Find Me Fit

Following the Cyber Crumb Trail

I recently turned my attention to website tracking. I realized that we’re doing a terrible job of figuring out what the hell our users are actually doing once they get to the site. Right now we use Google Analytics. As simple as most Google products are, I found this one wasn’t. So I spent the last few days diving deep into GA and researching competitive products.

My first conclusion was that I needed to better define which questions I was trying to answer. What exactly does tracking a user on a website mean? Here’s what I came up with:

1) Where is the traffic coming from (i.e. the source)?

There are basically three categories of traffic: direct, referring (a website that links to you), and search engine. Google does a great job of detailing all three. Also, when it comes to search engine traffic, it’ll even show you which key words resulted in visits to your site. Some of the results are very interesting.

2) How is it getting to us (i.e. the medium: natural search, paid search, flyer, newspaper, etc…)

This can be a much harder question to answer using just tracking software. If it’s a web-based medium such as paid search, then you have no trouble. GA can tell you exactly where the traffic came from. If it’s offline, you have to prepare your website to track the results effectively. The best way to do that is to set up a custom URL. For example, we recently powered photo broadcasting for the KCCN FM 100 Birthday Bash. At the event we handed out flyers with the URL, “bbash.kindfish.com”. Since we weren’t driving any other traffic to that sub-domain we could be reasonably sure that any direct hits were a result of our flyer.

3) What is driving the traffic (i.e. the campaign: a concert, a new promotion, etc…)

This is important in the context of knowing exactly what you’re tracking. For example: ok, the traffic came in from text ads I paid for on Google, but what was the promotion? If you’re using Google AdSense to drive traffic, GA fully integrates to give you detailed results. If you’re doing an offline promotion (newspaper promo for example), the same points from the previous question apply.

4) Which page is it coming to?

GA tells you exactly how many hits come to every page where you have the tracker code embedded. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to tell you where they go right after that. I want to know what path users are most commonly taking through our site. It seems this would be an obvious feature. Maybe I’m missing something.

5) What is the call to action on that page and is it being taken?

Hopefully each page on your site has some sort of purpose. As an early stage start up, our purpose is usually to get the user to sign up to use our service. Most of our pages are geared towards that action and Google has an interesting way of letting you track just how successful you are at getting users to take a particular action. It’s called a conversion goal and it’s basically a funnel.

6) What is the conversion funnel for a new user and is it being taken?

The one thing we weren’t clearly articulating every time we drove users to the site was the conversion funnel. This is probably the most important aspect of any campaign or traffic driver. Once your users get to your site, what are they supposed to do, and are they doing it? GA lets you set up specific goals in the shape of URL steps. For example, if your goal is to get user registrations, it might look like this:

Step 1: landing page URL
Step 2: registration page URL
Step 3: thank you page URL

If GA detects that a user hit all three URLs in succession, that’s defined as a conversion (successful completion of the goal).

7) If they are not taking the conversion funnel, where are they clicking?

This is something I really wanted to see but couldn’t really find. This ties in with my point earlier about user navigation. I want to know what path our users are taking through the site, especially if they are not taking a pre-defined path as defined by a GA Goal.

8 ) How many of the website visitors are unique and how many are returning?

GA is actually very good at this. It gives you full breakdowns of the returning visitors vs. unique visitors as well as returning vs. unique pageviews. If you click on the Visitors tab you can see a full breakdown of the data under the new vs. returning section. The Visitors section also provides excellent information broken down by days and even hours, geography, and browsers. Also, one of the coolest data points is average number of pageviews per visitor.

9) What is the average length of a visit?

This is also tracked by GA under the visitors area.

10) What path are they taking through the site?

As I’ve mentioned this is really the biggest missing feature. I want to have a view of the average path users take through Kindfish.com. Without knowing where they are clicking, it’s very hard to optimize the site’s navigation.

One of my favorite features is the GA site overlay. It tells you how many people clicked where. In some ways it address my concern about being able to tell what a users average path through the site is. The site overlay is basically a version of your live site that is loaded in a GA controlled browser frame where they overlay little numbers over each link on your site. You can actually click through and see the number of people that clicked where as you go deeper.

On the site overlay front, GA actually has some very interesting competitors. One of my favorites (I think we’ll actually try these guys out in conjunction with GA) was CrazyEgg. They offer you a fantastically well-visualized view of your users’ click streams as well as heat maps of where they are clicking. If you’re trying to optimize your site’s layout and figure out where a user’s eyes are going, there’s nothing better to help you understand this than a heat map of your site. ClickTale takes it one step further and actually _records_ your users using the site. You can then go to ClickTale’s website and watch video of your users using the site. Pretty impressive.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 3:51 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.