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Google Analytics Event Tracking in a Template File

| November 11th, 2011
in Google Analytics



Ever had an issue where you want to track unique events (or virtual pageviews) within Google Analytics from a template file?  For example, on an e-commerce site, you may have a series of product pages that use the same ‘add to cart’ button from either an include file or some kind of reusable wrapper.  You may want to track each ‘add to cart’ click as a unique event for that specific product, not just the product section as a whole.  Since the actual JavaScript snippet for event tracking can only be placed into these file once, this would seem to post a problem.

Here’s the Solution.  In this case, we are going to use the URL of each page to serve as a unique identifier for the event tracking.  If the URLs are not unique among the pages where you want the event tracked, there is a slightly more complicated solution that you can contact me on Twitter for.

In the <head> of the pages that you want tracked, place the following code snippet (or save this snippet as a JavaScript file and reference it):

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--
	function passID()
	{
		var fullURL = parent.document.URL;
                var uniqueID = fullURL.substring(fullURL.indexOf('XX'),
		fullURL.indexOf('XX')+3);
		return uniqueID;
	}

//-->

</SCRIPT>

This snippet will grab a 3 character unique ID out of the page URL on which it appears.  Simply replace the XX in the code above with the 2 characters that precede the unique ID in the URL.  If the ID is only one character long, then you have it.  If it is 2 characters, replace the “+3″ above with “+4″.  If it is 3 characters, replace the “+3″ with “+5″, and so forth.

Note: If XX appears multiple times in URL, you will want to make it longer than two characters to ensure that you get the identifier that you want.  Just make sure to adjust the ending portion of the substring accordingly.

Now that we have our unique ID, the rest of the event tracking is easy.  For your onClick or onSubmit event, the tracking code for GA usually appears as:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label']);

With ‘Category’, ‘Action’, and ‘Label’ each being strings that the coder enters to display in Analytics.

In this case, we’re just going to make one adjustment:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', passID()]);

‘Label’ has been replaced by passID(), the function we created in the <head> of the page for the uniqueID.  You could also replace ‘Category’ or ‘Action’ with the passID() function as well, but I think ‘Label’ makes the most sense as these pages are going to be similar in nature coming from the same template file.

That’s it, the unique ID will now show in the label section of GA.  Feel free to contact me with any questions and I’d love to hear about any case studies where you use this.

- EJW, follow me on twitter: @ejwestksu



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News from The Google Analytics Partner Summit

| September 15th, 2011
in Beacon News, Beacon Team, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing



Beacon’s own Brad Henry is doing a Google Analytics user survey with one of the GA staff at The Google Analytics Partner Summit in Mountain View CA!

 



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Beacon Technologies Through the Eyes of an Intern – Week 9

| July 15th, 2011
in Branding, Google Analytics, Pay-Per-Click, Web Marketing



Week 9 was good.  I spent this week really diving into marketing Beacon.  The bulk of what I did this week involved making sure things were up to date or set up correctly.  I ensured that the local listings for Beacon were correct in directories like Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.  Once I was done with that, I worked on setting on some goal funnels in GA to track conversions for Beacon’s contact form.  I set up the funnel to track if the contact form was filled out from a specific page.  The other updating I did was related to the special offer page for the current promotion Beacon will be running.  This didn’t involve creating anything on the page, but rather making sure links worked correctly on the page and that links from other pages pointed to the correct special offer page.

Along with that work, I spent a large amount of time working on a PPC campaign for the special offer.  This was really fun.  I got to manipulate the keywords for ad groups within the campaign to try to ensure that the ads were associated with the right keywords to improve the quality score of the keywords.  The better the quality score, the more likely the ad will appear in related searches.  There were close to 20 ad groups that I focused on for this campaign.  After looking over the previous statistics, I tweaked the copy of the ads for each ad group to hopefully be more effective.  I also wrote one or two new ads for each ad group.  If you don’t know already, the ads have a limited number of characters for each line.  There are four lines in each ad.  The headline, line 1, line 2, and the display URL.  The headline and the limits you to 25 characters and the other three lines limit you to 35 characters each.  Here is an example to help visualize what I had to work with.

