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How many heads does a hydra have?HOW TO TRACK UNIQUE VISITORS IN WEB 2.0 ANALYTICS

June 2013ANALYTICS & MEASUREMENT

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PARADISE ANALYTICS

In an ideal world, web analytics tools would be able to track unique visitors without occurring in data accuracy doubts. In the real world, every customer has one site with a unique domain (www.customersite.com) and the tracking tool is based on first party cookies to bypass the browsers’ security settings. In this scenario, the cookies used to track the unique visitors are written from the same domain being analyzed. With Adobe SiteCatalyst, first party cookies tracking must be enabled. Google Analytics and WebTrends use by default first party cookies and that’s a great point of advantage of these tools).

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Therefore, the only elements that could affect / inflate the counting of unique visitors are the cookies deletion (by the users or by cleaning tools) and the usage of different browsers, different PCs or different devices by the same visitor. I’m assuming, of course, that in this world nobody disables cookies and Javascript!

Anyway, even in our perfect world there would be a critical point: the count of unique visitors related to the time range of the analysis. Consider how the unique visitors metric can change its meaning with different time periods of analysis: for a specific day, I would know the number of my daily unique visitors, but if I select one week, I could see both my weekly unique visitors and the sum of the daily unique visitors; in the same way if I select one month, I could see the monthly, the sum of the weekly, or the sum of the daily unique visitors.

The point here is the purpose of the analysis. Another weak point is detected when we analyze a custom period. How can we be sure about the number of unique visitors for example from Monday to Wednesday? Tools of Web Analytics like Google Analytics, SiteCatalyst are “intelligent”, so are able to deduplicate the visitors for custom periods. Anyone would love this standard of perfection.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

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Unluckily the real world is more something like this: one site with several domains (e.g. one domain for each country, www.mysite.com, www.mysite.it, www.mysite.es) and several sub-domains (e.g. minisites, minisite.mysite.com). The biggest issue in this scenario is not being able to activate the first party cookies tracking accurate count of unique visitors crossing from mysite.com to mysite.it).

How can the tools manage this picture?

Google Analytics provides a custom page code (_setDomainName() and _link() functions) that is able to deduplicate visits and visitors. Also, if you want to track two groups of sub-domains of the same domain (e.g. aaa.mysite.it and bbb.mysite.it in a profile, ccc.mysite.it and ddd.mysite.it in another profile), you can simply use _setDomainName(“.mysite.it”) for both profiles.

The profiles will be managed with the use of filters. Adobe SiteCatalyst gives two options: the first requires to activate the cross third party cookies (2o7.net), the second to use the first party cookies only on the main site (e.g. www.mysite.com) and the other sites require to write the same cookie as a third party cookie. This last solution is working fine on our customers.

THE HARD TRUTH

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The worst case of the real world scenario is when a unique visitor browses mysite.com and mysite.it during the same session using a PC in the morning, his mobile device in the afternoon and the iPad in the evening!

This world can be more complex than what we might think! In this case, the Marketing Department requires to differentiate more the online experience and to embrace the growing need for online interactions (PC, mobile, iPad). These requirements can be translated into a need to identify both cross browser and cross device visitor, to make the web experience more customized.

What are the possible solutions in this complex world? Some customers are experiencing the Local Shared Objects (LSO) commonly called flash cookies, in order to track the visitor cross browser. The flash cookie tracking is based on the concept that when a browser requests a page, it can transmit information not only about itself, but also about the computer it’s running on. In this way, it would be possible to uniquely identify each computer, regardless of the browser used.

The flash cookie is written in your computer, and even if you delete your browser’s cookies, you do not delete your flash cookie, so that if you browse mysite.com using Firefox and then using Internet Explorer, you are still recognized as the same visitor.

We still have an issue about this type of tracking: Flash technology is not supported by the great majority of mobile devices, so the tracking cross device would not be granted.

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Another solution is recently coming to light: taking advantage of the wide spreading of Facebook, the visitor that uses PCs, iPads and iPhones to navigate both mysite.com and mysite.it could be uniquely identified . We are just testing this method right now and the following steps can give you an idea of how it works:

- the visitor lands on the home page of mysite.com;

- a popup appears to the visitor, asking the visitor if he wants to Connect the site with his Facebook account (typically rewarding some discount or special offers);

- if the visitor accepts the connection, a welcome message (a kind of “Welcome Visitor, you are signed in with your Facebook account”) will appear on the site;

- all the most relevant data provided by the Facebook profile, as gender, day of birth, geo-location and so on, are collected in the web analytics tools in conjunction with the visitor’s behavior on the site;

- an example of information that can be reached by this method is a high percentage of Italian male population is watching the pants showed in home page but only a very small percentage of them is going to buy those pants. In this case, it could be useful a direct email program (also the email address is provided by the Facebook integration) towards the Italian men, showing a very advantageous discount to buy the pants. Pretty cool isn’t it?

This integration offers the opportunity to segment your offer based on the visitors’ behaviour on the site and their own Facebook information (social-demographic data, thoughts, and so on). The Facebook visitor ID is the only keystone that ensures that the cross browser and cross device tracking works right.

As you can imagine, the Facebook solution is in conflict with the user’s privacy, and this is why this solution is the most debated. There’s a trade off between the greatest accuracy to identify the unique visitors and the privacy that seems not to be granted. If this scenario takes place, the data will not be aggregated anymore.

They would instead be tied to the single specific user: the web analytics world is switching from an anonymous data collection to a one-to-one data collection.

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WHERE IS THE WEB ANALYTICS WORLD

GOING TO?The future is to connect the online experience with the offline

actions, in order to link the online and the offline customer.

A primary key must be identified to tie the two worlds.

When it is found, the golden age will come!

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Presented in October 2012 during the Google Analytics Partner Summit and officially launched in Q2 2013, the new way of data collection called Universal Analytics is able to recognize a visitor regardless of the used device (even RFID) or browser.

This is possible thanks to the new Measurement Protocol and in particular thanks to a new parameter called User ID (uid) and to the fact that session identification is handled at a server level.

To enable the multi-device tracking is necessary that the site hosts a sign-in/log-in system. This feature, then, won’t have an impact on too many websites. Anyway, the increasing number of Google Plus users is a benefit in this way (i.e. Android users are already logged in with G+ credentials).

GOOGLE’S UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS

Moreover, with Measurement Protocol it is possible to upload data in offline mode (conversions from a POS o a loyalty card for example) into Google Analytics.

Universal Analytics uses one single first party cookie (Google Analytics standard tracking uses four cookies) called _ga that expire after two years and move the analysis from a visit-centric view to a visitor-centric view. Obviously the employment of a new tracking system implies that there are NO possible connections with the historical data: it is necessary to create a new GA property.

There is also a new set of reports specially designed for the multi-device analysis: Device Overlap Report, Device Paths Report, Acquisition Source Report.

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