I work a lot with Omniture’s web analytics package, SiteCatalyst, which has an awesome arsenal of reports and features.  Quite literally, there are hundreds of thousands of ways that you could analyse the data that has been pulled from your site. However, one who is excited about all this information and bent on absorbing every detail can soon be overloaded. T.S. Eliot once said

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? We need wisdom in order to be responsible. We need wisdom to manage our information. At present we have super abundance of information which we are unable to digest.

T.S. Eliot died in 1965. I’m sure he would be dumbfounded in the progress that we have been able to make in hording information.

How can you avoid the data deluge? When I’m shopping I like to follow my Rule of Three. If I am buying a computer, I look at three places that I know to be good and then I decide. With a commodity like a computer, there are so many retailers that you could have you work cut out for you if you tried to research each one. Plus, the Rule of Diminishing Returns explains that for each additional store that I might look into the additional benefit I gain decreases. On the extreme, you can imagine that it would be very costly for me to drive, or even call, to every compute retailer in the world so that I had all the information available. I think that checking out three reputable companies gives you a good idea of the price the market is asking for.

Similarly, with web analytics, if you look at everything you can quickly become overwhelmed. It is much more useful to focus on a few key indicators and keep all of the other information on hand when you have a more specific question to ask.

The data that I look at the most often are:

• Referral source - see what percentage of your traffic is coming from where. If a site should be sending you traffic then ask why they aren’t. If there is an unexpected site sending you traffic then you might be providing some unknown benefit that you could improve on. How much traffic you are gaining for search engines is also a key point to look at.
• Keyword conversion - see what words people are using to find your site, or, just as important, what words people aren’t finding your site with.
• Visits - a classing metric to keep in mind. This will take care of its self if you are good at the previous two points.
• Specific goal conversions - If you want people to do something specific on our site (which you should) you need to track the success of that goal and the common paths to that goal. Check the exit and entrance rates along that path.
• A/B testing - this source of data can be used to improve your goal conversions as you refine the conversion process.

Those are probably my favorites, but it is vital that you collect all of the data that your analytics software is capable of. You might only use some of the data every now and then, but when that time comes you’ll be glad you did. For example, what is the average browser width and height of your users? That is information that you will mostly need when you do a site redesign. So, the usefulness of this information is infrequent, but valuable when needed.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 and is filed under Whatever, Quotes, Internet, Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.