Jamesq

I’ve been struggling to sort out a 10px page shift on the Glendown Farm website. I’d like to blame it on the flu but I think it was just ignorance that I hadn’t noticed the shift was only happening on the longer pages due to the content centering taking the vertical scrollbar that appeared into consideration.

Thanks to Zoe Gillenwater’s post for the following CSS fix that effectively makes every page 1 pixel longer than 100% forcing a scroll bar on every page and eliminating the shift!

html { min-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 1px; }

Wasn’t sure what to make of this take over when I first heard about it but actually think it will be really great for webmasters and agencies. Guess many analytics companies will be a little concerned at this point but hats off to Yahoo! for making what could be a fantastic tactical manouvre. Also hats off to Dennis and Indextools for their hard work and positioning of their product. I really hope that the take over doesn’t impact on the how approachable and helpful Indextools are and hope that the experience within the Company is put to best use

A couple of great posts to read on the subject include Nordic eMarketing’s post, OX2′s Web Analytics Post and Eric T Peterson’s Post which all go some way to outlining what the future may hold for the Companies involved directly and indirectly and also what might be in store for the Web Analytics market. Eric T Peterson’s post is great from the industry perspective and it’s great to get agency views from the others. Not forgetting Dennis’ blog as well with posts on the buy out and more significantly his most recent post announcing Yahoo!’s decision to make Indextools available for free. I’m sure this will prove to be a significant event and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. It will also be interesting to see how competitor’s reliant on a fee to provide the service react an innovate to overcome this potential obstacle.

Not having the largest blog readership on the web has it’s advantages when it comes to drilling down into the stats. It certainly isn’t a time consuming job on Chewing the Cud! Indextools has a last visitors option which provides a detailed breakdown of individual viewing records and for a small site lets you get a real flavour for overall viewer behaviour and even differences between identifiable demographics.

The image below shows a visit I made to my blog after doing an ego search for myself in Google. It also provides a whole host of data about my viewing, my previous number of visits and my browsing configurations. This level of detail is great from a website development perspective. It is possible from here to identify trends and follow user journeys to identify areas of improvement, regional or configuration variances and any other number of metrics you may be interested in.

A really useful feature is the ability to view a visit path, particularly useful for commercial sites to track the effectiveness of a particular keyword, referrer or campaign. Only just breaking the surface of what indextools can offer yet but the potential data at your finger tips if you configure the tool correctly seems a marketers dream. It will be interesting to carry out a few tests on browser set up and site usage to see how the tool reports data.

On this note I started watching a series of videos with Avanash Kaushik and John Marshal on web metrics and how analytics tools measure them which gives some really important insights for marketers to understand what’s behind the numbers. Only a couple videos in on the series but will certainly be going back to finish of the set of 5.

A couple of nights back I set aside a bit of time to get the indextools web analytics set up on Chewing the Cud. Couldn’t find any resources online directly addressing how to add it specifically to a WordPress Blog so just followed the indextools generic installation instructions. These turned out to be really comprehensive and readable but thought I’d share the process incase there is anybody out there looking for the same help I was. Continue reading

I’ve signed up for Indextools web analytics which I’m going to get added to the blog in the next week or so. I haven’t looked into setting this up too much yet but don’t expect it will be too difficult. I had a quick look on Google but couldn’t find anything about getting it added to a wordpress blog specifically but I think there is a fair bit of info on the Indextools site so I’ll heck that out. All I could see on the web was around adding Google analytics to the blog which I’ve currently got running. This was easy as I just used a Google Analytics plugin.

I chose to go with an indextools account mainly after speaking with Charlie at SES London. We’d been running it on the site at work for a couple of months and the couple of issues I’ not worked out were quickly sorted after speaking with the guys at the Indextools stand. Since had contact with them by email to set this account up and help set up our account at work and they’ve been great.

I’ll keep the blog updated on the progress of this and show how the stats are looking.