Get the Most Out of Your Analytics
(Written by guest contributor Joel Ownby)
In the early days of the Internet, commercialism had not made its entrance and no one was thinking about tracking traffic, much less analyzing it. Nearly a decade later, we had progressed to tracking visitors in the form of “hits,” which did not tell you effectively even how many individual people actually visited your site. Now after nearly another decade, we find ourselves in a virtual analytical paradise comprised of numbers and data. With the advent of dynamic web development environments like PHP and ASP that can be easily tied to database solutions like MySQL and MSSQL, we have progressed in leaps and bounds in the web numbers game. We know where our traffic is coming from, how it got to us, what operating system people are running, what Internet browsers they are running, where they live, what language they speak, what other sites they visit, how long they stayed on our site, how many different pages on our site they visited, what page they first landed on, what page they exited from, and much, much more.
Before we get into actually measuring and analyzing our traffic, let’s talk about why we are doing it in the first place, and look at some of the questions we are trying to answer.
Some of the basic unknowns:
How many people visit my site every day?
Of the people that do come to my site, how many purchase my product or click my ads?
Which of my pages get the most traffic?
How long do people stay when they come to my site?
How many different pages do people view when they come to my site?
What are my top selling products or most clicked ads?
Some more complex questions:
What is the average monetary value of a visitor to my site?
What are the values of the individual pages in my site?
What is the value of new visitors compared to return visitors?
How many visitors are required to acquire one customer?
We use the answers to these questions to make decisions and assertions that increase revenue. There is a quote from Jim Stern that I first read in a book I am going to tell you about later that I really like. It goes like this, “What is the ROI (return on investment) of measuring your ROI?” Here is my take on that question: If you have no traffic, concentrate on getting some; if you have traffic, concentrate on how you can get more traffic while also increasing the quality of the traffic you do have. Most people look at analytics and metrics from the standpoint of measuring what you already have and I have always felt that they leave out a key point in that assumption. Analytics can certainly help you understand your traffic, but it can also help you get more traffic because it shows you where your existing traffic is coming from, allowing you to move in the proper direction. For example, if you see via your analytics that a page about fly-fishing is your most popular page, then it would be a good bet that you should develop more content about fly-fishing. That example is over-simplified, but it gets my point across.
Google Analytics, at http://analytics.google.com, is generally the best analytics package for most people and it’s free. Google Analytics allows you to place a small snippet of code on your web pages that gathers your traffic data and then displays it for you when you log in. The interface is clean and friendly, the breakdowns of data are very useful, the graphs and charts give a great snapshot of various data sectors, and to top it off you can link it to your Google AdWords account and easily measure the PPC traffic you buy through the Google AdWords service.
It’s very easy to add your website to your Google Analytics account by clicking the Add Website Profile link at the bottom of the interface and then placing the code on your site. There is usually about a 24-hour delay in stats reporting, so don’t expect to see anything immediately. After you have added a few sites, you can view the stats for one of them by clicking the View Report link next to the site you would like to see analysis for. After you have selected a site profile to view, you can see your main navigation and option menu to the left.
The Visitors display lets you see all of the information about your visitors, including unique visitors, new and returning visitors, visitor languages, the operating system visitors are using, the Internet browser visitors are using, and much more.
The Traffic Sources option shows you where your traffic is coming from. You can see which sites are linking to your site and sending traffic, which search engines are delivering you traffic and how much they are delivering, and which keywords are delivering traffic to your site broken down by quantity. The Traffic Sources pane also shows you your AdWords data, if you have your accounts linked.
The Content pane shows you all the data related to the content on your site. Some examples of the data found in the Content pane are the top content on your site, the top content on your site broken down by page title, the top landing pages (or entrance pages) on your site, the top exit pages on your site, and there is even a really cool site overlay feature. The site overlay feature allows you to place a Google Analytics overlay on your site and actually see how many people click on every link within your site. The overlay allows you to follow the exact paths that your visitors follow.
The last major section of the Google Analytics interface is the Goals section. The Goals section allows you to create specific goals within your site and then track conversions related to the goal you created. For example, you can create a goal that is the purchase of a product, and then use the data to determine how many visitors actually convert to buyers.
All in all, Google Analytics is an incredible piece of free software, and although I will admit that I use a few pieces of tracking software in addition to Google Analytics, most web site owners will never need anything else. Without accurate data, success can only come from dumb luck and gut feelings. My gut feelings have been proven wrong countless times, and I am not willing to bet my financial future on dumb luck. Make sure your numbers are sound and then apply yourself and you will be successful!
If you are serious about understanding and implementing your analytics, then I highly recommend a book called “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics,” by Brian Clifton.
Action Steps
– Learn the importance of Analytics.
– Gain insight into your site’s strong points.
– Know your traffic.
– Gauge the value of each visitor and each page.
– Watch your sales & conversions explode!
