1. Which pages are most worth promoting.
2. How you can improve on your future content.
But how can you identify your best content? With this article, I’ll avoid weighing in on which metric in particular is most important (be it sales, pages per visit, etc). Instead, the focus will be on how to interpret your analytics without relying on “most” as an indication of “best.”
For example, a page that results in more sales may simply be doing so, because it has more visits. That says nothing about whether it’s the piece of content most worth promoting.
This is going to be an advanced article, involving spreadsheets and standard deviations, so it might not be for everybody. I’ll try to keep it step-by-step and fairly easy to comprehend but, even then, it’s worth asking how much time you want to invest in analytics, as opposed to outreach and other activities.
Take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, and choose your time wisely. This is going to be most useful for sites with a decent amount of resources and a lot of analytics data to work with. With that in mind, let’s get started.
Analytics
- Start by getting as much data as possible. Head up to the top right portion of analytics and expand your date range. I would advise expanding it to include everything from the day you first set up analytics on your site up to the present day.
- In the left sidebar, click through content, site content and landing pages.
- Stick to comparing apples with apples. At the top left corning of analytics, click advanced segments and select search traffic, then click apply.
- Make sure the data you’re going to export includes more than just the traffic. Above your graph you will see a visits vs. select a metric. Click on select a metric and choose your metric of choice, such as pages/visit.
Building Your Spreadsheets
There’s no denying it, this step’s a pain. If you can build an application to pull this off for you, I’d advise doing it. The steps below assume you selected pages/visit, but it could be a metric.
- Make sure you are only viewing search traffic (or a different source if you prefer, just make sure all the data is from the same source). Click on the page at the top of the list, then go to the top of the page and click export. For a spreadsheet, you will typically want to select CSV.
- Open up your CSV and scroll way down the page to the bottom of your day, visits, and pages/visit stats. In the cell below your pages/visit data, type “=stdev(” and highlight the data from this column, then type “)” and hit enter. Make sure that you only highlight the data that comes after analytics started recording data from the page. This will give you the standard deviation of the sample, which is basically a measure of how much the pages/visit fluctuates.
- Repeat this process for all the landing pages that you want to consider. I know, it’s a pain and not always worth it.
- Go back to analytics, and export a list of all the pages you are considering.
- Create a “standard deviation” column. Copy the standard deviation of each page and paste it into this column.
- Create a “confidence interval” column. A confidence interval tells you how reliable your data is so that you can avoid favoring statistical flukes. Excel has a function for this. At the top of this column, type “=confidence(”
- Excel’s “confidence” function requires three values. The first one is the “alpha,” which determines how accurate you want the results to be. To understand what this means, if you type “0.01” you can expect one out of every 100 of your results to actually fall somewhere outside of your confidence interval. There’s a good chance you don’t want more than one fluke in your data. If you were comparing 50 pages, then, you would want your alpha to be 1/50, or 0.02, or smaller. Type “;” after you enter your alpha.
- The next thing Excel needs is your standard deviation. Click on the cell from your standard deviation column, and type “;”
- The last thing Excel needs is the sample size. In this case, it should be from your visits column. After you click on the cell from this column, type “)” and hit enter.
- Click on the square at the bottom of your “confidence interval” cell, and drag it down to the bottom of your data.
- 11. Now create one more column, called “minimum pages/visit.” Subtract your confidence interval column from your pages/visit column to get this value.
- Select the full table and sort your spreadsheet in descending order by “minimum pages/visit.”
- That was a chore, wasn’t it?
Why can’t you just sort it this way in analytics? Well, you can, but the problem is that analytics (and this infuriates me) doesn’t offer any data on statistical significance. When you sort the pages by pages/visit, most of the pages you see have just one or two visits.
If you have limited resources and don’t have time to use the method discussed above, it is possible to filter the results by a higher number of visits. For example: Above the results, click on advanced, and change landing page to visits. Adjust the command to say include visits greater than 50, or whichever number you feel works best.
The problem with this is you are forced to “feel” your way through the data, and work off your hunches. Is 2.6 pages per visit with 56 visits really better than 2.2 pages per visit with 1,036 visits, or is there a good chance it’s a statistical fluke? You have no way of knowing without using the procedure discussed above.
You will have to weigh your options to decide where your resources and time are most valuable. Sometimes it’s best to simply identify what appear to be your 10 best pages and focus on them, knowing that some of them are probably flukes. As you promote those pages you will collect more data so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Don’t forget to pass this along if you found it useful.
Carter Bowles, Post from: SiteProNews:
