• 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)

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.

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.

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.