The Acid Test

Ok. Here's the acid test. You managed to create a Google Analytics account, generate the javascript code for your site, and place the code at the bottom of your site. So what's next?

Sign into your account and go to your dashboard which will look like this. I'm tracking several sites so yours may have only one listing.


If you look under the status column you should have a green check mark - that means you successfully installed the Google code and Google is receiving data.

IF you have a yellow triangle you're in trouble, but don't panic. Give the site a few hours and come back later to check it. Sometimes it takes awhile for Google to retrieve the data, figure out it's yours, and place it on your dashboard.

IF you still have the triangle after a few hours, you will have to go back and install the code again. Maybe, you placed it in the wrong area. In any event, Google has a lot of help information so take a look if you get stuck.

Ok, so let's assume you have a nice fat green check mark. Now comes the fun part. Really, I mean that.

Click on the "View Report" link and almost like magic, Google has created an analytics dashboard for you complete with a month's worth of data from the day you open the report. Of course, if you placed your code a few days ago you will see very little data. You can change the date range or make it just one day by clicking on the date.



There's a lot you can do here and you'll have to play with it. I'm just going to highlight what you first see for now because I know your brain is starting to hurt again.

The first element is a nice line graph showing the number of visits by day. This shows you which days visitors decided to come to your site and how many.

The next section is Site Usage. This shows visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and the percentage of new visits or visitors. Most of this is self explanatory except maybe bounce rate. This shows the percentage of visitors who stayed less than 10 seconds. That means they found your site, glanced through it and left - they were not interested. A higher bounce rate will tell you something on the site is driving your visitors away. Ideally, you want a low bounce rate.

The average time on site tells you just that - how long the average visitor stayed. If the average is over a minute or so you can assume they liked what they saw and read something there.

The last metric tells you the percentage of new or first time visitors. Obviously, you want this to be high because it will indicate that whatever you are doing on other sites, it is driving traffic to your site. But, a high visits number and a low percentage of first time visitors will show the majority of your visitors are loyal and make repeat visits.

Image via CrunchBase

Ok, are you passed out yet? Just a few more metrics to cover and you're off the hook.

Visitors Overview on the left is just that, but the Map Overlay is really cool. Click on any country in dark green and it will show where your visitors are from by country and by state or region. I find most of my visitors are from my home state and that makes perfect sense since most of my friends and relatives are here.

The last two sections are highly valuable in determining what's working and what is not on your site. The Traffic Sources Overview will show you cool metrics like the percentage of direct traffic (visitors type in your site address), the referring sites (where you have links on other sites to your site), the search engines used to find your site and the keywords visitors used in those search engines. All valuable information that will tell you how effective you are in driving traffic to your site.

The Content Overview tells you which content on your site is getting the most visits or interest. This is great for blogs because it will tell you which post is getting read the most and you can determine what subject matter the majority of your visitors like best. It is also valuable for multiple pages on a web site to determine the most interesting pages.

You can also customize the dashboard to show different reports if you don't like the default offering, and you can easily export any report to a PDF, CSV, XML or TSV file in addition to emailing them.

I think that's enough for now. Go pass out.

Ok, so you think you are ready to try web analytics?

If you can copy and paste that’s all you need to know to get started. You’ll be the dog chasing ghosts instead of your favorite pet.

Ready? Go to Google Analytics and create an account. If you have a Google account for gmail or another Google feature you may be able to use that ID and password. If not just sign up.

On the next page, create an web page account.

Fill in the fields on the next page for your website or blog.

You’re almost there. After you finish with the account creation the JavaScript code is generated and you are ready to copy and paste.

Ok, now here is where you have to pay attention. Read everything on the page especially this sentence just above the JavaScript window: “Copy the following code block into every webpage you want to track immediately before the tag.”

You’re brain is hurting now, right? Take an aspirin. If you have never seen or created HTML language then might as well be hieroglyphics.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, the universal code read by every web browser on the planet telling it what to display on your computer screen. Since your brain is hurting I captured the link to the HTML definition on Wikipedia in case you wanted to know more.

The tag tells the browser that it’s the end of the body of your web page. The Google JavaScript code goes right in front of the tag and there is a good reason for this location.

Quickly, I’ll tell you because I know your brain is overloading – when you request a web page, the browser begins reading the HTML code and loading the elements of the page including cool pieces of information called meta data which is like the inside scoop on the web page and browser. Other pieces of information from the browser are also there like where the person was before they entered the site, the name of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and other bits of juicy data. No personal or identifying information, mind you.

