Measure

Web analytics – meaningful measures part 3

May 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Part 3 – Flow

A number of ‘flow’ charts have been added to GA recently. These provide a great way to quickly understand how visitors navigate your website en route to taking an action such as a goal completion or event.

So far, flow charts have been added for Visitor, Social Visitor, Events and Goal Completion analysis.

The easiest way to describe a Flow Chart is to quote part of Google’s description of Visitor Flow:

“The Visitors Flow shows you the paths that visitors take through your site — where they come from, pages they see and where they exit.” [Read more...]

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Web analytics – meaningful measures part 2

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Part 2 – Traffic

Following up on my recent post which looked at visitor information, I now want to discuss the information that can be gleaned from the traffic data that is collected by Google Analytics.

Traffic sources and medium describe where site visitors originate from. By analysing this information a better understanding of how different sources and mediums interact and engage with your website can be determined. [Read more...]

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Web analytics – meaningful measures part 1

March 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Part 1 – Audience

Judging by a number of conversations I have had over the last couple of weeks, a high proportion of those who measure what is happening on their websites still use total visits as a barometer of success. So what’s wrong with total visits as a measure? Well as a headline measure it tells you very little and, used in isolation of any other dimension, it is largely useless.

Google Analytics provides a wide range of different ways in which you can interpret visitor information. The following are all ways in which total visits can be made more meaningful: [Read more...]

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Tagging and tracking – just do it!

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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With more and more communication taking place across the social web, the need to find a means of measuring the value of all of the effort put in, increases. Every day, it seems, new tools are emerging that promise to help you measure your social influence. At the same time it seems there is still much wringing of hands whenever ROI (return on investment) is mentioned, because this holy grail of social measurement remains elusive.

In the midst of all of the hype and enthusiasm about quantifying social capital, it appears that some of the basic things that can be measured are being ignored. I guess this is because they are just not exciting enough and aren’t dressed up with fancy labels. However as dull as tagging and tracking can sound, these simple techniques actually provide useful information. What’s more some of the information gathered can actually be linked to business outcomes! [Read more...]

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How to measure the success of an internet marketing campaign

November 22, 2011 By 1 Comment
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Unlike many forms of traditional marketing where the size of the target audience is often a key measure, the success of an online marketing campaign can and should be measured by business outcomes.

The key to achieving this being to use and exploit the rich functionality provided by Google Analytics. There are just a few simple steps to take which will get you under-way and then you can start to measure the success of your campaign:

  • Set measurable campaign goals
  • Determine the cost per conversion
  • Determine the value per conversion

That was easy wasn’t it! Let’s look at those steps in a little more detail though. [Read more...]

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Actionable reporting is essential

April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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It’s quite common to be given Analytics Reports as part of the package you receive from your web services company, but do check out what you are going to get.

Quite often you will receive an email once a month accompanied by automatically produced reporting. This is fine as long as you have the time to trawl through the mass of data and charts provided, in order to firstly work out what it all means and, secondly work out what you should do about it. All too often this challenge is very daunting, and many people settle for checking if visitor numbers are on the increase or not, and do little more.

There is a real need to interpret this data if your marketing campaigns are to be properly managed and optimised for your business. So don’t assume that being sent analytics reports will provide the answers, check to see if the company has analytics savvy staff who can interpret the data for you, and give you actionable recommendations to help improve your marketing efforts. The investment will pay for itself many times over by ensuring your marketing spend is driving [Read more...]

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Analytics Dashboards

February 11, 2011 By 1 Comment
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Next Analytics – an excellent Excel Plug-in

For quite [Read more...]

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Interpreting Analytics

December 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Turning analytics data into business information

We all instinctively know the importance of metrics to help us understand how well our websites perform. Measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns is a particular focus of our attention. To that end most websites now enjoy the benefit of having some form of analytics tracking code busily collecting data in the background.

But what, typically happens to all of this data? In many companies the focus is just on the headline numbers – how many visits, how many pageviews, how much time on site, etc. Sometimes the web design agency will send out a report each month, however this is rarely a considered analysis of what happened, and usually falls far short of providing insight and recommendations for improvement.

[Read more...]

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Web Analytics and Segmentation

August 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Getting past the headlines

Output from website analytics can look really impressive. It can tell you how many visitors you’ve had to your site; the countries the visitors have ‘come from’; how many pages they’ve read; and much more. It can present the data in all manner of charts and graphs, with sub-charts and statistics galore. But what does it all mean?

The truthful answer is, quite often, not a lot.

When trying to evaluate the performance of your website, what targets do you set? What data do you gather? And what do you measure against? If you are unsure of the answers to these questions and simply gather statistical data without truly understanding its importance or value, you’re effectively wasting time and effort.

[Read more...]

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Measuring Social Media

May 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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A must see video Interview with Jim Sterne & Avinash Kaushik.

The interview took place at the eMetrics Conference in San Jose, an is a discussion about Jim Sterne’s new book Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. The run time is just short of 9 minutes.

[Read more...]

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