analytics

I haven’t completely lost my mind, or changed my opinion on the value of web analytics. Instead, I just think you need to be careful. My warning is simple: Web Analytics can suck the life from your content.

If you have a combination of niche content and mainstream content (say you write a blog about music) if you only listen to analytics, you will kill your site. The web is built upon a foundation of availability of all types of content. Naturally mainstream content is searched for more than niche content, and you may see more pageviews for you mainstream content. It may not event be mainstream, it may just be your most popular content. The point is you can’t let the popular content become the only thing on your site.

Why not? Why not just make your site focused on the popular? A few reasons really, 1: niche content will be easier to win in the competition for traffic (even if it comes from a smaller pie) 2: Saturation makes the web dull - and 3: I don’t like it.

Lesson: don’t just blog about apple and google… it’s really boring.

I wasn’t using my regular IP address yesterday, so everything that I did yesterday went into my Google analytics data. That’s not a problem - that’s easy enough to fix and the data from one day from me is small enough to lack relevance. The problem was a search query that I did… and the number of times it showed up in my keywords from yesterday. I searched for something once, it showed up four times. All from the network I was on, all seemingly from me. It wasn’t something a standard searcher would query and I imagine it was one of the first times - if not the first - it has been searched for. So… one query, four queries, that’s not a big deal, right? No, not in isolation, but if it does in fact happen on a larger scale, then yes… it is a big deal. If I don’t have accurate data, then many of the decisions I make are based on incorrect beliefs.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Don’t just rely on Google Analytics - which I know many, many people do. Diversify your tracking methods and make sure you have solid data. I’m sure most of you already knew that.

And by the way…
Yesterday was the third birthday of Lopico - for more on the year that was, read this post.

Am I missing it? Google Analytics is my analytics program of choice, but I don’t think that I’ll be able to use it for my new web app. Why? Becuase it’s mobile and Google doesn’t seem to address the mobile analytics market. I use my new program at least 10 times per day on my phone, yet Google doesn’t track this. I’ve found one option, but it’s not free. Damn Google’s got me used to everything being free. I would be inclined to think that it has more to do with the mobile browser than the analytics tool, but with the claim of the one company that I was able to find, I’m guessing that I’m wrong.

I’m a big believer that the true strength in corporate blogging comes less from having a corporate blog and more from watching what others blog - I’ve been lucky enough to have some companies reach out to me because of what I’ve blogged, it would be great if an analytics company could help me out here.

- J.D. Amer is a guy that needs a better mobile analytics program.