Web site analytics:
"In the country of the blind…"
By Jon Fletcher - Managing Director
"…the one eyed man is King", goes the saying, and it’s nowhere more appropriate than in the field of web site analytics.
Admittedly the word "analytics" is enough to bring back memories of long boring maths lessons, but don’t switch off just yet. It turns out that this bit of maths is actually very interesting indeed - it helps make lots of money - and that’s always a good attention grabber.
Traditional marketing has always struggled along with a range of assumptions, approximations and guesswork when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of its endeavours. For example, we often hear mention of the ‘brand’ word - brand impact, brand penetration, brand awareness, and while these are not to be summarily dismissed, there is sometimes more than a little "brand obfuscation" when metrics are involved.
With the advent of new media, web sites, servers and the glorious Interweb, a whole new area has developed to complement traditional marketing. With it comes the ability to measure the real effectiveness of marketing spend.
No longer do you need to rely on focus groups and representative samples, now you can measure the lot, record the behaviour of everyone interacting with your site and react almost immediately to your findings. A/B testing was never so simple or so effective.
Log files
Behind every web site is a web server and every web server writes a "log file" for each and every site. This log file records when someone visits a specific page, the time they arrive, their IP address (their unique number when they use the ‘net) and a range of other things. Just the data mentioned above is enough to generate the following example statistics:
Number of visitors
Then with some simple web site structuring:
All of these can be compared across date ranges or after changes have been made to your site. Armed with a set of reliable statistics like these, you are much better placed to make appropriate decisions regarding the content of your web site and the products or services you are offering.
Google analytics
Our ubiquitous friend Google even has a tool capable of providing a wealth of statistics without the need for a log file (http://www.google.com/analytics/ ). Beyond this there are software packages allowing the advanced analysis of visitor behaviour on your site.
It is important at some stage, if not for the whole process, to get some professional help in the interpretation of any results that are produced. When one of our client’s first came to us, their IT department was reporting 3 million visitors per year to their main site. In fact, they had less than 30,000. The discrepancy was being generated by an over enthusiastic self diagnosis system on the server and a lack of filtering in the log file analysis.
Couple the technology with professional expertise, and you have a powerful formula. One that can not only interpret results, but also trends and, crucially, opportunities for the future.
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statistics, you're better placed to make appropriate decisions regarding the content of your site.