SES New York 2011: Analytics RX: Diagnosis and Recovery

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RX

A little late after a (very tasty!) lunch I’m jumping into the room of Matthew Bailey, one of my favorite speakers at SES. He’ll talk about Analytics and how to find actionable items. He calls pageviews, monthly visitors, time on site etc. “Caveman Analytics”, all so 1990 :)

A step by step guide how to make Analytics fit to your business:

1. Find errors first

Find 404 pages in Analytics, not in Webmaster tools. Webmastertools only shows you 404′s that Googlebot found, Analytics shows you 404 pages people found.

2. Detect duplicate content

Filter Top Pages by URL strings to find Duplicates.

3. Segment your data

Keep adding context until it answers the question “Why?”. ”Question asking is the single greatest tools humans have”.

4. Identify Rankings by Performance

Clearly define your goals: ”If you’re not measuring activity that’s making you money, you’re not measuring anything.”Find out which keywords bring you conversion and value. Remember that you can have the right rankings for the wrong page!
Performance provides direction. You should know which products have high margin, which have low margin.

5. Segment Entry Points

A number one ranking doesn’t mean profitability. If a page has a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate, also a high ranking doesn’t necessary make the page profitable.

Find out which pages convert, which don’t. If you have 2 pages ranking for the same keyword you have to find out which one converts better.

6. Identify bounce rates

The reason why people bounce, because they didn’t find something specific to what they were searching for. A great report in Analytics is the weighted sort report, which shows you immediately important pages that have a high bounce rate.

7. Follow the money

Implement Goal Value. When you report to the C-level in a company, you have to get dollar signs in your report.

8. Action

Companies that had a full-time analyst realized a 1200% ROI within six months.(Forrester Research, 2009)
They follow the money!

Two great quotes of Matthew to finish this post:

“The social media room over there is full, but they don’t make money, we do!”

and

“Analytics: it ain’t sexy, but it makes money. ”

Evert Veldhuijzen started working on the Internet in 1992, while he was still studying law in Groningen (the Netherlands). In 1999, while he was employed by the German tour operator FTI in Italy, he established the Italian company MLW services, specialized in the creation of Internet sites for touristic companies. In 2001 he and the company moved to Berlin. MLW Services became Veroworx. Veroworx' focal point was especially the creation of Web sites, while Evert Veldhuijzen specialized increasingly in the area of online marketing. More articles and bio from Evert Veldhuijzen
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