Applied Analytics

A data funnel is like a treasure map of your website. In order for users to accomplish the goals you’ve set out for them, they need to follow a trail of web pages before they eventually reach that goal.

If your goal is to sign people up for an email, they’ll need to visit a page with a button that takes them to a sign up page (dotted line), then the sign up page (dotted line), and then a thank you page (big, red X) that verifies that they’ve signed up.

I briefly touched on data funnels last week when I talked about the importance of goals. Funnels and goals go hand in hand because a goal means you want your users you wind up doing something specific on the site or winding up somewhere.

So think of funnels as a map of where your users are in the process of getting to that elusive goal. For those users that don’t make it to the X on the map, a funnel can show you where they are getting stuck and if enough people are getting stuck that you should do something about it.

Here is what a typical funnel looks like:

In it, you can see that 853 users hit the home page, 126 reached the RegisterLogin page, and 21 made it to the Account Success page. That means 21 of your 853 users managed to follow your map and reach the goal. That’s a 2% conversion rate and depending on what exactly your goal is, is not too bad.

What the funnel lets you do is attack each step in the process individually. Let’s say you change your homepage around and add blinking lights and flashing arrows that point to the sign-up box.

In theory, more people should notice your sign-up box now. But instead of just checking how many people have created an account and seeing if that number has gone up, you can check the funnel conversion for that first step to see if it’s made it better or worse.

Funnels give you a more nuanced look at how each part of your site is performing. Instead of just having one big gauge telling you how the overall site is doing, funnels give you a more detailed look at the different parts of the site.

Once you’ve nailed down where there are problems and opportunities for improvement, then you can tackle them exactly where users are having the toughest time and make adjustments.

Image by cameronparkins

Most people that don’t put too much thought into their websites do the following: they log into Google Analytics (GA), check and see how traffic was yesterday, maybe click into the Traffic Sources section to see if there is any pattern there to explain the drop or rise in traffic, and then go back to doing their thing. Selling widgets, blogging about cats—whatever.

But if you don’t have a defined goal for your business, then you’re not only missing out on one of the coolest parts of GA, you’re also selling your site/business short. So ask yourself the questions: what’s the goal of me site? What am I trying to accomplish?

Everything on the page (and everything you do) should be geared towards that one goal. Whether it’s selling more widgets, increasing pageviews, making more money, etc. This will also help you make tough decisions about your business by simply asking yourself “which makes the most sense to continue to achieve our goal?” You’ll know which decision to make if you let your goal be your guide.

But you have to have a goal.

And once you do, you can have GA track it for you by setting up goals. What you’ll be able to see once you’re all set up is the conversion rate for your users, which you can break down into any of the slices of traffic you want (users from Finland that use Chrome, for example) and see which users convert best. It’s the kind of insight that causes “aha” moments and can improve conversion across the board.

Not only that, you can see conversion funnels too, which are a nice graphic depiction of where in the process of achieving the goal they drop off. If you notice most users dropping off at the sign-up page, then you know there’s something you can fix there.

If you’re a blogger, the goal-setting can be a little tricky. What is your goal? It could be to have users join a mailing list, read one specific post, or something as simple as subscribing to your RSS feed. If you’re a blogger and you can’t figure out a goal for your site, use RSS subscriptions. It encompasses a lot of things: are you writing interesting content that people like and keeps them coming back for more? Are you networking and getting the word out there so that more people come to your site? Are you selling yourself enough?

Tracking RSS subscribers via Feedburner is great, it gives you a nice, overall count and a trend of how you’re doing over time. But placing it as a goal in GA means you’ll be able to find out a lot more about your users. If users from a guest post at Sidehustleblogging sign up at a much higher rate than users from any other site, maybe you should figure out what it was about that guest post or what it is about Sidehustleblogging and their readers that “clicked” so well.

Then you try to replicate it.

That’s what analytics is all about: noticing patterns and repeating them to achieve your goals. Just make sure you have a goal to begin with, or else none of this will matter.

Image by D-32

The Google Blog has a great guest post up today from Tom Critchlow of Distilled titled Using The Wrong Tracking Code Can Cost You $500k a Year. In it, Tom goes over a very simple error that can cause a huge drop in conversion for a very specific slice of users—those using Internet Explorer 8.

It seems like such a non-issue until you see how the conversion rate for those users sucks compared to everyone else. And all because of a simple little thing like not using Google’s latest code.

I think a lot about how this stuff (analytics and numbers) can help people and small businesses with their sites, and this post is a great example of something that’s small, easy to fix, and has a huge impact on the bottom line.

Analytics can do a lot of stuff to make you smarter about who you target, how to target them more efficiently, and how to expand your reach on the web as quickly as possible. But when it comes down to it, what we all want to do is make more money and spend less time doing it.

Nice work Tom—well done.

