Analytics Content Analysis Fields

Legend

General usefulness is a blend of the difficulty in getting the value and how useful it is once you have it. These stars roughly correspond to:

• ★★★ Broadly Useful. These would be worth including a most analyses.
• ★★ Frequently useful for particular needs. These may not be quite as broadly useful, but they are frequently useful. Notably, if you have a general reason for a field that is rated two stars then you may wish to go to the category and look for others that may be slightly more useful.
• ★ Rarely useful. These are listed since they still have a "following" or because they are easy to implement so are tempting to rely upon. Your mileage of course may vary, but in general these are less useful fields.

Ease of automation is how easy it is to get the value:

• ⚙⚙⚙⚙ Easy to automate. Completely point-and-shoot automation (although, of course, there can be exceptions to when some information is more difficult to extract than it should be).
• ⚙⚙⚙ Relatively easy to automate. With the right tool, this can almost certainly be automated with very limited configuration (not requiring deep technical knowledge).
• ⚙⚙ Can probably be automated. With the right tool and some technical ability and/or time to configure (for instance, providing xpath and regex information to select content out of a page) this can probably be automated. But it probably is not just clicking a single button to set up and run (unlike the three and four gears items).
• ⚙ Very difficult to automate. This almost certainly requires manual intervention. Note: there is a technique that can be applied in many cases to sample and then use rules and repeat.

Obviously all of the above is ratings in the general case. You may have particular needs for fields that are generally not useful, and you may already have some clean data that makes automation trivial for some elements that are more generally difficult.