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DEMYSTIFYING WEB ANALYTICS
Using Web Analytics to Grow Your Business
March 2009Gregg Holtsclaw Director, Online MarketingDelphic Sage
 
 
© Copyright 2008, Delphic Sage, LLC
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Demystifying Web Analytics White Paper
 March 2009
 
DEMYSTIFYING ANALYTICS
 Analytics represents a wide range of disciplines and methodologies. The focus of this white paper is totarget anticipating change, increasing revenue with analytics use, and general considerations forimplementation with commonly available packaged applications such as Google Analytics or WebTrends. We will focus mostly toward on-site analytics, the measurement of events on your site, ratherthan measuring off-site metrics such as buzz, share of voice, or visibility. While a variety of tools and nearly infinite applications for those tools exist, most of the commonpackages share similar basic features that you should consider in regards to the whitepaper. Whenselecting tools there are really three factors to consider: cost, what types of metrics you intend tomeasure, and ease of use. Cost is fairly straightforward as a budget can only stretch so far. The types of metrics you need greatly determine your tool set. For example, an eCommerce site might find quite alot of value from Omniture
, but a blog really wouldn’t need that level of analysis. Ease
of use means both implementation and business user experience. As always, the more planning and effort you put into analytics, the more action oriented your results will be. This white paper will help guide you in that effort.
USING ANALYTICS TO ANTICIPATE CHANGE
 A common misconception about web analytics is that analytics can only be used to determine pastevents. Not true. In fact, there are at least two extremely viable applications of analytics to helpanticipate change and plan future marketing efforts.The first way to anticipate change using analytics is to cook analytics into your competitive analysisprocess.
 What does that mean? Before answering that question, let’s review the
three most commonmethods I run into for quick and dirty competitive analysis:
 
Spying on your competitors.
Statbrain, Spyfu, and a variety of SEO Tools fall into this category.Essentially, if you can get an idea of where visitors are coming from and what content is on a
competitor’s site, you can make a tastier omelet f 
or that audience to sample, and watch your trafficand conversion events to see what works. While not an exact science, this is often the most common
approach I see employed, arguably because it blends your “gut” with anecdotal evidence.
 
 
Content Analysis.
Usually two methods of content analysis are used to determine popular site
content on a competitor’s site. One method is to check in
-bound links to a domain or page via aspecific
SEO tool, or possibly just using “link: 
www.yourcompetitorssite.com/page
” in Google to
determine volume and quality of in-bound links to identify heavily consumed content. The other
 
 
© Copyright 2008, Delphic Sage, LLC
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Demystifying Web Analytics White Paper
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version would be
to monitor your competitor’s Google News, Technorati, or other mentions to
determine content that is quickly being consumed.
 
 
Data mining or interest bucketing.
A measurement of similarity. What content is similar to existingcontent, but not represented? For example, in the eCommerce world, this would result in cross-sellingand related products add-ons.
The application of this data is probably very clear now, but in order to cook analytics into your
competitive analysis it’s best to look inward and then outward. In theory, if you are currently in
 business and have a conversion on your site, whether consumption of content, submission of a lead, orpurchase in an eCommerce environment then you have an initial data point to begin to track against.For example, if you are a provider of services in the financial area, and you measure success againstlead generation for a product line, you can use analytics to track where on your site you recorded theconversion. You may then measure that content and page structure against other pages that you areusing to convert customers and extrapolate
similar content that might be as effective. What’s different
about the content? Is it the layout, text, or the path that leads to the content? Are there similarities inthe traffic source of the higher converting visitors? These questions will be the same questions that you try to guess against when it comes to your competitors, so having your own benchmark will help you evaluate your intelligence gathering. Anticipating change becomes a factor because you can identify trends in your own competitiveinformation, for example seasonal shifts in consumer purchase patterns, and use those benchmarks toformulate actionable plans. A common example of this has been the online shoe industry targetingspring sales of sandals and other beach wear to the 18-24 female demographic (Spring Break travelers).The second method of anticipating change through analytics is to drill deeper into your customerengagement to find out what content might be gaining, or losing, relevancy over time. A standardapplication of this idea would be seen in general blog posts. Posts that are new tend to be consumedrapidly at first, and lose relevance over time. However, the opposite often proves true when a nichetopic is approached. For example, a blog post discussing types of worms used for vermicomposting(composting in buckets using worms to break down organic matter) at redwormcomposting.com hasgrown in popularity steadily. In order to measure a blog post common ways to gauge user engagementcould be through RSS subscriptions, comments, views, or linkbacks. A quick summary of three other metrics you should establish to help predict change through analytics:
 
On-site search trends.
Easily the most robust data that gets completely ignored. For some reason,people assume that the keywords that brings visitors to a site are more important that the keywords
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