Let's Do Website Analytics

Let’s do website analytics! Every good website developer, amateur or professional, needs a strategy for website analytics. One of the big topics that was covered during the recent Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 Conference dealt with making better use of analytics. It is amazing how much data can be overlooked by not taking time to dig deep into the information provided. It is also even more amazing how many websites use no analytics at all. Often, a simple look at the source code of a website will reveal no html code for analytics.
One level of doing good website analytics is to make note of the websites that are referring traffic. It is advisable to develop a spreadsheet of those websites, and make note of every time a referral happens. If a website is still small, it may be fine to do this monthly. Place the names of the month and year across the horizontal grid of the spreadsheet, and the website names on the vertical grid.
Another good tactic is to note the number of pages from within a specific website. Certain websites may be feeding traffic from multiple pages. Note the pages that produce the most traffic, and try to target material toward that specific page. In a kind of reverse fashion, the levels of pages on any website should also be watched, to see which pages are getting the traffic. Many people fail to look past the traffic that is hitting the home page.
These tactics can really help a website developer understand where traffic is coming from. However, there is still another layer in this social media era that needs to be considered, if one is to do good website analytics. The actual people that are sending traffic to a website also needs to be noted. Sometimes, on sites like Twitter, people are clicking on a link to a specific website that was placed on a particular User’s Twitter page by retweet, direct message etc. Good analytic software like Google Analytics will be able to show the specific User page that was used as the referral. Hence, you know the specific user, because the referral came from their User Twitter Page.
Once specific social media websites have been identified as referring sites, it becomes advantageous to do research on how wide a market those sites reach. A specific referral to any given website might have come from a Twitter User Page with only 40 or 50 followers. But another referring page might have 8000 followers. Finding ways to frequently target the large Twitter page can help drive traffic to websites. To get a start on this strategy, try a website like Klout.com. There are others as well. A strategy for website analytics needs to involve, as a minimum, these layers of analysis.
Raymond Province is an IT Programmer in the health care industry. He frequently writes about search engine optimization, website development, and writing good website content. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.