Curious About the Mountain of Traffic

Sometimes, I look at my blog statistics that are built into Wordpress.

Today, for the last 20 days, I see this Wordpress reporting of HITs:

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Naturally, I am curious about that mountain of traffic this past few days but since the WP data is so flakey, I jump to Google analytics for that blog and look at the last 30 days:

hmmm, no sign of any traffic event in the last few days.​

Looking back at the WP data, I notice that while visits had the mountain, the visitors did not. So there was maybe one person who returned to the blog over and over and read the entire blog a few times creating lots of visits but not lots of visitors.

Except, GA shows no corresponding increase in either page views or sessions that supports this idea.

So:

- I go back to WP stats are flakey, they are counting some sort of bot activity that GA does not

- WP stats are flakey, what the heck is a "hit" anyway and why when I look closely, are they reporting last 20 days?

Many More Readers!

I just took a peek at the statistics relating to the views and readers of this blog.

Last week, I noticed that we had 99,854  page views.

Today, it's 100,126 page views!

That's a lot of new page views over this weekend. I'm thrilled and humbled.

Given all those readers,  I'll dig down and find some more interesting insights to share with you.

But right now, I'm watching the Oscars.

And looking at one of my other blogs that has no readers, I think I'll do a call out to my blog on homeschooling education, scope and sequence.  

Viral Lift Calculation from Addthis

I'm unimpressed, or at least confused, by Addthis' analytics. I'm new to Addthis.com and generally, I like the breakdown by service, some of the ability to look at timeframe , and the overall presentation.

But the table about effectiveness should, in this user's humble opinion, provide this: 
- why not allow people to pick a specific time period so they can compare March vs February?  Or March 2015 vs March 2014?
- overall statistics including: number of page views, number of shares, percentage of people who shared on each page
- the value of these shares which is what they call the viral uplift

I would think that the columns information that I'd like to get are:
- page impressions of the addthis.com gadget
- number of shares - total or by service
- the percent of shares
- number of click throughs from the shares by other users
- the percent

Instead, there's just this viral lift concept which I think is just the last point. I think.
I'll go ask this question on their forum and see what they say....
I've posted it but, I'm not sure that I did the signature right. Probably, I'll be banned now...sigh.
http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Note - I can't find my post and haven't tried logging in again.
Generally, our sites took over direct management of our social media icons ourselves.
We lost the viral uplift calculation but we never figured out how to use it anyway.

Urchin vs Googl Analytics: Score One for the Old School

Query - Name a very useful feature of old Urchin (analytical tool) that newfangled Analytics doesn't do?

Answer - Track downloads.

Urchin was bought by Google a number of years ago and their software was upgraded and repurposed to Analytics which we all use.  But many of our hosting companies still provide for free the old Urchin software. Recently, when I wanted to track the PDF downloads from my site, I found that Analytics somehow doesn't have this feature (or I just couldn't find it) so I fired up old Urchin and found how many people had downloaded my handy-dandy ebook, Learning about Homeschooling.  It's free, take a gander.

Google Analytics - not really working, yet

For a little over a month, we've been trying to implement google analytics on Time4Learning. So far, I don't really feel that we've learned that much. The good news is that:
- the number of conversions from Google Analytics matches (within a few percentage points) what our shopping cart/credit card system is showing
- we are beginning to get a sense of which of our referring sites (aka ads and partner sites) are contributing not just in terms of traffic but conversions.

It just occurred to me that we don't know if the we are correctly tracking the PPC traffic. We installed tracking codes on our Google, Yahoo, & MSN PPC campaigns so we can track that traffic separately. I wonder if the the PPC results from within those programs matches the Webanalytics results?

The big problem is that 70% of our conversions are being tracked by Google Analytics as "direct", meaning they found our site through typing in our URL or through a bookmark. I simply don't believe that since our users report, as part of the signup process, how they heard about us and we get around 70% reporting that they found us through the search engines.

I also noticed that we got NO conversions out of our top 16 keyphrases from natural search.
This feels unlikely to be true.

When we dug into the statistics, I was told because of the iframe coding on our demos, the sessions could not be tracked. (which is why the iframe demos were recoded with java script).
This would explain why two thirds of our conversions are classed as "direct entry".

But, this doesn't make sense. Google analytics, much like PPC, is primarily cookie-based. This means that whether the session was trackable or not, google analytics ought to be able to track the conversions back to the original entry to the site. So even if a user found us through natural search, bookmarked us, return a week later and signed up, Google analytics should report them as natural search.




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Google Analytics - at last

One of the projects that we've never faced up to was the installation of webanalytics. There were a number of reasons for this chief including we didn't know how to do it and we didn't want to do it wrong. Plus, once installed, it creates a lot of opportunity to analyse and improve things (ie a lot of work) which we didn't really have the staff for. So we postponed it until now.

Once we decided we had to do it this quarter, we started looking a bit more energetically for some staff to help. And we got lucky. Enter Zib. She seems to know her stuff. And she's implemented and used Google Analytics before. I was a little worried since she's used to working as part of a deep highly skilled team and I'm not always sure that our inhouse staff can do everything that needs to be done.

So far, everythings great. We're cleaning up old tracking codes, installing new ones, defining "goals" to track etc etc and it looks like, we'll be analyzing the performance of all of our ads, sales funnels, landing pages, and whatnot before the end of the month.

Am I pleased? Oh, yes.




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Webanalytics 1 - Back Story

I'm getting geared up to install Google Analytics on our site: Time4Learning. I'm trying to learn enough so that we do it right the first time. Have I got some history? Oh, yea.

Adwords Conversion Measuring
I've long been haunted by a mistake that we made when we set up Google adwords. Adwords lets you set up several types of conversions to measure. In our case, we wanted to measure how many people signed up for our free newsletter and how many people joined (ie paid for) our educational learning service. BUT, all types of conversions are not equally supported by Adwords tool chain. We made our most important conversion, the payment, to equal the variable "sales count". It seemed logical at the time. But, as we worked with adwords, they have all sorts of automated tool support for one type of conversion, unfortunately, the one that we set up as signing up for our newsletter. Over time, we've stopped even tracking newsletter sign-ups and we continue to invest all sorts of time in optimizing our "sales count" conversions by keyword, by bid, by landing page, by type of demo shown. For instance, should we bid more for the term learning games or educational games? Which one converts at a higher rate? And can we change it by having landing pages optimized for those terms.

Sadly, the conversion that we care about requires us to download reports from Adwords, not to use their convenient tools. This problem chews about about 15 extra minutes everytime we have the slightest question on adwords and keywords. After three years, that's alot of time and more importantly, it's alot of research that we didn't bother to do since we tend to be in a hurry.

Other Time4Learning history to consider in setting up analytics.

We have adwords under one google account, webmaster tools under another. Which one should we put analytics in? Answer: Adwords. there's more synergy of tools.

We have more than just one site that we care about. For instance, many visitors (we think) visit our parents forum which is hosted on Time4Learning.net as part of the process of checking us out. How would we track this?

We sign alot of people for our newsletter and we hope, that it is step towards signing up with us eventually, We 'd like to track that.

Lastly, we have several types of pages: .htm, .shtml, .html, .aspx, and some secure ones (https). We use includes. How does this affect the implementation process?

So stick with us as we work through these problems. A real live case study. More reality blogging. And of course, if any of you have great advice on these questions, I'm interested. I have hired a SEO guru to come visit us periodically at "lawerly" rates per hour. After session one, I'm pleased.



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