Is your site a black hole where visitors arrive and then are never seen again? Do you know what they did there? What they liked and disliked? If they started the shopping cart (or enquiry system) and then left half way through?
Today, thanks to Google's free analytics (always worries me that, Google giving something away - but that is another story) many sites now can tell a lot about what their visitors get up to. Whether this data is used correctly is (yet) another story and we won't go down that route today, no let us concentrate on whether ALL the data that could be collected IS being collected.
The difference between a Black Hole a Grey Hole and a White Hole
As above, many sites are now using analytics and will therefore not have a black hole for a site, but they probably still have a grey one as they are not using Filters, Tagging and Event Tracking, all three of which will add a whole new dimension to the data collected and will allow you to better understand what is going on. Used correctly you can see Everything and your site becomes not black or grey, but bright white (at least data wise).
For instance, did you know that with 'Tagging' you can split your visitors into the right groups, those coming in via a Newsletter being separated from those coming in via Banner ads etc.
With 'Event Tracking' you can see if people click a 'mailto' link to send you an email, or to go to another site. Better still you can use it to see at what part of filling out a form users stop, something that could save you a lot of lost business (cause you would know what they did not like and could therefore change it).
Filters on the other hand allow you to see the data in clearer fashion by only collecting data on a particular section of visitors, plus, they can also be used to 'filter out' visitors from your own business etc.
As you can see, there is a whole lot more to Google analytics than meets the eye.
The question is, is your site a Black Hole a Grey one or one where you see it all..?
More tomorrow
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