Search is nothing new but it is, paradoxically, the new new within some circles of web design and definitely a core element of any sensible usability construct for web sites and web applications. On that note, A List Apart, the New York Times of web design, today publishes a search cum usability trifecta hitting on several issues I will be alluding to during the upcoming TIG conference, including what to make of your metrics. All the articles are read-worthy:

• Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision
• Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! (by Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor fame)
• Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up (by Lou Rosenfeld, co-author with Peter Morville of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)

This is a cross post from our Webdogs 2.0 sister site, but may be of interest to those following this project. It’s like this:

Last week Google promoted its Conversion University, an “online course” in some 25 parts for groking the basics of Google Analytics. Essentially, it is a series of topics, for each of which there are from 5 to 15 or so rapid-fire (typically 20-30 seconds) Adobe Presentations explaining how its various features and analytical tools work. For legal services and other non-profits, many if not most of the topics covered in this commercially oriented online course are about aspects of web analytics that are not particularly relevant. But for those not familiar with Google Analytics or those who have not used it for anything more than to track site visits and page views, these online presentations do offer insights about other specific tools within Google Analytics. Among other things, these brief presentations can help you better understand the data Google Analytics generates, how to filter it, how to report it, and how to understand the significance of things like “keyword searches” that bring people to your site and the significance of “site search” that tells you what your users look for once they find the site. Stuff even non-commericial sites would find helpful to know and understand.

Relevance of web analytics to findability is self-evident. That said, if you already have a close, personal relationship with Google Analytics, this is likely too basic. If not, this is a good way to start getting a groove with Google Analytics.

Last week Google promoted its Conversion University, an “online course” in some 25 parts for groking the basics of Google Analytics. Essentially, it is a series of topics, for each of which there are from 5 to 15 or so rapid-fire (typically 20-30 seconds) Adobe Presentations explaining how its various features and analytical tools work.

For legal services and other non-profits, many if not most of the topics covered in this commercially oriented online course are about aspects of web analytics that are not particularly relevant. (After all, it is called “Conversion University” for a reason.) But for those not familiar with Google Analytics or those who have not used it for anything more than to track site visits and page views, these online presentations do offer insights about other specific tools within Google Analytics. Among other things, these brief presentations can help you better understand the data Google Analytics generates, how to filter it, how to report it, and how to understand the significance of things like “keyword searches” that bring people to your site and the significance of “site search” that tells you what your users look for once they find the site. Stuff even non-commericial sites would find helpful to know and understand.

This is a web metric that tells us, on the one hand, we are doing something right but, on the other, reflects how grim things are out there.

It’s like this: Two months ago, in a different context, we observed that traffic at the California Food Stamp Guide seemed to have reached an annualized plateau of about 54,000 visitor sessions and 570,000 page views. Pretty much what we were expecting based on our experience with traffic at the earlier version it replaced.

That was then. This is now: Traffic at that site has escalated dramatically in the last two months, to 7.000+ visitor sessions with 79,000 page views, per month, which annualizes to 84,000+ visitor sessions and now approaching a million page views, at 948,000+ page views per year:

Translation: In the last two months, there has been a 55% jump in visitor sessions and 66% jump in page views. And the bounce rate now falls regularly below 1%, hovering around 0.65% most days. More people are finding it and sticking to the site.

What’s going on? During this more recent 30-day period, illustrated above, 86% of the visitor sessions were driven by 3,841 different keyword searches (the proverbial long tail). People have always been looking for help getting food stamps. But a whole lot more are now out there looking.

The California Food Stamp Guide is an object lesson that real, usable, nutrient-dense content is valued by advocates and low-income clients alike. The FSG is a collaborative project mounted by multiple advocacy organizations in California to rethink and republish on the Web their best take on the information people need to deal with the Food Stamp Program.

Did the effort pay off? Here’s a Google Analytics screenshot for the last 30 days, reporting nearly 4,000 visitors, 42,000 page views, an average of 10+ pages viewed per visit, and a remarkably low 1% bounce rate.