This equals 25 characters

This is the length of 35 characters

Here is a new set of 35 characters.

www.displayurl.com/35morecharacters

It seems like it would be easy to get your point across in that amount of space since you have 70 characters for the “meat” of the “sandwich”, but considering my second line was a predetermined mentioning of the special offer, I really only had 35 characters to deliver the message.  I was able to make the headline whatever I wanted to help get the message out there.  Also, the display URL can more or less be whatever you want.  It doesn’t have to be a valid URL.  It is meant to help convince people to click on the ad.  The ad is pointing to a real URL of your choosing in the background.

In addition to writing and editing ads, I was given the freedom to determine the best geographical area to target with the ads, I was able to give input on the daily budget of the campaign, and I got to learn about and set up some A/B testing within the campaign.  A/B testing is where you run two almost identical ads or websites or etc. and see which outperforms the other.  Once you get enough data you stop the less effective one and move on to testing the winner versus another small change.  Hopefully I’ll be able to see some results before the end of my internship.  If not I’ll have to check back in to find out how it’s going.



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Google Demands Speed & Helps with Asynchronous Analytics Tracking

| December 29th, 2010
in Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Web Marketing



Though it has been released for over a year now (December 2009) it is worth stating — or restating — that if you use Google Analytics for your website statistics, you should migrate to their Asynchronous Analytics Tracking script and away from their traditional Javascript library or the original Urchin script. For background, see:


Benefits of a Faster Site

  1. A faster site improves your user experience.
  2. Your site SERP Ranking (Search Engine Results Page) improves.


A Short Back Story

Urchin was purchased by Google in early 2005 and Google Analytics was rolled out a few months later, largely based on “Urchin On Demand.”  The Urchin tracker is still supported by Google, as is Google’s traditional Javascript GA script. Unfortunately, both are rather large and synchronous — they have to load before page analytics start to be tracked or other events occur. This is why Google has always recommended that you load Urchin or the traditional script at the bottom of the document.


The Downsides to Synchronous Loading

  • Events often aren’t tracked because the Stop or Back button is hit before the library is called at the bottom of the page and loaded.
  • The library are large and slows your page load down.
  • Other events on the page are held up by the time to load the library, further slowing down the apparent “responsiveness” of your site.


The Need For Speed

It used to be that the best practice on website design was small images and lean, clean website pages on a fast server so that they loaded quickly over dialup, on slower computers.  Much of this ideal fell by the wayside in the past ten years as code for sites became more robust and had better features, but came at a cost:

  • Code bloat on the page, from more complicated pages or page structure, heavy style sheets or javascripting
  • Bloat in applications on the server, leading to longer response times
  • Poorly designed code
  • Larger, less optimized images
  • Web 2.0 and the advent of heavy Javascript libraries to support things like AJAX, highly stylized website designs, chat, image effects, form processing libraries, etc
  • Overuse of large Flash animations
  • Embedded media like movies or sound
  • Shared hosting on overburdened websites

All of the reasons listed above can penalize your search engine rankings on Google, and even how often Google or other search engines bother to index your site. This article isn’t about poor website design or substandard hosting (that’s for another time) but with all of these ways that you can hurt your site, adding to it by continuing to use Google’s traditional script only compounds the problem.


Faster is better
, and Google has for some time now factored how fast your site loads into its ranking algorithm.

Because of this renewed importance of page load speed for Google they realized that these large load time libraries were counterproductive to the internet and their own goal to reward speed in search engine rankings.

During 2009 they developed an AJAX, or asynchronous, script that would become the Google Analytics Queue object, or _gaq.  This object is used to asynchronously load the Google Analytics library in the background, AJAX-style.

This switch frees up your pages to finish loading, loading faster, queue up events or commands to execute after the library loads, and better push events on your page into Google Analytics.  You have the ability to push all of the traditional metrics you might use into Google Analytics asynchronously, plus it is now easier to create virtual events or pages and push data into GA for later use.

