You can learn a lot from your analytics. This is obviously why you even measure them, pull them, keep tabs on them, right?
But seriously, you can learn a lot from your analytics… so why don’t you (yes, you) do more with them?
After having a number of discussions with countless people in terms of their analytics, metrics, and measurements, I’ve generally discovered that most people are getting their traffic collected but rarely do anything other than take a look at their pageview numbers (and perhaps visits… did you know there was a difference?).
There’s such a wealth of data there and if you want to grow your ministry and/or blog to produce better results than you should weekly analyze and adjust.
For example, here is a look at my traffic pattern yesterday from a sources perspective:
General Thoughts:
One of the most important things you need to know when starting out is where your traffic is actually coming from. If you look at yesterday’s metrics, you can see that nearly 44% of my traffic came from referring sites. This is not a surprise since I’m using Twitter as a valuable mechanic in my traffic engineering program.
Another note is that about 28% is direct, meaning people are going straight to the site without a referral or some other site pushing the visitor to come. This is nice to know, but one of the questions that one might entertain could be how these “direct” viewers became RSS Readers (because some of them are). There’s many more questions that you could ask yourself as well.
The Search Engine pie is one of the big ones, that, over time, you should begin to grow and should be a large portion of your long-term and overall strategy. There are a lot of specific strategies associated with increasing this and eventually, if you’re gunning for it, SE Traffic should take a much larger piece of the pie. One personal goal is to have consistently 33% (or one third) of my traffic be from SE by the end of this calendar year.
And that brings up one more important part to all of this… do you even have goals for your metrics?
Perhaps we should start a weekly community discussion on metrics, analytics, and best practices… that sound like fun?
I know you are mainly talking about analytics, which I use, but I got caught off faurd by your RSS comment.
I am probably the only non-RSS blogger in America. I actually find them cumbersome and prefer to use my delicious bookmarks to check up on blogs.
Maybe I'm "doing it wrong."
i don't think so… there are a number of ways to “do” this type of stuff… but there are a number of general strategies and tactics which to employ that have proven results.
we can dig in deeper perhaps.
I'm definitely in for this "tribe"! We've got it all set up, and take a look at the info regularly. We haven't really started developing our strategies yet, though. I'd love to discuss with a group how best to utilize the info.
sweet!
I would love to gain more understanding…look forward to you guiding us to a deeper understanding about analytics.
I'd love to soak up some knowledge. Sign me up.
Perfection, like glorification, is a work in progress and not to be seen this side of heaven. But we must try nevertheless and fight the good fight.
Sweet. Stick around… you might be able to learn something… i learn a lot from the community as well… love it!
i like to fight.
>>one of the questions that one might entertain could be how to convert these “direct” viewers to become RSS Readers.
John, many of the direct viewers may already be RSS readers. When a person uses RSS reader software rather than a web-based reader, I'm pretty sure their visits look direct since they are not coming from another site.
Paul,
That's what I meant but not what I said… good catch.
thanks!
Johnny-Boy:I think that would be splendid. I've seen the goals area on Google Analytics and wondered how in the world do I set a gauge?