Are You A Stats Junkie? Posted August 22nd, 2006 in Monetization, Guest Contributors

About a year ago, Google bought Urchin and shortly after released Google Analytics. Within a few hours, the demand had brought down their shiny new servers and the next day Google made Analytics invite only. For months webmasters begged and wondered when they would get to use this awesome new tool. On August 15 Google opened Analytics up to everyone.

Now, you have no excuse to start using this powerful tool. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and setup your account. Then put the code on all of your pages. I put mine in my forum footer. Once Analytics starts collecting data, you’ll want to setup at least 1 goal: Registrations. Goals are similar to Conversion Tracking in AdWords. But instead of placing a piece of code on your “Goal” page, you just tell Analytics the URL. If you have a “Thank You” page after a user registers, use that, otherwise you’ll have to use your registration page.

After a few hours, Analytics will start to show data in the reports. I use the “Marketer” view for the left navigation, so if I mention some pages and you can’t find them in the Executive view, that’s why, just switch to Marketer. The first thing I look at each morning is the Marketing Summary. It gives you a look at your organic, direct, and referral traffic and if it’s up or down compared to the previous 7 days. It also gives you a look at your top 10 keywords, and referrers. If you setup a goal, you’ll see G1 as one of the columns, this is the percentage of visitors that registered from that particular source/keyword. This is one of the most valuable bits of information because it will tell you where to focus your efforts.

Now that you’re armed with all this information, you need to start understanding it. Find the keywords, sources, and referrers that result in the highest conversion rate. Focus your time on getting more traffic from those sources. Look at keywords that perform poorly, work on increasing the quality of those pages. Yes, even on a forum, you can increase the quality of each page. Rename the title, clean up spelling errors and include solid information someone can actually use. If you have 1000 hits on 1 thread and not a single conversion, you need to work on your “Register Today” links and improve the quality of that thread.

Work with the “Search Engine Marketing” menu to see which keywords are performing best and what topics get you the most traffic. Look at the “Overall Keyword Conversion” report to see which keywords convert the best. I probably spend more time on this page than any other page in Analytics. Looking at keywords I rank for, monitoring the positions of those keywords using DigitalPoint’s Keyword Tracker, and figuring out where all your organic traffic is coming from.

You can look at a cross segment of traffic to just about any value in Analytics (not just Keywords) by clicking the maroon arrow. This is extremely valuable if you want to see which search engine sent all the traffic, which keyword was used to find a page, what country people are from, if they are first time or return visitors, etc. Use this information to improve your targetting. If you can figure out which demographic converts the best, you can target those visitors with your advertising, link building, and offline marketing. My site has great success with visitors from India coming from Google searching for C++ related topics. I was able to find that out using Analytics.

If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself spending hours looking through Analytics finding trends and looking for ways to improve member registration rates, posting rates, traffic, and the overall quality of your site (think depth of visit and pages per visit).

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com