p.s: I found Tip #3 to be an eye opener, since I haven’t noticed this option in analytics before - thanks again !

Tal.

Stephane: Great answer! I believe your hypothesis is correct.

I was initially thrown by that number (71.79%, delta of +4.92%) was becuase if traffic went up by 45% (!!) then how come the delta over prior month went up only 4.92%. I would have expected the % New Visits to be much much higher. Say 90% becuase of that surge of extra traffic.

But perhaps I got a surge of folks who last came in Dec.

Thanks for playing!

Joe: You are right, I love the sustained boost, that particular post, which also got on stumbleupon, delivered a slow but consistent surge of traffic. Sweet!

Jonghee: I met some of your peers at Alan’s event yesterday, they are delightful!

Alec: I encourage you to checkout this post:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/03/benchmarking-now-available-plus.html

More than anything you’ll notice that the Users get complete control over the settings and you are in control. That’s great progress (and a first in the industry, on the free side atleast, I believe).

There benchmarks will only available after a enough websites opt in and only like sized websites are compared and formulas are applied to ensure results you see have a measure of confidence.

Great question, please see the link above and it lists two other links that provide deep insights.

Bryan: Great call to arms: Trust no one, get out and earn your context karma! :)

Greg: Exactly the source of my confusion initially!! The data is for my blog, the two spikes are two popular posts on those dates.

Ken: In some cases tools that have built in annotation features (a la google trends) work great as the tribe takes on the responsibility to annotate the data (IndexTools is one of the tools that has this feature).

I have also seen wiki’s work well in some cases. At one of my jobs we set up a online spreadsheet (a la Google Docs & Spreadsheet).

I don’t know if this helps.

Beth: Great point! Yes on the future post. :)

Andreas / Jon: Excellent adds gentlemen! Thank you.

“Yourmom”: Trying to be cute while rushing a post out has a price, I am sacrificing grammar. I’ll try to be more careful. I appreciate the feedback.

Eric: I think some tools allow you to created computed metrics (define new metrics in the tools) but it is not possible to change the definition temporarily.

ClickTracks is a good example, it computes “Short Visits” (bounces) as visits that were shorter than five seconds. But you can create additional metrics with either ten seconds or just one page view or whatever you prefer.

Thanks everyone for the comments and feedback, your conversation truly makes the post valuable.

-Avinash.

Something occured to me while I was reading today - When there is a spike in your data because of a single day’s activity - for example because of an email newsletter or something - well we can report on the month including that exceptional day, but what if you also wanted a baseline for the month excluding that day?

Is there an easy way to exclude one day from the data so that you could get a good measurement for the rest of the month without the effects of that one unusual day be taken into account?

How can you be so perfect with these ones….I am your fan……now…

I’m thinking the answer would be:

GRAMMAR

I’ve recently gained access to reports from the correspondence unit - they catalogue emails, including ones that are from the contact pages on our website, and produce a weekly report of common themes and whether they have approval or disapproval. They also note how many are from the websites - I’ve found this to be gold in explaining some of the more bizarre events and getting a feel for what’s working and what isn’t.

Also I keep an eye on media statements from the departments as they can have links or context which may drive traffic to our sites, and also news items (through Hitwise media alerts) a quick way of reviewing what’s out there

As an aside, a classic cock up is getting a request for metrics for a print ad that had a vanity url running over the weekend. Slight annoyance at not being informed this was happening turned into apoplexy and amazement when it was discovered marketing hadn’t bothered to inform anyone connected with the website. The url pointed at…nothing! they’d completely made it up. Governance and process were quickly reviewed…

That is important and valuable. There are two easy things to help with this:

1. Get yourself into all mailing lists / customer list and you will see in your inbox what is happening in other areas.

2. I had a google calendar running with all involved agencies, freelancers etc. where major changes on the website where added by the one in charge. So we maintained a calendar just for analysing data - even month later!!

Andreas

I would add that the product/service category is key… eCom Metrics are often normalized across categories - which is a very “context-challenged” POV

For example -
A product/service with, say a higher price point & longer decision cycle may lead to more online research. The “low” conversion rate may be a success if you know that shoppers tend to convert on say, the 3 or 4th visit.

Hope we can look forward a future post on same metrics that vary greatly depending on ecom category??

thanks, AK.

I’d be asking “why did we stop the weekly emails”…

This would also go some way towards explaining teh shift towards “new” traffic, since the emails would tend to bring returning traffic.

So although we had a good last 30 days, if my hunch is correct we could have done even better and need to be asking questions amongst the tribe.

Now you just inspired me to dig deeper into the metric and compare more often than not. I’ll probably even spend 5% of my day stepping outside the office to see what is happening and use software to give me reporting on other things.

Thanks you much. I noticed the 1:30 am post of this blog and the 6 am response back will your full house presentation at SES.