Designing a website with web analytics tracking in mind
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on April 6th, 2007
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As a web analytics vendor consultant I see all types of websites every day in all different shapes and sizes. But the one main difference between what I think are the good ones and the not so good ones are their trackability. By that I mean the effort required to track visitor traffic throughout the website.
A quick note to remind you that no matter what type of website you have, be it Flash, AJAX, dynamically driven using Coldfusion, all website traffic can be tracked its all about how much effort you wish to put in to tracking.
I have compiled a short list of what I see as the most trackable types of site with the least amount of effort required.
- Flat file html web page sites with really clear directory structures and page names, the kind your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) company would/should create.
- Dynamic websites in PHP, Coldfusion, ASP, .NET etc. where all user entered values are output to the URL. Eg. http://www.bookassist.com
- Dynamic websites that use one page like index.aspx and pageid values for every single page.
- AJAX websites.
- Flash websites.
- Websites that mix any number of AJAX, Flash, flat file and dynamic elements.
Most of these types of websites you can use page tags or log files as your data capture method of choice however it is only possible to capture data for the following site types using page tags. Be aware that when implementing a page tagging solution that you should plan what data and where it should be captured very carefully to avoid misinterpreting your web analytics data.
- Flash
- AJAX
So why are flat file web sites easier to track than Flash files?
Well data from Flash files has to be collected by specifying the user events to track, this is done using page tags. Flat file websites store all their data automatically in web server log files by default.
That is not to say that page tags cannot be used for flat file websites, there are advantages and disadvantages for both page tags and log files.
In conclusion not all websites are created equal but they can all be equally tracked with varying degrees of effort.
April 6th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Hi Matt,
Definitely! I often explains to clients that Web Analytics tries as much as possible to adjust to the present situation, but we do come across sites that are quite hard to measure, or to create certain types of reports, so occasionally the site has to be adapted to the measurement needs.
In the last 5 years, organizations have solved the web publishing problem, hiring people and putting processes in place. The sites are up, the content is there, it all works just fine, but sometimes what was good in terms of publishing decisions is bad in terms of measurement.
I encourage all my clients to let the analyst give his or her input early on in projects. Often, just changing a little bit how to develop a page or an application will make their work much easier.