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Basic Website Analytics for Content Managers

Josh — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:24:03 +0000

If you work with a site that publishes articles on a regular basis then you should be familiar with how your content performs and where people are coming from. It’s also important to keep an eye out for problems, traffic spikes, and a new incoming traffic sources. This guide is a quick overview of basic Google Analytics (GA) for content site managers.

In an effort to help the content managers for SocialMediaToday.com (and sister sites), I came up with this quick guide to using GA. I believe that content managers should be able to answer 5 basic questions on a weekly basis. Additionally, if you own a content site but do not directly manage the content, this will give you a good sense of how “well” your site is doing (depending on the goals you have for the site). Please note that this information works for any analytics program though the screen names will, of course, be different.

First steps

The first few steps (after setting up Google Analytics on your site, of course) are:

Log into GA
Click the blue “Access Analytics” button
Select the account you want to view (click on the name)
Clicking “view report” next to the domain you want to view
You are now at the Dashboard screen which is referenced below. Default date range, FYI, is one month.

1) What is the trend on the site this month? This quarter? This year?

Each site has its own unique set of goals to accomplish and one key component to many of those goals is increasing “traffic.” Traffic can be defined many different ways but here I’m talking about visits (people coming to the site and clicking around) and pageviews (the actual number of web pages viewed). Increasing visitors is just a matter of getting more people to the site. Increasing pageviews is tied to visitors but can also be improved by helping the existing visitors to view more content.

Are overall visitors increasing month over month?

Dashboard (Visits): There are two ways to see progress since last month for visitors:

Change the date range to two or more months
Select “Compare to past” (pro tip: make sure that the current date range and the past date range start and finish on the same day of the week)

Are overall pageviews increasing month after month?

Visitors > Pageviews: Same as above, look over a long time period to add some context to what you’re looking at.

2) What content works?

This is the most difficult to quantify (and qualify) and one of the most important things you can try to understand. Where possible, look for emerging trends, sticky content, long-tail success, and trends to tell you what to publish in the future. You’re looking for key words that bring in search traffic, articles that bring in social media love, and pages that just perform better than others.

What are the top keywords?

Traffic sources > Keywords: This tells you what words and phrases are bringing people to your site through search engines. Have a top performer? Make sure that page is SEO perfect for that phrase to keep your ranking. Have a few slouches that still show up on the list? Improve the SEO structure and look for similar phrases that might work for that page.

What are the top stories?

Content > Top Content: This is a great place to see what content has been doing well over time. Look for the big winners and, using the drop-down at the top, figure out where that traffic came from. What you’re looking for is the source of that page’s success and how it relates to your other page. (pro tip: Are your top pages optimized to get people to where they want to go? If not, you’re missing out on potential sales/leads/revenue).

3) Where does the traffic come from?

Understanding the source of your site traffic can help you find good incoming links, possible collaborations, interesting trends, and good/bad publicity. The information here is, for the most part, value-neutral unless you’re working to increase a particular segment. Some sites have a good mix of sources and some are heavily weighted towards one in particular. The important thing is understanding where you have an influence and where you don’t (though that’s beyond the scope of this post).

Where does my traffic come from?

Traffic Sources > All Sources: This being a pie chart and all, remember that one segment going down means another went up. Again, this is mostly value-neutral but if one piece of the pie is 10% or less, you probably have a problem.

What sites are sending traffic?

Traffic Sources > Referring sites: This is a good way to keep an eye out for new and interesting sources. You’ll likely recognize most of the domains here but for the ones you don’t click the jump-off icon and explore. Did someone link to you? Make sure to thank them.

4) Any anomalies?

Anomalies are defined here as sudden spikes or dips in traffic. Spikes can come from marketing efforts, incoming links from popular sites, or extra-sticky content. Dips can come from an on-site technical issue, search engine penalty, or a broken automated process.

Are there any spikes/dips in traffic?

Dashboard (Visits) and Traffic Sources > All Sources: First, take a look at your visits for the last month or so on the Dashboard. If you see a big spike on a particular date, go to Traffic Sources > All Sources and set your date range from the day of the spike to a couple of days after and take a look at the sources. You should be able to see where it all came from.

5) Are my efforts paying off?

Manual promotion efforts should be tagged with 3 UTM codes at the end of the URL to make tracking what you’re doing much easier. Understanding how much effort you put into certain tasks and the return, in terms of traffic, of these tasks is key to figuring out your best use of time.

What promotions are working?

