Before you can gather insights into what your visitors are doing, you’ll need to install YWA on your site as well as verify that it is functioning correctly.  In this post we will explain how to install the basic YWA tracking code and then how to check if it is actually sending data from the end user’s browser.  We will also illustrate the difference between the pixel only tracking code vs JavaScript tracking code and how YWA uses both to ensure accurate tracking of the users of your site.

Basic Tracking Code Installation

The basic tracking code for your project can be generated by YWA with with 4 easy steps:

Click on the “Installation” section of the YWA interface Choose the correct project URL from the dropdown menu Select tracking code for non-secure (http) or secure (https) pages Click the next button

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The following is a guest post from Avinash Kaushik.  Avinash is a leading voice in the field of Web Analytics through his blog Occam’s Razor, speaking engagements and best selling books.  He is also the Analytics Evangelist for Google and the Co-Founder and Chief Education Officer at Market Motive.

There are world class analytics tools, available for free, from Yahoo! and Google that will get you more data than God ever intended you to have. Yet, perhaps shockingly, a vast majority of decisions website owners make are based on faith and not data.

Breaks my heart.

After wiping off my tears, and meeting with many leaders of businesses large and small, I have come to the realization that the problem is not that we don’t have enough data, or even enough of the right type of data. All that exists.

The problem is we [+]

The following is a guest blog from Gustavo Cornejo of Multiplica, one of the members of our Consultant Network (YWACN). They are located in Barcelona and specialize in web measurement, testing, and intelligent analysis. You can find the original post in Spanish here.

Monitoring websites with secure pages requires the use of two different sets of Yahoo Web Analytics tracking code, one for secure pages and the other for non-secure pages. The drawback to this is that you are left with inconsistent tracking code across the site and care must be exercised to ensure that the correct tracking code is being used in the right place.

An alternative to this would be to use the secure tracking code on all pages but this would lead to unnecessary load time on the pages that do not need it.

Another solution is [+]

The following is a guest blog in Spanish from Gustavo Cornejo of Multiplica, one of the members of our Consultant Network (YWACN). They are located in Barcelona and specialize in web measurement, testing, and intelligent analysis.  Update 11/2/1: We’ve added an English version of this blog post here.

Para el seguimiento de webs con entornos seguros es necesario implementar dos códigos diferentes utilizando Yahoo Web Analytics, o simplemente utilizar siempre el código para entornos seguros.

Alguno de los inconvenientes; el seguimiento y la inconsistencia en el código, errores en la implementación. Utilizando sólo el código para entornos seguros estamos penalizando un poco más la carga del código en todas las páginas que no requieren elementos seguros.

Una solución es integrar un discriminador según el protocolo utilizado en la página para cargar para cargar el código necesario. Adicionalmente, tendremos que saber cuándo se carga para [+]

ADDENDUM: New Opt-out Link in the YWA Privacy Policy

We have recently audited the opt-out links we provide with the Yahoo! Web Analytics privacy policy, and going forwards, we have decided that we will be using only the following Opt-out link:

http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/details.html

Please review your privacy policies and update the Opt-out link to the one included above before the end of the year. From January 2011, we will only support the link above and all other links will be disabled.

With this change, we align ourselves to the Yahoo! standard on opt-outs and we provide you with a unique resource where you can check the details of our comprehensive privacy policies.  In an effort to make our privacy policies relevant to our international customers, we have also created a number of localized opt-out links, which you can now take advantage of:

US: http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/ US (en [+]

We often get asked how to get a Yahoo! Web Analytics account and so thought we could help clarify this issue through this short blog post.  First of all, Yahoo! Web Analytics (YWA) is a free web analytics product that we offer to select advertisers, customers and partners of Yahoo!. If you qualify for an account then you can install YWA to your website and your site doesn’t necessarily need to be hosted by Yahoo! for YWA to run on it.

New YWA accounts are available through three main channels:

Yahoo! Advertising: If you advertise with Yahoo! and are supported by a Yahoo! Account Manager then you are eligible for a YWA account.  You may contact your Account Manager or fill out this form to request a new account. Yahoo! Small Business (YSB): If you use either the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard [+]

We are pleased to announce that we’ve released a few enhancements to our product and we are calling this release Version 9.6.

So, what’s new?

We’ve made significant architectural changes to the system in order to improve overall performance and scalability.  As a result, we’ve introduced some data collection limitations which can be mitigated using URL Rewrite – for further information, follow this link.

We’ve also introduced new Campaign by Type reports.  In addition to the standard Campaign Summary report Yahoo! Web Analytics will introduce five Type reports:

Paid Search Display Email Affiliate Other

What’s improved?

More consistent terminology across reports and wizards Simplified invitation process New metrics:

Assists: Assists are a score, not the actual number of times the campaign assisted; they represent a weighted sum of the number of times a keyword or ad contributed to a conversion that was credited to another keyword or [+]

The next Google Analytics User Conference is coming up on Thursday, March 17th in San Francisco. Attend and you’ll connect with other Google Analytics users, industry experts, authors and even folks here from the Google Analytics team. GAUGE (as in Google Analytics Users’ Great Event) is being produced by several of our Google Analytics Certified Professionals, and will be collocated with eMetrics and Conversion Conference, which are being held the week of March 14. If you’re already planning to attend those shows (or need another reason to go), now you have an event focused solely on making the most of Google Analytics.The event provides valuable insights through expert-led, user-to-user collaborative sessions that are insanely practical. This is not a “come and be spoken to” conference but rather [+]

After launching a massive amount of new data through our Data Export API, our developers gave us a lot of great feedback back and support. Thanks! Now we want to show you how to master this data to make better business decisions, starting with the unique visitors metric.In this blog post, we ask Analytics team members to give us their favorite ways to request and use unique visitor data. Next, we translate that into an API query along with screen shots of how the data looks. Finally, we give you a deep link to the query explorer tool so you can make that same API request with your own data right now. Let's Go!(Note: You can do most of these queries using Custom Reports through the Google Analytics web interface.)Query example #1: Measuring Total Unique VisitorsBefore we start using [+]

Back in December, we brought you custom variables for your Android applications. Today,we’re doing the same for our iOS SDK by releasing version 1.1 of the Google Analytics SDK for iPhone with Custom Variable support. We are also offering a NoThumb version of this SDK.Custom variables can be used to segment your users and provide actionable context. Some great use cases are:Free vs paid: What percentage of users prefer a paid app vs. a free app that delivers ads? Are you making more money on the free version or the paid version?Installs by version: What version of your app gained the most users? What version lost users? How quickly are users upgrading?Portrait vs. landscape: Do your users prefer to use your application in portrait mode or landscape mode?For more great ways to [+]