Analytics and Valuable Visitors

The aim of our Analyze That! series is not to help you drive traffic to your site, but to help you examine the traffic data you’re already getting so that you can answer questions – are we reaching the audience we want? What content does our valued audience respond to? As you answer these questions, you naturally push your content to evolve and meet the needs of your audience. This whole site (and its sister site, tippingpointlabs.tv) is an exploration of that premise and how it plays out in online content marketing.

What content speaks to our core audience?

Picture this: Alice composes a post called “Audacious Title”; it’s so popular in pageviews, she’s convinced that’s the kind of content that counts. Now, Jane knows better, knows it in her gut — but how to prove it? Jane’s guts … Alice’s popular post … one is a lot shinier.

Some time ago, Alice, Jane, and the whole team figured out that the audience they value the most happens to read WeAreYourAudience.com. During that research, they realized that the very popular ReallyNotYourAudience.com did not represent their target audience.

Jane asks the question, “Where did Alice’s pagesviews come from?” and she opens up Google Analytics to find out. She looks in the Content report for the post at Analyze: Entrance Sources and spots that 90% of the pageviews for “Audacious Title” were directly referred there from ReallyNotYourAudience.com.

Just passing through

Jane digs deeper and discovers that an office intern had recommended Alice’s post on ReallyNotYourAudience.com. “Audacious Title” instantly stirred up a little controversy and attracted many visits while its page position lasted. By the next day, though, it was buried and forgotten, displaced by the next 30 or 50 items of passing interest.

Going home

In 10th place as an Entrance Source is WeAreYourAudience.com, sending 2% of the total pageviews. Alice’s post does interest the target audience, but the high pageview count doesn’t equal a grand slam home run, as she had thought it did.

When Jane shows her this report, Alice realizes that, actually, “Audacious Title” was barely in the ballpark. This simple analysis prevents her from being lured off the course of core content – Alice won’t get caught off base; she won’t be distracted by passersby.

About the author

Anita Roy Dobbs -

Since Anita first tagged up with the Tippingpoint Team in 2007, she has flexed an array of skills from previous positions in publishing, television production, indie filmmaking, and offline as well as online community trailblazing. This extensive experience enables her to oversee a spectrum of content creation and distribution so the puzzle pieces come together in a coherent picture and the work flows.

From her studies in fine art and theater at Yale, she has an illuminated love of line and story. In her years at Boston Film/Video Foundation and then studies in the UC Santa Cruz Film/Video Department, she has an expansive passion for teaching and learning (especially about and through media).

"Since my earliest memories, I've dreamt one week of being an inventor, the next week, an animator, then a research scientist, a portrait artist, a director -- I'll stop there, but none of those dreams has stopped; I still want to be every one of those things. At Tippingpoint Labs, I get to exercise all those faculties while helping our team and our contributors develop their own dream roles."