What is Web Analytics and Why Should I Care?
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on March 21st, 2007
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The short answer:
Web analytics is the process of looking at the visitor behaviour to your website and then using that information to make business decisions that will improve business performance.
The long answer:
If you have a website then there will be a reason for its existence, it may be that you run an online shop where visitors buy products from you. It may be that you have a business and require a web presence to describe your products and services and thus generate leads. Or it may be that you’re just creating web content because its fun.
What ever your reason behind having a website you will have, or should have a goal for that website. In the case of the online shop, the goal is to make more sales. For the lead generation site the goal will be to generate more leads in quantity and quality. And for the fun content site the goal may be to entertain as many people as possible and gain more traffic to your website.
Now, you have your website with your current content and you have your website goal or objective. How do you get from your current situation to a place where your goals are being achieved?
This is where web analytics comes in.
At the lowest level websites are hosted on web servers and these web servers record requests made to them for resources. Resources can include images, Flash files, MP3s, PDF documents and web pages. These records are generally grouped into time periods such as days or weeks into web server log files.
It is possible to process these log files and produce meaningful reports on the way in which the web server resources are requested. When the web server records a resource request it will also note down who made the request (IP address and Internet Browser), what time that request was made, which internet page caused that request (Referrer) and some other information about that request. This means that when it comes to looking at the meaningful reports created by processing your log files, there will be a record of who made the requests (unqiue visitors) and in which order they made them (visit clickstream).
Ok, so you have some reports of who used your website (unique visitors), where they came from (referrer), what pages they visited on the site and in which order (visit clickstream).
Using this data there are a number of business questions that you can answer, things like:
- Do I get more traffic to my website on a Monday than a Wednesday?
- What is the most popular area of content that people visit on my website? What do my visitors want to read about?
- Where does my traffic come from?
- Where do people leave my site? Does one area of content cause more people to leave than others?
- What keywords to people use in search engines to find my website?
- Are people using certain keywords landing on relevant content that causes them to convert into paying customers?
- Is there a problem on my website that only Firefox browser users are experiencing?
The list goes on and on, and with different methods of capturing visitor data like page tags you can record more detailed elements of a users visit.
It is important when analysing your web analytics data however, that you have a goal for your website and so you should ask business questions of your data that will allow you to change your website in order to reach your goals and objectives.
But…Why Should I Care?
This is a nice easy one. If you want to achieve your website goals or need to prove your marketing campaigns are working then you need Web Analytics. Oh, and it will save you lots of money in your marketing budget.
If you still need convincing then speak to a web analytics vendor like SCL Analytics who will give you many reasons.
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