I became a major fan of Omniture SiteCatalyst while at IDG last year, driving a 30% increase in traffic just through simple blocking and tackling site operations and content management through the system’s excellent dashboard interface and sitemap overlay. Omniture, for those non-metrics weenies out there, is a web-hosted service that uses jscript tags to track the traffic patterns through a web site. It is waaaay more sophisticated than I have the time to be, but, it is an excellent tool for informing all design, content management, and strategic plays for a complex web site.
It always irked my sense of Yankee thriftiness that we at IDG were never exploiting the full power of SiteCatalyst — it’s commerce and cart tracking capabilities — now we can.
As I find time over the next weeks I’ll be building my own dashboards for monitoring the health of the site and especially path analyses for determing where the traffic is going. It’s one thing to drive traffic into a site, it’s another to know whether or not that traffic is bouncing off the homepage or following the paths set by our online promotions and content strategists.
Jeesh — and here I thought all along it was the brilliant edit tweaks. Huh.
Indeed it ’twas — metrics without analytics without action are like p#@$ing in the wind. I should have noted that based on the analytical insight that what the dogs wanted to eat was career flavored dogfood, Janice and team served more career content and voila! Instant traffic lifts. You gotta know your dogs.
The dogs may read it, but the fat vultures manage it.