Using Google Analytics to Guide Content

Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website? If not, do yourself a favor and visit google.com/analytics right now. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait.

Since I’m assuming that you’ve taken a look at the website now, I’m not going to go into great detail defining Google Analytics. In short, Google Analytics allows you to track your website’s traffic. Simply add a profile for your domain to your Analytics account, and install the provided code on your site. This might sound complicated, but Google does a great job walking you through the steps when you sign up for an account. I promise: If I can do it, you can do it.

Last week, I installed Analytics on the WordPress site for Charmed Weddings & Events, the wedding planning business I co-own. Within 24 hours I had all kinds of data! I had no idea how much traffic our little website was getting. If you had asked me a week ago how many people visit our site within a five-day span, I might have guessed 10. But in the last five days, eventcharm.com has had 112 unique visitors.

Among other surprises, I learned that:

• While I would have thought our most-viewed content to be our most recent blog posts, it’s actually our older posts about wedding trends that are getting the most traffic.
• The keywords most used to find us are related to wedding trends as well. Other keywords are related to wedding photography.
• The majority of our visitors aren’t clicking links posted on Facebook or Twitter, but are coming from search engines.
• Much of our content features Michigan wedding venues and vendors. I would have thought that most or all of our traffic would come from within the state, but Michigan and California are tied for our top feeder. Other visitors come from all over the United States–some even from outside the country!

In just a few short days, Google Analytics has shown me that it’s not the content tailored to Michigan brides that carries the most weight. In fact, the broader topics like wedding trends are much more popular. Our “Fall 2011 Wedding Trends” post was published in November 2010, and it’s our most visited post by far. Our hope is that eventcharm.com will be a resource for Michigan brides, but also provide important information to potential clients. To keep our traffic steady and eventually see more clients as a result, we’ll have to keep publishing content that’s appealing to brides everywhere.

How can Google Analytics help direct your website’s content? It only takes a few minutes to get started.

All Things Web

I’ve been neglecting my blog. I have good reason, though, I swear. I’ve been consumed by all things web.

Well, maybe not all things web, but several things at the very least.

First, without getting into too much uninteresting and depressing detail, I am currently helping with a website redesign at work. This is not to say, by any means, that I am redesigning a website. Mostly I am writing for websites, helping to communicate with clients, organizing the process, and working in a content management system to make updates to sites that have yet to updated. It’s a huge undertaking, this project. I am constantly amazed at the level of ability I see in my coworkers–but there’s so much to do, and I wish there was more I could do to help.

And herein lies my first distraction. How can I help with a web redesign? If not for this specific project, then others in the future? A colleague recommended this series of free online videos from net.tutsplus.com, Web Development from Scratch. If you have a basic understanding of HTML and some interest in the subject, these videos are fabulous.

Meanwhile, all of this attention to web really got me looking at the website for my events business. Once upon a time, my business partner and I decided we’d like to host our website on WordPress. We paid someone to create a custom theme for our site, and we’ve been generally happy with it. It’s only after I’ve gotten more familiar with web content and structure that I realize our site needs some work. The person who created our theme seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth (seriously), so any updates to the theme are going to be our  responsibility. Is this something I can figure out how to do?

And so, what I’ve been researching and spending time on lately is what has been keeping me from this blog. My goal, which I’m now putting out into the universe, is to take what I’m able to learn about CSS, HTML, etc., and eventually figure out how to update our WordPress theme. Maybe someday, I’ll even be able to create one from scratch!

Okay, baby steps. But in the meantime, if I disappear again, I may be immersed in video tutorials or cascading style sheets. Wish me luck!