One of my favorite blogs is Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. Recently he published a post called, Analysis Ninjas: Move Beyond The Top Ten. In the post Avinash argues that looking at the top ten items on any list has limited value. What lies beneath the top ten is often more important and valuable. The problem, he states, is that analyzing below the surface is difficult and time consuming. What is needed are tools to make the task easier.
He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.
This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.
The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.
The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?
The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.
When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.