Traffic Sources > All Sources: Again, we’re going to take a look at what sites are sending traffic. Did you start a Facebook page? Then you should see an increase in traffic coming from facebook.com and similar (pro tip: scroll to the bottom of the All Sources page and type part of the domain name you’re looking for in the “filter source/medium” field and click “go.” Viola!). Set up a banner ad somewhere? There should be traffic coming from that domain.

Advanced: what promotions are working?

Traffic sources > Campaigns: This takes advantage of GA’s campaign tracking function (explained a bit here). If you’re doing manual promotions, banner advertisements, or SEM or any kind (like AdWords), you should be tracking your success (fingers crossed) with campaign codes. Once they’re tracked, you can easily see what’s working and what isn’t.

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Seasonal Web Traffic: The Proverbial Coal in Your Stocking

Josh — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:45:36 +0000

December 2009, I looked back through the analytics of several busy content sites I help manage and saw a serious traffic drop-off. It’s no fun being the bearer of bad news and the news was pretty bad. Most sites were seeing close to a 40% decrease in overall traffic starting on the first week of December. It was ugly.

A little internet research, typically the cure for any random issue you can’t seem to explain on your own, did not do much to allay our fears that something – something terrible – was happening. There were a few anecdotal reports of traffic drops but I could not find anything that allayed our fear. We crossed our fingers, took some time off, and hoped for the best.

Turns out that the significant down-turn cleared itself up by the first non-holiday week in January. Here are the visitor graphs to illustrate:

As you can see, the sites saw a big dip in traffic that came on slowly and recouped immediately after the last holiday weekend. We were quite relieved.

But, still, there was the question of how to potentially prevent this problem in the future. I wanted to figure out if there was some kind of obvious pattern that this dip was following so I looked at the traffic sources for one of the sites (the last graph above). It confirmed my suspicion that we were just seeing an overall decrease in web use:

Visitors from direct traffic

Visitors from referring sites

Visitors from search engines

The fact that the drop was across all three (actually four; our campaigns showed a similar pattern) was bittersweet. Sure, we weren’t doing anything wrong or suffering some sort of Google penalty but there also wasn’t any obvious recourse. We were prepared for next year with an explanation but not a way out.

I read a Chris Brogan article (or was it a video? I’d link to it if I could find it again) that made me feel bad (which is rare) but I got his point. He said that everyone slows down around the holidays so that’s the best time to kick ass and take names. While everyone drinks and eats and gets their merry on, he’s making videos, writing blog posts, and generally crushing it. I felt bad because I think I watched/read on vacation.

Point being, we slow down during the holidays and we should slow down if we need to. Incoming content slows down, traffic decreases, people spend time away from the glowing screen. This is a good thing from a human standpoint but is there a way to mitigate it? I see a few options:

If possible, start tuning your content towards the people that are active on the web at this time: shoppers and the researchers/media that follows them. I see so many “what I’m thankful for posts” and that’s cute but I’m not motivated to read that at all. What I do want to know is where the good deals are. For a blog about business finance or social CRM, this just doesn’t make sense. But what about retail spending analysis? Improving online sales? Bumping up customer service during these months? The people that are producing are dying for timely content and the holiday season makes it too easy.
Another option is a holiday-specific event like a webinar or conference. The problem here is that your general attendance might be low so the return on the time invested may not be worth it. If it’s vital to keep those numbers up, it needs to be done.
The last option is to accept the hit and concentrate on other things. Let go of a few things and concentrate on cleaning up broken links, old site sections, social networks you’re not using. Change the pace and the focus to switch things up and give yourself a break from the usual. Catch up on your RSS feed and leave several comments across the ‘sphere.

In the end, if you’re starving for work, you can find it. Just make sure you understand the limitations of the season and set your expectations accordingly.

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Easily track and build Google Analytics UTM campaign URLs with Google Docs

Josh — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:47:36 +0000

If you’re using Google Analytics and you’re not taking advantage of its built-in campaign tracking, you’re missing out on important insights. Campaign tracking uses URL query strings to determine where your traffic is coming from specifically. URL query strings are the funny “?something=this&somethingelse=that” text that you see on the end of URLs (try a Google search and look in your address bar). By using this tracking method, you can understand your traffic better and learn what’s working and what isn’t. It’s particularly beneficial for people who are promoting their site across several different channels like email, Twitter, and Google Adwords. Here is a little more in-depth description from Google.

The most annoying part about using tracking codes, however, is creating the URL. You need to append at least two (and up to five) query strings to your URL to use this function in Analytics and making this happen while tracking what codes you’re actually using is frustrating enough to make you rethink this whole thing in the first place. Google provides a cute little tool to help you but it’s still a pain in the ass.

