Hi Experts:
I have a site which is tracked using Google Analytics. For the site, we post articles for our readers daily. The article information is stored in a database and the articles are stored as .htm files (database points to these). The users click on a link on the stie, and a common template program pulls the information from the database and displays the article. Everytime an article is clicked on, a count is stored in the database--this is just a simply a click count and not very useful for us.
Google Analytics will track these, too, of course. I usually produce a report which gives the article name, date is was posted and number of visits to the article using the Google count.
I've been asked to come up with some sort of scheme to count an "average daily" hits for an article and am not sure how to proceed. The customer wished the reports to be more "meaningful". Of course, the longer the article is on the site, the more interest there MAY be in it. Popular articles always have more hits, but the frequency will taper off.
I know this is somewhat vague, but does anyone have any experience with this and can give me a little guidance? What types of reports are easy for clients to understand and interpret?
Thanks!
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Why not just count the page views?
To come up with a "meaningful" metric, you need to determine (tell us) what the purpose of having articles on your site is.
If it's to generate search engine traffic, then the meaningful stat is how much traffic is referred from search engines.
If it's to get people to visit another site (or page) mentioned in the article, then the meaningful stat is how many people click on a link in the article.
Yes, thank you for the responses. They want some metric which is independent of the day the article is posted. What I am doing is taking the number of pageviews for an article and dividing that number by the number of days the article has been on the site to get the "average pageviews per day". They seems happy with this and they understand it. Previously, the numbers I reported didn't jive with them because of the volatile nature of the data, I guess. Of course, the longer the article is posted to the website, the less "pageviews" it will get. Over time the averagle pageviews per day goes down...
Does anyone know how sites come up with the TOP TEN articles (or whatever) for sites?
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by: dhwakePosted on 2009-10-15 at 08:22:15ID: 25581482
Do they only want one metric? if they are ok with a few this is what i would do:
-# of visitors for the new article each day - this way you track how well your new articles do on a daily basis
- # of visitors looking at all of the articles in a day - this will show overall how your articles are doing
-the average daily that they asked for - i don't really like averages, but if they want it, it isn't that hard...