I would suggest as good reading an excellent reminder article about page speed and user experience from Jakob Nielsen, one of the foremost authorities on User Interface Design and User Experience.  Switch to the asynchronous script, and keep your site lean. It will benefit your users, and your rankings.



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Is Your Email Marketing Solution Measuring Up?

| November 4th, 2010
in Web Marketing



Sure every email marketing solution needs to do some basic things like import email addresses, build emails (on some scale) and send those emails. However, there are a whole lot of bells and whistles out there. After years of working with email marketing I have compiled a master list of what I want from my email marketing solution.

• Ability to compare email message data
• Personal representative available to help maximize effectiveness, segment your audience, give consultative advice, and provide trouble shooting expertise.
• Free customer support
• Email design and creation tools.
• Open & click tracking
• Spam checker to ensure your emails do not get sent to junk email folders.
• Inbox preview (including mobile), which is invaluable to creating universally accepted emails
• Works with you personally to clean up your email database to achieve the highest deliverability.
• Automatic data clense
• Unsubscribe processing
• Stays current on changes in the practices as major ISPs in order to resolve deliverability issues.
• Real time stats
• Ability to send targeted emails to opt-ins based on their actions
• Extra reporting on things like friend forwards, survey responses, updates and bounce inactivation.
• Easily integrates with Google Analytics
• Ability to run A/B tests.
• Allows you to set up automatic emails to remind or encourage recipients
• Data integration application to sync data with your applications
• Ability to upload email data

 



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Posted in Web Marketing | 1 Comment »
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Google Visits Beacon

| October 27th, 2010
in Beacon News, Beacon Team, Pay-Per-Click



With the significant increase in the monthly PPC spend by the clients that we manage, Google has assigned a team to work with us directly. Our Google Account Team representatives visited our offices here in Greensboro this past Wed (Oct 20th) to discuss and collaborate on our Google Adwords strategy.  We now manage several million dollars per year in PPC budget on behalf of our clients and of course, our partnership with Google for PPC and Google Analytics is a great benefit for both us and our clients.

Some of the items discussed included:

  • CTR importance
  • Google Re-marketing
  • PPC Landing Page Testing Strategy
  • Content Network Implementation
  • Brand Trademark Protection through PPC
  • Category Competitive Benchmarking Results
  • Quality Score Relevance
  • Approval process for Enhanced Brand Channels for our YouTube clients

From left to right: Michelle Vincent(Google), ArPit Vaidya (Google), Meredith Clark (Google), Brad Henry (Beacon), Nicole Tolbert (Beacon)



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You Down with CTR (Yeah you know me)

| October 24th, 2010
in Pay-Per-Click, Social Media Marketing



Along with my tips and tricks for all things web marketing, I also feel it is important to often times ‘kick it old school’ which is why I chose to create this awesome blog post in tribute to Naughty by Nature.

CTR, how can I explain it
I’ll take you frame by frame it
To have y’all jumpin’ while we singin’ it
C is for Click, T is for Through
The last R…well…that’s Rate
It’s sorta like another way to call a cat a kitten”

“You down with CTR (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who’s down with CTR (This whole party)
You down with CTR (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who’s down with CTR (This whole party)”

So..why all this hype about CTR?

CTR holds the greatest weight in Google’s quality score rating system by far so I thought it would be beneficial for you if I explained it a little better.  For starters, click through rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions.  It is the popularity score that online campaigns use to judge their performance since it is the immediate response to an ad. The CTR measures what percentage of people clicked on the ad to arrive at the destination site; it does not include the people who failed to click, yet arrived at the site later as a result of seeing the ad.  However, we can still pick up stats on these non-immediate users by reviewing our “view thru conversion” stats.

I also want to point out that a higher CTR does not necessarily have anything to do with high conversion rates, which is also very important.  While you can create the most compelling ad ever to hit the pages of a display results page, once the users click on your ad, it doesn’t mean that they will automatically convert on your page.  That is why PPC Landing page testing is so important.

