Year: 2012

Happy New Year 2013!

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

People ask me what will I be doing this new years? In the past, I would be partying during my bachelor days … there were some other nights when on New Years, I was installing Ubuntu alongside with a glass of scotch! (yes, this has happened on two separate New Year occasions in fact!). This year end, I plan to spend quality time with my family and away from the machines.

As time goes by, one’s personal opinions on certain issues also change. 2013 for me is going to herald such changes. Resolutions for me have always been a no-no. I used to think that resolutions are just another way of breaking a rule that you set for yourself. As we enter the year 2013, I am making these resolutions … not for breaking them but as a sense of maintaining some personal discipline!!

Here are my resolutions for 2013

  • Be more regular on my blog, with at least 1-2 posts a week.
  • Not just write about games or random topics, but try to write around a niche of topics that are ACTUALLY interesting and USEFUL to people.
  • Wake up at 7am every day (yes, even as lowly as this one … I can’t help it … sometimes I just manage to oversleep till 10!!)

I’d like to stop here since I never tend to follow-up with things when I overdo them. The thing with resolutions is that they need to be measurable … and then we need to follow through with reviews and rinse-repeat!!

  • That means I need to post roughly 81 posts in 2013 (right now I am at 504, exactly a year after I write this post, I need to be at 585+ posts). Perhaps a small widget displaying the post count this year would do this task! Saw this post a day after I published this post – it’s the commitment which pays and why there is no such thing as writer’s block.
  • I have decided to write more about WordPress, Google Analytic and, Google Adwords. How do you track useful to people, hmmm … one metric could be traffic! another could be the number of returning visitors! A third an perhaps more relevant metric could be the share of Most Read Categories to switch from games (which is now at 39%) to Technology.
  • This is a completely offline event, so you need to rely on my reliable reporting! Which means that I report faithfully what time I woke up and keep a track of this for a year! Ughh … I am hating this resolution already! A percentage metric would then be a simple matter of find how many days I woke up at 7am.

I will leave you with this lovely quote I stumbled across on the interwebs

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.

Wishing you all a very happy new year!

The Cinderella Visitor

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

It’s surprising, every time I open Analytics, I learn something new about this product and I learn something new about my site … like the fact that I have to deal with Cinderella Visitors!

Here is a maths problem for you. In fact if you have pored through your Google Analytics account, I am sure even you would also have been stumped by the same problem.

Below is a screenshot of my site’s monthly traffic stats –

Monthly Stats

Now, yes … these are humble beginnings! That is why some of you should visit this site more often!! So if you look at the unique visitors (that’s the total number of visitors coming to the website), then it is 530. This is good, that means through the blog I am getting in touch with at least 530 people a month!! Holy cow!! That’s roughly 18 conversations in the day.

Out of those 530, a huge number are new visitors (511). So does that mean only 19 visitors are returning back to the blog for those 126 visits? Hmmm … that should not be that hard to find. One look at the Returning Visitors Advanced Segment should shed more light on this …

Returning Visitors

Well, this seems to the problem don’t it. Things don’t just add up here! 45 visitors are responsible for those 126 visits, which means that 485 visitors are responsible for those 511 New Visits. How can this be possible? These 485 people have come on the site ONCE ( … sigh!! aee jaanewaale ho sake to laut ke aajaa …), but the number of visits tell me otherwise.

Which should bring us to the real question of what does Google Analytics define as a visit? Here is an insightful article from Google about How Visits are Calculated in Analytics. There we have our answer –

A single visitor can open multiple visits. Those visits can occur on the same day, or over several days, weeks, or months. As soon as one visit ends, there is then an opportunity to start a new visit. There are two methods by which a visit ends:

  • Time-based expiry (including end of day):
    • After 30 minutes of inactivity by the visitor
    • At midnight

Ahhh! So if the visitor comes to the site, sticks around for more than 30 minutes without doing anything and then clicks on any other links, then its considered as ANOTHER visit. This should have been a sufficient reason IF the average visit duration was on the higher side, but since its not the case (and I write reasonable short posts too!), so the other method seems to be in action here!

At least 26 visitors have been around the site around midnight!! A quick check on my GA for hourly visits confirms my suspicions! I had 26 visitors coming to the website around midnight … and as the clock struck twelve, these Cinderella visitors fled (or at least Google Analytics made them fade away) and came back as New Visits!! By the way, in case if you are wondering why have you not heard about this term Cinderella Visitor before, then do not worry … I just coined it!

So where are the glass slippers? The glass slippers are the ubiquitous utmz cookies!!

Data Highlighter by Google Webmaster

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

If you are a webmaster or own a site, then it is likely that you know about Google Webmaster Tools (WMT). If not, then the first thing you need to do is bookmark my blog! Then head on over to Google Webmasters and register your site the NOW! I cannot stress more on this. Google Webmasters allows the webmaster to slightly influence the method in which the Google bot crawls your website. Why is this important, well you can actually tell Google to crawl certain pages of your website, and ask it to not crawl other non-important pages. Typically, you would do this using Sitemaps (do remind me to write about this sometime later!).

