One of the things that I learned in building SQLServerCentral.com is how not to track traffic to the site or growth. We used a few counters over the years, gathering basic information, and while that helped, it wasn’t enough. Time and time again we couldn’t answer questions about our audience and develop patterns for how people used our service.
It’s easier on a web site, but it can be done in almost any business. You just need to spend time doing it. Asking questions of customers, finding out how they came to you, why, and then storing that information away.
If you don’t have tracking on your web site, add it through Google Analytics now. I actually just set that up recently for this site as well as my other persona sites. It doesn’t give you a ton of data, but it does give you good information and you’ll learn some valuable things.
We use it on SQLServerCentral now and it has helped me in working with our developers to learn:
- that we need to be Google friendly. A large percentage of our traffic comes from there.
- We need to support IE and Firefox, as we get about 40-some percent from each platform and that most people have upgraded to Firefox 3, something I need to do.
- Most of our people are 1024 or higher in terms of resolution. Good for addressing complaints about not fitting on 800x600.
For JumpstartTV, we’ve added more tracking and actually tried to build a framework that we can add to most everything. We want to try and track each email, each link, each click and now when, and who, clicked it. That helps us to determine a few things.
- How active people are
- Is the audience turning over, meaning can we keep people engaged or are our 500 videos a day from the same person or different people.
- What things work well when we change them. Do people notice them?
There are many more questions we try to answer, and many we’re not sure to ask, but I’m sure we’ll think of along the way. Tracking as much as we can enables us to go back and potentially ask those questions in the past as well as the present and determine how well we’re building the business.
Most people aren’t that technical and it can be hard to track stuff, but it’s a question you want to ask of all your providers for your web stuff, email, etc. Get the data and you can always figure out what to do with it. Grab an online disk, put up a computer in your office, something and save all this stuff. Don’t worry if it isn’t in a database, that can happen later. Just get it stored somewhere.
If you want my recommendation, invest in a database guy. Not necessarily full time, but someone that knows BI and have them slowly move this data into something like SQL Server. I think that’s a great platform and it includes tons of BI capabilities, something other platforms don’t. As they pull in the data, slowly you can then use Excel or some other platform to begin analyzing it and finding out more about your business and how to grow it.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment