Understanding the Importance of Analytics

I have an undergraduate degree in History, and I went to grad school for Digital Media Studies. This tells you that, besides the fact I targeted two worthless degrees, I'm not a fan of math and have avoided collegiate degrees that involve any type of math courses. In fact, I avoid math like my 7-year-old nephew avoids vegetables. People's eyes glaze over when they hear the word analytics followed by stats, any type of percentages, and anything that sounds like accountant-speak.

However, you should view analytics not as a bunch of numbers, but as a tool set that tells a story. It can tell you how people are finding your content, what content is most popular, and where users are sharing that content. Knowing what type of content is popular, where your site is popular (in which time zones, countries and states, for example), and even what time of day your posts get more readers is all pretty valuable information. Understanding your audience's interest in your content, as well as preferences for when and how to read your content, is important.

At one point in my life, I had a pretty popular humor blog. Through studying analytics and reactions to my content, I figured out that if I posted my blog between 9:30 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. EST, my posts garnered the most comments and got the most traffic throughout the day. When I posted after noon, my blog got about half as many comments and half as much traffic over a 24-hour period. Additionally, I saw that my site was getting shared and voted for on the social news site Reddit (www.reddit.com) more often than Digg, (www.digg.com), another social news site, so I replaced the Digg button with a Reddit button. This change increased the amount of traffic I received from Reddit because people had the visual reminder to share the post with their friends and vote the post as a favorite of theirs.

I was able to continue to drill down from there. Not only did I have the information on where my content was being shared, but I was also able to garner more information for analytics. Posts that had a picture mixed in with the first three paragraphs often had a lower bounce rate (the interval of time it takes for a visitor to visit my site, then ‘bounce’ away to a different site) than posts that had no picture at all. If I wrote the post while elevating my left leg and wearing a tinfoil helmet, I saw a 25 percent bump in traffic. (Okay, maybe that last one isn't true.)