I wrote a guest post the other day on SideHustleBlogging about…guest posts! How very self referential of me. Anyway, there is  tons of great information out in the world on how to land guest posts, how to approach bloggers, etc. But having written several guest posts myself, I wanted to take a look at how to evaluate whether a guest post was worth it or not and what we can learn for future guest posts. Using Analytics, of course!

So please head over to check out Using Analytics to Target Guest Posts. The post is a quick, step-by-step guide at evaluating a guest post to see if you picked the right audience to expose your content to on another blog. It can help you decide where to submit to next time so you don’t waste time sending great content to the wrong place.

Stay tuned for a post on analyzing the guest post using the techniques in my guest post about how to target your guest post…still with me?

A Good Post on Bounce Rates

How 30 Seconds Dropped my Bounce Rate by 78% @ Encosia: Dave does a good job of revealing one of the weaknesses of the bounce rate metric (how many people hit your site and leave without seeing another page)—we can’t really tell what a person does on the site if he or she bounces.

We get no time on site or any other info to answer the ever-elusive question: what did this person do? So Dave decided to take matters into his own hands and use a simple hack to change the definition of a bounce and he did indeed lower his bounce rate. The lesson here is clear: a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just tells you people are leaving after that first pageview. Although I do think that if your bounce rate is high because people are getting what you want, you should still try to engage them in some way by offering something of value—but that’s just me.

Pop quiz, hot shot: you have to run your site by keeping track of just one metric. What’s it gonna be? Bounce rate? Time on site? Conversion rate?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The most important element of anyone’s website is the customer. We should all know this by now, so it shouldn’t come as a shock—but no numbers or charts or data reports are going to help you aren’t devoted to your users. That’s the whole point of tracking what they’re doing online: to know what they’re doing so you can get out of their way and give them more of what they want.

Most of us typically worry about how to make customers click on this or sign up for that. Should we put a border around this box and maybe blow the font out on this widget? Maybe we should force a pop up when they do this so they can then go to this page, where they can buy the PDF.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! What we need to do is listen to our users—whether it’s via the analytics, surveys, user testing, etc. Anyway we have to see what our users are doing with our site or our product is a way to get a peek into what they want.

For example, when the first Mac came out Apple wasn’t supposed to be about desktop publishing—it was supposed to be all about spreadsheets and word processing. But Pagemaker changed the game. It was an unanticipated consequence that took Apple to the next level (Check out Guy Kawasaki talking about the Apple example).

You want to hear the best part? As a blogger or small-business owner, you have a HUGE advantage over larger companies with structured bureaucracies because they have very short-term goals that they need to meet. And they usually succumb to those pressures. As a small-business owner (which is what all bloggers really are), you don’t have to let those things get in your way of tending to your customers.

Avinash says it best in his book, Applied Analytics:

It is important not to underestimate the challenge of moving from a company (short-term) focus to a customer (long term) focus. It is extremely hard for most company employees to pull off (the mindsets are more entrenched the higher up you go in an organization).

Take heed, all you small-business owners: here is one advantage you have over the big boys. Please don’t waste it away—make sure you listen to your customers!

Image by 10ch

Copyblogger has a great post called The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers that distills a lot of the wisdom that’s out there about becoming a successful blogger. It’s got the usual stuff in there like being persistent, prolific, and consistent.

But look at what the #3 tip is:

3. Effective bloggers are analytical

They study their statistics, so they know where readers come from — what sites, what search engines, what search terms, and even what countries…

But that’s not all—just knowing all this stuff doesn’t do you any good if you don’t turn it into something actionable, right? Oh wait, Copyblogger has more to say about it:

Then they tailor the timing, content, layout, and images of their posts to suit their audience.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. You can be as brilliant a writer or marketer or networker as you want, but you need to know what your users are doing on your site. It’s via the analytics that they tell you what they like and don’t like. You could ask them what they want and what they think, but they might not even know it themselves.

The analytics is the most honest form of communication between the two of you.

Anyway, it’s nice to see one of the top writing/blogging sites in the land giving analytics some much-deserved love!

The first time I realized how cool web analytics can be, I was at work typing out an email. But this was not your typical work email. Someone had asked a very specific question about why something kept happening on the site. The data was irrefutable but the behavior the data showed made no sense. So I sat in front of my dashboard and spent hour after hour looking at the numbers from all different angles, trying to figure it out.

It took a while, but I finally found an answer.

So I started to write up an email describing what I’d found. As I revealed the step-by-step logic I’d followed and inserted screenshots that explained the behavior so anyone could understand it, I had one of those out-of-body realizations you very rarely get at work.

I was having fun. Lots of fun. I felt like a detective that had cracked open a case and was hammering out the report. The report that would be handed out to the media the next day declaring the case solved, the guilty party identified, and the rule of law victorious. And I the hero.

And this is at work, mind you.

I know how stupid this all sounds. Trust me, I’m aware. But when you’re able to get this kind of feeling at work, you go with it—you don’t ask questions. You just keep going. And sure enough, the next time I was digging into the data trying to find answers to questions, I started to feel that rush again.

Finding answers is pretty cool, and while the data doesn’t have ALL the answers (web analytics is part art, part science after all), it sure can shed light on a lot of the questions your team might have about what’s happening on the site. Answers that can drive behavior to make your site better. Which means you’re having fun at work while you help make the site you work on that much better.

It doesn’t get much cooler than that.

Image by stevekeys

We all want our sites to be “better,” more efficient, and more effective. While that’s definitely true, let me fill you in on a little secret. The key to converting traffic data into actionable insights doesn’t have anything to do with KPIs (key performance indicators) or bounce rates or how good you are at crunching numbers.

The secret is to ask the right questions.

You could wade through the infinite data that Google Analytics spits out and never get anywhere if you don’t know what you’re looking for. That’s why when people ask me for help and only give me access to their Analytics profile, there is little I can do. Web analytics isn’t like SEO—I can’t just go in there and tell you to do this or change that and your site will perform “better.”

Each site has it’s own set of unique goals, problems, and advantages. That’s why the most important part of the process is asking the right question. It may sound like a cop out to you (“Just fix my site already!”), but it’s true. It’s like starting a new project without a goal—how are you going to know if you’ve succeeded without one?

There are tons of different kinds of questions you can ask, and the more specific you get, the faster someone like me can help you help yourself:

• Why are users coming to this page so much?
• All my posts have a similar bounce rate except for this one. Why is that?
• How did this page get so much traffic?
• Where did these people come from?
• Why does this page keep generating so much traffic from Google?
• What are my users clicking on when they hit this page?
• Why does Google hate me?

Asking specific questions that get at the heart of what you’re trying to do on your site is absolutely essential. Not only that, it makes things fun for people like me that love to dig into the data to help you find answers. I get to play detective by taking the questions website owners have and digging through the data to find answers.

It’s kind of fun.

So if you have a site (whether it’s a blog,  a business, or whatever), think about the questions you want answers to first. Then you can worry about how to use web analytics to find the answers. And feel free to send me your questions—I’d love to help.