Is your blog good enough to win an Oscar?

I am just thankful to be nominated. Did you ever really believe that? Well, in Web analytics almost getting the statue (reaching the goal) is really valuable information and could be what puts your blog on the front page of Digg. Setting goals is more than measuring Web page traffic and on its own, Google Analytics will not figure out what is the most important thing you want visitors to do on your blog. You have to tell Google Analytics to keep track of what’s critical to your business—and you do this with goals (Lofgren, 2012).

In Google Analytics, there are four types of goals (Google, 2013):

•           A URL Destination goal triggers
•           A Time on Site goal
•           A Pages/Visit goal
•           An Event goal

For my blog, I have set up two different Goals:

1. Time on Site of more than five minutes. It is important to me to have the ability to look at traffic that hopefully finds my content useful and has read at least one blog. The average reading time of one of my blogs is five minutes. I know this because Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute, figures the average adult can read 200 words per minute (Wylie, 2012).
2. URL Destination to a specific blog post. I have created a funnel to associate with this goal so that I can clearly see where traffic is going when they do not reach the goal and how traffic may be reaching the desired blog post, but taking another route. Measuring visits alone will not give you this incredibly valuable information that essentially translates into the low hanging fruit because once you set up a funnel, you can quickly identify bottlenecks and streamline the process to improve goal conversion.

But be careful, goal funnels really only work when you require your visitors to move through a series of pages (Lofgren, 2012). Additionally, funnels only allow you to set up ten steps. If you need additional steps, split the funnel between two different goals.

An event goal is really the golden statue in many cases, because it allows you to set up goals that are custom to your site. For instance, I could set up an Event goal for my blog subscription, apply a funnel and determine which blog posts are generating the most subscriptions. I may find that by making a couple minor adjustments to the content in future blog posts will improve my conversion rate. The closer these metrics are to activities that generate revenue, the better (Lofgren, 2012).

Avinash Kaushik is the author of Web Analytics 2.0. In his book, he talks about quantifying the economic value of your website and in the context of the example he uses, economic value is the imputed value of an action taken on your website. The question you must answer is, “As a result of this action by a Visitor, was any value created for my business?” (Kaushik, 2010). Can you see how much more valuable this type of information will be to you in comparison to simply measuring unique visitors?

I will use my blog as an example. The economic value of a blog subscription for me is $4—the cost of an email address. Now combine this with the Event goal to measure blog subscriptions and the funnel I have associated with this goal. Now, I have an opportunity to the real value changes to my blog have on the bottom line. Imagine doing this on your company’s website. Congratulations on your new promotion!

We all see the world through our own filter, so should we not look at our data using filters, too?

Filters are excellent to exclude internal traffic to your site from your reporting so that you can have a clearer picture of the activity taking place on your website from consumers. This is just one example. You can also use filters to include a specific domain and monitor traffic only on a subdomain. For my blog, I am dreaming of the day when it becomes wildly popular and Mashable cannot help but reference my work in tweets and blog posts. This would be an incredible accomplishment and right up there with drafting my acceptance speech for my blog Oscar.

Traffic from Mashable is something I definitely want to measure, but I also want to see if other tactics I have implemented to build relationships with other major influential bloggers is having any impact. I want to look at traffic to my blog that is coming from websites other than Mashable.

To do this, I can set up a filter to exclude the term ‘mashable’ in the domain. Therefore, no matter what page Mashable includes links to my blog, I will not see that traffic in reports when using my filter.

There is a very important piece to remember when using filters. Once raw data has been passed through a filter, Google cannot re-process raw data. Filters forever modify the data in a profile. For this reason, we recommend maintaining an unfiltered profile (Google, 2013).

Beginning with a fundamentall understanding in the metrics Google Analytics provides you will provide you with a tremendous amount of insight into consumer behavior and the activity on your blog or website. You will be able to identify seasonal trends, where visitors are coming from, what pages they are accessing the most and how often, and how many people find your website or blog completely repulsive. These are just a few pieces of highly valuable information you will begin to gather as you begin to understand metrics.

Once you have a better understanding of who is visiting your site, lay out who you want to visit your site and what paths they will take to get the information they want. Try to think about them clearly and identify a few different mindsets (i.e. a person who is in a rush and searching to solve an analytics problem, a person who is looking for a thorough understanding of goals and funnels and has all the time in the world). A person’s mindset is going to impact the path they take on your site. Try to understand these paths and set up goals to help you to better reach and engage with these different types of people.

Goals, funnels, and filters will be the final key to turning your blog into a well-oiled, money-making, machine. An Oscar winner.

References:

Google (2013). Google Analytics IQ Lessons. Retrieved on February 25, 2013, from, http://google.com/analytics/iq.html

Lars, Lofgren. (2012, May). KISSmetrics. 4 Google Analytics goal types that are critical to your business. Retrieved on February 25, 2013, from, http://blog.kissmetrics.com/critical-goal-types/.

Wylie, A. (2012, March 2). PRSA. The ART of the short story: How long will it take to read your piece? Retrieved on February 25, 2013, from, http://www.prsa.org/Intelligence/Tactics/Articles/view/9637/1045/The_ART_of_the_short_story_How_long_will_it_take_t

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Pu