It may seem counter-intuitive, but my notion of truly advanced website measurement involves simplifying and centralizing the operation, rather than running two or more tools—your website content management system and other third-party analytics applications—in parallel. After years of practice, it has become clear to me that measurement in context is far more effective than not.
Centralized Measurement Tools
In our latest release of the NewfangledCMS, we took into account the need to simplify, centralize, and contextualize measurement tools. Thanks to the release last spring of the Google Analytics API, we have been able to deliberately move away from a model in which we rely upon small, third-party applications to round out the capabilities of a basic install.
One hallmark of the web 2.0 paradigm has been the proliferation of smaller, functionally limited but focused applications- things like PollDaddy for website user polls, Wufoo for customizable contact forms, or ShareThis for adding social media sharing tools to content. These small applications are still popular and in wide use- we even recommend them in some cases to our clients who need a fast solution and lack the budget to replicate the needed functionality within their websites. However, when it comes to measurement applications, our desire has been to fold in the most important aspects of those tools within the CMS, so that key metrics can be seen in context, as well as mixed with user-specific tracking data generated only by Newfangled's custom tools.
Merging Google Analytics data with our data expands the scope of measurement, which is what makes it advanced, yet simplified. While Google Analytics is not able to report your rank on a particular keyword, anything particular about those who fill out forms and their browsing activity on your site, or which users by email are the most active users of your site, we can. Naturally, compiling this information with Google's metrics is a profound expansion of measurement opportunity. We may be one of the first web development companies to take our software in this direction, but believe me when I tell you that the entire industry is moving in this direction. This shift expands the purpose of a content management system far beyond simply creating and editing site content, to adding in analytics, campaign and goal tracking, user-specific session data, and much more. Yesterday's CMS is today's Website Management System (WMS).
See the Big Picture or Narrow Your Focus, In Context
Our latest release includes a dashboard (more detailed images coming up on the next page) immediately upon login that delivers ten individual reports which we have identified as the most important metrics to follow on a regular basis. Half of these are basic reports derived from the Google Analytics API, while the other half are unique to our application, including keyword ranking, lead tracking, and most active session monitoring. As you can see from the image above, the reports are formatted in a way that makes a quick overview of the "big picture" just as easy as the ability to narrow in on something more particular, such as which referrers have the highest conversion rate.
Additionally, this release includes wonderfully detailed reports that can be overlayed directly on each page, showing you when the page was last indexed, which sites refer traffic to the page, traffic rates, bounce rate, goal conversion rate, and even which phrases delivered organic search traffic to it. Having a report (like the one shown in the image above) literally inches away from your editing capabilities allows you to quickly make changes to your content in response to the conclusions you draw from real-time data. Again, more detail about the on-page reports can be found on the next page.
Now that I've described the concept behind this new website management system approach, I'd like to show you some of the dashboards features in more detail.
I am amazed at the unreal information you can obtain from google analytics. I place that javascript code on all my sites.
You mentioned that third-party applications won't be able to provide the detail of reports that you're pulling in to your system, but if you're using the API, can't they do that too? Maybe I missed the point?
Russ,
I agree! Google Analytics is incredible, and getting it for free- unreal.
Chris
I am consistently amazed at how much info you pack into these articles!
Richard,
I can see how that point may have needed a bit more clarification. As I mentioned earlier in the newsletter, we are pulling in data from the Google Analytics API and merging it with data that we gather from custom tools within our CMS. Specifically, they are tracking tools that can follow sessions starting from any specified source. We've built individual session trackers for traffic coming in from aliases, newsletters and Google traffic, though they could be amended for pretty much any specific entry point. Once a session is tracked, it is assigned a numeric ID, which remains the session's identification until that user fills out a form on our site. Once that happens, the form data (name, email, etc.) is matched to the numeric ID. Now that I have a name and contact information for the session, I have some very valuable data about my new lead- what pages they viewed, how long they spent on them, etc. Google Analytics does not allow data tracking to specific user information, so it has some limitations in terms of lead management. Aside from looking at this data in terms of a specific person's behavior, it's also helpful to consider user trends- what pages are most viewed from different points of entry, how much time in a session from those entry points, etc.
Now, taking these two sources of data and creating a dashboard around them already exceeds what a third-party script might be able to do, simply by virtue of the custom tracking data. But, having the same company that creates your website also provide these new measurement tools and guidance on how to use and grow them is a unique opportunity. At any point, we could add in custom reports to any individual client's dashboard with ease. This is the main difference I was trying to point out.
Thanks for reading,
Chris
Richard,
Chris is spot-on with his description of what our internal tracking tools add to the product and how they operate. When I was developing the new dashboard and integrating the wealth of data that Google provides, it was a challenging endeavor to mix and match it with our own, internal store of data. As Chris stated, Google Analytics is technically capable of tracking individual users' behaviors, but their terms of service prohibit adding any personally identifiable information to a user's Google tracking session.
We've pulled as much data as we could from Google Analytics and supplemented (and surpassed, in some instances) it to provide a lot of insight to not only how the website is performing across all users, but also to narrow in on how specific users use the website.
Nolan
I like how you are consolidating multiple referrers from the same domain by indenting the subpages. I wish Google did that!
@Peter Bryant, Thanks, the last few have been pretty dense. I'm intending to do a lighter one at some point...
@Sean, Good eye! Yes, that was a big feature for us. As we were working with Nolan to put together these reports, determining some layout improvements was a big priority, as we were limiting the actual real estate for each report significantly in comparison to Google Analtyics.
For those readers that didn't notice this aspect of the reports (it was shown in the second image on the second page), here's a detail: