Paul Hayes

“Track every­thing”, lest vital vis­i­tor trends fall through the cracks — that’s my newly endorsed web ana­lyt­ics doc­trine. As a pre­cur­sor to the quan­ti­ta­tive ‘what’ and the qual­i­ta­tive ‘why’ we need that cold hard data before analy­sis can begin; Google Ana­lyt­ics is the pop­u­lar har­vester of choice and out of the box it grabs a lot. Vis­its, Pageviews, Screen res­o­lu­tion, et al — GA seem­ingly has all your con­ven­tional data needs cov­ered. But one sig­nif­i­cant trend is lack­ing — how vis­i­tors leave your site, specif­i­cally through out­bound links on a page, data that inevitably leads to a what and an avenue for inves­ti­gat­ing the why. For instance, “Which part­ner sites are attract­ing the high­est click throughs?” or more gen­er­ally “Why do vis­i­tors leave my site?”.
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