One additional point to note is that there is a big difference to the important of CTR when you review the different sources you chose to advertise.  When it comes to the search engines, CTR need to be a top priority.  However when you are putting paid ads on Facebook, remember that although the click through rates are not exceptionally good, the social aspect of people being able to “like” my page, then be made aware of the updates in the future is where the money is. When you set up your campaigns as CPC instead of CPM, you can build brand awareness and pay almost nothing for it! So…

“You down with CTR (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who’s down with CTR (This whole party)
You down with CTR (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who’s down with CTR (This whole party)”



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Posted in Pay-Per-Click, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »
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Get Your Website JUICED! Google Visuals That Improve your Website.

| October 13th, 2010
in Google Analytics



Pattern detection in Google Analytics is a lot easier with visualization tools. One of the neat visualization tools available to enhance your Google Analytics is JuiceKit that works through the Google Analytics API.

Very easy to setup. Just visit the Google App Gallery and login into your Google Analytics.

There are two tools available. A Referrer Flow and a Keyword Tree visualization.

The keyword visualization lets you see right away the most frequently used search terms and their performance.

There are a few parameters you can set like the size and color. In the example below, word size corresponds with the number of visits and color relates to the bounce rate. Other settings can include % new visitors or average time on site.

In the center of the tree, you will see a frequently used keyword. To the left and right of the keyword, you will see search terms used the most often in combination with your keyword.

A “Juiced” website screenshot of the Keyword Tree below:

-

One thing that stands out above are the queries related to pricing.  That is a question easily answered by contacting us on our online form.

A great tool to check out! Next post, I’ll explore the Referral Flow tool to answer the question “What pages are people viewing on your site and where are they coming from?”.



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Conversion Optimization…how big will it become?

| September 28th, 2010
in Google Analytics, Google Web Optimizer, Web Marketing



For the past 10+ years I have been consulting and advising businesses with their Web Strategy investments.  From Corporate Websites to University/College Re-Designs to eCommerce systems to Web-based Integrated Applications…all projects demand a careful discussion regarding the investment and the possible return on the investment.

Very often with our clients, Web Marketing Services is a vital piece of the puzzle towards driving the necessary ROI for the Web Strategy.  For many years, the majority of focus in Web Marketing was driving qualified traffic (new prospects) to our client’s sites using Optimization, Paid Ads and more recently with additional attention on Social Media Strategies. I could spend the next hour writing about the detailed tasks on how we help our clients receive qualified traffic but that is not the purpose of this blog entry.

The purpose of this entry is to drive more attention to the art of Conversion Optimization.

Wiki defines Conversion Optimization as the “science and art of creating an experience for a website visitor with the goal of converting the visitor into a customer“.

While ‘converting visitors to customers’ is certainly an obvious goal, Beacon will take you much deeper and determine multiple ‘Conversions’ within your website and your processes so we can carefully track, measure, analyze and act to improve the success of your website investment.

I view Conversion Optimization at a more granular level than “converting the visitors to a customer”.  It all starts with a very thorough and possibly complex implementation of Google Analytics. Without a very sound setup of analytics, you will NOT be able to successfully invest in Conversion Optimization.   The process starts with consulting sessions with the client to understand the business so we can recommend and implement a custom Google Analytics setup for segmentations, funnels, and goals.  Afterwards, we begin to accumulate data in order to make informed decisions for modifying the site/funnels/processes in order to increase Conversions.  Certainly the process is more involved and is unique to each client but I hope this gives you a sense of how we view Conversion Optimization.

More and more of my interaction with clients/prospects is focusing on Conversion Optimization.  Beacon has an exceptional team of Marketing experts and we truly understand the value of Conversions Optimization!!

I enjoyed reading this article below and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Please comment on this blog if you have any thoughts and suggestions.

