Google Analytics Access Required
ExpertFocus needs access to your Google Analytics account to work. Granting access is required if you want to use this tool.
Tap or click the user information menu on the top-right of this page and then the Access Google Analytics button. Choose Accept in the pop-up window that appears.
FAQ
What is ExpertFocus?
ExpertFocus is a tool for the About.com Expert. It interfaces with your Google Analytics account, allowing you benefit from all of that great data without having to be an expert in web statistics.
While publishing your content might today be as easy a few taps or clicks in Atlas, interpreting the mountains of valuable data about the visitors to your great content isn't nearly as simple.
To help solve this problem, ExpertFocus pulls in dozens of pages of Google Analytics data and turns it into a Site Story - an easy-to-read narrative of what's happening on your About.com site.
Where can I leave feedback about ExpertFocus?
Leave a comment on this expert HQ post. Any and all comments are welcome.
Please look through the rest of this FAQ, as well as in the Bugs and Upcoming Additions tabs, before leaving feedback in case your question or concern has already been addressed.
Is there a way to pull up a Page Story for any page I want?
Yes. Just drag the following link up to your bookmarks bar/toolbar in your browser:
To use it, just click the bookmarklet when you're on one of your About.com pages. The bookmarklet will error if you use it on pages outside About.com or pages that you don't have Google Analytics access to.
As is, the bookmarklet defaults to the "Week" version of the Page Story. The other timeframes load in the background but if you'd prefer a version that starts at the "Yesterday" view then drag this one to your toolbar instead, or for the "Month" install this one.
Why do I keep getting alerts about sampling?
Sampling is what it's called when Google Analytics provides estimated data and is mostly unavoidable. Google Analytics samples data when the data set it's pulling from is too large or will take too long to process.
Google samples data more often when providing data to external tools (like ExpertFocus). Sampling occurs most often on page-level data. On larger About.com sites, sampling will even occur with some data on the site-level Yesterday/Week/Month stories.
Additionally, the older and more granular the data, the more likely the chance of sampling. The specific sources that drive traffic to specific pages are almost always sampled, sometimes even in the reports in Google Analytics.
Sampling also occurs until 12pm or so (US) on many pieces of "Yesterday" data throughout ExpertFocus. This is because Google doesn't fully commit to yesterday's data until mid-day the next day (today).
What do I do if the spinner doesn't go away or the progress indicator is stuck?
Refresh the page. There are several reasons why data will stop loading but it's usually due to some issue pulling data from Google Analytics into ExpertFocus. Make sure you only have one ExpertFocus page open and then refresh that page.
Try clearing your cache if a simple refresh doesn't do the trick.
Why don't some of the links work?
Links on ExpertFocus pages that lead to other ExpertFocus pages are disabled until the page you're on fully loads. This is necessary to help prevent your IP address from pulling too much data from Google Analytics at once.
Google limits how many requests can be made from a single IP each second so loading multiple pages at once in different tabs or windows will cause one or more of those pages to fail.
Why do I see so many "Infinity%" increases?
The Month Story, and the Month view of a Page Story, will report "Infinity% SM2Y" every time until October, 2015. This is because About.com has only been using Google Analytics regularly since October, 2013, meaning that there won't be data to compare until 24 months after October, 2013.
Sometimes "Infinity%" is completely accurate. For example, some pieces of content didn't exist a week ago or truly had zero pageviews. Now that it's getting pageviews, the increase is of an infinite percentage.
New About.com sites may see "Infinity%" much more frequently until their sites start to see regular traffic.
1.1.000 (2015-11-04)
Added Google Keyword tool and Access Management page.
1.0.111 (2015-08-20)
Updated Page story so the new-format SBS pages can be viewed independently.
1.0.110 (2015-08-04)
Added Traffic From About card to Yesterday, Week, and Month stories.
1.0.101 (2015-06-26)
Corrected issue where new content was appearing on the "Yesterday" view of Trending Content.
Clarified the reasoning for sampling of previous day content on the FAQ page.
1.0.100 (2015-05-27)
Added Trending Content.
Corrected wording on the sampled warning that appears on the Month Story.
1.0.000 (2015-05-21)
Initial release.
Here are the bugs I'm already aware of and are working to squash:
- The data in the "Where [Yesterday/Week/Month] Visitors Came From" area in those stories doesn't provide the traffic breakdown between those major sources of traffic.
- Warnings do not appear detailing the reason why a page is stuck loading data and won't continue.
- Your Google/Google+ profile image does not display after connecting your Google Analytics account.
- Some pieces of data that are 0 or 0% are incorrectly reported as "NaN" (not a number).
- Changes of 0% are described as "increases" instead of the "flat" or "no change" they actually are.
- Singular pieces of data are discussed in plural language (e.g. "1 sources sent remaining 1 visits").
- Some really long URLs without dashes can push the Landing Page column in the Trending Content tables too far to the right.
- Sites with no content to show in a Trending Content table are shown an empty table instead of a message indicating the lack of data.
- Some GA roll-up accounts (About Staff only) may encounter sampling in some situations but are not alerted to the fact.
- Larger About.com sites may encounter sampling in the Week and Yesterday views of the Trending Content module but will not receive notices about it.
A number of improvements are planned for ExpertFocus, from bug fixes, to data clarifications, to new features. While I can't guarantee when the updates might occur, here are some of the upcoming plans:
- Google Keyword tool (est: mid October)
- Chrome extension (est: early October)
- A "Today's Story" that shows how things are doing so far today and how that's comparing to that same partial day traffic from previous days
- A "Next Week" view (predictive data on how next week might perform based on what happened that week last year)
- An option on most stories to generate simple graphs with multiple, overlapping timeframes
- Notifications and advice when certain conditions occur (e.g. an alert when a page's bounce rate is higher than average for that document type, plus advice on what to do about it)
- Realtime visitor count (probably a semi-transparent overlay that's always available)
- Source-specific stories (e.g. here are your best and worst social pieces, here's when shares happen the most, etc.)
- An option to view a multi-page document's "Page Story" as a whole (i.e. the data will show all of an SBS, not just the one URL you're viewing)
- An option to include newly viewed content and lost content within the Trending Content module.