27

Jan

By Dennis R. Mortensen
3 comments
Content grouping and why ignoring it is suboptimal

Any decent Web Analytics tool enables you to assign each page on your website a unique document name for the purposes of reporting. This is an override function and you are usually not forced to use it, as if you do not assign unique names to each page, the tool tends to apply the HTML title tag as the name of the page viewed – and with that an opportunity to report on this grouped entity.

Some analysts, unfortunately, do not make the effort to create a reporting naming strategy for their pages (content), resulting in potential errors in reporting and foregoing the ease of creating new reports. Let me describe a single example of this problem (and there are many more, trust me).

Any serious search engine optimization (SEO) activity includes optimization on the HTML title tag for the pages in question. With the title tag changing every now and then, the collected and reported-on information will show a new page for every change in my analytics solution. So if my HTML title tag changes from:

<title>Increasing Front Page Performance</title>

to:

<title>Increasing Front Page Performance for Online Media</title>

I will have the same unique page reported as two distinct pages — which is of course extremely bad, both for long-term reporting as well as short-term reporting (measuring the effects of the SEO activity itself). This is a great example of where we need the page name override functionality.

I highly recommend you use any page naming opportunity provided, or at least, that you adopt a clear document naming strategy as you deploy your web analytics solution.

Further to this and making it even more problematic, is the concept of updating the page name for an article as the story develops – where both title and content are subject to change. How do you report on this over the long run (web analytics) and how do you report on this as the story develops (real-time) ?

In our Article Performance in Real-Time report we accepted the fact that one could not expect a writer to apply a script/tag update as the story developed – that’s a ludicrous suggestion. So as we do Semantic Analysis on the Articles, we determine if it is indeed the same article, even if its Title has changed. With this in place you do not have to think about document naming, as it is done on the fly, but even more sexy, you’ll have the most up to date name as a reference into the Article. Beautiful!

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

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  • Mike Sukmanowsky

    Good article Dennis! We handle it pretty simply at the Globe right now – every piece of content has an ID within the CMS. We simply follow the top IDs and then can run a “breakdown” of the titles – actually gives a pretty cool view of when traffic really broke for different headlines.

    Of course, semantic analysis is much more fancy :)

    Did you guys look at using content IDs? Any publisher (regardless of CMS) is bound to have a root ID to content that won’t change after initial creation.

  • http://visualrevenue.com/ Dennis R. Mortensen

    Hi Mike,

    You and I and very much on the same page in regards to how one should think about this! I preach to publishers, who are not necessarily as coordinated as you, to apply the same measurement thoroughness to an Article as a Retailer would apply to a Product of his. No retailer would have a product without a SKU number attached to it, and no Article should really exist (even from a reporting point of view) without a unique identifier.

    >>Did you guys look at using content IDs? Any publisher (regardless of CMS) is bound to have a root ID to content that won’t change after initial creation.

    We did and we are to some extent, BUT we wanted our reader response tracking solution to come with minimal deployment pain and as automatic as possible. So we take advantage of the fact that we need to parse the Article as part of our Recommendation Engine to provide the latest, most up to date document name, while still grouping as the same Article.

    Speak soon..
    d. :-)