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Mike Fleming Blog Archive

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Don’t Waste Time Looking at Web Data Until You Do This – Part 2

We’ve talked about what makes a good metric to look at for your business. But, you have to be careful here. There is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless amount of possible metrics that if you are not careful, you will catch yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea as to how to get back home where you belong. By “home,” I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve.

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Where You Should Invest Your Web Marketing Budget

…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…

How to Have a Lifetime of Happiness on Your Website

…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…

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Are You Held Accountable for Your Website Decisions?

In a typical business, the highest paid person’s opinion usually wins. This does not mean that their opinion is always the most informed though. It’s just the most powerful. The problem is that it is also the least accountable. But, in the world of the web, there’s a new sheriff in town. Data. This is because data (when used correctly) can provide accountability for decisions made.

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Analyzing Customer Search Sessions to Learn What They’re Thinking

So far, we’ve looked at pattern analysis and failure analysis as ways in which 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.

Site Search Analytics: Engines Don't Play Matchmaker, But You Should

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, 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.

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Site Search Analytics – Pattern Analysis to Improve Your Site

Your site search data, the phrases your website users type into your internal site search engine, is data that is swimming with insights into helping to make satisfied customers with your web site. If you are someone that is responsible for the performance of a site, this is most likely information that you’ve never looked at and may have not even known existed. But, you’re going to want to become familiar with it because it’s about the best place you can go online to learn what your users want. Read the first post in this series for why.

Site Search Analytics: What Your Customers Want…In Their Own Words

When people come to your site, it can be really hard to know why they are there. The truth is the average conversion rate on e-commerce sites is only around 2-3%…and that’s on sites that are specifically built to sell stuff. So, what happens to the other 97%? Why were they there? Did they find what they were looking for? If not, why not? Is the content they are looking for even on your site? If so, are they able to find it easily?

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PPC News – Advertisers Can No Longer Hide Behind the Click

Until now, the only information a user had on a search results page to decide where to click was the 135 characters in the ads. This led to many advertisers getting away with bad post-click marketing as long as they wrote great ads. Not any more. Advertisers can no longer hide behind the click. Now, users can hover over an ad and see a preview of the landing page with snippets of real text to see how closely it relates to what they’re looking for.

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What's Changed? – Your Door to Website Performance Insights

Either reporting or looking at reports of your top X whatever rarely leads to insights. Why? They rarely change. Ok, once in a while they do, but for the most part, your top keywords, landing pages, referrers, etc. are going to be basically the same. This is because (for most, not all) what you’re offering doesn’t change. The problem is that when you look at a report like this, you are looking at static numbers. The key to getting insights from your website is looking at trends, or what’s changed. This opens up the doors to asking why things went a certain direction and finding out what’s really going on where.

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