Web Analytics: Your Intuition is Wrong

The Why and How of Web Analytics

By Eric PoulinWeb Analytics: Because Your Intuition is WrongWhat are analytics?Stats about your web siteVisitorsContentSourcesConversionsKey Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Why should I care about analytics?Because your intuition is wrong

Why should I care about analytics?And you miss thingsCount the passes video.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNdekYNzvzA

Understanding Analytics Terms

Google Analytics DemoThere are a lot of web analytics terms. Some everyone know and are easy to follow, but some arent quite so intuitive and downright confusing. Before we can go any farther we need to make sure that we have a grasp of the most commonly used terms.5Understood Terms

VisitsPages/VisitAbsolute Unique Visits% New VisitsTraffic SourceLanding Page

There are a lot of terms that are pretty much self explanatory and everyone knows what they mean.6Misunderstood Terms

PageviewsAvg. Time on SiteBounce RateExit RateTraffic TypesBut then there are those other terms that we think we understand but do we really? How exactly is average time on site computed? What is a Bounce?7Pageviews

not a meaningful statisticHigher pageviews is not always betterMore could mean harder to find what a user wants?Low pageviews could be excellent navigationNot meaningful statistic

8Avg. Time on Site

The average time on a site is the time on each page not including the time on the final page because we have no way of knowing this9Bounce Rate / Exit Rate

Bounce RateExit Rate* a Bounce is always an Exit, but an Exit is not always a BounceDifference between a bounce an exit rate10Traffic Types

Traffic Types (Source/Medium) Direct (none) Referral from another site Custom Search TrafficOrganic generic searchPPCCPCCustom set by variables11Benchmarking

Alexa & Compete are great for gaining some big picture knowledge about what is happening with your site. Also they both allow you to compare you website versus peer institutions and benchmarking.

Quantcast also provides good comparison data, but what this service offers that is insightful is demographic data.

Valuable to understand the trends, but dont obsess over the data.

12Benchmarkinghttp://nucloud.com/edurank/

Alexa & Compete are great for gaining some big picture knowledge about what is happening with your site. Also they both allow you to compare you website versus peer institutions and benchmarking.

Quantcast also provides good comparison data, but what this service offers that is insightful is demographic data.

Valuable to understand the trends, but dont obsess over the data.

13BenchmarkingGoogle AnalyticsLaw & Government -> Education -> Colleges & Universities

Google Analytics also offers some Benchmarking data. This can be valuable for understanding areas that your sites performance is weak at compared to the rest of the industry.14Choosing an Analytics Package

Although all these are Javascript options there are other types of analytics trackers. Javascript arent perfect but are 95-97% accurate.15Choosing an Analytics Package

Although all these are Javascript options there are other types of analytics trackers. Javascript arent perfect but are 95-97% accurate.16Why Google Analytics is Free98% of Googles Revenue comes from advertisingThe more they know the better ads they can serve up and better user behaviorVery tight integration with Google AdWordsInstalling Google Analytics

Code should go directly above the closing body tag Notice the setDomainName attribute

18Tracking Links

Not only can you track PDFs but you can track external links, videos, and pretty much anything that is handled through a link. Its a best practice to place your links in a directory that will be easy for you to search and find results.19Site Search Report

Site Search can provide actionable data about what visitors of on your site are having difficulty finding. This can be great insight into what needs to be more obvious to find on your site. 20Keyword Report

The Keyword report is more valuable for profiles of subdirectories, but even looking at your whole dataset digging down deep enough you can find interesting pieces of knowledge about what is driving traffic to your site from the search engines.21Content by Title Report

Similar to the Keyword Report the Content By Title is most valuable when looking at subsets of data. I prefer it better to the Top Content Report because its easier to read and Page Titles are hold heavy value to SEO so this is one way to look for titles to optimize.22Referring Sites Report

Referring sites can tell you where your visitors are coming from whos linking to you and what these visitors are doing once they arrive on your site. Its always good to know where your visitors are coming from. You can also tell additional data from this report like what types of visitors do what once they arrive on your site.23404 Error Page Report

Using your 404 page to learn what people are looking for and not finding is an excellent tactic to increase site usability and resolve problems that future users will never have to worry about.24Goal Conversions

There are multiple ways to track goals. This is extremely important because it helps you figure when and how your website is helping with the bottom line. The easiest way to do this is set a goal of someone visiting a specific page, like a thank you page after a conversion event. You can even go deeper and put dollar amounts to these events.25Offline Campaigns

Offline campaigns can be tracked. Send users through a shortened URL that does one or two things. It redirects them to a landing page while also applying tracking variables and/or segmenting your visitor26Blogs

Blogs are also something important to tag. Visit the link to learn more about Woffords Blogs. In my opinion the two standards for blog tracking, besides Google Analytics, is FeedBurner and ShareThis.27RSS Statistics

Feedburner grabs all sorts of data about a blog feed and subscriber count. Subscriber count is based on how many unique IDs pinged a feed the previous day.28Ask Your Audience

Customer surveys are a great way to ask your audience.

4Q is a service that will allow you to ask just a few targeted questions to random visitors of a page.

SurveyMonkey is a free service that allows you to ask surveys with meaningful data and collect results. Its super easy to use.29

There are so many social networks and social bookmarking sites out there it is very easy to get lost and confused.30Monitor Social Media Growth

Facebook Insights provides some data about your pages. Also you can setup tracking URLs to links back to your site.31Monitor Social Media Growth

LinkedIn doesnt currently provide any analytics so a spreadsheet and your regular monitoring is required.32Video Analytics

YouTube provides a slew of video demographic and tracking data. Im sure other Video services do also. What is important to look at is how much of your videos are individuals watching and what type of individuals are watching videos? It is idea to have calls to action after a video so you can track a conversion and videos are an excellent starting point.33RSS and Alerts

There are lots of sevices that provide RSS capabilities to track a keyword. Google also has Google Alerts if you prefer a daily email. Another service worth mentioning is tracking your brand name on twitter.34Web Analytics Rule #1Always Be Testing#1

You can always be testing something. A/B testingTweaking a page to see if it leads to more trafficOptimizing for search engines35Web Analytics Rule #2Dont get caught up in the numbers. Look at the TRENDS#2

This rule leads into the next rule, but concentrate on trends. Remember the data isnt 100% accurate.36Web Analytics Rule #3Setup a reporting scheduleand track key metrics#3

Setup a schedule of when you will be checking your analytics. Weekly works well for some things but for most of your bigger campaigns you will want to let them stretch out a little more and monthly will work.37Web Analytics Rule #4Set Goals#4

We have gone over A LOT of various analytics and it can be overwhelming. If you dont set goals and look for specific things then you can easily get overwhelmed. Also write them down and remember your spreadsheets.38

Setting Goals X campus visits scheduled a month

X number of viewbooks downloaded a month

Lower bounce rate on specific landing page X% over next month

Get donor email campaign to generate X amount over next month

Increase our video exposure X% for next month

Promote and increase presence on a social network by X%