Eyes Wide Shut No Longer As We Get All Analytical
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People are often surprised when I say I’ve never worried about stats, seo or optimisation. Yes we get good search rankings and the only stat that’s really concerned me is the one that has a pound sign at the front. It’s a nice laid back attitude, but there comes a time when you have to get all analytical and for the first time we’ve introduced Google analytics to our websites. It’s a whole new world (cue Peter & Katie)!!
Now there’s stats everywhere and already GA has thrown up some stuff we didn’t realise (mainly because we’re lazy and didn’t bother checking before). Popular landing pages have been updated where needed and hopefully that will start paying dividends.
Sites which we thought were doing ok (they weren’t) have also had a bit of a going over based on the excellent wordpress duplicate content penalty fix by KirstyM.
This is perhaps something we should have done a long time ago - but it does go to show that even old time affiliates can be lazy, not take advantage of stats and information available and essentially wander around in the dark running a website. Perhaps not the best plan for newbie affiliates to follow!
Despite this half-arsed attitude we’ve managed to do ok, so perhaps armed with a bit more information and stats we can improve in a number of areas.
So why start using stats now?
The reason is we probably can’t work any harder and in order to do better commission wise we have to start working a lot lot smarter. We now need to know what works and what doesn’t and tailor our efforts accordingly.
In retrospect it sounds insane that we never started out this way!
Let’s see if having our eyes wide open and armed with more stats improves conversions and commissions.
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4 Comments on this post
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Dio said:
You can’t beat a good stat!
Personally I go for Clicky Analytics, they’re nice and easy and good for getting a snapshot of multiple domains at once. I much prefer them to Google Analytics.
July 7th, 2008 at 10:09 pm -
Winston said:
As a BI professional I guess I’m a little biased when it comes to stats but I think you summed it up well. Its about working smarter, leveraging your data to provide insight and then crucially acting upon that information. Having worked in the data world for a good ten years now I obviously have a whole heap of real world examples across various business sectors where we have used data to make decisions that have big positive impacts on a business.
That’s my day job of course! Like many it seems, I often skip this stuff on hobby projects! But so do many big companies and it often takes a forceful data evangelist to push forward cultural change. But it’s amazing how quickly people get excited when you deliver your first big wins!
GL with GA :)!
July 8th, 2008 at 12:12 pm -
Lammo said:
I’m probably the other way - I can spend all day analysing stats, looking for patterns, trends etc. I made a concious effort a few months back to only look at stats (be it earnings or traffic stats) once per day, and as a result got some work done. I still think it’s worth taking a good look at the stats a couple of times a month just to check you haven’t missed anything.
And just to add, one of our sites traffic sources/pages viewed varies so much on a day-to-day basis that I’m back to checking (and most importantly reacting) several times a day.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
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