mon.itor.us is a free web monitoring service that has an excellent user interface and charting capability. And did I mention it is free!

Not only does it monitor you website to see if it is up and running, it provides a set of tools for web traffic analysis and resource utilization.

All the data are presented in nicely formated charts that looks really great.

An excellent tool to analyse your server uptime, traffic and server load.

Now it is open and you can sign up immediately. No need to wait for invitation email.

So, don’t wait. Go over to Google Analytics, sign up for a free account and start gaining insights on your web visitors.

In this article I want to look at Adsense click through rate (CTR) and how you can use this insight to change your ad layout and improve conversion.

Take a look at this report for August todate. The channels, all belonging to the same site, had been masked (We don’t really need that for this discussion anyway).

Some Basics

Before we move on, let’s take a look at some basic. A good source of information is the AdSense Help Center.

In order to obtain the CTR data, we first have to create Channels for each of the ad position.

You might also want to get familiar with some of the terms: Clickthrough rate, Click, Page Impression.

Making Sense of the data

Here, the clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most important figure to look at.

Due to the ads different position and impression on different pages, absolute figure like click and impression does not give a complete picture.

CTR on the other hand tells us how effective is the position, ad format and style.

To compare, take a look at this data from July. Not all the channel corresponds as I had created more channels in August.

The page impression are almost equivalent. We are not at the end of the month yet, so in fact this month’s traffic has slightly increased.

The CTR though has some good news (and so does the number of clicks).

For one channel the rate has increased substantially from 6.46% to 11.52%. This I attribute a creative format change that I had done.

Not shown here is the page Effective CPM, this has also been increased by filtering Low Paying Ads.

The Next Step

In the next month, I am going to remove the low CTR channels and reposition them. Then I’m going to monitor and result.

I hope this helps you as much this exercise had help me. Please share your thoughts and any comment you have.

This article is written by Ken of 59Ideas and first published on Analytic Insight. You may copy and use this article if you retain this message.

Tech Crunch called this release a screw up and staggering utter stupidity.

The original intention of the data was to be for the purpose of personalization, query reformulation and search research.

However the amount of personal information that can be gathered from the data is staggering. As some have discovered.

The compress archive is 439Mb and expands to more than 2Gb.

Summary:

• 36,389,567 lines of data
• 21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
• 7,887,022 requests for “next page” of results
• 19,442,629 user click-through events
• 16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
• 10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
• 657,426 unique user ID’s

Imagine the kind of analysis and data mining can one do on this data!

On a related note, what tools can one use to analyse such data?

They are a Google Analytics certified consultant so you can expect them to know much more about using the tool than the average you and me.

Take a look, I learn quite a bit from there, like homepage A/B testing.

This article is divided into 2 sections. The first is my notes on setting up the tracking code. The second is reading the Google Analytics report.

Setting Up

The code I am using comes from ASP.NET 2.0 Resources. (A local copy is here.)

The setup requires changes in the web page and the Google Analytics seetings.

Web page setup

1. Download astracker_v2.zip, unzip and upload the tracking javascript astracker.js to the web server.
2. Add reference to this javascript to your web page directly below Google Analytics code (see example below).

   <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"
     src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"
     type="text/javascript">
   </script>
   
   <script type="text/javascript">
     _uacct = "UA-xxxxxx-y";
     urchinTracker();
   </script>
   </script src="/javascript/astracker.js"
     src="/javascript/astracker.js"
     type="text/javascript"
     charset="utf-8">
   </script>
   

3. Save the file.

Google Analytics Setup

1. Log on to your Google Analytics account and open settings for desired web page by clicking Edit link.
   
2. You should see “Conversion Goals and Funnel” pane with four goals (G1-G4). Click on the Edit link for first goal (G1).
   
3. Set Goal URL to “/asclick” (without quotes), Goal name to “AdClicks” (without quotes) or whatever you like. Set this goal as active (by checking Yes option for Active Goal)
   
4. Skip Define Funnel, scroll down to Additional settings and make sure Case sensitive option is NOT set and Match Type is set to Head Match.
   Click Save Changes button to complete setup.
   

Reading the Report

Once it is setup, leave it to run for a few days and you should see some interesting traffic and click statistics.

There are a few reports that report on the click conversion. I divide them into Summary, Detailed and Drilldown.

Summary Report

The first is the Conversion Summary.

The Goal Conversion is shown as G1:AdClicks

Detailed Reports

Detail reports are found in All Reports > Content Optimisation > Goal & Funnel Process.

Goal Tracking

Shows the number of clicks over time.

Goal Conversion

Shows the conversation rate - clicks as percentage of visits.

Defined Funnel Navigation

Basically a visual of the entry point leading to the click.

The last 2 reports Reverse Goal Path and Goal Verification provides the most information about your Adsense ads.

Reverse Goal Path

This shows the path leading to the click. Notice how the ad unit and the target destination is shown.

Using the pseudo Goal URL, the goal click is shown as /asclick/ad_unit/www.visited-site.com

You get 2 important information here

1. You know which ad unit is popular
2. You know where your visitor is clicking on. You will not find this information from Adsense.

Goal Verification

This report is a reverse of Goal Path shoing the final Goal URL

Drilldown

There are many drilldown that you can do based on the Goal URL. I will just point out 3 functions you can use and leave the atual exploration to you.

2. Use the filter with “asclick” to look for the Goal URL you want to look at.
3. Use the display drop to show more than 10 items per page.
4. Use the drilldown options to dice and slice the data in anyway you want.

*Note that stats show above are not necessarily from the same site or date.

Do you have any particular report or drilldown that you find useful? Share it with our readers here.

Google Analytics is by far the most powerful free analytic tool available for doing web analytics.

However the value of this product is constrained by your ability to squeeze valuable information out of it.

It will be as good as some free webstats tools if you just use it for data collection and charting. This already is very powerful if you know how to extract and make sense out of the data.

According to Google, the Google Analytics service “tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.”

Where your visitors are coming from? How long are they staying? Where are they leaving? What keywords are visitors using on Google or Yahoo that lead them to your site?

Google Analytics can help you answer these questions.

How to get a Google Analytics account?

Request an invitation. If you do not have a Google Account, you have to sign up for one too. Nowaday the wait for the invitation isn’t very long. My last request came in less than a week.

Once you have an account, it is very simple to set up. Sign in and take some time to explore. The amount of features does take some time to learn and get used to.

I am learning too and will be sharing more of my experience and tips with Google Analytics.

I submitted my email address and heard nothing so far. Anyone received any invite?

Measure Map is supposed to provides free, easy stats for your blog.

Here are a few posts by early beta testers

• Data Mining is an alpha tester.
• Jesper N?hr was invited.
• Valleyway has an interest point. Could it be all the fancy Google Analytics UI are the work of Measure map?
• Measure Map explosed this nice javascript+flash slider (via Ajaxian)
• More comments on the Masure Map’s Google groups

Sounds very much like Measure Map.

Solution Watch reviewed Blogbeat in detail a while back.

Techcrunch covered the deal last week. The analytic space is getting interesting, now even the blog analytics are in vogue.

(The domain blogbeat.com looks like is being squattered. The original Blogbeat is at blogbeat.net)