Google Docs to the rescue! Using similar code as my simple Google Docs CMS, I created a script that parses a spreadsheet full of tracking codes and turn them into usable URLs that you can then copy and paste. It makes it easy to keep track of the campaigns you have while quickly creating error-free URLs. See the Google Docs UTM appender in action.

Download the UTM URL builder
What you’ll need:

The file from the big, green link above
A Google Docs account (it’s free, you can sign up here)
Access to a web server or a local host that can run a PHP program
A site using Google Analytics

Step 1 – Create a new Google Docs Spreadsheet

Easy enough… go to docs.google.com and log in. Click the Create New button on the top left and select “Spreadsheet.”

When the spreadsheet loads, look for a Share button on the top right. If it prompts you to save the document, type in a nice descriptive name, click OK, and click Share again.
In the menu that appears, select “Publish as a web page.”

Select “Sheet1″ from the top drop-down, then click Start Publishing.
Under “Get a link to the published data,” select “RSS” from the first drop down then click the Cells radio button.
In the text box at the bottom, you should have a URL like “http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/tFjKofPSUgX5PSPJhEuH7Dw/od6/public/basic?alt=rss.” Highlight the whole thing and copy it, then click Close on the window.

Step 2 – Add your Google Doc link to the script and upload

Now, we need to open the PHP file and give it the link to your Google Doc. Open the index.php file as plain text using Notepad (PC) or TextEdit (Apple). When you open the file, you should be able to read the code clearly (even if you can’t quite understand it). You should see “$feedName=” right near the top of the document. Paste the link you copied in the step before in between the tick marks after the equals sign. When you’re finished, you should have some like this:

$feedName = ‘http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/tjMfK6oILkthGlM9Vo_8ACQ/od6/public/basic?alt=rss’

If the link is correct, the script should be ready to display the Google Doc. Unless you have a server instance installed locally, you’ll need to upload this script to a public web server. If you have your own website, just upload this file to any public folder. If you’re confused, email your IT department or your tech-savvy niece.

Once the file is uploaded, you’ll want to test it out to make sure everything is working. Go to the file you uploaded (http://[your domain]/[the path to the folder you used]/link-append-util.php) and you should see “UTM coded URLs” at the top. If you see “Invalid feed!” then the link to the Google Doc was not made. Make sure the URL is correct and in between the tick marks after $feedName=.

Step 3 – Update your spreadsheet with the tracking codes

Once the script is functioning, you’re ready to input your URLs and tracking codes.

The spreadsheet needs to by laid out properly to make sure that the script can read and display the information in the right order. Here are the rules and you can see a sample of a functioning Google Doc here (it’s the one I use to create the example here).

Cells A1, B1, C1, D1, and E1 will not be read by the script.
Cells F1, G1, H1, and I1 determine the name of 4 additional custom references that can be added.
Column A after row 1 is the name of the link. This can be anything.
Column B needs to be a valid URL without pre-existing query strings (meaning that there can’t already be a “?” in it)
Column C is your utm_source code
Column D is your utm_medium code
Column E is your utm_campaign code
Columns F through I can be any other reference code you’d like. Again, the name will be taken from the column header. Leave these blank if you don’t want to use them

A few things to keep in mind:

The source, medium, and campaign codes are required meaning that they are always pulled. If you leave one blank, it messes up the rest so make sure you always have a value in there. If enough people want to eliminate this requirement, I’m happy to offer an alternative, just comment below.
If you’re not using the custom reference codes, you can leave them blank. If you are using them and each URL will have one, then you’re good to go. But if some URLs need one, others need another, make sure to put an “x” where you don’t need one. For example, if the first URL is using reference2 but not reference1 and the second URL is using reference1 but not reference2, make sure there is an “x” under reference1 for the first URL and under reference2 for the second. Hopefully that makes sense. Again, comment if you’re confused!

Step 4 – Reload the script and fire away

Once your codes are loaded, refresh the script and you’ll see them listed nicely in a row. In order for each one:

The first thing listed is the name from column A for that link.
Next you see “Paste into form field or if in doubt.” This is the not-validated version of the URL . This should work everywhere and is the safest choice. If you’re not sure what the hell I’m talking about, use this one. There is a “test it” link that tries it out.
Next is a field with the URL. Just click once to highlight, copy it, and paste it where you need it.
After that you’ll see “Paste into code.” Use this for HTML and PHP that is not validated (i.e. within an application file or static page).
The validated version of the URL appears in the text field. Click to highlight, etc.

Step 5 – Comment, Share, or Tweet if you like it!

