Archive for the ‘Analytics’ Category

Two posts ago, I talked about the importance of laying a web analytics foundation for your company by measuring, valuing and analyzing the critical few visitor behaviors on your site that have an impact on your bottom line.  In my last post, I talked about the step after that, which is determine why the data you’ve collected is the way it is (the why?). Once you’ve listened to why your customers couldn’t complete whatever tasks they were trying to accomplish on your site, you should have a bunch of ideas on how to fix it.

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Engaging in proper site SEO isn’t about pulling out a checklist that you can run through in a month, check them all off and say all done! A good optimization strategy consists of a variety of moving parts. Check one issue off your task list today and two more problems show up on your radar. Good SEO is kind of like an engine: There are many working parts, any of which can (and should) be improved, repaired or replaced to boost your vehicle’s performance. The more your engine is used, the more work there is to do to keep the engine in top shape.

With that said, there are some basic components of every SEO campaign (not to mention a really big checklist) that form the foundation of a successful campaign. Anyone who’s been around SEO for any length of time already knows these “basics,” but they bear repeating for anyone who is unfamiliar as to where to begin with their SEO effort: Click here to keep learning

There is one report that will work for any type of website, and it qualifies as my nominee for the best web analytics report: Outcomes by All Traffic Sources…this report represents two things you should care about more than anything else: sources of traffic and Outcomes…you can strongly infer the kinds of people coming to your site and why they may be coming…it highlights two questions to focus on first: who? and how much?…If you start with this, you’ll find that your senior executives suddenly care about your web analytics reports…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0 Click here to keep learning

Company owners and other business decision makers who handle a web marketing budget are given, whether it’s their fault or not, too much website data that doesn’t directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What’s wrong with this?  Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company.  So, when it’s time to decide how to invest, there’s nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money.  To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to focusing on outcomes.

Step One: What’s the Point?

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Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few?  You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence…If you can’t take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the wrong metric for your business…the simple process of identifying a metric as your key performance indicator and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights…before you diagnose how to improve a metric, you have to identify all the influencing variables…analyzing the variables will help you identify where the true opportunities for improvement are…it forces you to dig in a methodical manner and let the data, not opinions, drive action…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

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…the bottom line for magnificent success is the people…invest multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor…a great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless.  A free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja will yield massive results that impact your bottom line…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0 Click here to keep learning

…you need to drastically rethink what it means to use data on the web…there is a lot of data, but there are fundamental barriers to making intelligent decisions…because clickstream data is great at the what, but not at the why…it’s important to know what happened, but it is even more critical to know why people do the things they do on your site…and the what else, which is perhaps the most underappreciated data on the web…your web analytics tool can report only what it can record…if you marry the what with the why and the what else, you’ll have a lifetime of happiness…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

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For far too long our online efforts have accurately been classified as faith-based initiatives…that’s exactly how we made decisions for our offline efforts, and when we moved online, we duplicated those practices.  But online, in the glorious beautiful world of the Web, we do not have to rely on faith…you have a God-given right to be data-driven…to understand the impact and economic value of your website by doing rigorous outcomes analysis…web analytics is like Angelina Jolie; sexy, powerful, and a force for good.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

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So far, we’ve looked at pattern analysis and failure analysis as ways you can use your internal site search data to improve your website (which you should be doing!).  But, there’s more than just search queries to look at.  There are also search sessions that you may be able to look into for more insights.  A search session occurs when a searcher executes multiple queries in one session while trying to address a single information need.  As they interact with your search results and content, it should tell you a lot about how your site is servicing them.

Gain Insight Into the Searcher’s True Need

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We’re currently talking about how to use internal site search data to improve your website performance.  The first type of analysis we looked at was pattern analysis, which entails finding what popular queries have in common or what’s odd about them to gain insights into the content your visitors want and need.  Next, we’ll take a look at failure analysis to find where your site searches are going wrong so you can find what to fix first.

Failure Analysis

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