Alex Schultz: APIs

Google Analytics Regular Expressions

I was using Google analytics regular expressions on Saturday to try and understand how my cocktail making relationship engine had worked out. As I was using the regular expressions I noticed that there were very few resources to help you get them right for Google Analytics so in case you are interested here are my tips.

First the regular expression variables supported by google analytics:

.  match any single character

*  match zero or more of the previous items

+  match one or more of the previous items

?  match zero or one of the previous items

()  remember contents of parenthesis as item

[]  match one item in this list

-  create a range in a list

|  or  ^ match to the beginning of the field

$ match to the end of the field

\  escape any of the above

Some real examples:

If you are looking for the page index2.php then your regular expression should be "index2\.php" you want to escape the "." with the / since that will make the regular expression run faster as Google will now only look for the "." character and not "any character" which is the special meaning of ".".

I have a regular expression "displaycocktail.php" within all my cocktail recipe pages. For the test group I was passing ?test=test on the end of that URL to google analytics and for the control group ?test=control. A couple of examples of urls showing up would be:

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=control

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=control

If I wanted to see just the control group I would use the reg exp "displaycocktail\.php/.*test=control" where the ".*" means match any number of characters at this point in the regexp.

Hopefully this (esp. the working examples) are useful for you to get started.

Cocktail Recommendation: Part 4 - the results

Wow did it work or what! The cocktail recommendation engine I produced earlier this year has been a fabulous success. I set up an AB test of the cocktail recommendation by randomly assigning my visitors to either see the cocktail recommendation engine or not and the main target was to reduce the bounce rates of visitors to my cocktail recipe pages (both buckets contain c. 1million page views).

The above graph shows you the overall impact of the test across all my cocktails with 100days of data. This impact is diluted because of the volume of cocktails for which I don't have enough data to produce cocktail recommendations so below is a list broken out by cocktail id (I have removed the names since work people see this blog and some are naughty). The cocktails in the list below are essentially the cocktails found as the first 10 here (you are warned... that page contains rude words) under the tab "Graph of cocktail recipes in order".

On average for the top 10 cocktails the recommendation engine reduced the bounce rate by 16% with some cases (esp. slippery nipple) having an impact as high as a 31% reduction in bounce rate for the page.

Tickle.com - impressive revenue generator

I am a little bit of a sucker for anything that makes me feel clever and so for the first time in a very long while I clicked on a banner ad yesterday. The advert took me to tickle.com and an IQ test.

This IQ test was pretty cool and took 12 pages to complete. Once I had completed the test it through me into a string of 6 co-brand sign ups before I got the results of my test. Each page carried 3 cpm banners from rotating sources. I can get a $1cpm so I expect they should be able to get the same or better. Just the banner ads earned them $0.036 from me doing the test. Each of the 6 cobrands make >$1 per sign up so again low balling it let's say 1 in 10 signs up to only 1 that's another $0.1 a visitor from one test their earning is at least $0.14 and they claim almost 0.5billion tests served, that's $70MM in revenue with the conservative estimates above.

This however isn't the end of the game. Today I received the following email:

Another smart move, I clicked and visited their site, being pushed through multiple pages of co-brand sign ups again, returning to the site and being merchandized a bunch of other pretty cool looking tests, which the internet marketer side of my brain stopped me from taking but I strongly considered.

Tickle.com is owned by Monster.com so it isn't that surprising that they are really professional and good at what they do but it's pretty cool to see such a smoothly operating affiliate/cpm business model out there where arbitrage traffic purchasing is a real opportunity. Great job Tickle.com and keep it up.