Wow, the SES San Francisco 2010 conference was a real eye opener this year. As I digest data from that conference, I am reminded of how important it is to be digging deep into website analytics.  Website analytics strategy was covered during the recent Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 Conference, really dealt frankly with the topic of making better use of analytics. It is amazing how much data  you can overlook by not taking time to dig deep into the information provided. It is also even more amazing how many websites use no analytics at all. Often, a simple look at the source code of a website will reveal no html code for analytics. But that is a topic I will have to write about on another day.

One level of doing good website analytics for your website  is to make note of the websites that are referring traffic to you.  It is advisable to develop a spreadsheet of those websites, and make note of every time a referral happens to your various websites.. If  your website is still small, it may be fine to do this on a monthly basis. Place the names of the month and year across the horizontal grid of the spreadsheet, and the website names on the vertical grid. Then, you will begin to really be able to watch the data. The basic view in Google Analytics, if that is your tool, will show you a day by day view for a month. That’s just not enough though.

Another good tactic is to note the number of pages from within a specific website that are referring to you. Certain websites may be feeding traffic from multiple pages. Note the pages that produce the most traffic to your website, and try to target material toward those specific pages.  In a kind of reverse fashion, you should also be noted what page level in your website is being targeted. Many people never look past the data for the home page of their website.

There is still another layer in this social media era that needs to be considered, if one is to do good website analytics. And it is a real proverbial honey pot. The actual people that are sending traffic to a website also needs to be noted. Sometimes, on sites like Twitter, people are clicking on a link to a specific website that was placed on a particular User’s Twitter page by retweet, direct message etc.  Good analytic software like Google Analytics will be able to show the specific User page that was used as the referral. Hence, you know the specific user, because the referral came from their User Twitter Page.

Once specific social media websites have been identified as referring sites, it becomes advantageous to do research on how wide a market those sites reach. A specific referral to any given website might have come from a Twitter User Page with only 40 or 50 followers.  But another referring page might have 8000 followers. Finding ways to frequently target the large Twitter page can help drive traffic to  your websites.

To get a start on this strategy for social media, try a website like Klout.com.  There are others as well. A strategy for website analytics needs to involve, as a minimum, these layers of analysis. I guarantee that there are others as well. We’ll see how many you can come up with, now that we have touched on the issue of digging deep into website analytics.

Raymond Province is an IT Programmer in the health care industry. He frequently writes about search engine optimization, website development, and writing good website content. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.