And since we’re on the topic of how diggin’ data is so cool, there is a helpful two-parter, Google Analytics Part 1: Getting Started with Site Tracking and the follow-up Google Analytics Part 2: Examining Analytical Data, both freebie articles at Community MX. It’s pretty basic but informative stuff, and includes in part I useful bits about the scripting options for using Google Analytics to track static and dynamic PHP sites, ASP pages and JavaScript events, and in part II what to make of the data you get. (At LSNC we have been using Google Analytics for several months now, and have found it to be a very stable, reliable and quick-loading web-based analytic tool.) A few months back, we posted an item about outsourcing your web statistics, which included tips on how to use Google Analytics with your WordPress and MediaWiki installations. Community MX is a subscription site for web developers, with a heavy emphasis on the Dreamweaver market. The freebie articles posted there are, of course, teasers to get you to buy in. But Community MX regularly posts a lot of high-quality free articles that you may find helpful. Well worth the perusal.

The answer may be Google Analytics, now that it no longer has a waiting list and does not require you have a Google AdSense account. And it’s all free, of course.

The question is a practical one for legal services and other non-profits living with IT-staff deficits, and as likely as not don’t have the resources or in-house talent to mount their own, nominally sophisticated set up for tracking website statistics. Yes, your web hosting service undoubtedly provides some kind of web “traffic” reports as part of the package, but does it give you everything you need or could use? Reliably? (Executive Director, who needs stats stat for a funding proposal, like yesterday: “What? I can only get a report on the top 100 page views? There’s no data more than a year old? We don’t have direct access to the web logs? Didn’t we pay for more than this? We didn’t? And they don’t offer any more than this, even if we did?”) Or you may have someone like Scott “Voodoo” Trudeau who in between his morning espressos could set you up stats righteous with some open source goodie like AWStats or such, but few programs are so blessed.

As much as anyone else, this dilemma has plagued LSNC for years. Over the years we all too long engaged in the false economy of relying on a “free” web server, courtesy of our network provider (whom we love, otherwise), and whatever web statistical reporting service du jour they deigned to offer. And too often considerable head scratching on their part when the reporting functions broke down, for whatever reason. Ugh. To resolve this chronic problem, we not only worked out an arrangement with our network provider to hook up a web server we built and configured to our liking, but we also have been exploring other options for getting accurate website data reports. We may settle on using the feature set in Google Analytics as the core of our web reporting.

I say “may” because we haven’t used it long enough to get several months of web data under our belts to fully evaluate how good it actually is, consistently and reliably. But the initial experiences are very promising. By design, Google Analytics is oriented toward a “marketing” model, so it emphasizes reporting features that are extraneous to the purposes of a legal services organization that needs to report to LSC and other typical funding sources about how website resources are being used. But Google Analytics also has usage reporting features, many of which are common to other web stat services, that are as useful to a non-profit as it would be to a commercial enterprise: unique visitors, page views, depth of visitor sessions, rankings of entrance and exit points, length of visits, and so on. It also offers analytic tools for evaluating site navigation patterns and the “clickability” of links on any particular page. There is a fair amount of data analysis available to measurably add to your understanding how “usable” your website actually is. Most any view or ranking you would look for would encompass up to 500 distinct pages. There are select report filtering features. You can track multiple domains within one account. And it’s a total freebie, provided you stay under the annual 5 million page-view limit. (Oh, please, you wish!) Very good stuff.

Google Analytics is very easy to implement, but does involve some work, as easy as it may be. Once you set up an account, you need to add a code snippet to every page you want tracked. (To see an example, view the source on this page and look at the very bottom, before the closing body tag.) For a site like LSNC.net or Webdogs 2.0, all this required was adding the code snippet to the WordPress footer.php file, or the handful of other, static HTML files at the site. There is even a solution for the MediaWiki components at our main website like our CalWORKs pages, which involves adding the code snippet to the MonoBook.php file. Tracking PDF and other file downloads involves more work, since you have to tag individual download links with a special code.

For those who like to have on-topic tech books, there is one title that came out a few weeks back, aptly entitled Google Analytics. One of the unexpected surprises in this book, and for me helpful, are the initial chapters that are not about Google Analytics at all, but rather about AWStats as an object lesson of what is valid and not valid about traditional web log analyzers.

There are significant things Google Analytics cannot do for you, most notably the inability to analyze your existing web logs, if you need that to be done. If you go with Google Analytics, its a totally forward approach. In any event, after we get more experience with it, I will try to breakdown better how this works for us, and whether it is keeper.

Oh, and by the way, Mister Voodoo himself has some nice things to say about Google Analytics.