Can we have some examples of how others are using Google Analytics?

Aha, another wise person who recognises the potential dangers of getting lost in swathes of data. Well done you for your determination to get tangible and meaningful.

At THE EDGE we are using e-commerce reports to measure ROI (return of investment) of online advertising and social networking, as well as determining the best upstream traffic partners for us to focus on (those web traffic sources that are resulting in most completed transactions). We also use “tagged links” to observe and analyse the behaviour of groups of people landing on our site from external emails and advertising.

Here are some other real-life examples from arts organisations that have been shared with me of how web analytics are being used:

-      Adapting timing of marketing campaigns after observing seasonal website traffic peaks

-      Changing price breaks after observing in a “goal funnel” a higher than average drop-out from the purchase path when customers reached the pricing information page

-      Investing in an international online campaign when identifying an opportunity for more international visitors

-      Change of social media focus when realising one particular social media tool was starting to feature commonly in website traffic sources

-      Persuading a board committee that the top level navigation tabs were wrongly prioritised, using the site overlay feature and tagged links to build evidence

-      Determining which website content views resulted in the most revenue and tweaking the content accordingly.

-      Simplifying online purchase transaction process by removing a “dead page” from the purchase path as a result of viewing visitor behaviour on that site

-      Monitoring and adjusting Google Adwords campaigns.

Hi Merrilee - great to hear from someone using Google Analytics.

Did you know about "tagged links"? You can add tracking code to any external link coming into your site and then run specific reports on those 'micro-segments'.

You might already know about this, but perhaps useful for others out there?

A couple of examples:

1. We place specific tagged links into each of the stories in our e-newsletter (in the "read more" links that go back to our website). We can then run GA reports on each link to see what the ultimate visitor behaviour and revenue was from each story.

2. If you had a listing and a banner ad on an external site, you could place different tagged links in each and see which one was most effective. You can really measure ad campaigns closely.

3. You can put specific tagged links behind status updates or features on Facebook - then you see more detail in the traffic sources report - you can see exactly which Facebook links sent which traffic.

Building a tagged link is easy - Google has a URL builder which makes it seriously easy - and then the tracking is very specific.

Thanks for sharing your experience and uses of GA.

Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com

Hi all

We've been using Google Analytics since NZLive.com went live. We use it to work out where our vistors are from, what kind of reach we have, what content they like and how they find it.

We've also found some surpising trends - for example, we know that there is a 'seasonal' ebb and flow to our traffic and we'll always have the highest traffic in summer - the annual patterns are actually very consistent, but we recently discovered that there is one day each year where the traffic is nearly twice as high as any other day..... it's Waitangi Day each year. So its great to know that this is a day that Kiwis really want to spend time doing things. We always have a big focus on it but now we might have some richer content on Waitangi Day or experiment with some different content. We also discovered that Te Matatini National Kapa Haka Championships 2009 is the second most popular event on the site ever - which is just amazing.

It's been a really useful tool for us, but we also know that there is so much more that we could be doing in order to make the most of Analytics and that we need to be spending more time gathering meaningful statistics and analysing them carefully.

I recently was fortunate enough to attend a presentation and workshop with Sebastian Chan from Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (thanks Culturemondo and National Library). Seb is fantastic, he has a really rigorous approach and he knows the analytics tools inside out. He spends about 1 day a month gathering stats and about 2 days analysing them. It has really paid off for Powerhouse because in Seb's time there website visitor numbers have tripled. You can read his thoughts on web metrics on this Fresh + New(er) blog.

Like Ben, Seb would strongly advocate for working out what your objectives are (and make sure they are tied into your organisation's objectives), decide what part of your audience you want to focus on, segment your audience and then benchmark and measure.

Seb warns that you also need to know the pitfalls of some analytics packages. For example, almost all of them do not measure the time on site for the last page of any visit i.e. the time on the last page always counts as 0. This is critical to know for a site like NZLive.com where people are most likely to enter the site by looking for an event using a search engine and they may only go to one page to find out about an event and then leave - all those visits to check the time or cost of an event, count as 0 time on site.

However, help is at hand - there is a Google Analytics Report Enhancer add-on that you can install that will calculate 'true time on site'.

I'd highly recommend that take the time to really know how to use analytics to the best of its ability and if you ever have a chance to attend a Seb Chan workshop, you must, must go.

Jackie from NZLive