| As someone who has built several top 1000 trafficed websites over the past decade here is what the publishing industry definitely needs out of an analytics program. 1. Please give me a report that can prove that my user traffic is real. 2. Please give me a report that can prove that the traffic is healthy. I know that I can get this from analytics now, but it needs to be the focus. For a decade I've competed against content websites that for the most part game seo traffic, build click traps and generally pollute the Internet with secondary source content. I've always had fairly large audiences on my sites, with healthy 50% returning visitor rates. However, when it comes to getting ad dollars, I always lost to competitors who had much larger volume mostly because they were either buying meaningless inbound links or using some other scam like click trap "we recommend this hot girl talking about prostate cancer" photos to goose their numbers. Meanwhile we'd create quality content and my sites would have hundreds of comments, while theirs would have very little. It didn't matter that my audience was more engaged, advertisers bought volume. I just need something that I can show to an advertiser (or even better, that they have access to and can compare) that says... hey, this website isn't a constructed fabrication made to fake volume and take your money you sucker. This is a real website. A lot of the industry right now is based upon buying links from aging front door portals (Yahoo, MSN, AOL) which still do ungodly amounts of traffic with a mostly Internet illiterate audience. Sites buy these links, convert them into CPM click traps on their targeted magazine sites and sell their inventory to advertisers who don't know that the whole thing is shell game. They think they're buying ads on a hot new site with explosive growth. |
I'm building an analytics interface for GA though and would love to chat about what else publishers need in an analytics interface - luke at itsninja if you'd like to chat.