Analytics with Kyle James

Kyle directs us to his blog doteduguru.com says all this info is on his blog.

Says we are important. We could put a redirect to a porn site from the homepage and have more of an impact than any speech the campus pres could give. LOL

Getting students to our school is #1. Other things we have to determine what's important for our site like RSS feeds, video, etc. Must define those before look at any data/analytics.

Terms:
visits, unique visits, etc.

Misunderstood terms:
pageviews--what's good? 3 or 5? pageviews are irrelevant.
time on site--there's no way to know how long anyone was on the last page. the avg time on site doesn't acct for last page
bounce rate--bounce means they come then leave.
exit--they come to site and visit other pages then leave. leaving to subdomain would register as a bounce.
traffic types--direct (bookmarks too), search
benchmarking--Alexa, compete, quantcast are free services
edurank.nucloud.com--Kyle and friends are doing this, is in "alpha-beta" version. :-) says to check it out and let him know of any bugs you find.

UPDATE 9:56 AM

10/90 rule--10% of budget on tools and 90% on people.

Many use google analytics in this session. Can track more than one domain in google analytics.

Sitescan and WASP are recommended by Kyle.

Data overload!!
must segment and filter. Can set up to 100 profiles within google analytics by city or dept.
set up site search within GA.

set up a sandbox profile and a raw data one so can get all raw data.

standardize your data: capitalization, www --to use or not to use. make sure so set up for both.

able to filter subdomains, and exclude IP filter.

UPDATE 10:10 AM

can filter by country, region, city. says the order of filters are important, so will have to play with that to get it right.

full referral URL filter is available

destination URL tagging is important and easy to set up. Great for campaigns. can send to short URL then redirect to landing page so can track the short URL to see how campaign is faring.

Can track links to docs such as a PDF viewbook, or videos, flash. He thinks this report is still a little buggy, but worth paying attention to.

Can tag audience segments and is great for email marketing campaigns. Says he hasn't used this one, but if anyone has he'd like to hear about it.

Site Search Report can help you to see where the search was started and how many times they had to redfine that search can help you know what is difficult to find on your site. These things may need to be made more apparent.

Also helps with terminology: residence halls vs campus dorms. Can see what users are calling things. Can tell if they got frustrated and bounced after trying to search.

Can tell what search engine used outside and what keywords or pages are brining in lots of traffic.

UPDATE 10:15 PM

page titles are important for SEO. referring sites report is helpful.the 404 error page report is great. can add some code to those page.

"It's all about your user, guys."

Can track more than our site. Facebook or even offline campaigns. When send out URLs on offline ads, can track what is effective and track which URLs are being used.

Tracking blogs: Feedburner and ShareThis
Can monitor social media to see what's being used: facebook for college kids but myspace seems for those that don't go--his experience anyway.

Always test.
Don't get caught up in numbers, look at the trends.
Set up a reporting schedule and track key metrics.
Set up goals.

UPDATE 10:25 AM

Q: How to help marketing people understand the data in the reports?
A: Audience member: we provide a custom report that makes sense to them. Kyle: can have a report scheduled to send to particular people on specific dates

Q: how to get tracking code?
A: Kyle: adds it himself. Can drop the code into the template near the footer tag