Ophir Cohen - Web Marketing Done Right.

 ”the vast majority of web content is made up of poorly optimised websites. By that I mean poorly optimised for visibility (visitors can’t find you via the search engines) and poorly optimised for the user experience (leading to low conversion rates). These two are closely related and web analytics is the key to unlock the potential of both.” (Brian Clifton)

Hi,

I just read a very good interview with Brian Clifton.
For those of you who don’t know who Brian is, he is (was) the Head of Google Analytics in EMEA, holds a Phd, a veteran to the web marketing industry and the author of the new book: Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.

Brian is now leaving Google and going back to be a Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media - the company he founded back in 1997.
The interview is very interesting, and I just wanted to quote one sentence (at the top of this post) I feel is the essence of web analytics or Web Metrics as some call it).

Web Analytics is the place where most optimization techniques are reflected, where they can all be measured, demonstrated and leveraged. When wanting to show a client their SEO or Usability is not good enough, simply review their analytics. On the other hand, to know the problem of web sites - simply look at their web analytics - you will find the most intreaguing business aspects strengths and weaknesses of their operation. It’s not all about how many visits did I get yesterday vs. the day before - it’s the basic analysis of your business, thrugh the eyes and behavior of your customers.

I had a conversation with Brett Crosby from Google Analytics some hours ago, and it appears Google Analytics is releasing very powerful new features for their free web analytics suite. I must say at first I was not very optimistic, but when our conversation ended, and I was looking at the screenshots - My head was simply nodding unwontedly  - These guys usually roll out great products, but these features I’m about to cover are way more than “features”. These have the potential to actually CHANGE to way we do web analytics, and the significantly change the way we treat the web as a marketing tool!

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Following Avinash’s great post I’ve already mentioned yesterday, I re-read the entire post and more than 3o interesting comments.

The main problem as Avinash explains, is that we can’t actually calculate the time on page and time on site where we don’t have an “exit” mark.

This basically means, that most of our “bounces”, “zero” time on site and “short visits” (depending on your software verbiage) are related not only to those who close their browser right after entering your page, but to those who viewed 1 page, perhaps even for a while - but didn’t go any further.

Well I say delete them!

The problem with zero time on site

The zero time on site is screwing up the entire time on site statistics of your pages.
Here’s an example for a website we manage where the average time on site is 91 seconds. 

Looks fine to the untrained eye: 91 seconds and 2.2 pages per visit - So is this the correct number? (more…)

Avinash Kaushik (see his RSS on my homepage ), the author of “ Web Analytics - An Hour a Day” and “ Occams Razor” blog, wrote an excellent and comprehensive post on the methodology behind “ time on site” and “ time on page” metrics.

For all of you who always wonder how this is calculated and how come sometimes the numbers don’t seem too logic - Avinash exaplains the method from A to Z in a simple and logic way. Highly recommended! (more…)