Mission: Deconstruction

Now I've come to the hardest task in Web analytics: the actual analyzing part.

I'm most interested in finding out who is visiting my site in an attempt to discover how to bring them back again to consume my wonderful content. My main driver of traffic to this blog was a post on June 14 that I wrote on Facebook asking family and friends to check out my blog.

Since that time, I've had eight unique visitors who have made 13 visits with 43 pageviews. You can see from the chart below that they mostly occurred in one spike. The day I posted the blog link on Facebook is the day I got the most traffic of seven visits. I was curious as to who these folks were so I could reward these most loyal with high-priced Christmas presents.

Location

The most visits to the blog came from Morgantown, followed by Broward County, Fla., where one of my friends works. You might find the Moscow entry interesting. I know it to be from my one and only friend in Moscow, Idaho, who has clearly visited the site twice. In a conversation with him (market research, if you will), I discovered that he tried to comment on the site but was unsuccessful. I view this as customer feedback on the technical details of my site.

Then I got one visit from Lake Worth, Fla., where my brother attends college and one from West Palm Beach, Fla., where I grew up. This last entry should clearly be labeled “Mom.” Luckily I always get her something nice for Mother's Day.

I would add a caveat that I don't think location is always an important metric to check. But since the blog has had so few visitors and the locations vary so much, the metric works in this case. For my company's news site, the location data typically shows that most visits come from Morgantown. It's great that the city's population is so engaged with the site, but this isn't great for attracting new students from other locales. It's similar to the new versus returning visitors debacle. You want growth in each, but you can't merely attract returning visitors (Kaushik, 2010).

Use Dimensions

But I'd clearly want to know who the people in Morgantown are. I know a lot of folks in Morgantown, and I really would like to know who is deserving of better Christmas gifts.

So I went to Referral Traffic under the Traffic Sources tab. I did get most of my referrals from Facebook, but I also got three referrals from blogger.com and all of those visits were from Morgantown. I'm positing that these visits could be from friends who have blogs or a classmate who lives in Morgantown. I found out that these visits were from Morgantown by selecting City as a secondary dimension.

For non-ecommerce sites

Ever since I read Avinash Kaushik's suggestions on key metrics for sites that do not have an e-commerce component, I've been eager to try them (Kaushik, 2010).

Frequency and recency are both discussed in Kaushik's book, yet they must have displayed differently when he wrote it a couple of years ago (Kaushik, 2010). This spring, he wrote a blog post on the usefulness of analyzing the now combined frequency and recency reports.

Count of Visits

Kaushik likens visits to relationships, calling single visits one-night stands (Kaushik, 2012). From the Count of Visits report below it appears that I had 13 visits with 43 pageviews. I ran the report again with an advanced segment of returning visitors and had five visits from returning visitors. One of these included 16 pageviews. These are the visits I'd like to keep an eye on.

Days Since Last Visit

The Frequency and Recency tab also has a Days Since Last Visit segment to measure recency. There's nine visits today and two visits the day before. When you compare it with the following Returning Visitors segment, you'll see that a lot of these visitors have been recent but have been one timers. This isn't what I'm going for, but I know that I need to let my visitors know about my new posts to get them to keep coming back.

Visit Duration

In the Visit Duration tab, Google Analytics is showing me that most of my visits are lasting fewer than 11 seconds. I have had two visits that have lasted more than three minutes. To find out how to replicate the success I've had with these visitors, I should look deeper into where they came from and where they looked for so many minutes. I'll go into how to do this in a later post. I will add a caveat that Kaushik mentioned (2010). Because this is a blog, it will probably get a lot of one page visits. Analytics systems have no way to measure the length of visits that only last one page, so sadly no matter how long they are, they don't count for visit duration.

Page Depth

Most site visits included two pages. Only three visits were to more than two pages going up until 16 pages. I'm not sure that this statistic is going to change much because it is a blog, but for other sites, you'd want that number to be a lot higher (Kaushik, 2010).

Bounce rates

I was surprised to see that my site has a zero-percent bounce rate. Checking in with my Kaushik text, I remember that blogging sites typically have high bounce rates because visitors usually go to a blog site and then leave after they've read an update thereby showing many visits consisting of one page only in the analytics report (Kaushik, 2010). Maybe my visitors are just more thorough because they're friends and relatives.

What should I do differently?

The question you have to ask yourself is whether you should change anything based on your newfound analytics knowledge.

Since I have a blog, I want to increase readers, but I also want highly engaged readers; those who keep coming back, offer comments and get something out of my posts.

My blog is new, but I can still work on some preliminary ideas. I want my new visitors to return, so I have to make it easy for them. I'll encourage them to subscribe to my blog via an RSS feed. I'll also have to create content regularly enough to keep their interest. And I'll have to work on making my blog more interesting.

To that end, I've included screenshots of the Google Analytics reports I've referenced. Finding ways to use multimedia clips where necessary will also work. I'll work to keep a conversational style, and I'll work on directing my blog toward people who would find it interesting. My Facebook friends are mostly not marketing folks. But my classmates and workmates are mostly marketers. So I can try to link to as many of their blogs as possible.

An additional metric to think about is keywords.

I didn't run any reports on keywords because no one came to my blog by searching for it. But I could change that by making sure I'm including relevant words in my posts so that if anyone were searching for information on my blog, they'd be likely to find it.

On the Traffic Sources lesson in the Google Analytics IQ lessons, there's a helpful segment on correlating keyword searches with landing pages.

(Google Analytics, 2011)

References

Kaushik, A. (January 30, 2012). Google Analytics tutorial: 8 valuable tips to hustle with data! Retrieved from: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/google-analytics-tutorial-8-valuable-tips-to-hustle-with-data/#rfm

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Google Analytics. (2011). Traffic sources. Retrieved from: http://www.google.com/analytics/iq.html