analytics and you

Analyticsand You

How To Better Understand Your Audience Through Data

About Russell Heimlich

★ Sole developer at the Pew Research Center

★ Creator of dummyimage.com

★ Frontend and Backend Developer

★ @kingkool68

I Like Burgers

So you’ve built a great site...Now what?

You Probably Have A Few Questions...

★ Who is visiting my site?

★ Where are my visitors coming from?

★ What are my top pages?

★ Are visitors finding what they’re looking for?

★ Is my website achieving it’s goal?

Analytics Can Help!

What do you mean Analytics?

“...the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.”

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

In other words...

Gathering data to inform our decisions.

Which sounds better?

★ I think we should change the navigation.

It’s not working.

★ Based on the data, visitors aren’t clicking on

items in the navigation.

So where do I start?

Picking An Analytics Package

★ Omniture

★ Mint

★ Piwik

★ Woopra

★ Google Analytics

★ List of Web Analytics Software

When in doubt...

The Plan

★ Signup

★ Get JavaScript Tracking Code

★ Add Tracking Code To Your Website

★ Collect Data

★ Analyze

★ Make Decisions

Even if you don’t think you need analytics

★ Add it anyways!

★ You can always ignore it...

Google Analytics Terminology

See the Google Analytics Glossary

Visits

“A period of interaction between a visitor's browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time. (30 minutes)”

Unique visitors make visits, visits make pageviews.

Unique Visitors

“Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.”

Unique Visitor = A Person (sort of)

Pageview

“A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.”

Every time the tracking code is loaded, that counts as a pageview.

Pages/Visit

Average number of pages visited during a visit.

Bounce Rate

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

Visitor lands on a page, then leaves your site.

Landing Page

“The first page that a user views during a session. This is also known as the 'entrance page.”

Where the visitor enters your site.

Exit Page

Where the visitor left your website and went somewhere else on the Internet.

Top 5 Metrics

★ Unique Visitors

★ Pages per Visit

★ Visits (How often visitors come back)

★ Bounce Rate

★ Average Time on Site

Analytics In PracticePractice Makes Perfect

Meet My Blog

www.russellheimlich.com/blog/

★ Listing of posts

★ Single posts (these have ads)

★ Each post has related posts and tags

★ My first WordPress project :-)

★ One day it will be awesome...

All of the Important Metrics

The Top Content

Most People Stop Here!Keep Going, There’s More Data!

Details of a Popular Post

How Did They Get Here? And Leave?

Lots of Entrances

★ I wonder which sites are referring them?

What Keywords Are People Using?

Conclusions?

★ “Roach Gel” is a pretty good keyword

★ “Combat Gel” not so much!

★ Bing visitors seem more engaged than Google

★ Consider buying ads on Bing for “Roach Gel”!

Search is Valuable!“Duh!” – Google

Search Can Read Minds

★ Tells what your audience is looking for

★ Reveals what they thought was the best answer

Key Search Questions

★ Are the terms broad or specific?

★ Is a particular term showing up a lot?

★ Can I promote an area of my site more?

★ Am I using the right labels/description?

Read These A List Apart Articles

★ Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective,

Life Altering!

★ Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision

★ Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the

Bottom Up

Random Slide

Nifty WordPress Plugins

Google Analytics for WordPress

★ By Joost de Valk

★ All-in-One Tool

★ Lots of Features

★ Easy to Use

★ Will Insert the Tracking Code for You

★ 2 Million+ Downloads

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics Dashboard

★ By Carson McDonald

★ View analytics data in WordPress dashboard

★ Shortcodes and Widgets for sharing stats

★ See Sparklines in Post Listings Admin Page

Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics Dashboard

JetPack

★ By Automattic

★ Stats cloud powered by WordPress.com

★ Not Google!

★ No additional load on your server

★ An official plugin

JetPack

AddThis

★ By Aaron Jorbin

★ Analytics on Sharing

★ Which content is shared the most?

★ How is your content shared?

★ Learn what interests your audience

AddThis

CrazyEgg

★ See Where People Click (even non-links)

★ Generates Heatmaps

★ Costs Money

★ Has a WordPress Plugin

CrazyEgg

ChartBeat

★ Real-time analytics

★ See what content is popular RIGHT NOW!

★ Twitter, Locations, Uptime, Page Load Speed

★ Hypnotic

★ Costs Money

★ Has a WordPress Plugin

ChartBeat

Wrapping UpThe Important Take Aways

Analytics...

★ Gives you data to inform decisions...

★ Are easy to implement...

★ Come in different flavors...

★ Not as complicated as you might think.

Thank You!

★ Slides are available!

http://www.slideshare.net/kingkool68

★ Twitter or Google +1 or Chat or Whatever...

Kingkool68