Patrick

336-232-5668 direct

336-944-4187 mobile

Patrick Flanagan at LinkedIn

ARTICLE TO READ

Conversion Optimization Is The New SEO

by Scott Brinker

Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. As we begin a new decade in search, we face a parallel truism: great search marketing is 1% about getting the click and 99% about what you do next.

Starting here in 2010, conversion optimization is the new SEO.

To be sure, SEO is still important and still evolving. There are still plenty of companies that need to adopt its best practices. SEO isn’t dead. But among the giants of SEO, there is a growing restlessness for the next mountain to conquer.

That mountain rises beyond the SERP and beyond the click.

SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin recently declared that conversion optimization is the most underused and highest ROI activity in the marketing department. Predicting that 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization, he wrote, “Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this… 2010 is the year, simply because it’s an inflection point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value.”

SEO and conversion optimization are a lot alike

Conversion optimization and SEO both thrive at the tumultuous intersection of marketing, IT and customer operations. SEO professionals are experts at navigating this technical and political tempest. They are part engineer, part creative and part strategist—all bundled together in the role of a front-line change agent.

Those same talents, honed over the past decade, are exactly what’s needed deeper in the funnel.

Conversion optimization, like SEO, isn’t a one-shot project. It’s an integral part of the new marketing. The most valuable players will do more than optimize a landing page or run a good A/B test themselves. They will help organizations absorb conversion optimization into their culture and operational rhythm.

Good SEO practitioners know that short-cuts aren’t the answer. Sure, almost anyone can “optimize” a single page’s conversion rate by eliminating all choices and brow-beating visitors with misleading promises. You can myopically increase conversions that way—but at a terrible cost to brand, reputation and customer goodwill. Such black hat conversion optimization, like black hat SEO, isn’t worth the price for legitimate businesses.

(That is one of the reasons I prefer the phrase post-click marketing—it suggests a broader regard for user experiences and long-term relationships.)

Like SEO, conversion optimization is data-driven. Web analytics remain your greatest ally, but you must roll up your sleeves and dig deeper into user behavior. Segmentation analysis becomes even more crucial. How do different segments interact with you, and how can you optimize their particular experiences? Carry that through to revenue (or at least quality-scored leads).

Ultimately, in both SEO and conversion optimization, content is king. Don’t let technicalities overshadow what really matters: compelling value propositions and meaningful brand experiences. In SEO, this wins you links; in conversion optimization, it wins you customers.

But SEO and conversion optimization are different too

SEO often prides itself on minimizing the need for PPC search advertising. While that’s a noble achievement in traffic generation, conversion optimization actually flourishes with paid search, for reasons we’ll examine below. So the first step is to clear away any paid media prejudices.

Combined with PPC, conversion optimization enables highly controlled experimentation. Turn on traffic for a specific keyword, with a particular ad, to a matching landing page, and run well-defined tests with a minimum of confounding variables—and do it in a matter of hours. Iterate quickly. If a problem arises, or you strike gold, react instantly. Test, test, test.

Of course, SEO traffic can be optimized too. But take full advantage of the control PPC offers you.

In SEO, the atomic unit of experimentation is the blog post. In conversion optimization, it’s a matched PPC ad and landing page. While most organizations can now blog nimbly, producing coordinated landing pages may still be a slog. It doesn’t have to be: optimize the process, not just the pages.

Conversion optimization extends beyond a single page. SEO usually avoids breaking up content into multiple steps. However, you may find that multi-step landing pages convert better, because they engage respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitate segmentation (they’re also called “conversion paths” for a reason).

While SEO encourages open publication of everything—that great new report you produced makes excellent link bait—conversion optimization often benefits from dangling valuable content as an incentive to convert. A landing page offering your report, in exchange for a name and email address, can still be link bait, but there’s clearly some trade-off.

Furthermore, some conversion-oriented landing pages shouldn’t be indexed by search engines at all. If you’re experimenting with special offers, or running campaigns with short expirations, you want the prerogative to change them or turn them off without leaving residual expectations out in the wild. For limited promotions, the meta robot tags you probably want are “follow, noindex.”

