My Google Analytics stats show that 70% of visitors spend less than 10 seconds on my site and 66% of visitors visit one page only. When I first looked at these metrics I was really concerned that I was doing a terrible job at engaging my visitors. I came up with a list of actions such as linking to related posts, improving the categories, encouraging comments etc . I’m absolutely certain that there’s a lot of room for improvement and that action plan is still valid. However, I do have a much better insight into the metrics after reading Avinash Kaushik’s fantastic book on web analytics.

Time On Site

When someone first visits a website, a session is started and the time is logged. From that point, every time a request is made to the web server, there is a timestamp. The time spent on a page is calculated as the difference between the timestamp when the visitor goes to the page and the timestamp when they visit another page. All well and good except that there is no way of knowing how long the person spends on the last page they visit as there is no time stamp to indicate the end of that event and the beginning of the next. The tools calculate the time spent as zero.

This makes the metric particularly misleading when the website is a blog. Although I might like people to go deeper, read other posts and have a look around, it’s perfectly understandable that someone visits and just reads the latest post. The problem with the stats is that whether they spend 10 minutes reading the post or 5 seconds deciding it’s not interesting, the time on site is still zero which then distorts the overall “average time on site” metric.

Page Views

The number of pages viewed is usually considered to be important when trying to measure the level of engagement. The more pages someone looks at, the more interested they are in the website as a whole. It’s not quite so straightforward with blogs. Subscribers and repeat visitors are a good measure of engagement and yet these visitors will typically come just to read the latest post, or the last few posts which will probably be on one page. And then of course they might not visit the site at all and read the posts somewhere else like a reader.

So what should you measure?

Well I guess the metrics are still useful as long as you understand the inherent flaws. And subscriber stats and number of comments are useful indicators of engagement. Anyone want to offer some feedback on what metrics they find useful and the best way to measure engagement on blogs in particular?

20 to 25% of search queries that Google gets in any one day are unique. The queries have never been seen before. This statistic was given at the recent Google searchology event.

I spent some time analysing the searches that resulted in a visit to my website during the previous month. Here are some of the stats:

• 42% of queries were unique
• 85% of queries were made up of 3 words or more
• The longest search query was 17 words!

The figures aren’t surprising. Having a blog means that I rank well for a large number of longtail searches on the subject of adWords, pay per click or Google. Search queries are getting longer and queries with 3 words or more are much more common now than they were previously.

Some observations:

Keyword analysis is a good way to uncover hot topics and common questions or concerns

For example, quite a few people came to my blog because they searched, in different ways, on the topic of adWords being expensive. It’s interesting to know this and I can take action by writing more on the topic or addressing it in a frequently asked questions section.

Of course I had to have written something on the topic in order to rank for the combination of “adWords” and “expensive” in the first place. There are obviously a range of other popular topics that I haven’t written about and therefore the search phrases don’t appear in my log files. However, blogging is a great way of producing a variety and volume of content to get visibility for those long tail phrases in the first place.

Did people get the information they wanted with the long tail searches?

People phrase things awkwardly, or use odd combinations of words, in an attempt to get information on something they don’t know a great deal about, particularly when the topic is complex. I tried out quite a few of the searches trying to assess the experience from the perspective of the searcher. Sometimes I thought there was a good chance they got relevant information. Sometimes the content probably didn’t cover what they wanted to know and just happened to contain the same words as the query but in a different context. That’s going to happen and the searcher may just leave immediately to try again. Maybe they weren’t part of my target audience anyway. However, it really made me have another look at overall usability and reminded me how important it is to have clear navigation and help people find what they want.

Details are good but focus on the overall trends

I love the detail in analytics and could happily spend hours pondering some puzzling aspect of the data. There are always a few puzzling things as well. One of the keywords someone used was the single word “Australia”. I’ve no idea how someone arrived at my website from that because of course I don’t rank anywhere for the word Australia (I checked :-). The details are interesting and can offer insights. However, overall trends and some key pieces of information are what is important.

On that note, I’ll finish with a link. I just ordered Avinash Kaushik’s book on web analytics.

There’s a new version of Google Analytics out and all accounts will be upgraded over the next few weeks. Most of the analytics bloggers on my list wrote about it yesterday.

My accounts haven’t been upgraded yet so I can’t see the changes first hand but this is a great write up on Google Analytics V2 from Avinash Kaushik with screen shots.

It’s easy to get access to a large amount of information about your website visitors with analytics software such as Google Analytics. Analytics is worth the effort but only if you’re going to do something useful with the data.

This list of the top ten web analytics blogs is a great resource for advice and news from analytics experts.

I like this post from Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor.

He recommends that newcomers to analytics start with the bigger picture before getting bogged down in too much detail. The big picture questions are:

1. How many visitors do you get?
2. How do they get there?
3. What do they do on your website?

The information gathered by answering these high level questions should then be used in conjunction with your website goals. What’s the purpose of your website and what actions do you want your website visitors to take?

Starting at the macro level can form the basis for implementing changes and measuring results so you actually make real use of the stats.