While the page loads, the Google JavaScript records all this juicy information and sends it to a server somewhere in Google land with your account numbers and stores it there for about a year or so. When you access your Google Analytics account, it pulls all the data and compiles into nice graphs and charts on the analytics web site.

There are a lot of other things going on, but I wanted to give you the simple version of how web analytics works. You’re probably passed out by now. Let’s take a rest and continue another day. Next will be how to put the code on your web site and how to make sure it works.

So what is Web Analytics and what has it got to do with writing a book?

A lot, especially, if you plan to sell your work at the biggest market place on the planet – the Internet.

Web Analytics is simply that – the analysis of the web in such a way that it enables you to discover your market, tantalize them with your work, and convince them to buy whatever it is that you are selling.

You can find additional definitions at these and other web analytics blogs if you like:

Google Analytics Blog at http://analytics.blogspot.com

Occam’s Razor at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

Web Analytics Demystified at http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog

There’s more, but we would need a lot more space and you would be bored scrolling forever to the bottom of the page. Just search for “Web Analytics” and be done with it.

Ok. You are still asking the same question: what has this got to do with writing a book?

With the explosion of electronic books all over the Internet, with the dire state of the economy and with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle 2 electronic book reader, the Stanza book reading application for the iPhone and others like it, more and more people are buying their entertainment from the Internet and this includes books. E-books are cheaper than printed ones, they can be read almost anywhere if you have a reading device, and people save gas and have more time for finding a job if they are out of work.

That means if there are a million books for sale on the Internet today, there may be two million by the end of the year. So the question is how are you going to make your work stand out against those numbers?

If you are lucky and have the marketing muscle of a major New York publisher or the brand awareness of a James Patterson, you don’t have much to do. But if you are like ninety nine point nine percent of the unknown aspiring and published authors you need an edge that only web analytics can provide for you.

You first need to use a web analytics tool and it is a good idea to start with ones that are free like Google Analytics. There are others like Yahoo Analytics, Microsoft Analytics and Omniture, but some cost money and some are not easy to use unless you are a web analytics guru.

The Google Analytics will help you, “measure, collect, analyze and report Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web site usage,” according to Wikipedia.

In essence, Google Analytics and other tools are like my dog, Nickie – when a visitor comes to your site, the tool senses them and tracks their activities. No, the tools don’t bark – my dog does that, but analytics will tell you things like where your visitors came from, what links they clicked on, how long they stayed, and where and when they left.

I know, you’re probably saying so what. What does all this information mean?

A lot. If you knew the search phrase a visitor used or the website or search engine that referred them to your site, you can understand their intentions. For example, if a lot of your visitors used the keyword phrase, “free novels” and one or both of those words were on your site, you can assume these visitors are looking for free novels. If there are a significant number of these visitors coming to your site, you may want to consider offering one of your novels as a free download for a limited time to keep visitors on your site. Most likely once the visitor realized there were no free novels, they would instantly leave.

With the time spent on site or TSOS metric, you could see if visitors were staying. This would indicate that you have something that interests them and maybe they may decide to register or buy something. Another analytics metric, Page Depth or clicks per page would indicate if your visitors liked your home page enough to explore other pages on your site.

And if your visitors registered or bought one of your products, you would have a conversion rate metric because you converted your visitors to do what you intended them to do – register or buy your product.

It’s like buying a house. Your real estate agent may show you one that you are not thrilled about because of its design, but after you go inside, see the bonus room, the sauna in the backyard you fall in love with the house and make an offer. Your website is similar.

Ok, I think that’s enough for now. Your brain is probably hurting right now.

The Dog is Chasing Ghosts

Every so often, our labradoodle, Nickie, will confidently stare into a corner of a room with no windows and bark repeately for several minutes.

"What is the dog barking at?" my wife would ask.

"Ghosts. I think the dog is chasing ghosts." I say.

She raises her eyebrows and her face says, "maybe," and the dog stops barking and we go about doing whatever it was we were doing.

Whether my dog is barking at ghosts or not, something is there, something triggered the keen senses of my pet whether it was a sound, a smell or a noise.

The Internet is similar in that of all the millions of users out there, you can't see them or touch them, but you know they are there. And if you are involved with the Internet with a website, a blog or paid advertising, everyone wants to attract as many users as possible to visit our websites, read our blogs or buy our products.

So like my dog, Nickie, we too are chasing ghosts whether you want to call them that or not, but we don't want to chase them away - we want to invite them in.

And that is the hard part and what this blog is all about.