In our weekly blog posts we’ve recently been focusing on tips to help people develop apps. Today I’d like to share a few tips on monitoring visitors to your website and to more importantly evaluate how it’s performing. To do this, we use Google Analytics - though there’s other tools out there - the reason being that it’s very good at monitoring everything that happens on our site.
Basic Stats
Knowing the raw, basic visitor numbers are obviously important. They show me how many people are visiting our site to learn more about our apps. If we are running any advertising I can see its effectiveness too. You may well see a correlation between visitors and sales (though with sites linking to the App Store that may not be entirely accurate).
When looking at unique visitors, I combine this data with “Avg. Visit Duration”, it gives me a relatively good indication that visitors are getting what they need from the page they arrive at. Don’t just focus on the unique visitors though: repeat visitors may be potential customers coming back for that final bit of information before heading off to the App Store to purchase.
When it comes to sending people to the App Store, a useful indicator of how this is working is measured by our “bounce rate”. Bounce rate is the term used for people who visit your site, but only view one page before exiting. If a user had clicked a link to our Analog product page, you’d hope this is exactly the page they were looking for. Hopefully they realised it was the photo editing app for them, before clicking on the “Available on the Mac App Store” button! On this occasion a high bounce rate is good however we also see a high bounce rate from our blog posts which is something we’re planning to improve on in future. The most important area to pay attention to your bounce rate, however, is on your home page. Your home page is generally your most popular landing page and probably contains little information, so visitors coming in and bouncing before going deeper into your site for more info should be addressed as soon as possible.
Where is your traffic coming from?
So whilst keeping an eye on the numbers is a good start, what I find particularly useful is comparing numbers with ‘Traffic Sources’. If you are running any promotions or advertising this is where you can see which sites are generating the traffic. You can find this information via Google Analytics’ Traffic Sources > All Traffic report. In here you can find some really useful information: traffic from blogs that may have reviewed your app, features from tech sites. It gives a good indication of which promotions are working, which sites drive traffic and sales. With this information you may choose employ a few tactics, such as targeting sites which generate high traffic to advertise on, or to contact and offer Promo Codes for a competition perhaps as there’s a good chance the readers will be more receptive to your app.
The amount of data on offer from Google Analytics is far beyond what we need, so it’s best to think about what metrics are important to you so you get the most out of your analysis. Keeping track of the core metrics to your business can be best achieved by setting up a “Custom Report”. In Analytics, Click on the “Customization” tab and follow the simple guides. It’s the most efficient way to track the same metrics for your weekly reporting as it will pull all your information together for you.
Monitoring Outbound Links
Right now Google does not offer a simple way to track outbound links, so if we’re going to try and track sales made on the App Store, some basic tagging is needed to pull in the number of clicks on each App Store link. For each outbound link you’ll need to use a little JavaScript that relies on Analytics’ _trackEvent method that records the links, then modifies the links required to track. Google call this Event Tracking and once in place can be easily viewed via the ‘Content > Events > Overview’ report.
To setup the JavaScript, insert the following code just before the </body> tag in your HTML document:
<script type="text/javascript">
// Create function that pushes a "trackEvent" to google
// and then redirects to the given destination
function trackOutboundLink(destination, category, action) {
try {
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category , action]);
} catch(err){
// We'll just log any errors to the console for now
console.error(err)
}
// Add slight delay so _trackEvent can register
setTimeout(function() {
// then redirect to the given destination
document.location.href = destination;
}, 100);
}
function setupOutboundLinks() {
// Use the new 'querySelectorAll' method to get any outbound links
// 'querySelectorAll' works in all modern browsers (everything except IE7 or before), so if you need older browser support
// you'd need to use document.getElementsByTagName('a') and then filter them to check the URL is 'outbound'
var outBoundLinks = document.querySelectorAll('a[href^="http://"]');
// Loop through all outbound links
for (var i = outBoundLinks.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
// Add click event listeners for anchor element
outBoundLinks[i].addEventListener("click", function(event) {
// Prevent the browser from executing the hyperlink
event.preventDefault();
// Get the required attributes
var destination = this.href,
category = this.getAttribute("data-category") || "default category",
action = this.getAttribute("data-action") || "default action";
// Call trackOutboundLink() that pushes the trackEvent and
// redirects to the destination.
trackOutboundLink(destination, category, action);
})
};
}
// call setupOutboundLinks() when then page is loaded
window.onload = setupOutboundLinks;
</script>
Inside the ‘click’ eventListener you'll notice we‘re trying to get two ‘data-’ attributes: one for the category and the other for the action. If we can't find either ‘data-‘ attribute we set a default. The ‘data‘ attribute was introduced in HTML5 for exactly these sorts of situations.
With that in mind, you‘ll need to update any outbound links to include those attributes, like so:
<a href="http://www.AppStoreLink.com" data-category="Outbound Links" data-action="AppStoreLink.com">App Store Link</a>
To make this more meaningful when you view your “Event Tracking Reports” you should take the time to replace ‘Outbound Links’ in the example above with a meaningful label - the name of the app, and perhaps where the links is (Header or Footer for example). This adds another layer of data that can be used to monitor the efficiency of links in different locations on the page.
Finally while we are on the subject of tracking outbound links, you may look to include “Social Interactions”. Learning how people socially engage with your site allows benefits such as learning which content users like to share therefore find interesting. Remember that Google is starting to use the social 'stickiness' of your content - so the more interactions your content generates, the more favourably your page will feature in natural search listings.
Handy Keyboard Shortcuts
This is a feature that I only discovered recently, and has been saving me a lot of time ever since! To access the list of keyboard shortcuts just hit Shift ?.
Tracking 404 Pages
While talking through my post with the team I asked what they would like to see better-reported by the Realmac site and 404 “Page Not Found” errors were brought up. Whilst we try to keep all our links up to date, we know people sometimes see error pages as a result of a broken link. The source of a 404 error can easily be tracked down with Google Analytics (or indeed Google’s Webmaster Tools). When building your site ensure the error page titles are descriptive enough that they can be easily found in your reports - as any error pages will be treated as page views.
Google Keyword Tool
Throughout this post I’ve focused primarily on Google Analytics, however there’s another Google tool that you might find useful - the Google Keyword tool. It lists the most-Googled terms that relate to the words you enter. I find it really handy for choosing keywords to use when submitting our apps to the App Store. It may not be exactly what people are searching for in the App Store, but it’s what’s being searched for on Google so at the very least gives you some ideas!
If you’re not keeping track of your website activity already, I hope I’ve given you a few pointers. A few minutes every week should be enough to make sure that you keep on top of traffic. The key is to making your reporting as automated and speedy as it can be - however I’d also recommend occasionally clicking through the more in-depth reports to give you a better idea of how visitors engage with your site.
If you have any comments, let me know via Twitter or leave a comment below!
