Enhanced Google Analytics: Firefox Plugin

By Sal Uryasev
April 13, 2009
Find more about: search, google analytics

There is new life in the tool that shows change in Google Analytics. A year after releasing our Greasemonkey script, we are pleased to release an updated version of the Enhanced Google Analytics script as a free Firefox Plugin. For those already using the older Greasemonkey script, you can skip ahead to the What's new? and How do I get this plugin? sections of the page. For the rest, you may be wondering: Why does my Google Analytics need change?

Change, and why it is important

When I first started working at Juice Analytics, my boss Zach showed me a part of his daily Google Analytics routine. He would open up the Referring Sites page, glance at all of our 942 referrers. Using his superior intellect and capacity for remembering random urls, Zach would discover interesting deviations in the traffic from sites linking to our blog.

Our top referrers looked more or less similar day to day. Even once you get past the more recognizable top sites such as Twitter and Google, the various somethingblog.com pages, without context, often look a lot like somethingelseblog.com. To top it off, most of the information is not even specifically interesting. Our chartchooser.juiceanalytics.com domain sends us consistent regular referrals, but so what? Day to day, I don't even really care about Google or Twitter unless something changes. With change, I know whether someone has posted something new about me, sending valuable traffic. A good read on the topic is Avinash's rant about "actionable analytics".

Our Firefox plugin is designed to allow analysts to get more action out of what changed in the Referring Sites and Keyword Reports. Here are a couple examples of the plugin in action from our Google Analytics account:

What's new?

Our focus for this release has been to improve functionality, to reduce the barrier to entry for new users, and to allow automatic updates for the plugin. The new version of the script works nearly instantaneously, and the installation involves only two clicks (in contrast to the 7 clicks of the Greasemonkey version). As a Firefox plugin, updates are now automatic and require no reinstall. Keyword sensitivity has been raised to 50% for consistency. As a slight bonus, the design and layout of the form and buttons is now sleeker and the table stands out in a pretty Google blue.

Greasemonkey itself is no longer required for the plugin, but you may want to keep it around for any of the other cool scripts available from the community. If you ever find yourself wishing that something about the web looked different, acted different or had different functionality, there may be a Greasemonkey script to ease your pain.

How do I get this plugin?

First, you need Firefox 2.0+.

If you are a user of the equivalent older Greasemonkey version of this script, you may want to go ahead and uninstall it. Go to Tools=>Greasemonkey=>Manage User Scripts..., select Google Analytics Downloader, and uncheck the Enabled box.

If you never had the script installed, or once you removed it, simply click here to go the mozilla addon site, select the checkbox and click the button. Once installed, navigate to Google Analytics, and go to either the Referring Sites or Keyword pages, and click the blue button.

Happy analyzing!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

45 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown


March 31, 2010
Burak Tansug said:

Hi,
This is a great plug-in, but I could not find the updated version for Firefox 3.6.


April 12, 2010
Maksym said:

This is unavailable for Firefox 3.6.2. Update it please


May 3, 2010
Nikos Kapsomenakis said:

I would also like to ask you to update this great add on for newer versions of Firefox


May 21, 2010
ChrisM said:

Please add for 3.6.2. Can't wait to use.


June 16, 2010
Tarvinder Gill said:

I had firefox 3.6.2, then downgraded to an older version of firefox to get the plug-in to work.

Your name

Email (optional, will not be shared)

Type the word "juice" (required to confuse the spammers)

Your comment


Add a comment




Introducing Concentrate for Long Tail Search Analytics

By Zach Gemignani
January 9, 2009
Find more about: concentrate seo search analytics

We are pleased thrilled to introduce Concentrate™, an innovative long-tail search analytics tool. Concentrate is for SEO and paid search professionals who want to make sense of search keyword data and make the most of search investments.

Check out the demo here. Or try out the free version here (you’ll need admin access to a Google Analytics account).

We built Concentrate because we saw a fundamental conflict in the world of search analysis: On the one hand, search keyword data is terrifically interesting and valuable. It can tell you what your visitors and customers want and how they think about you and your products.

Juice Analytics keywords

Unfortunately, search query data is also big, messy, and hard to get your hands around. In a typical month, the Juice site gets over 10,000 visits from over 7,000 unique keywords.

Even if I could somehow wrap my head around our top 100 keywords, I’d only understand 25% of the visits. For people spending money on search engine optimization or paid search campaigns, that’s a big blind-spot to accept.

We want you to understand and act on all your search data. Concentrate ingests data from sources that most sites already have available (e.g Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics, Hitwise, Compete, etc.), enhances this data by finding common patterns and query types, and visualizes search phrases for exploration and analysis.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will share examples of some of the interesting things you can do with Concentrate, including:

Pattern identification to condense the long tail into keyword phrases with similar structures. For example, here are some common search patterns from a cooking web site (the “[x]” represents a wildcard).

Patterns

Keyword visualization to show the connections between keywords and the relative performance of phrases. This wordtree shows the frequency of words within phrases (size) and average time spent on site (color).

Wordtree

Congratulations to Chris, Pete, and Sal for all their hard work, diligence, and creative problem solving to launch this solution.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

8 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown


January 10, 2009
Daniel Waisberg said:

Looks amazing, I will implement it and start working for my own website. I think that for search marketing / SEO companies this will be a killer tool. It can add a huge value!


January 12, 2009
Bjoern Sjut said:

Hi,

has there already been testing with foreign languages? I could volunteer to integrate it with a German content heavy site to test the behaviour on umlauts, etc.


January 12, 2009
Bjoern Sjut said:

Oh, I can shed a light on this already: My most important keywords for our German sites are "error#" and "unicode error#" :-(


January 12, 2009
Pete Skomoroch said:

Bjoern,

Thanks for the feedback. I just fixed that unicode error for you and reloaded your list. Concentrate should run without errors on foreign languages, but some of the text processing components (stopwords, stemming, etc) are only fully supported in English at the moment. Let me know how the new results look and we will work on incorporating more international features.


February 27, 2009
Pauli Price said:

On the final validation stage, where I entered the bounce rate for my first keyword, the application met with an un handled exception because it couldn't find the google analytics keyword file. Perhaps because there were spaces in my site name? Unfortunately it also spit out all kinds of diagnostic information you probably don't want the casual observer to see. You really want to trap that unless the login is a privileged account.

Anyway, help doesn't go to a help screen or anything - it appears that clicking on 'help' brings one to the account page, so I figured I'd post my tale of woe here.

Your name

Email (optional, will not be shared)

Type the word "juice" (required to confuse the spammers)

Your comment


Add a comment








Joining Juice | Contact Us | Privacy Policy
© 2005—2009 Juice Inc.