Doing some research at some popular products from when I was a teenager is always fun. You can dream back to those times, and at the same time see which products are still in demand or which brands are just lasting forever. And who didn’t want to have a real Victorinox Swiss Army Knife when you were younger?
So I was very surprised to see all Victorinox watches as related products being displayed next to the Wonder wheel when you search for Victorinox Swiss Army Knife. See screenshot below.
Makes you wonder why these watches are shown here or what triggered these to be displayed. Non of the related searches of Victorinox Swiss Army Knife in the wonder Wheel are actually watches…
If you search for the query Victorinox Swiss Army Knife on Google products, you will see that there are plenty of knifes for sale available.
I guess the highest bidder is able to show somewhat unrelated products next to the Wonder Wheel related searches. As long as you just show the same brand, but a different product, the quality score won’t be too much effected.
Using Google Analytics can be a real time saver if you would like to do some advanced research on your website traffic or how you can expand the number of visitors. I will explain a number ways how I use Google Analytics to research next steps on how to grow the traffic to my websites by writing better content.
For the research cases below and in later posts, I’m using Google Analytics with specific advanced segments set up. In the examples I’m not only explaining how to use the advanced segments to do the analysis, but I will also show you how to set these up.
Old posts can drive a lot of traffic
Do you have some great ranking posts which drive most of your traffic. You either spent a lot of time researching a specific subject and wrote a valuable post on it, or you just got lucky hitting an interesting point which resonated with a lot of people. Now, think about when did you write this great piece or lucky shot of content? Wouldn’t you want to know which posts over the year are driving the most people to your site, and more importantly, are you improving in the quality you publish?
The advanced segment setup I’m about to show you is only possible when you have date based URL structure. On my Dutch blog TheNextCorner.com I have such a URL structure, which I at first thought was a big pain in the ass, now I wished I had it setup like that on this site!
Below you see a 3 year graph of the visitors to my Dutch blog on a monthly basis. As you can see, I have a steady growth of visits to my site, with here and there some peaks or decline.
From the image above I can not see which posts of which year are driving the most traffic. I would like to know specifically what the posts from 2007, 2008 and 2009 contributed to the overall traffic on the site.
After setting up some advanced segments that will apply certain filters based on the year in the URL, I can look at the contribution of the individual posts from each year as part of the total traffic.
Setting Up Year Specific Post Reporting
Having the year and month as part of your URL structure is, like I said earlier, a must have or the set up of the advanced segments for this reporting. Currently my Dutch blog has this URL structure set up for a long period of time already.
For some tips on how to set up custom advanced segments in Google Analytics, I posted a number of relevant resources at the bottom of this post.
If you would like to set up an advanced segment which tracks all the traffic for posts which were submitted in the year 2007, I would go into the Advanced segment editor, and click on the link, create new segment. Here I choose from the menu on the left side: Dimensions> Content> Page. I drag the Page box to the dimensions or metric box in the middle.
After this, all you have to do is make sure the condition mapping is on Matches exactly. To determine your new advanced segment will only report the metrics for the posts that have the year 2007 in the URL, you input the following into the value box: /2007/
Give your segment a name, and your done.
Pulling reports on year of post
Now that you have set up a couple of advanced segments, you can actually drill down in every report you have in the standard view of Analytics on those advanced segments you have set up; in this case the posts written in a certain year.
Just use your pull down menu above the dates to check the segment you would like to include in the report. In a next posts I will go deeper into the neat things you can do using these yearly posts segments setup.
Resources
If you don’t have experience setting up advanced segments in Google Analytics, I can recommend you read the following posts:
Just over 1 year ago, I decided to re-launch my original idea of The Next Corner TV. The idea of a TNC TV channel was build on my photography hobby and my idea of posting time-lapse video’s of photo series I have made. However, I underestimated the time needed to a) shoot the pictures needed for a time lapse b) the time needed for post processing
In September 2008, I decided to re-launch the site, as the English sister site of my 3+ years old Dutch blog: Thenextcorner.com (sorry, site is in Dutch). After some stupid mistakes loosing some of my early content, I finally got traction in the new year.
PPP; Porn Pills & Poker, the Golden Triangle
After spending 2-3 hours on Google Street View, making screenshots when street view launched in Amsterdam, I got a major surge in traffic on the post “Redlight District Amsterdam on Google Street View”. The post was fully intended as link bait, and it succeeded somewhat in that getting links from some major sites.
The link from Valleywag thought me one important thing about the way the Internet works, and I always keep this in the back of my mind… Links are not only good for SEO, links can drive considerable amounts of visitors. Below here you can see the amount of visitors coming from just one link on Valleywag:
The result of having multiple links from authoritive sites linking to this Red light District post, has made it rank pretty well if you look for directions in Amsterdam around the Red light district. Mister Google is sending a decent amount of visits to the page on a number of keywords which are primarily focused on the Red Light District in Amsterdam. using the advanced segments in Google Analytics I can drill down into what of the search engine traffic has been coming to this one past over the last couple of months.
Blue is total search engine traffic, orange is search engine traffic going to my Amsterdam red light post.
Not a One Night Stand
After the success of the first Google street view prostitute voyeurism post, I took the opportunity to replicate success when Street View launched in a number of other Dutch cities which have a red light district. And although this post did not get the incoming links and traffic from other sites, it does get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines.
Above you see Search engine traffic driven to The Next Corner, with the blue line as total search engine traffic, green the Amsterdam red light post, orange the second Google street view red light district post, where the red arrow is indicating traffic from the second post is contributing to the total search engine traffic.
Sex Sells
These two posts contribute to a large extend to the total traffic on my blog. And although I got some quality links from sites in the field I’m working in to other posts, these two post still dominate in driving traffic. We can simply conclude: SEX SELLS!
Now I will have to find out about the other two, Pills & Poker… Maybe my visit to Amsterdam end of February, beginning of March will give me enough inspiration to get some good content out on these two…
Building on my post on the seasonal traffic I get on my San Francisco Tips website (the site is in Dutch), where I concluded most of Dutch folks are looking for their summer holiday in January!Today I just took a look at the day of the week that is driving most traffic, which most interesting implies the Dutch are blocking their Sunday for summer holiday research!
Below you can see the traffic on my San Francisco Tips website from December 1st, until January 24th on a daily basis. All the Sundays are highlighted, where these Sundays represent the day with highest number of visits of the week.
Apart from Christmas or New Year, it’s a pretty consistent picture!
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