Analytics and Feeds
This past week I deployed both Google Analytics and FeedBurner on my blog site. FeedBurner, as I knew from implementations at a previous job, can be tricky to set up properly (in particular, the Apache redirects) and also is hard to debug because changes take a while to propogate to their site from your feeds. But once up and running, I can add all sorts of functionality to my feeds, such as pinging different aggregators when new posts are added and even a rotating banner that scrolls through titles of recent posts to be used as a signature in emails. FeedBurner also gives me rudimentary stats on subscribers to my feed.
But far more interesting is Google Analytics. While I’m using this only out of curiousity and not for anything like marketing, site conversion goals, or ad campaigns, I have been very surprised to see the amount of traffic I’m getting as well as from where that traffic is coming. Granted, a large portion of visits are from search bots, I’m also getting genuine vistors from all over the globe. I can see where they are coming from, whether they are new or returning visitors, what pages they are viewing, as well as lots of other interesting little factoids (all gathered using first-party cookies and Javacript code). It’s also amazing to me that this is free.
Here is a sampling of the kind of data I’m seeing for my site using a date rang of 9/1/2006 to 9/13/2006:
September 13th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Hmmm…you’re on my wavelength today. I spent a good part of the morning ripping apart my Google Analytics reports for the past couple months to support a proposed IT change (sell off a domain).
It’s amazing the stuff you can come up with. In the past week I have:
Identified 4 potential customers researching products (our stuff is big ticket enterprise apps)
Identified one competitor evaluating products for which they have no direct match (are they planning a new product?
Provided proof that an off the radar project has gotten legs.
Plus, it’s a tremendous tool for those of us that work in metrics obsessed environments. Tons of stats ready to be bent to support any of my passing marketing fancies.
September 13th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
Thanks for the excellent comments, Mark. (If you don’t know Mark, David Churbuck describes him as “one of the smartest guys on the topic of publishing technologies”. He’s all that and more.) These all are fine examples of the power and usefulness of Google Analytics that I am not currently able to provide. My use, again, is just experimential and based on my own personal blog stats. You show a far broader reach and understanding of how this can be used for real business solutions.
I had some experience with Omniture at my last job and know that many people rely on it and that it also costs a lot of money. How do the two stack up against one another? Any comments out there?
September 16th, 2006 at 7:47 am
[...] [update: Chris Murray, a very smart coder and sysadmin, has some thoughts on blog analytics here.] [...]
September 16th, 2006 at 10:49 am
[...] In the past week, I’ve spent a lot of time ripping apart Site Traffic Statistics, as well as planning metrics packages for a new site. Strangely enough, both David Churbuck (formerly of Forbes.com and V.P. of Internet Marketing at Lenovo) and Chris Murray (former Director of Technology at CXO Media) both blogged about metrics. Here’s my take on why analytics are important to all site owners, and why conversely you should not allow yourself to get bogged down in the details. [...]