Over the last few months I’ve noticed something with the Google Analytics stats for my small business forum that call into the question the validity of those referrer stats and are making me question Google Analytics stats in general.
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Last year around this time I published the year end stats for 2006. While we’re not quite to the end of the year, I think we’re close enough to 2008 for the stats review and a comparison to last year numbers.
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What’s the most important metric when it comes to determining the health of your site? It’s not really a fair question since no one metric tells the entire story, but for a long time page views have been considered one of the most important metrics. Page views don’t tell the whole story of course. Does someone look at a lot of your pages because they like your content or because they can’t find what they’re looking for? And with the rise of Ajax applications how meaningful is to to measure when your entire application is on one page? Recently there’s been a movement toward time spent as a measure of engagement with your site, though that has it’s share of problems too. So how is one to measure visitor engagement with your site.
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Over the weekend I was presented with a request to take a Yahoo survey. I was curious what Yahoo wanted to know and thought why not kill a few minutes and see what I could learn. The survey was simple enough and seemed fairly obvious what Yahoo was hoping to discover. My answers, while honest, made me wonder if the wrong conclusions could be drawn from my answers.
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Back in October I mentioned that Google had launched a beta program called Website Optimizer to make it easy to perform multi-variate testing on you your site. Website Optimizer is now open to everyone with an AdWords account.
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After seeing SEOmoz release their stats a little over a week ago, I was inspired to do the same. Hopefully it’s not too far into the new year to make a review of last year seem out of place. If you missed Rand’s post have a look at SEOmoz’s 2006 Stats in Review.
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Creme king of what?
That was my reaction too when I first noticed several people had found their way here using ‘creme king of baits‘ as a search term to find the post in the previous link. Many results for the term revolve around using soft plastic worms for fishing bait, an idea originally pioneered by Nick Creme. But type link bait a few times, refer to Rand Fishkin as the king of said link bait, and mention how the cream will rise to the top, and you may find yourself ranking well for a term like ‘creme king of baits’ too.
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Far too many people still seem to consider ‘hits’ a useful measure of web statistics so I thought I take a little time to define a few basic website measurements. Web analytics are an important of running a successful website. Being able to track visitors to your web pages and what they do once on your site is an essential part of SEO and PPC advertising. You really can’t do either effectively without knowing something about the traffic your site is or isn’t getting.
One good way to find new content to create for your site is to look at your web statistics package and see what long tail search phrases are bringing traffic to your site. The long tail searches are an indication that there’s an interest and also that it’s probably easy to compete for the phrase. So how can you make it work to increase traffic and conversions?
Bounce rates can be an important measurement for your website and web pages. They can help determine whether a certain ad campaign is successful, whether you’re targeting the right keywords, or whether changes you make are improving your site. Knowing the bounce rate of your site and individual pages can give clues about what is and isn’t working for your site.
