Archive for June, 2009

Easy Pop-Under

June 18, 2009 at 6:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

Pop-up advertising is nothing new to the web; we’ve been fluently closing free iPod offers for years now.  However, the latest breed of these attempts to be less intrusive by popping under the current browser instead, with the intention of you not seeing the ad until you’ve closed the browser window.   Fellow Mac users probably see the fault in this logic (since after a typical browsing session, you’d hit Apple-Q, which kills all browser windows at the same time), but nevertheless the technique is growing in popularity, and you might be wondering how to do it.

Fortunately, this is a VERY simple technique which can be cross-browser friendly with only two Javascript commands:

// specify the destination and window size
function popUnder(url, height, width) {

     // spawn the new window using blur() to attempt to
    // force the window into the background
    window.open(url,
        'width='+width
        +',height='+height
        +',left=200,top=200'
    ).blur();

     // force this window into the foreground (to cover
    // any browsers that were unresponsive to blur()
    window.focus();
}

And that’s it — you can now be on the road to being a more subtle nuisance. =)

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Google Analytics Anomaly: More Visits than Page Views?

June 4, 2009 at 7:16 pm · Filed under analytics

wtfBy definition, page views on any given site should be always be higher than the number of visits. However, myself and some other people have came across an anomaly in Google Analytics where visits are the one that is higher.

I don’t have a solution to offer yet, however I do have an explanation…

This is related to sub profiles and events. If you have a parent profile with events and make sub profiles from it, you will most likely run into this issue (until it is solved by Google). I’ll first explain events and sub profiles. If you’re already familiar, feel free to skip the next two sections.

Events

Events are not associated with page views at all. That was actually a perk of using an event to keep track of non page view type information. In the past, we had to use trackPageview() to reports that didn’t occur ‘naturally’. The drawback of that is that it created fake page views which inflated our page view numbers. Using events, that information is kept separate from page views, allowing us to gather useful data and still trust our page view figures.

Sub Profiles

In Google Analytics, you have a unique ID for every parent profile you have a unique Web Property ID and a parent profile for that web property. You can then create other profiles for that web property and filter out various data. The filters usually take out traffic to certain URL’s, certain hostnames, etc etc. This is useful when you want to view only a subset of data or want to see an abstraction of the data.

Ohnoes!

the event visitsThe anomaly occurs because filters in sub profiles won’t also filter events. So what? The events are associated with visits. Since events aren’t filtered, the visits come with them. If your parent profile has 562k visits with events (random number) then your sub profile will automatically have 562k visits even if you filtered out ALL traffic data. That’s exactly what happened in the screenshot from the first paragraph.

 

 

Hopefully that saves some head scratching out there. I’ll post again if I find a solution or if I notice that Google takes action on it.

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