amy cham :: pixels + people

Setting Goals for Content Sites

If you’ve been reading up on internet marketing, you’ve no doubt seen many articles talking about improving your site conversions. On a sales-oriented site, this is very intuitive…what portion of your visitors end up buying something? 

For a content site, though, it can be difficult to decide what a “conversion” might be, much less how to measure it and optimize for it. As this is something I have struggled with on some of my client sites, I thought it was worth a post and hopefully some discussion. 

This article is not intended to be a definitive, all-encompassing guide…rather, my hope is to get the wheels turning for how you might be able to more effectively use and measure your content-based site.

Web 2.0 Analytics presentation

I just got back from tonight's meetup, and the feedback has been pretty good so far.  I really enjoyed giving the presentation, and I hope that people found useful tidbits that they'll be able to use in their own analytics projects!  The presentation focused on using urchinTracker to flag user interaction points and understand how their non-pageview interactions are affecting your goal conversions.  I used Google Analytics as the example platform, but I'm guessing other javascript-based packages have some similar mechanism available.

If you're interested, I've PDF'd my presentation in notes view.

Updated: Dorian Benkoil of Teeming Media (a strategic digital media editorial and business consultancy, helping companies manage their digital media toward specific business objectives) was nice enough to record the presentation audio for us last night.  You can listen to the mp3 here. (You'll want to turn the volume up on your speakers.)

Were you there?  What did you think?  How will you use Google's urchinTracker in your next analytics project?  How have you used this technique in the past?