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adCenter Analytics - How To Run Basic Traffic History Reports

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:27:46 GMT

Last week we talked about Getting Started With adCenter Analytics and implementing analytics tags on your website.

Today, we'll show you how to run some simple reports to track how many visitors you have had to your site, and how many pages they viewed.

When you log into adCenter, click on the Analytics Tab, and then Profiles and you will see the list of sites you have created profiles for.

A green status light means the tool has been collecting data and you are now ready to view some reports.

Click on View under Reports for the Profile you want to see data for.

Depending on how long data has been collecting for, you will see a screen that looks a bit like this:

On the left hand side find the Reports Menu. Click on Traffic & History and two options will appear.

“Visitors” is the number of unique users that have been accessing your site and viewing content over any given amount of time.

“Page Views” are the total amount of pages that were viewed by those visitors.

The number of page views is very often larger than the visitor total, as a user may look at more than one page of your site while browsing it.

A quick way to see how many visitors have been to your site in February would be to hover your mouse over the February segment of data. A tiny pop-up will appear with that month's visitor statistics.

In this case the site received 1501 unique visitors in February.

In order to see how many pages those visitors perused, click on the Page Views option in the Traffic & History menu.

You can get a quick view of data by hovering your mouse over the week or an actual day too.

To get a detailed breakdown of your traffic for a given month, week or day, simply click on the data segment and it will highlight in orange.

Below, you will see a graph showing the detailed traffic for that given time selection including Visits, Page Views & Bounce Rate.

Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of your visitors that viewed just a single page of your site when they arrived. They may have perused the first page on which they landed but did not explore the site further. A high Bounce Rate might be OK for a blog, as readers may only arrive to read a single post. But if your site is selling products or services, you'd want users to spend some time navigating your site, so a high Bounce Rate may be a signal that you need to investigate further.

We’ll talk about analysing reasons for Bounce Rates, and how to take action in more detail in a later blog post.

The final way you can run a basic Visitor or Page View report is by clicking on Select A Custom Date Range.

This functionality enables you to see data for any given number of days, weeks or months. You may want to see your site's traffic for just a three week or six day period. This lets you click on your desired start and end time values and see how much traffic you have received during that date range.

Do check back next week when we'll be delving into some other reports in a little more detail.

Cheers

Mel - adCenter Community Team

adCenter Analytics - Getting Started!

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:45:59 GMT

adCenter Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps you easily understand web site user engagement and online marketing campaign performance.

You can track audience behaviour from click to conversion, segment data by age and gender or simply run a report to see how many visitors have accessed your site, where they came from and what content they looked at.

You can be up and running with adCenter Analytics is just Four Simple Steps!

Step 1 – Register

adCenter Analytics is in Beta at present and access is by invitation only. To be considered for participation please complete the invitation request at:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/adcenter-analytics-registration

Step 2 – Sign Up

Once your invitation request has been processed, you will receive an e-mail with an invite code similar to the code below:

“7a9c466e-0f67-4a4a-b9af-029af-02b0ea4e2611”

Follow the prompts in the e-mail, and sign into adCenter. If you do not have an adCenter account, you will be able to create one in a few simple steps. Once you have signed in you will be directed to the Analytics welcome page and prompted to enter the invite code. Enter the code and click “Next.”

Step 3 – Create a Profile

Click on the Analytics tab at the top of the page and you will see two icons: Profiles & Users

Click on the Profiles icon to add the URL of the site you want to track with adCenter analytics. To add a Profile, click on the Add New Profile button.

In the profile name box, type a display name to identify the web site or blog you are tracking, the domain or web site address, and select a time zone. If appropriate, check the “Automatically adjust for daylight savings changes” box and click “Save”. If you are manually inserting the tracking script onto your web pages then check that radio button and click "Save."

You can automatically insert the script using our wizard. Check back for a post on that on Thursday...

Step 4 – Adding the Tracking Code to your web site

You will be prompted to add a small piece of Javascript code to every page of your website that you want to track. You’ll need to copy and paste the code snippet just before the </body> tag in your site’s HTML.

Once your site goes live with the new analytics code added, Microsoft adCenter Analytics will begin collecting data within a few hours!

Next week, we'll run your through how to run some basic reports.

Cheers

Mel - adCenter Community Team

Microsoft adCenter Analytics Beta Upgraded

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:19:00 GMT

We’re pleased to announce a recent upgrade to adCenter Analytics (formerly known as “Project Gatineau”).

Since we launched the Beta at the end of October, we’ve been listening to our customer’s feedback and working hard to incorporate any requests and suggestions.

One of the pieces of feedback we received was about the $5 adCenter sign up fee. Moving forward, we’ve now waived that fee for Analytics customers.

