In this series, I would like to provide real-life analysis from the site Mytripguru.com. This is my site so I am comfortable reporting the traffic figures and analysis. The aim is to show how web analytics can be used to drive real change on a website. Remember, analysis means absolutely nothing if it does not drive change!
The first thing in any analysis is to frame the goals of the site in terms of Key Performance Indicators. For the purpose of this post, the goal of MyTripGuru.com is attract high quality traffic with highly engaged visitors. How would you measure high quality traffic?
First, I set up a goal in Google Analytics to define my Key Performance Indicator. In this case, I want to see how many users sign up for the site. This goal is very simple to set up in Google Analytics. A visitor who successfully signs up for the site visits two pages – the sign up page and the confirmation page. These have to be included in the goal. In the case of Mytripguru.com, the pages end in signup.php and my-account.php. The goal looks like the following in Google Analytics:
With Google Analytics, goals are tracked once they are created, so you will need to wait for data to be collected before insights can be gained. I set this goal up a while ago so I have some traffic numbers to analyze. The first question is how many times this goal has been completed on the site. This is an easy analysis. Just pull up the report Goals Overview and look how many times this goal was triggered (expressed as a conversion).
But this data is still pretty meaningless because it is not actionable. What I really want to know, is how traffic from various sources are converting. Are my SEM campaigns effective? How good is the traffic from referrals? How are my email campaigns performing? What about organic searches and direct traffic? To analyze this traffic I like to pull the necessary metrics into Excel using the Excellent Analytics plugin. This is a very useful plugin that let’s you pull data via the Google Analytics API to take advantage of Excel’s powerful reporting capabilities. The report I generated in Excel looks like this:
Now we can see some more interesting figures. Direct traffic (medium: none) has resulted in 27 registrations and referrals have resulted in 42. Not bad. But a quick glance at the figures show that cpc traffic is quite high. I don’t see many conversions here. To put things into perspective, some simple data crunching is necessary. In Excel, I added two Key Performance Indicators – Bounce Rate and Goals/Visit.
Now, the data is starting to become meaningful. The metric Goals/Visit puts things into perspective. On the low end, cpc and organic traffic is worrying. On the positive side, email traffic is converting very well, although the traffic numbers for this medium are too small to be meaningful. As a web analyst, the clear priority here is in optimizing cpc and organic traffic to generate more conversions.
The next step is to drill down into the cpc and organic traffic. Since I am running a cpc campaign with several thousand keywords and virtually no one signed up, I believe the problem is with my landing pages. In another analysis I also noticed that most of the landing page for organic searches are the same as for cpc traffic. So, my landing pages clearly need work. Had the number of conversions been higher, I would take a look at specific keywords and ads that are converting well or especially poorly. My focus for optimization would then be on the SEM side – such as writing better ad copy or using better keywords. In this case, I think the problem is not with the quality of my ads but my landing pages. Now the fun begins. It is time to take a closer look at my landing pages. But that is the subject of another post!
