Reporting That Makes Sense
It has been a while since I have posted on the statzen blog. The primary reason is that I have taken a little time for myself. I took a motorcycle trip from Tennessee to Washington, DC and back while camping along the way. It was a great time and now I am back and motivated to continue getting statzen into the hands of people who can benefit from it.
Right now I am sitting on a plane and have spent the flight working on a way to provide reporting in where visitors come from. I currently see the “referrer” report as the biggest missing piece in statzen. Granted, I am trying to do much more than provide a typical referrer report. I want a report on where people came from that follows common sense. Who cares about identical URLs? The real question is which site is sending the most traffic. Some ancillary questions are: Which pages on that site are delivering the most visitors? Are those links recognized by Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search ,etc? Are those referrals from a search engine? If so, what are the most common search terms for that search engine? What about the most common aggregate search terms?
That is a fair amount of ancillary questions. The challenge is to how to keep it simple and useful. The key to simplifying referrals in a way that makes sense is through aggregate reporting. First I need to address polyURLism (www or no www, etc), this way a unique referrer will only appear once. Secondly, providing aggregate information on the domain is the primary information that people need. As long as their is an ability to drill-down, starting with the aggregate provides the most information with the least mental processing required from the user.
This is what I am currently working on. I hope to have this glaring hold in the functionality of statzen into the current users’ hands by the end of the week.
