Tracking Referrals from Microsoft Bing

On June 1st, Microsoft released Bing, the company’s next generation search engine and aspiring Google killer. Bing has gotten a lot of publicity lately and chances are, it may have referred a good piece of your website visitors already.

As a web analyst, you may be wondering what your Analytics vendor is doing to accommodate Bing and what steps you may need to take to update your search engine-related reports. I will try to answer those questions below.

If you are using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, your vendor may have already updated (or will soon be updating) their solution to accommodate this new search engine into their reports. If not, you will most likely need to perform an update to your software.

• WebTrends On Demand customers have begun to see the changes on the date of the launch itself. If you are however using WebTrends Analytics on-premise software, you will need to run a browser and keywords updater, downloadable via the WebTrends Support site.
  
  
• Omniture updated its collection of tools (SiteCatalyst, SearchCenter, Discover OnPremise) on June 3rd. You can check out Omniture's press release for more information.
  
  
• Google is actively working on an update to recognize Bing in Google Analytics. In the meantime, you can customize your Google Analytics tracking code by adding the following line:
  
  pageTracker._addOrganic("bing", "q");

Nestor Archival Jr.
Senior Analyst, Consulting Services
Stratigent, LLC

Educational Resources - As Promised

I hope that you’ve been able to make it out to an OMS near you. I’ve had the pleasure of presenting in MN and ATL, and the crowds have been awesome! As part of my presentation, “Inside the Mind of an Analyst,” I promised to deliver a list of resources that you could use to educate yourself on Web Analytics. So, as promised, here is a list. I’d love for you to comment and add in other resources that I don’t have listed, and please contact me directly if you have any questions at all (bill@stratigent.com).

Books:

Web Analytics Demystified (http://bit.ly/11yceN) by Eric Peterson

The Big Book of KPIs (http://bit.ly/11yceN) by Eric Peterson

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day (http://bit.ly/G7G4m) by Avinash Kaushik

Yahoo! Web Analytics (http://bit.ly/9TIc2) by Dennis Mortensen

Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (http://bit.ly/ah3ax) by Brian Clifton

Always Be Testing (http://bit.ly/33VUb) by Bryan Eisenberg

Call to Action (http://bit.ly/shNnt) by Bryan Eisenberg

Blogs:

http://analyticsinsightblog.stratigent.com/

http://www.the-omni-man.com/

http://blog.onlinemarketingconnect.com/

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

http://webanalyticsdemystified.com/wad-weblogs.asp

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

http://rich-page.com/

http://blog.webtrends.com/

http://www.omniture.com/en/resources/blogs

http://blog.coremetrics.com/

http://analytics.blogspot.com/

http://www.grokdotcom.com/

Help Forums/Developer Portals:

http://www.google.com/analytics/support_overview.html

http://developer.omniture.com/

http://developer.webtrends.com/community/developer/

http://groups.yahoo.com/phrase/webanalytics

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ywa/

http://www.twitter.com/ (Hashtags: #wa, #ga,#ya, #omniture, #webtrends, etc.)

Bill Bruno

VP, Business Development & Technology