Live Blogging Session #2
What do Analytics tell us?
Visitors: unique, location, loyalty
Traffic sources: websites, keywords
Pages: views, times on page, bounce/exit rate (learn what pages are most engaging)
Goals: conversion rates, funnel
Usage: clicks, scrolling, mouse tracking (current technolgy allows you to track what users clicked on, where they move their mouse, what they looked at)
Bounce/Exit Rate—how many people leave before reading another post. (60% to 80% bounce rates are common, 20% to 40% is outstanding.)
Don’t worry about hits—look at page views and unique visitors.
Why Use it
Write more targeted, engaging content
Measure marketing effectiveness
Google Analytics
Free—if you don’t use this, install it now! It can’t backtrack, only analyzes since installation.
Industry standard
Advanced Segmentation
Limisted Customizability
No User-Identifiable Information
Social Media Metrics Plugin
Analyzing Data
If less than half your traffic comes from search engines, learn about driving search traffic.
Goals—setup specific things you want to track (Google allows 4 goals)
Woopra/Clicky
Free & Paid options
Real Time Stats
User-Identifiable information—allows you to track individual users; you can track how specific visitors use your site
Fancy/Rich interface
Woopra: Live chat with visitors
Clicky: Visitor tagging
Hit Traffic
Paid, 60-day trial
keyword tracking
to-do list
blogger/typepad integration
Crazy Egg
Paid
Click Heatmap & Overlays—tracks exactly where on a page people clicked
Click Tale
Paid
Interaction tracking
session videos— watch exactly how a user used a website
Chart Beat
Paid
Realtime dashboard
Analytics, interation and marketing
WordPress Stats
Won’t tell you anything more than Google analytics, but it’s a nice built-in basic solution
Alexa
Free
Publically available
traffic stats
low reliability for small sites (guesstimates some)
Useful for comparing to competitors
I asked: Is there any software that provides data on internal searches so you can track what people are looking for within your site?
A. Google analytics can do this if you provide it with your local search page and the search query.
With a few minutes to spare, he’s going into some advanced analytics examples. It’s fascinating, but visual. Also, since I’m new the concept of analytics there’s no way I can cover it properly.
I’m glad you enjoyed the session, Heather! Thanks for live blogging it! The full presentation slideshow is available at http://www.slideshare.net/VibrantSolutions. Let me know if you have any questions about anything I covered or anything else analytics/ecommerce related. Thanks!