Here’s another really simple customisation that you can and should do as part of your basic implementation, which helps you to further understand attribution.

Attribution is probably one of the hardest and most contested measurements available…which “thing” led your customer to do something. Read on to find out more about stacking in SiteCatalyst.

It often strikes me as strange that people still look at numbers in the aggregate. Knowing that you get a certain amount of page views, or a certain amount of visitors and so forth, doesn’t really tell you anything.

In order to get some insights of value, things that you can really act on, you need to segment your traffic and conversions.

But so few people really do it, and even fewer do it really well. Read on to find out why segmentation should form the basis of your analytics strategy…

One of the basic features of SiteCatalyst is its ability to track conversions. To do so, you need to use Success Events. The Success Event is generally a counter of something happening on your site. However, there’s a couple of things that should be considered though, when using success events, especially if you’re using it to count things like leads…

Improving internal search should be one of your primary goals. It’s probably used by an extraordinary amount of people, searching for all sorts of things. In this post, I show how to capture the number of times people search, a breakdown of keywords and search attempts, and also demonstrate how much search is costing your organisation.

So, still want to know certain things like what pages were viewed from visitors conducting a search, or which campaigns are driving most page views – and you don’t have Discover. Well, there’s two parts to this post and a bunch of answers…so read on.

One of the little-used nuggets in SiteCatalyst is “participation”.

It’s a given that you want to know how many sales you’ve made, or how much revenue you’ve generated, but what about which pages have helped to contribute to that conversion. Not every visitor follows the same path through the content, and it’s therefore beneficial to be able to see which pages are more likely to drive a conversion than others, thereby exposing your most valuable pages.

Just presented on how to get value from your analytics platform to around 150 people at the Marketing Higher Education Symposium 2009, at the Sydney Convention Center.

Slides are available on my blog.

I was chatting with one of our School Deans today about various results and he posed the question “Is it possible to see which courses people viewed after seeing one course?”. His interest was based on the fact that the user doesn’t always purchase the “most frequently visited course”. They often view one thing, but end up purchasing something else, and our reporting doesn’t highlight that behaviour.

Now, that got me thinking…that’s probably pretty common behaviour. So how can we make that visible?

So, there’s lots of metrics and lots of terminology. Understanding the meaning is the first step to understanding what’s important.

This post is for those of you who want a quick primer into what’s important and what’s not. It doesn’t however talk about the “why” – that’s for a future post.