by Jason F Bennett
1. March 2012 19:57
One of the hidden truths of analytics is the large amount of unknown time to be spent at the beginning focusing on the landscape and figuring out the story. Sometimes the reporting lens sharpens the view quickly, but more often there are multiple dead ends, misplaced assumptions, and hydra-headed results that come from asking a simple question.
My work during the week is really dedicated to embedding with our clients, so side projects into Exsilio’s site analysis really had to happen over the weekend. I had actually pulled some pretty amazing reports the previous weekend, focusing on referral traffic and visit data. Search was a surprisingly high share of traffic into the site.
The second surprise was the traffic destination – our blog posts. In fact, after our home page, the blogs made up the top 15 entry pages for the site.
Another instant realization is that the blog posts drove almost no traffic through the main marketing site. So interesting though it was, there was little to speak to how to improve the usage of the site by those who were actually using it. (Don’t worry, I’ll come back to the blogs.) There was surprisingly little to speak to how folks were or were not travelling through the site. Google analytics has path analysis, but limits the pages at each interaction step to the top 5 pages.
So what’s interesting? The bounce rate? The bounce trend (tracing the exit at each interaction)? Exit pages? High bounce pages? Each of these requires a willingness to walk into the maze of analytics data, quickly smell out interesting content questions to explore further, or drop the report entirely. Once you’re done sniffing out the blind alleyways of solid but uninteresting data, content strategy requires you to build a story. What is your customer, your lead doing? What do they want? What can you offer?My first chapter about the Exsilio.com site? A golden gloves boxer wearing chef pants and a sandwich board advertising Axe body spray. 1% away from a sure shot at the title.
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