A few months ago, I started to notice a trend in the data for The Writer’s Coin: there was one keyword that was getting the lion’s share of the traffic. I was thrilled that something I had written was not only getting picked up by Google, but was also ranking high on the search results page (this was an assumption based on the amount of traffic I was getting).

After all, that’s the ideal result every time you publish something:

• Users find it useful or entertaining
• The search engines pick it up
• Search engines deemed it important enough to show high up in the search results page
• You get massive, relevant traffic

My traffic wasn’t massive, but it was the biggest keyword (by far) in terms of driving traffic:

You’ll see that “hot flat and crowded cliff notes” was the most popular keyword, getting almost twice as much traffic as the #2 keyword.

Awesome, I thought, my review of Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded was so fantastic that Google decided it was worthy of being placed high up in the search results page!

But was that really the case?

Sure enough, run a search for those keywords and you’ll see my post at the top (#1 baby!) of the results page. But you’ll also notice something else (red circles are mine, not Google’s):

The words “cliff” and “notes” were totally accidental. It was a coincidence that I happened to include them in a piece of content that was also a review of a popular book.

So when people search for the book and then “cliff notes,” which I guess happens a lot since people are lazy and don’t want to read the full book, my review comes out on top.

Ideally, this is the kind of stuff you do on purpose to drive relevant traffic to your posts, but it’s interesting to see how accidents like these happen from time to time.

The analytics gods were smiling down on me the day I wrote the review. Part of me wonders what would happen if I worked “cliff” and “notes” into all my book reviews, but that would be cheating.

So What?

These kinds of “unintended consequences” happen all the time, but you can only take advantage of them and learn something if you know they’re happening—and that’s why it’s so important that you have someone monitoring your web-analytics data. It doesn’t matter if it’s someone internally or a consultant—just make sure someone is paying attention.

This post was included in the Book Marketing Blog Carnival

Applied Analytics has one goal: to help you make better decisions about your site without over complicating things. There tons of websites out there devoted to web analytics, and most of them are aimed at other analytics nerds who love to talk about this stuff.

Applied Analytics is different.

This site is for anyone with a website that wants to make it better. That covers everyone from bloggers to small-business owners to the “data guy” at large companies. And by “better” I mean you want to drive more traffic, more conversions, or you want to learn more about the people using your site.

Ultimately, that’s what’s so cool about looking at all the numbers we call “web analytics”—they let you put together a story about the users coming to your site, what they’re doing, and how to give them more of what they want.

Whether you know a little about about tools like Google Analytics or haven’t even heard of them, the purpose of this site is to help you use these tools to make your site a better experience for your users.

I like to think in terms of questions—without them we’d never find any answers:

• Why did this user go there?
• Where did he come from?
• What makes him come back?

Applied Analytics is about helping you find better ways to answer questions. Once you know the question, you can use web analytics data to help find a good answer. An answer that can be turned into action on your site.

What the Hell is “Web Analytics” Anyway?

“Web Analytics” is just a fancy way of answering one question: what’s happening on my site? There are hundreds of tools to help you answer that question and all those tools comprise “web analytics.” But I’m not going to go through every single one—you don’t need to know them all. What you do need is a basic understanding of how they work, the things you can do with them, and a place to discuss what your goals are.

And here it is. Go.