Safari 4 Beta distorts Web Analytics
There is an interesting article over at Formatur.de (in German) that talks about Apple’s release of Safari 4 beta and its potential impact on web analytics. The contention is that due to Safari’s new Coverflow-like feature to display the most visited sites, Safari makes regular “hidden” visits in the background to update its screenshots in the Top Sites. This means a website that is listed in the Top Sites section gets visited even if the user does not actively visit the site. The implication for web analytics, Formatur goes on to explain, is that Safari 4 users will have more page views, higher bounce rates and more ad impressions (therefore lower conversion rates) due to these hidden visits.
According to Formatur, there is no known workaround to this issue for web analytics providers as there is no method, using JavaScript or otherwise, to differentiate between a virtual visit and a real visit.
I tried to replicate this phenomenon on my site using Safari 4. On Wednesday, I visited my site several times to ensure it appeared in the Top Sites in Safari. On Thursday I used Safari for my web browsing but made sure never to visit my site. I then pulled up some reports in Sitestat and Google Analytics to check if there were visits from Safari 4 on Thursday to my site. I then segmented these reports to isolate my visit - in Sitestat I used my IP Address and in Google Analytics I segmented by City and Provider. While the segment in Google Analytics does not necessarily exclude other potential Safari 4 users in my city, the data from Sitestat validates.
Top Sites in Safari 4 Beta
Safari's hidden visit to Datadriving.com with in Sitestat
Safari's hidden visit to Datadriving.com in Google
These reports confirm Formatur’s suspicions that Safari 4 is making hidden visits to update its screenshots and these are being tracked by analytics tools like regular visits. The question for me is how often does Safari make these hidden visits and how will it affect web analytics if Safari 4 gains market share or, as Formatur predicts, the Top Site feature is copied by other browsers?
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New Sharing Statistics from ShareThis
Late last year I reported some web content sharing statistics (from August 2008) from ShareThis, the news sharing service. At the time, I was surprised by the large percentage of email and Facebook sharing and the absence of Twitter. Now, ShareThis has produced updated share percentages for January.
ShareThis Share Percentages Jan 2009
Unfortunately the variance since August reported in the following chart does not make much sense if you compare the share percentages in January and in August. Therefore it risky to make too many interpretations from this data. At the same time, its not for nothing that Gregg Easterbrook once said, “Torture numbers, and they will confess anything”. So here goes:
The rise in Facebook is no longer a surprise to me. I find myself using the service more and more to share content from around the web. I am glad to see Twitter on the list, but am still surprised the percentage is so low. AIM is also a surprise, mainly because I haven’t used the instant messaging service in about 10 years. And the percentage drops in Email and Digg (again, take the figures with a grain of salt) seem to support the idea that new social networks are beginning to take hold.
Is it even possible to make predictions for the next results? I would say no, not really, but I will give it a shot anyway. I predict Digg, Email and Technorati to decrease further, Facebook to stay the same, and increases from Twitter, Stumbleupon and FriendFeed.
UPDATE
Apparently some of the figures in the above chart are incorrect. The adjusted figures just released by ShareThis show a more plausible AIM statistic of 0.1% which seems to be more in line with reality.
ShareThis Updated Share Percentages Jan 2009
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How to make Twitter even more useful
These days, I find myself using Twitter more and more to stay informed. By following a handful of thought leaders, tech luminaries, celebrities and friends, I get a steady stream of news, links to content around the web, opinions and even conversations. But as Twitter grows in popularity, it is becoming increasingly difficult to filter out some of the noise.
Tweetdeck is a step in the right direction for removing the clutter unavoidable in this microblogging platform. It allows you to create groups and set up search notifications on any given topic. Each filter can be viewed in a separate column. Yet it does not nothing to eliminate noise - that is, tweets that don’t interest me.
So here is my idea. Why not add a social networking component to Twitter, like Digg or Reddit do for content? Tweets could be voted up or down and tagged as uninformative if they do not contribute to the conversation. An application like Tweetdeck could offer filters for only the highest ranked tweets from all my followers. Or I could run a search for only quality tweets (as decided by the Twitterati) from a particular topic.
I realize that the beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity, but the success of Tweetdeck clearly demonstrates that there is a market for more granular control. What do you think?
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Is Google Analytics Being Evil?
There is an interesting article over on Sitepoint and originally broken by Michael VanDeMar about recent tests Google has been conducting to offer AJAX search instead of the standard HTML search it currently offers. Essentially, AJAX is supposed to improve the user experience by speeding up search. Besides some Firefox plugins possibly no longer working, there didn’t appear to be any major reasons to be concerned. However, the implications for web analytics tracking tools, it turns out, could be significant. From VanDeMar:
Every single analytics package that currently exists, at least as far as being able to track what keywords were searched on to find your site in Google, would no longer function correctly.
The reason, VanDeMar goes on to explain, is that search URLs in this test include a hash sign (#) which is then followed by the search parameters. Since browsers do not include anything after the hash sign in the referrer string, this information would not be sent to the tracking servers. Every visitor coming from a Google search, therefore, would appear to be coming directly from Google.com without search term information.
Web Analytics providers will be understandably upset if these developments are true. Search engine traffic is a huge part of any site’s traffic so losing detailed referral information would be critical to say the least.
Even if this test is rolled out and the implications turn out to be a problem, I am sure the web analytics community and Google will make nice and come up with a solution. And, while I doubt that Google is intentionally being evil, it is once again a reminder how even routine tests by the internet giant can have huge ramifications throughout the industry.
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