This new version includes many additional reports and data views to help you analyze your website’s traffic and give you a better handle on the success of ALL your marketing campaigns.

Access new reports such as in-depth visitor tracking, treemap views (colour-coded snapshot graphics that allow you to quickly understand complex data), and campaign reporting.

Use summary report rollups to gain insights about ROI, visitor loyalty, conversions by referral, and campaign timeline view, which displays a color-coded timeline of multiple campaign performances.
Track marketing results beyond search ads. Analytics campaign performance reporting covers ROI, conversion rates, and revenue of banner, e-mail, and direct response marketing campaigns.

View and compare pay-per-click (PPC) campaign performance for multiple ad placement programs—not just adCenter. View performance for adCenter and third-party online advertising programs within a single reporting interface.

This new functionality is further enhanced by your ability to track and report on different segments by demographics.

This means you will be able to see the behaviour of your visitors broken down by Age & Gender.

Next week we’ll drill down into some of the new reports in a little more detail so keep checking back to the adCenter Blog for further news and updates.

In the meantime please take a look at your account and let us know your feedback as we value your opinion.

You can share your thoughts and comments about these new features on the adCenter Analytics Forum, where you can interact with other beta participants and if you have further questions, please contact our Analytics Support Team.

If you’ve not yet registered to participate in the Beta please fill out the adCenter Analytics Registration Form and check out the adCenter Analytics page on our advertising site.

Cheers

Mel – adCenter Community Team

Microsoft Gatineau Analytics Beta Open to International adCenter Users

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:02:47 GMT

Due to the overwhelming demand from customers outside the United States, we have decided to open up the web analytics beta and invite customers from international adCenter markets. (Please be aware the beta is available in English only.)

Customers who have expressed in interest from the UK, France and Canada should receive an invitation very soon!

Do be aware that Gatineau is still in its early stages of development, and we hope to tell you of some new and exciting improvements and features in the coming weeks.

If you have not registered to be a part of the beta - Please Sign Up Here!

Cheers

Mel - adCenter Community Team

Microsoft Web Analytics - Gatineau Beta Holiday Update

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:06:25 GMT

Hello Everyone

With the holidays just days away, we thought we’d take the opportunity to let you all know how the Gatineau Beta is going, and address some of the main support questions you’ve been asking via email and on the Web Analytics Forum.

Firstly we’ve sent out quite a number of invites to customers who have registered their interest. Apologies if you have not received your invitation yet - we are continuing to send out invites and will resume in the New Year.

In general the feedback has been positive, mainly because of the demographic data the tool provides, but also because users recognise Beta 1 is certainly not the finished product and that they’re looking forward to many more cool features early next year, including some exciting visualizations of key data, and an expanded set of marketing and e-commerce reports.

One of the more common pieces of feedback we’ve had is dissatisfaction at the $5 sign-up fee for a Gatineau account. We hear you on this! The fee is an unavoidable feature of our integration with adCenter sign-up at this time. The good news is that, with a forthcoming update to adCenter, the fee requirement will go away in the New Year, in time for our Beta 2 release. We took the call to launch the Beta before the adCenter sign-up update hit, because demand for us to get started has been so huge. We understand it wasn’t the most perfect situation, but we do hope those few users who have had to pay the fee are now enjoying being some of the first people in the world to use Gatineau.

A few users have also experienced some difficulty signing up. If you experience any difficulty, just contact our Gatineau Support Team and they will resolve this issue for you as quickly as possible.

All in all, it’s been a great first couple of months beta-wise. Do keep an eye on the adCenter Blog for more updates and please do sign up and get involved on the Analytics Forum at the adCenter Forums.

Happy Holidays!

Ian, Mel & The Gatineau Team

Project Gatineau Web Analytics Begins Beta Today!

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:59:40 GMT

We are happy to announce that Project Gatineau, Microsoft’s new, free web analytics service, is ready for beta testing and the first invitations are now being sent to customers.

To manage Project Gatineau’s growth and give customers the best web analytics service possible, the beta is by invitation for US advertisers only for the moment.

All advertisers can request an invitation here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau

Project Gatineau’s web analytics are useful to sites of all sizes – from smaller sites that can’t afford an expensive web analytics solution to larger sites looking for a boost in their web analytics capabilities.

With the Gatineau beta, you can learn more about where your visitors come from and easily measure your marketing campaigns across any medium and from any traffic source.

Features include:

Click and visitor tracking reports
Marketing campaign reporting and conversion tracking
Unique demographic and geographic information from your site visitors

Of course, Project Gatineau is a beta service so we are still adding features and working hard to improve.

With your participation and feedback, we hope you will help us build Gatineau into the best web analytics service possible.

Request your invite today!

Check out the adCenter Forums to see what people are saying!

Thanks

Ian Thomas & Justin Carder - Microsoft Project Gatineau