Friday, August 25, 2006

Who moved my traffic?

Your site traffic is down, you are running up and down the hallway freaking out. Who moved my traffic, who moved my traffic. Wait before you get all anxious about the traffic. Downturn in your traffic might not be something to freak out.
Below are some of the things to look at to find out why your traffic is down. Some reasons are within you control (stop freaking start working) some out of your control. Some might be very obvious and some might not.

  • Seasonal Impact - Do year over year comparison and see how the traffic pattern was last year.
  • May be overall traffic is down even for your competitors (do comparison at http://www.alexaholic.com/ )
  • Has a new competitor entered the space? How is their traffic?
  • Traffic drivers - How was the traffic from these sources?
    Campaigns (Banners, Search, Emails) - Did they ran as normal.
    Email - Did anything change there? Did you send out your regular emails, newsletters?
    Search - Did you change anything here, has search engines changed their algorithm.
    Search - Did you change your site? Meta Tags? Content?
    Affiliates - Has any affiliates changed their site.
  • Environmental Factors - How is the weather in the geographical region where you have most visitors from? Nice weather can keep people outdoors, resulting in lower traffic.
  • Was there any site outage?
  • Have you made change to your web analytics tool configuration? If yes, investigate what those were? Problems in filter could be filtering out a lot of traffic.

This is a work in progress. Feel free to send me other things that you might look for.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Web Analytics Books

Know of a book I am missing send the name to me. I have not read all of these but complied this list of of Eric Peterson's Yahoo Group postings.

Web Analytics Demystified by Eric T Peterson http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/about_wad.asp

Web Site Measurement Hacks by Eric T Peterson http://tinyurl.com/mzk6r

The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators" by Eric T Peterson http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/about_kpi_book.asp

Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success" by Jim Sterne http://tinyurl.com/mptuj/n/n

Drilling down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet" by Jim Novo
http://jimnovo.booklocker.com/

Measuring the Success of Your Website: A Customer-centric Approach to Website Management" by Hurol Inan
http://www.hurolinan.com/books/WebAnalytics/default.htm?src\u003dbooks

Search Analytics: A Guide to Analyzing and Optimising Website Search Engines" by Hurol Inan
http://www.hurolinan.com/books/SearchAnalytics/default.asp?src\u003dbooks

E-Metrics: Business Metrics For The New Economy" by Matt Cutler & Jim Sternehttp://www.targeting.com/emetrics.pdf

Friday, August 04, 2006

All About Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free web analytics tool (ASP) from Google. You can get a free account at
http://www.Google.com/analytics

Google Analytics Official Help Links

Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/analytics
Help Group: http://www.google.com/analytics/analyticshelp
Google Blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Conversion University: http://www.google.com/analytics/conversionuniversity.html
Partners: http://www.google.com/analytics/support_partner_provided.html


Other Link
ROI Revolution: http://www.roirevolution.com/blog
this just in: http://cutroni.com/blog/
GA Experts: http://www.ga-experts.co.uk/blog/

More coming soon...

I would love to hear your tips and tricks