your tips is very useful

thanks

So what is “Click Density”? It is the ability of any web analytics tool to efficiently show where people click (as a percent of page views) on the web page. It looks like this in a good tool:

At a glance you know exactly which links are more “interesting / important / relevant” to your customers. This is what I was referring in the post, this report is a great way even for a novice to understand what is going on on the web page. No need to hover mouse, no need to think too hard.

But it gets better in a good tool.

Now I have gone in and created a quick segmentation of my most interesting traffic, from Search Engines. What you see below, on the same Click Density report, what is interesting / important / relevant to Search Engine traffic as compared to All Visitors.

Now this gets fun (ok I am a geek : )) because turns our Search Engine traffic is more interested in different links than All Visitors. Imagine the optimization of pages you could do if you could only understand to this level how different segments of traffic react to links on your pages.

You can begin to create a website that is optimized to people who are meeting the objectives you have set for your website.

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.
PS: Sorry for the delay in replying I was on vacation and I needed access to my blog clicktracks data to use in the examples above.

Also, thanks much for the great content. I love this blog. You are doing a fantastic job. I know it must be a lot of work.

I wait until Friday afternoon to read as it is my weekly reward. :)

Meant to comment earlier on your excellent post on Small Business Web Analytics. Every one of the reports you mention is very helpful - and most packages will provide the six initial reports in some form or another.

I don’t understand my clients’ business like they do (and in a Small Business your client is sometimes the person who created the business). Most of the time, they don’t know Web Analytics (or maybe they think they know a little bit - and those clients can be more work, actually) - and what they really want is intelligence - they want to know Why something works/doesn’t.

Also, most of the time, everyone wants free traffic from Search Engines - and while it’s always easy to get ranking for 3,4,5 work queries (there’s much less competition and much more relevance to your specific content) it’s much, much harder to do well on a one or two word query.

Take one of the hardest queries to rank well on …”Water”. Do you think even Perrier could rank well for that? (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=water) There are 1.46 Billion pages in Google’s index for that word.

Some of my clients were/are intrested in “house plans”, “home plans”, “floor plans” as the main keywords - and one of my clients was in postion 8/9/10 for a time for “house plans” and 5 for floor plans. When they dropped from postion 9/10 to postion 12/13/14 - they lost 100 visits a day (judging from LiveStats.NET analytics).

But I’d look at it the other way - the client briefly gained 100 visits a day they would not have had because of the first page listing. My point being that every small business owner would like to be #1 or at least on the first page of results - but usually don’t want to change anything about the site and once being on the first page - don’t keep up the SEO.

And as a friend and mentor of mine, Bill Hunt, brought up to me a couple of years ago - when you’re on the top, everyone tries to take you out-your a target for all your competitors. ONce your on the top of search results - you need a plan to stay on top and to defend your position - all of this is usually beyound what SMB clients are willing to do.

So, Web Analytics really should do the next best thing - the best thing really, focus on helping to make the site better by observing Visitor Intent and improving to the site - which, by the way, also helps with Search Engine Visibility and…Viral Marketing.

Your suggestions of PPC usage are both good and I agree with them. Think of my stress on SEO coming from two reasons:

1) For SMB’s ppc is a very complex activity and it can get very expensive very quickly. Hence in the actual interview I suggested that immerse yourself in SEO, you are building for the long term, but also read up on SEM (I had recommended Bill Hunt’s book) and then get into it.

2) Almost everyone I know (and maybe I am hanging with the wrong crowd) is doing SEM in a very sub optimal fashion. Often because you blow money and people show up. So think of me a small little voice trying to counter-balance this massive imbalance against SEO and for SEM. : )

Your suggestion of using PPC to test for Organic term performance is a excellent one.

I am looking forward to reading the book. Thanks so much for that and for your thoughtful comments, it adds so much value to my original post.

- I’m wondering why you suggest Hitwise & the YSM keyword selector tool, but not Wordtracker? Wordtracker does offer short-term subscriptions that are pretty cheap. Just curious if there’s something I’m missing…

- When you mention organic vs. PPC, you are of course right on the ball in terms of organic delivering more results in the long-term (sans long-term advertising budget). However, PPC is growing & growing because it provides such a straightforward conversion tracking opportunity! My hope is that free options like Google Analytics will bring some of that accountability back to the organic side.

- As an aside, I love to use PPC as a research tool for an organic campaign. PPC allows speed and ease-of-control so that you can get some quick information on how keywords might perform in organic results, before you make a big labor investment in reworking your content for chosen terms. Using your #2 analytic with organic results is doing the same thing, but might not provide as much opportunity for testing a variety of terms. Or were you thinking that this would include PPC traffic?

best regards (look for my book in the mail!)

-Gradiva
http://www.yourseoplan.com/

It is interesting that you did not say standard metrics like “conversion rate” which is primary recommendation of the KPI approach. Jumping directly to KPI’s is probably what distracts most “analysts” from doing some of the basic things identified in the article (basic but really critical).

All in all a nice complete article about how to approach web analytics and web acquisition strategy (with your recommendations on SEO).