The latest feature roll out by Google WMT is their Data Highlighter feature. You will find this in the Optimization section of Google WMT. At present this nifty feature lets you highlight event based data on your website. So if you are a training institute for financial certifications like us, then you can easily benefit from this feature. All you have to do is create a page set of pages which have this data that you need to highlight.

Page Sets in WMT

I created a page set called Batches (which is a set of pages for all our classroom centers in India). Then, the WMT wizard started and asked me to point out specific event meta information which was on those pages. Information such as the name of the event (for us it was events such as CFA Level I, Fin Mod, FRM Part I, etc.), event date and time, venue and address.

Data Highlighter by Google Webmaster

Now, the next time when the Google bot crawls this site, it will simply read and store this additional information and display them in the Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs).

Here is a really helpful video by the good folks at Google WMT explaining this feature –

As the World Ends

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

Today is the D-Day, the day when the Mayan calendar runs out … and thus, leading us to think that the world has ended. What were they really thinking?

In almost all civilizations, this day has been predicted. We Maharashtrians have an end of the world known as pralay. This literally translates into the great flood (Noah! Where art thou?). Interestingly enough the reason for this is pretty much the same across civilizations, that mankind has become decadent and corrupt in its glory and technical superiority and the gods have decided to end all mankind. Think about the mythical continent of Atlantis and how it ended. Yes, it’s a myth … but stories are told to enforce beliefs.

Another source of media supporting this idiotic notion is Hollywood movies. With movies such as Deep Impact, I am Legend, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Day After Tomorrow making big bucks, it simply makes sense to talk about the end of the world to get attention in the media (like this post for example!).

I still have not seen the retail brands out there taking advantage of such an event. If I were the owner/marketing manager of a retail brand … I would declare a sale and call it the End-of-the-world Sale!! Yes, its an original thought!

So, what are you going to do to handle the end of the world? I just celebrated 4 years of happy marriage with my wife yesterday. I intend to continue doing so for the next 40 years to come! End of the World … phhh … not for me. I use Google Calendar.

Custom Reporting in Google Analytics

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

Google Analytics rolled out more than 5 years back, and it has been rocking ever since. The first free enterprise class analytics seemed to keep on adding more and more awesome features every year. Especially after the acquisition of the Urchin tracker system, GA has been the de facto analytics system for all websites.

Of course for the more seasoned people out there who cannot get their exact set of data from GA, there are other niche analytics products. In fact Avinash Kaushik has an entire chapter dedicated to this in his kickass of a book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day (I recommend that you do read this!!)

I have been seriously working on GA for about a year or so now and the more I use this tool, the more I learn about how little I know! That’s the thing with knowledge, by the time you know a lot, you think you know very little. I wish if the other way was true as well :-D

The thing with GA and what turns off most people is that the sheer volume of data it can show in those pretty little orange pages is a lot. So a cursory glance gives you loads of data, however to get an insight, you have to sift through this data. Create segments, look at those segments and search through various different reports to find that one insight which will help you drive more traffic, more leads, more sales to your site.

This is where Google has shone their brilliance, they have allowed web developers, analysts, webmasters and business intelligence guys to actually work together and create custom reports, custom segments which can be shared. Yes, so I can burn the midnight oil trying to find which content works best for my site … however if I had to do the same for another website, I would have to re-create all those steps all over again. What a colossal waste of time! But now, I can simply share that report/segment and voila!!

In the next few days, I will be sharing more custom segments as well as custom dashboards which you can simply import in your Google Analytics and start right off!

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

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So, why does Hollywood and the entire gaming industries pit the aliens versus the human race? So if an intelligent race found signs of life on Earth, would it’s first reaction be to kill it or to move towards its annihilation? What would you do? Would you not first study it? Find a means of communicating and then communicate?

But no, the basic premise of almost all games is that the aliens have invaded, have superior firepower if not fierce claws (and sometimes both!!). The humans have to rally back and kick some alien ass. XCOM is no different.

If you are a fan of this game, stop reading this post here itself, I am not going to go ga-ga over this sorry excuse of a 12GB install game. And so shouldn’t you!! If you do remember the previous versions of XCOM and its expansions, then that’s pretty much that is there to this current game … with some pretty graphics.

The basic story is this, the aliens have attacked and are not leaving any prisoners. You are in charge of a high profile team made by technicians, scientists and soldiers across the world. The major countries are funding your outfit, and that means protecting each of these countries against alien invasions, figuring out the alien’s technology and building your own superweapons. Your soldiers gain powers and experience as they kill more aliens.

xcom-mapThe game play has improved a bit and most of the tactical game is fun to play, but it does get a bit monotonous towards the end. You end up moving one turn and then going into Overwatch for each of your units. If you have not played any of its predecessors, then do give this a whirl (just the demo will suffice).