msdanielle – just another ego blog site

During the last day of ad:tech I was able to sit in on a session with Google Analytics evangelist and author or Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, Avinash Kaushik. If any of you have looked into mastering Analytics, there is a good chance you’ve heard of him or read his blog. I recommend you bookmark it or subscribe to his feed. He’s an avid blogger and analytics enthusiast, and donates all book sales proceeds to charity.

There were a few resonating points that he made that I wanted to point out. However, before I do that, here is one tip I have for you all when attending conferences.

CONFERENCE TIP

During sessions, if you’re the type that likes to take lots of notes because your attention span is lacking (like mine), take pictures of the slides to help you remember the discussion (remember to turn off the flash or else you won’t be able to see the slides). Not all sessions are recorded or audio-archived. And even if they are, it sometimes takes weeks for them to be posted on the conference site. You might feel silly the first time you do this, but do you really care? You’ll be the one person with actual slide images to help you recall the discussion.

Words of Wisdom:

Take advantage of your site search.

Avinash recommends taking a good look at your site’s search data, if possible. Site search not only helps the navigation of the site for the user, but it also gives you data to interpret. Analyzing your top 20 site-searched terms may show a high degree of variance compared to the web-searched terms that people use to find your site.

Find out what’s changed.

He asserts that your top 25 of anything rarely changes for most sites. Use your reports to find out who’s sending you new traffic and which new keywords are being used to find your site. Check out how to create a “What’s Changed?” report here (additional resource here). It helps you find out which data is actionable (i.e. which sites to create a relationship with, etc.).

Where Analytics is heading…

As marketers, we are constantly seeking ways to track more and more data. Avinash projects that we may see an increase in event logging. This involves setting up goals that are not necessarily determined by page views and clicks. For example, create a video and set up goals for playing, pausing, 25% into the video, etc. (see slide below!). This can be achieved in java, ajax, etc. Creating these types of actions and tracking could eventually lead to the demise of traditional programs like Analytics (which is probably why I can’t find an article on his site about “event logging”!).

Hot tip for new users.

An audience member asked what best tip he would give Analytics newbies, if they had to focus on one area initially. His response: Look at the bounce rate of your web site and its pages, your traffic sources, and your search keywords. Bounce rate is essentially the percentage of users who come to your site and leave without clicking on anything (they’ve literally bounced from your site because it sucks, according to Avinash). It is the low-hanging fruit that can be easily understood and easily fixed first to help increase your site’s page views. What is your site’s bounce rate?

[Thank you to Avinash Kaushik who gave a great presentation and provided very earnest answers during the Q&A session that followed. He also gave away copies of his book for free, which I'll be reading very soon.]

Resources:

• Avinash Kaushik’s Blog
• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
• Juice Analytics

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