Dream building instead of link building

The driving goal of SEO is link building. At the risk of sounding schmaltzy, the driving goal of conversion optimization is dream building.

You want to get in the mind of individual prospects, starting from their very first search query to learn something new, solve a problem, or satisfy a desire—a need that you can fulfill. That is the stirring of a dream in their consciousness. Everything you do from that point forward—every touchpoint, every landing page, every follow-up email—should help make that dream real.

Success in conversion optimization is when a prospect rejoices, “Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for!” A dream come true.

It’s harder than link building. But it’s a worthy mountain to climb.



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Posted in Google Analytics, Google Web Optimizer, Web Marketing | 1 Comment »
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Google Chrome is full of S…..

| August 20th, 2010
in Beacon Team, Web Marketing



SPEED.  Super Fast Speed!!!

I want to change your life today.  Read this article and take my advice and enjoy your future days browsing the wonderful world wide web…fast.

* If you already use Google’s Chrome browser then please stop reading and go back to work…with your speedy browser.

** If you are a Web Marketing guru then please stop reading because you already know everything about everything.

I am constantly online reviewing websites.  I spend several hours a day analyzing sites and reading the latest & greatest on web marketing, hosting trends, design ideas, etc.

Until this past June, I used Firefox primarily.  I transitioned from IE to Firefox roughly 3 years ago because of all the Firefox toolbar features.   Firefox is still an important tool for me when I want to study a website’s SEO attributes but for the general public simply browsing the web…Firefox is overkill.

If you simply browse the web, give Google Chrome a demo.

You will quickly get used to the startup time and page loading speed.   I don’t know all the technical reasons for the speed and efficiency of Chrome but I know this….IT IS CONSIDERABLY FASTER than other commonly used browsers.

* Reply to this blog post if you try Chrome and like the results!!

Enjoy your new life,

Patrick

336-232-5668

pflanagan@beacontec.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickflanagan1


For Information Purposes:

Browser usage statistics show that Chrome is experience steady growth and now is owns ~17% of the market.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Browser Statistics Month by Month

2010 IE8 IE7 IE6 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
July 15.6% 7.6% 7.2% 46.4% 16.7% 3.4% 2.3%
June 15.7% 8.1% 7.2% 46.6% 15.9% 3.6% 2.1%
May 16.0% 9.1% 7.1% 46.9% 14.5% 3.5% 2.2%
April 16.2% 9.3% 7.9% 46.4% 13.6% 3.7% 2.2%
March 15.3% 10.7% 8.9% 46.2% 12.3% 3.7% 2.2%
February 14.7% 11.0% 9.6% 46.5% 11.6% 3.8% 2.1%
January 14.3% 11.7% 10.2% 46.3% 10.8% 3.7% 2.2%
2009 IE8 IE7 IE6 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
December 13.5% 12.8% 10.9% 46.4% 9.8% 3.6% 2.3%
November 13.3% 13.3% 11.1% 47.0% 8.5% 3.8% 2.3%
October 12.8% 14.1% 10.6% 47.5% 8.0% 3.8% 2.3%
September 12.2% 15.3% 12.1% 46.6% 7.1% 3.6% 2.2%
August 10.6% 15.1% 13.6% 47.4% 7.0% 3.3% 2.1%
July 9.1% 15.9% 14.4% 47.9% 6.5% 3.3% 2.1%
June 7.1% 18.7% 14.9% 47.3% 6.0% 3.1% 2.1%
May 5.2% 21.3% 14.5% 47.7% 5.5% 3.0% 2.2%
April 3.5% 23.2% 15.4% 47.1% 4.9% 3.0% 2.2%
March 1.4% 24.9% 17.0% 46.5% 4.2% 3.1% 2.3%
February 0.8% 25.4% 17.4% 46.4% 4.0% 3.0% 2.2%
January 0.6% 25.7% 18.5% 45.5% 3.9% 3.0% 2.3%

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