Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Nerd Alert! For many web entrepreneurs, keeping up with the ongoing web activity surrounding the websites you have created is a pastime that can quickly descend into a dark, pathological obsession. I can literally spend hours and hours in Google Analytics, the wonderful free user analytics software from Google, setting up goals, following user behaviour, troubleshooting pages that cause bounces etc. Google Analytics provides a feature called “Dashboard” which gives you a fantastic overview of your site’s most recent activity. However, there is one feature I want in Dashboard that does not exist yet, that would transform Google Analytics from being merely astoundingly useful to being goddamn essential for life as we know it. I’m going to call this feature “Peak Points”.

One of the nicest features about the Dashboard is the visual line graph it provides for all types of basic statistics such as pageviews, unique visitors etc.

This provides you with a quick snapshot of the activity on your website. However, it provides no data on this graph beyond the simple numeric values of each point. Where this data could be vastly improved is by telling the webmaster how the points relate to each other - in essence, why pageview activity at one point has increased in relation to the previous point.

In this age of tech blogging, digg, reddit, social bookmarking etc it is very likely that links to your content, if compelling enough, will spread across an infinite amount of social media. As a marketer or someone who has a vested interest in the press activity and buzz a website generates, exactly what sites are sending you large amounts of traffic, when and why are vital pieces of information to have. It helps define where your possible affiliate markets might be, who you could benefit from advertising with, who to go to first with your next big announcement, how successful your latest campaign theme was and so on. This is of course information that is already somewhat buried in Google Analytics and many other analytics packages; but the convention up until now has been to display this information in a rather boring, irrelevant table format where the context of the referrer is lost. I need more than that. And I don’t want to have to wade through tables to see it.

Peak Points would manifest itself as simple labels that appear automagically on your Dashboard line graph. At any proportional increase in traffic, over what Google Analytics calculates as “normal” (or a user-set value) Google Analytics would attach a label at that point. Google Analytics would assign each label a type, based on why it thinks traffic has increased proportionally since the last point.

Some example labels would be:

• Popular Content, when you have written a popular post that a lot of sites are linking to.
• Top Referrer, when there is no particular entry point (e.g. homepage) but a high percentage of referrals are coming from the same place.
• Discussion, when there is a lot of direct and returning traffic to an individual post, indicating that people keep coming back to add or read comments.

This is all data that Google Analytics already has. It simply has to…analyse…them a little to figure out what the numbers and referral hosts all mean and display it in a simple and understandable manner.

Peak Points would be clickable, to show more information about any given point, like below.

In the case of a Popular Post Peak Point (say that after 5 mohitos), the extended view would show which post on your site is attracting traffic at that point, and the top referrers to that article (the referrer links would link back to the permalink of that referrer, not simply the homepage). This information is incredibly valuable to have at hand. The next time you look at your Dashboard you will be able to see exactly the effectiveness of your last month of posting or marketing campaigns in a simple line graph format that is easy to interpret quickly. Want to know why your traffic surged in Mid May? Click the Peak Point and see why. Want to see how effective your latest email campaign was? Find the date when you sent them out, look for Peak Points and click them.

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Hope you like this idea - personally I’d find this kind of functionality incredibly useful. If you too would like this idea included in Google Analytics, voice your opinion below! You never know…someone from the Analytics team might be reading this…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.