What do you think about when you can’t get to sleep? All night I was reviewing web site issues in my head. I had just discovered goals and funnels in Google Analytics and realized there could be some reasons to use them even for my very non-commercial site. Essentially goals are counters of the number of site visitors who travel through your pages the way you hope they will. The tutorials seem to relate to someone entering, going shopping, filling out the customer and shipping pages, and finally using the credit card! But I don’t do all that!
But wait, this site promotes all the books by my authors. So far there has not been much direct purchasing as opposed to local gift shop sales, but I could get a measure of how many people actually went to, say, Amazon to look at the reviews and perhaps purchase a copy.
And I realized about 3 AM that I DO have two goals for my publishing site.
- I would like to locate people who have book ideas and some content that would like to progress to an actual finished product. If I could get a measure of how many people who entered the site went to look at additional pages that detailed the process (assuming I wrote such pages) I could get a sense of whether the site was helping toward that goal.
- I want to help “my” authors promote their books. If I had a measure of how many people went to Amazon that would help.
- I want to develop communities relating to sailing and to Scripture study. If I can measure how many people move over to those pages from this site, that might be significant.
Do I really NEED that information…no. But if I’m learning the technology, it might be fun. Still I will have to figure out how to do all that. The main lesson for me was to not drink 5 cups of coffee at Perkins Pancake House (even though the pot is right on the table), if I only have an hour of driving left for the day.