February 8, 2007 Comments
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Last summer while I was in San Jose for the Search Engine Strategies event I had the pleasure of taking some time to visit with Intuit's Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is one of those rare people that simply oozes genius, but does it in a way that the average person can understand. That's why his blog, Occam's Razor, is a fantastic resource for small business owners trying to learn more about how to make use of their web analytics. He's got a great post today about making sure you aren't digging deep into your analytics at the cost of understanding how the more general stats impact how you run your business. It should really hit home for small business owners.
I must admit, I've fallen into this trap myself. When you get rolling with a good analytics program (ClickTracks being my personal favorite) you find yourself absolute sucked into the minute details that you can find. Digging down to see exactly how visitors from one referral link interact with your site, figuring out how many people view a specific product without purchasing it, the list goes on and on. Some weeks I'm so busy looking at this type of data that I fail to analyze the larger picture stuff. Am I increasing the amount of time that people spend on the site? Am I seeing a constant increase of traffic over time? What new sites are sending me visitors this week?
If you are into Web Analytics almost always start with a rock solid understanding of understanding data at a macro level and resist the urge start understanding data at a micro level. You might not see the forest for all the trees.
The amazing thing is that this the “simplest” thing you can do and it is is surprising how many people don’t spend time on it (it is perhaps hard to resist the allure of having every piece of data you could possibly want on your finger tips, for every page of your site and for every person who comes to your site).
He goes on to offer up four "macro-level" questions that you should never fail to consider when delving into your log files and to offer up some insight on each of them.
1.) How many visitors come to your site?
2.) Where are they coming from?
3.) What do you want them to do on your site?
4.) What are they actually doing on the site?
Hat tip Andy Beal.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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