Anyone with a website needs to know what SEO is and how it works. That’s why I have a section called SEO Resources on the right sidebar. If you don’t know anything about SEO, I suggest you take a look at those links and also this fantastic intro to SEO from Corbet Barr over at ThinkTraffic—he does an awesome job of breaking it down to the basics.

There are basically two parts to SEO, and that’s what I want to focus on here today: on page vs. off page.

On Page SEO

On page SEO occurs when you change things on your site so that search engines (Google, for the most part) can find you. You may have heard terms like title tags, clean URLs, meta information, and H1 tags—these are all part of on page SEO. The goal is to make your website findable by the search engines by translating your content into a language the search bots can understand and “crawl.”

On page SEO is like being added to the map—people will be able to find you now. This stuff if fairly easy to put into place and anyone can do it in a few hours, depending on how large the site is and how much content there is.

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO is all about the links pointing to your site. It’s called off page because you can’t control it as directly as you can the on page stuff. It’s one thing to make all your URLs descriptive, but it’s something totally different to get links. You have to work for them.

If on page SEO is like being added to the map, off page SEO is like having a huge star next to your city on that map. Something that says “this place is important and worth visiting.” When you see it on the map, it makes you think, “this looks like a place I need to check out.”

When search engines pull the content they can “see” (thanks to all the on page stuff you’ve done), they then rank it in order of importance. So if you search for “Apple,” the bots will check to see which sites have more links pointing at them and the quality of those links. That’s why if you search for Apple you won’t see anything about the fruit on the first page, it’s all about Apple the company. And Apple.com is at the very top—all because of the big-time sites that link to it (and because that’s what Google assumes you’re looking for).

As for the quality of the links, that’s a Google algorithm we don’t know the secret to, but we can see a site’s pagerank to see how highly Google thinks of a site. This number (from 1–10) essentially “grades” each site/page on the Internet according to how high it would rank in a search.

Why Everyone Focuses on On Page SEO

On page SEO is much easier to do than off page, and that’s why most people like to spend so much time on it. Webmasters, like most of us, like to focus on the things they can control. SEO is no different because it’s like math: you make the changes, follow the rules, and boom—you can tell everyone your site is “SEO ready.” Done. Sure, you’re on the map now, but it doesn’t mean anyone is going to come to your site.

Take the keyword “gadget news.” There are over 47 million sites that show up on that search—who is going to show up on that first page (which is the holy grail, by they way—the higher up you are the more traffic you’ll get)? Check it out:

Why is Gizmodo at the top? Why are CNET and Engadget next in line? Because they have kickass sites that people love. People love them so much that they will link to them all the time whenever they find a story/review they want to share with someone else.

These links are the currency of the web and are a crucial part to what SEO is all about.

Which is More Important?

On page SEO is easy. Off page SEO is hard. That should probably answer the question. The problem is that people prefer to sit around and talk about on page SEO because off page is so much harder—you’re trying to accomplish two very hard things:

1. Create quality content/products people love
2. People have to show their love by linking to you

This stuff will drive management crazy because they can’t just throw money/time/resources at the problem to solve it. It’s not one of those problems that can be solved that way. Sure, you can buy links on sites that point back to you, but that doesn’t really scale. Instead, you have to create something so cool and so successful that people with quality sites (high pagerank) link to you.

An Example

Take the writing I do on The Writer’s Coin as an example: I once wrote a guest post on GetRichSlowly (pagerank 5 to my site’s 4) that included a link back to my site. That told Google that a higher quality site (their 5) was “endorsing” this other site (my 4)—essentially bringing up my 4 a little bit closer to a 5. With enough of these links, I can get my site up into a pagerank of 5, which in theory means more traffic.

I could write 1,000 guest posts for sites with a pagerank of 7 or 8 and that would do it, but that’s very hard to do and would take me years. It’s much easier to install Headspace on my, say “OK, I’m SEO ready,” and forget about the whole thing.

And as tells Marcus Aurelius tells Maximus in Gladiator: “That is why it must be you.”

Off page SEO is far more important than on page SEO and everyone with a website should be focusing a large part of their time on it.

• It will serve a dual function of networking and getting the word out into the world
• It’ll teach you the importance of social media
• You will get more traffic
• You are more likely to stay focused on your users/customers instead of the title tags on your site

Let’s not forget that Google is all about finding the “best” result for a user making a search—that’s all they care about. So while you’re catering to Google, you’ll also be catering to the best interests of people searching the web, and that’s a good thing.

Image by Map Center at the BPL

1. Write: Write down the top three questions you have about your site. Something you want to know, something that bothers you, something you want to improve—whatever it is. But write down three specific questions whose answers would help you make your site a better, more effective place.
2. Ask: Send those questions to me by email or via the form at the bottom of this post.
3. Wait: I’ll get back to you and we’ll get to the bottom of these questions together.

Pretty straightforward, right? What are you waiting for?

Image by Steve Keys