Sarah DeAtley
information + analysis + design
June 30, 2009 at 9:56 pm
filed under Web Analytics
Tagged Avinash Kaushik, burke, content, keywords, long tail, web analytics, ZAAZ
I was minding my own business, looking at some data in Google Analytics, and then I realized that one data set pretty much was a perfect example of the long tail. A) I was excited that I even recognized it when looking at a table, and b) I didn’t know what it really meant, but I did think it would be important to investigate.
General definition: increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
SEO definition: lots of key phrases individually account for little traffic by themselves but collectively all those key phrases often could account for a huge amount of traffic.
long tail example
As usual, I first turned to the Occam’s Razor blog for answers, and it seems like the long tail can mean different things in different contexts for analytics. When you are looking at keywords, and there a lot of keywords with small usage that add up to a big percentage, you would be interested in learning more about the tail. The tail keywords tend to be subject based versus branding keywords. So ours might be “Northwest Indians” versus “Burke Museum.” These keywords could be better utilized in the content of the site if this is what people are searching on.
On the other hand, I was looking at the top pages for a subsite, which Avinash compares to a “cliff” at the edge of the long tail. You should be trying to move the cliff further along the long tail ideally. In that case, most people are looking at the head pages only, and very few reach the long tail pages.
Content Long Tail
The overall gist of the long tail examples was that keyword analysis should focus on the long tail, and with content you can initially focus on the head of the tail. I guess what I’m having trouble with is how you apply this to other metrics, like average time spent on page, or bounce rate. Are keywords the primary instance in which you want to initially focus on the long tail to get more insight into user behavior? How do I decide which pages in the long tail to focus on for top content? If I see another long tail, should I just pretend like I didn’t see it so I don’t get confused again?
Last day of work at the Burke Museum. I am sad I won’t get to finish some projects or keep working on things, but hopefully they get a lot of benefits from what I did while I was here. Mainly I’m excited to start at ZAAZ after I relax for a few days.
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Rob
on June 30, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Congrats on finishing at the Burke! You should make them all subscribe to your blog so they’ll know how to awesomize their website.
Sarah
on July 1, 2009 at 6:44 am
Thanks
I should, but then I’d have to keep writing about them.
Lori
on July 1, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Hello Sarah,
If have a clean and attractive blog.
Average time on page will depend on how well your content suits the needs of the visitors that were targeted with the long tail (are they staying long enough to read it?).
Bounce rate will depend on whether the information was so specific (and whether it addressed (or not) the needs of the visitor) that the content of the rest of your site had no bearing or interest to the visitor (and they had no need or interest to see more).
Lori
on July 1, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Yikes, I seem to be unable to type. The previous comment should say – You have a clean….
Sarah
on July 1, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Hi Lori–
Thank you for the compliment and insights! Both of those make sense, it seems like it would be useful to focus on the long tail in top content and see how any changes in adjusting the “cliff” affect similar data in the average time on page and bounce rate?
web analytics
on August 15, 2009 at 1:58 am
Sarah,
I follow his blog and saw that “cliff” analogy before. I have applied this and other things I learned on my web analytics solution