A couple of articles of note I thought I'd pass along:
First, Gerry McGovern has an interesting post this week about the relevancy of page views. While I don't think any of our folks are engaged in this kind of metric abuse, it's a useful caution about reading too much into Web traffic statistics.
And there's an interesting article in today's New York Times about the hottest new job among the Twitterati (their word): social media specialists also known as professional Twitterers (My word. Is that a word?) to attract and engage younger customers. Perhaps what's more interesting that this article is in the Style section, rather than the Business or Technology section.
Another interesting source of information about traffic on your site is in the "Referrals" area of Smarter Stats.
Again, you'll find this in the left navigation bar in Smarter Stats:
And here you'll find information about how visitors are finding you - search engine results, other Web sites, direct bookmarks.
In the clip below, I've selected "Referring Sites" for the ANR Catalog site:
The default time period is for the past 7 days, but you can use the calendar to select any time period you like.
Each of these listings is a live link. The link takes you to the home page of the referring site, not the actual referring link - that's a different report.
For example, the Dave Wilson Nursery site has made 33 referrals in the past week to the ANR Catalog. Just knowing the referring site can be helpful enough - you don't always have to track down the referring page. But if I want to know the exact link I have to do a little detective work. A few minutes of clicking reveals. . .
a very nice reference to The Home Orchard.
But you can also look at "Referring Links" which gives you more (sometimes too much) detail.
From this report, I can see that most of my referring links are internal links from ANR Web sites. But the direct link from the Dave Wilson site is also there, at number 28.
So how do you use this information?
First, it's a good idea to have a handle on referring sites. It can reveal some pleasant surprises (as in the above example). It can also give you an idea of how well you're doing in search engine returns.
In this example, I see that a bookmark or direct entry is still my number one referral. For several weeks after we made the changes to the online catalog, Google was the number one referrer. Now Google has dropped to #2. This tells me that if I want to increase search engine traffic, I need to make some changes to ANR Catalog. If the search engine crawlers find static copy at your Web site, it can drop in the rankings.
Second, this is a good place to take some baseline statistics before making changes to your website. After the changes are implemented, you can see if changes to your content or title tags have had any effect.
Perhaps you've noticed that the Tip of the Week has gotten a little erratic - sometimes in spite of my best intentions, the weekly posting gets delayed.
Even if web communications is part of your job description, we're all pressed for time. I heard a lot of feedback at the Writing Right for the Web workshops that went along the lines of "This is great information, but where do I find the time?"
How do you set priorities?
One way is by looking at statistics. We use an analytical tool called Smarter Stats for Division web sites. If you're not signed up for Smarter Stats, just e-mail Dave Krause, and he can enable Smarter Stats on your Site Builder dashboard.
Traffic and click-through's can help you establish priorities. If a page on your Web site isn't getting any traffic you can make it a lower priority, or try to determine why it's not getting any hits.
If you want to increase traffic to the page, look at the Customer Carewords survey results. Are Carewords prominent on that page? Remember, you have about 10 seconds to capture a viewer's attention before they move on. 10 seconds!
Equally important to the number of hits, is "How long did they stay?" A visit of less than 10 seconds means the viewer didn't find what they're looking for.
How do you find this information in Smarter Stats? In Smarter Stats, go to the Visitors folder under Report Items in the navigation bar on the left. Under Visitors, you can choose from a few reports that show length of visit -- Monthly Visit Length, Daily Visit Length, and Weekday Visit Length.
You can also choose a date range by using the calendar at the right. The report shows the average visit length in seconds.
Other tools are out there - I've heard good things about Google analytics, but I haven't used the program.
Remember, Smarter Stats doesn't give you hard data there are too many variabiles. But you can use it as a snapshot and a guide to what's going on in your site.
I'll talk about other helpful information found in Smarter Stats in the next post.
- Recommended Links
- Nonprofit Marketing: Getting Attention
- Gerry McGovern - New Thinking
- ANR Blogs