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.

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.

Albert Einstein once had a picture hanging on his wall at Princeton that read:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

He was a smart cookie and often referred to it…and it definitely rings true for web analytics.

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.

In my previous post on People who liked this, also liked…, I put forward an idea how to generate “related” products of interest, based on what users were looking at, which could then be automated and re-published back to a site, based on Omniture data.

Having implemented this, we’ve made an interesting observation, which changes one our user assumptions, and I thought it was worthy of a quick posting.

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.