One of the good aspects to working in a consultancy is you don’t have to be good at everything.  I would like to think I can read GA code ok, am pretty good at configuring profiles, very good at analysing the data and with all this, quite happy to get someone else to work on [...]

Everyone likes to know if the people visiting their website are seeing it for the first time or are regulars.  This is even more important when they are paying for the traffic, if the money is going on acquiring new visitors (potential new customers) or is it just providing a convenient entry point for people [...]

While I generally begin to look at web analytics data at a weekly or monthly level, there are times when it is useful to drill down to daily numbers.  This can be when examining the reason for a change in the data or simply to review the previous day’s performance.  But an issue arises which [...]

I have recently been working on a project with Bowen Craggs for a client’s corporate website, defining the value of the website to the client using a Balanced Scorecard. This includes assigning values to specific pages within the website based on how well they are performing using web analytics data.  Before the project could proceed, [...]

One of the tasks that can be performed using web analytics is to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular page on a website. The ideal method of doing so would be for every single viewer of the page to tell you if it was useful or not. For a variety of reasons, you are not [...]

I am guessing there would have been a fair few questions asked this morning why websites didn’t perform as well as expected in the UK over the weekend, possibly down around 3% to 5% against last week.  If the usual suspects (online marketing, server going down) have been eliminated, then the reason in many cases [...]

As I discussed in my first couple of posts, there are some basic metrics that I look at when evaluating the performance of a website e.g. unique visitors, page views, etc. I am going to describe here how to set up a report in Sitestat that contains all these basic metrics. This report can be [...]

So you have set up some weekly reports, focusing on key metrics – whatever is most important to your business/website in understanding its performance. Monday morning, you crawl out of bed, into work and update your reports so you can check out this performance (hopefully at the touch of a button). But something has happened, [...]