That’s all I ask!

Please leave comments, questions, and suggestions below. I hope this saves you as much time as it save me!

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Understanding the Basics of Google Analytics

Josh — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:00:23 +0000

If I could recommend one skill to business owners with a website it would be a solid understanding of their site analytics and they are affected. So many people treat their website as something they need to have “just because.” If you build a site for services you offer or products you sell, what people see and how they interact is directly related to how much money your site pulls in.

Knowing what pages are the most popular, what keywords people are using to find you, and where people are going paint a picture about your customers, one that you might not be aware of. You probably want people on your product pages and your sign-up sheets, right? How do you know they’re getting there? How do you know they don’t get there and leave? How many leads are you missing?

This post outlines the very basics of Google Analytics and what it can tell you about your website.

Site usage overview (Main > Dashboard)

Visits

Visits are the number of sessions that occur on your website. A visit is, as close as possible, one person who views one or more pages on the site. If the same person comes back, that’s two visits.

More visits to a site equates, basically, to more “traffic” and, potentially, more people in general seeing the site. A visit count increasing means more sessions on the site which could indicate 1) more people returning to the site or 2) more new people on the site. Combining the change in visits with the change in percentage of new visits can give you an idea which of these scenarios is contributing the most. Month to month, you typically want this number to increase.

Pageviews

Pageviews are the number of pages on your site that were viewed. Generally, each link you click takes you to a new page. If, in one month, 1,000 people went to the homepage, clicked on an article, clicked on another article, and then went elsewhere, that month would have 3,000 page views.

Like visits, this is also a number that, generally, should be increasing month-to-month. An increasing pageview count means that more content is being seen across the whole site. Two things could happen to increase the pageviews: more visitors could be coming to the site or visitors could be viewing more pages per visit. Combining the change in pageviews with the change in pages per visit will show which of these scenarios is occurring.

Pages/visit

Dividing total page views by total visits gives the average number of pages that are viewed per visit. Blog-type sites typically have a pages/visit number between 1.5 and 2.

An increasing pages/visit number shows that visitors are clicking on more pages on the site per visit. This is always a beneficial thing but on a content site such as ours, diminishing returns kicks in past 2 pages per visit. Content published, content displayed, and inbound links all contribute to pages/visit.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of people who see one page and leave the site (essentially “bouncing” off of a page). Visitors who bounce have a page/visit number of 1. Bounce rates for blog-type sites are typically around 75%.

A decreasing bounce rate is always a good thing. A decreasing bounce rate means that people found what they wanted and more. Bounce rate is affected by the same things that the pages/visit number is: site design, reader engagement, availability of related content, etc.

Average time on site

This number is the average amount of time that each visit lasts. This figure is tough to report accurately by any analytics programs.

Not a lot of good conclusions can be made from this number by itself. An increasing time, however, could be an indication of reader engagement and attention span. This number can be used in conjunction with bounce rate and pages/visit to get a sense of how involved the readers are and whether this is improving or declining.

% New Visits

This is the percentage of the total visits that came from new visitors. A new visitor is simply someone without our site’s cookie present in their browser. As such, this figure has a fairly high margin of error.

Though potentially inaccurate, this is another number whose trends are useful to watch. An increase in % new visits could be an indication of extended online reach or influence while a decrease could mean improved reader engagement. This percentage should show in increase during periods of strong promotion.

Traffic sources (Main > Traffic Sources)

This is the Google triad of traffic sources: direct traffic (people who type our URL in their browser or use a browser-based bookmark), referring sites (a link to our site from another site), and search engines.

There’s no right or wrong distribution of traffic sources but a healthy strategy will typically keep each piece close to a third. For a long-tail, content-rich site like ours, the search engine piece should definitely be near one-third. Watching a particular source grow or shrink should correlate to promotions, SEO, or other outreach efforts.

Referring sites (Main > Traffic Sources > Referring Sites)

This is the list of domains that sent visits to our site. This list also shows visit quality by way of pages/visit, time on site, and bounce rate.

This list can be used to measure the success of site-specific promotions, look for new sites that we might want to partner with, and figure out which sites are sending the best traffic. There might be a community site that we should be interacting with or a social network that is doing well for us.

Keywords (Main > Traffic Sources > Keywords)

This list shows all keywords that were used to find the site via search engines. Like the referring sites, this list also shows traffic quality metrics.

These keywords can be applied directly to on-site SEO efforts. The keywords with the best quality (low bounce rate, high time on site and pages/visit) should be used in post titles, tags, and categories. These can also be used to determine which content gets published and what direction we give bloggers.