Analyzing traffic to your Film Page using Google Analytics

Ever wonder how many people are looking at your film page online? Whether or not people are purchasing your film for download, you STILL want to know how many window-shoppers you're getting. More importantly, you want to know, out of all the people looking at your page, how many are buying.

To allow our self-distributing filmmakers to monitor web traffic, we've added Google Analytics to our set of tools. Google Analytics is a standard platform that Google provides web site administrators to track the traffic on their sites. NewFilmmakersOnline.com ITSELF uses Google Analytics to track traffic to EVERY page on its site.

When a filmmaker begins distributing their film on the site, we create a "profile" which reports only on traffic to the filmmaker's page. (For example, only traffic to: "http://www.newfilmmakersonline.com/movie-download/2947,1629/David-Maquiling-Too-Much-Sleep"). Then, we ask the filmmaker to create an account with google.com, if they do not have one already. The film page profile is then assigned to the filmmaker's Google.com account. That's it! Now you can see how much traffic your film is getting!

The hard part, and the most IMPORTANT part is deciphering, analyzing, and eventually reacting to the data!

So, let's begin with some navigation around Google Analytics.

The Dashboard

When you click through to your film's profile, you will see the "Dashboard". This screen shows general information about your traffic inclluding visits, referrers, page views, and visitors. By default, the date range is up to a month's worth of data ending at YESTERDAY's date (TODAY is not included, by default). To see data JUST for today, you can click on the date range in the upper right hand corner and select today's date.

Here is what I like to look at on the dashboard!

Visitors

This is the number of unique individuals that have visited your film page. You will see alot of web sites which measure their site's success by the number of HITS or PAGE VIEWS that they get. I like to use visitors, because it truly represents the number of people who "window-shopped" at my film page. I can use this number later to measure against the actual NUMBER OF PURCHASES. Using the two numbers, (number of visitors and number of purchases over time), you can begin to figure out how much traffic you need to generate (in terms of unique visitors) in order to generate a volume of sales for your film.

The percentage which represents the number of purchases divided by the number of visitors over time represents the "conversion rate". Traditionally, at many web stores, I have seen the conversion rate somewhere at 1 - 2%.

Now, looking at this figure, you may start to wonder: "How am I going to generate enough traffic to make sales?". To give you SOME comfort, the stores with the 1 - 2% conversion rates were also ones that did not actively promote their products, either to a targeted or non-targeted audience. To raise this percentage, we do and will continue to offer you tools to self-promote your film to your target audience and beyond. This, in turn, will give you a better shot of increasing the "conversion rate". In another article, we will be giving you more tips on how to increase traffic to your NewFilmmakers Online Film Page.

Traffic Sources Overview

This area shows where users who are coming to your page are arriving from. Clicking on "view report" in this section, will give you a detailed breakdown of incoming traffic. The three categories of referrers here are:

Referring Sites: Third party sites, blogs, and social networking profiles which link to NewFilmmakers Online. You can often measure the success of incoming widget links from MySpace (msplinks.com), Facebook, blogs, and other sites by looking here.

Search Engines: Traffic to your page as the result of a web search. Each film page is "Search engine optimized" to include specific data about the film in the URL. For example, if you look at the URL for the film, "The Capitalist", you will see the name of the filmmaker and the film in the URL as well as the keywords: "movie" and "download" (http://www.newfilmmakersonline.com/movie-download/3288,1787/Ray-Soltani-The-Capitalist). By placing specific data in the URL, there is a higher chance that the film will come up higher in Google Search Results. Try it for yourself! Go to http://www.google.com/ and search for: Ray Soltani Capitalist.

The search engine optimization is currently handled completely by NewFilmmakers Online. We DO plan to export some of this functionality to the filmmaker in the near future. However. Note that traffic from search results can only get you so far. Unfortunately, sites that benefit the most from search results are usually ones that are getting plenty of traffic already.

Thus, the key indicator to success for incoming traffic for YOU should be the traffic from REFERRING SITES! It is important for you to form partnerships with blogs and websites, post on message boards, generate press links, and do whatever you can to make sure that you are constantly gaining traffic and interest for your film. Being a permanent link (on the sidebar of a blog, on social networking profiles, etc..) on many of these sites will increase your referring site traffic.

Once again, we will be offering you more tips on how to form partnerships and get more referring traffic in an upcoming blog post.

Map Overlay

This one is, in my opinion, the LEAST vital stat, but nevertheless, a fun one! It tells you where in the world people are accessing your film page from. If you've e-mailed your film page URL to friends and crew members around the country, you might be able to see if they looked at it based on whether your film page was accessed from their city. Alternatively, you can just look at this stat to gauge the international appeal of your film.

To look at the specific city where your film page is being browsed, click on "view report" in the "Map Overlay" quadrant. On the subsequent screen, you will see a dropdown box which is defaulted to "country/territory". Click on that dropdown and select "city".

There are many other metrics that you can use in Google Analytics. You will be able to get explanation on alot of these by using Google Analytics "Help" and clicking on "?" icons next to each metric. If you DO find metrics that directly help you in sales, feel free to let us and your fellow filmmakers know by adding a comment to this blog post!

In the meantime, enjoy Google Analytics!

Watch for an upcoming article on tips for increasing traffic to your film page.

- Bill