Is Google Analytics Killing Your Website?

I don't know if I'd go as far as saying that, but here's an article that does. In short, it equates the walls-of-data and charts to passive "oh, isn't that nice" TV watching, as opposed to "here's what you should do to improve things" the way other software, such as, ohhhhh, I don't know... HitTail does!

Real-time Search List

If you're looking for a website traffic tracking tool that shows you your real-time search list, then look no further. HitTail is one of those rare tools where you can just install the code, and sit back and watch your search hits as they occur in real-time. You don't have to wait a day for data collection to occur. You don't even need to hit F5 to do a refresh. HitTail works the way everyone wishes the log files worked--a de-duped list of your visitors, so you see only one entry for each human visiting your site, and you only see the data regarding what led them to your site. It's like watching your real-time list of referrers, with the keywords highlighted for easy insight. Give it a try. It will make you wonder why everyone doesn't just show the real-time search list as an analytics report.

Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

Google Analytics and HitTail often mentioned together

It's more than a year since we launched the HitTail Beta (August 14th--I should have done a happy-beta-birthday), and some of you have been with us since we soft-launched it in the form of MyLongTail at the beginning of 2006, where I documented the fact that's important to HitTail--you can get into Google search results with a brand-new website in under 2 weeks! The "sandbox" penalty was gone. So, imagine what you could do with a site that was already somewhat built up! Imagine what you could do if you knew the terms that were teetering on the edge of working for you already in natural search, and just required a little push.

Well, you just imagined HitTail, and I'm happy to have brought it to so many people for over a year now.

I'm always still surprised and delighted at the articles that keep appearing about HitTail in blogs and newsletters. Here's one that apparently has been out since May of this year from Yaro Starak, the Blog Traffic King, but I only just discovered. It sums up the whole long tail and HitTail thing very nicely, and for those of you who don't get it yet, it's a recommended read. Thanks, Yaro!

The feedback really just keeps pouring in, and I'm surprised by how across-the-board it's coming from. You can read a great deal of the feedback on our TypePad Quotes and Testimonials site. But there are even not-safe-for-work links that I'm avoiding putting there out of good taste. But never one to avoid controversy, I figured I'd share one not-safe-for-work link (NSFW) regarding funny suggestions from HitTail. There are more. Seems we're just as appealing to the adult entertainment industry as political blogs, eCommerce sites and the like.

I guess this makes us an equal opportunity secret weapon for driving website traffic. I'm even waiting for candidates from the 2008 election to start hopping on the HitTail bandwagon as part of getting their message out online. There was brief interest from Obama Girl, but I guess she's so busy with her newfound fame. I'll give her another try.

One of the amazing trends I've discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.

While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence--working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the "My HitTail" tab was only one of five--and actually the least-important one at that.

That's right!

We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you're already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!

The fact that we're not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We're not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We're merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It's not some derivative of this event that's important. It's the event itself--that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you--usually deep in the results.

This tells you two things:

1. You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL--like surveying for new oil fields.
   
   
2. There's a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.

So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you're simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic "oil", and you're verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There's no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don't have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail's writing suggestions.

It's that easy.

So, we don't ask you to give up Google Analytics. It does a bunch of things HitTail is unlikely to ever do. But because our philosophy is so radically opposite to statistics (anecdotal evidence), they compliment each other perfectly--and this is perhaps the reason so many people mention GA and HitTail in the same breath.

If you have to choose just one more tracking system to run in addition to Google Analytics, HitTail is it.

Sometimes, Tracking Less is More

For those who watch the Flash HitTail Demo, the words "WE'RE NOT ANALYTICS" is probably quite familiar. And for those who run multiple tracking systems, like HitTail plus Google Analytics, you will notice that HitTail doesn't track everything.

What???!!!

That's right. And I am often explaining why this is so brilliant, and saves users of HitTail so much time in zero'ing in on what's important... actionable data!

Going against common logic, our patent-pending tracking system knows when to not listen to the activity on your site, and therefore it collects LESS data. And when you're looking for long tail keywords that might be useful for making new content, less is more. Why? Because other systems that capture everything have to sort it out later, reducing the real-time services they can provide. They sometimes make you wait a day or more. Also, they can't keep the data forever. And they have a more difficult time figuring out which of all the garbage data they collected is the meaningful stuff.

What sort of collected data is garbage, you may ask?

Think about it. Where are your hits coming from? Are YOU perhaps responsible for some of your hits (I think you are)? Should you include every search test you perform as part of your competitive intelligence data, especially when what you're trying to do is get into the mind of your prospective website visitors? You're actually polluting your own data with your webmaster testing activities. You're telling yourself things you already know! And isn't the same true of your competitors searching on your site? How many of their keyword tests should you allow to pollute your data? They might hand you over a few interesting terms. But on the whole, they're going to be searching on a bunch of industry insider terms that don't really represent the thoughts of your real prospects, and might be interesting to you maybe once--not over and over, as they're doing.

So, HitTail filters all this ridiculous traffic at the source. In fact, when we detect such situations, our tracking system "goes quiet", preventing excess Internet traffic, and makes your pages load even faster. This is one of the various reasons we are one of the most light-weight tracking systems on the Internet.

While HitTail is awesome for watching search hits that come to your site, indeed, almost hypnotizing, it doesn't record EVERY search hit. It only records the search hit data of each visitor only once, then ignores subsequent visits during that browser session.

That disappoints a lot of people. But it shouldn't. You should be shouting for joy that some tracking system is doing this for you.

Because in the end, you're on the lookout for some very important events in the history of your website--events that every other tracking and analytics system ignores--for example, HitTail captures he first time a particular search led to your website... EVER!

Yep, that's part of what HitTail does. And even that is just pre-filtering. We take this pre-filtered data, which is already throttled to prevent garbage, and it is to that we apply our writing suggestion-finding algorithm to determine which of the BRAND NEW topics (which never led to your site before) qualify as viable writing topic candidates.

The unique experience that this all produces is fueling HitTail's incredibly positive reception.