'm surprised they do this, but it turns out the referrer string for Google searches typically includes a variable in the URL, "cd", which signifies the approximate ranking of the link someone clicked on to get to your site for a search term. e.g. "1" would mean your page was the top result.
We've had requests to parse this data. As of about 20 minutes ago, we are now doing just that! (Pro+ account required).
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More ways to view hourly data… and more!
We just deployed a bunch of changes to hourly data, amongst other things:
These are all insanely useful, particularly the first one!
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utm_custom: a new URL parameter to attach custom data to visitors
One feature that gets requested a lot is to be able to set a variable in the URL that could then be attached to the visitor as custom data. This would be particularly useful for things like email newsletters, so when someone clicks through, they can be identified automatically.
The variable name needed to be generic because of our white label program, and since we pictured this being used with "campaign activity" more than anything else, we decided to call the variable utmcustom (related to Google/Urchin's utmcampaign etc variables).