Web Analytic Matt

Web Analytics Methodology Part 1
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics on April 11th, 2007

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So you’ve just read or heard about a technology that can improve your marketing bottom line, or maybe you’ve known about it for a long time but haven’t been ready to take the plunge as of yet?

Of course I am talking about web analytics, but what is this technical term that you hear spoken about at marketing conferences?

Well, web analytics is simply looking at where people go on your website and how they interact with your site. The reason you might want to peer into the world of your website visitors is simple, to learn from their actions so that you can improve your website conversion rates.

This is achieved in many ways, for instance you can find the paths through your website that convert the most visitors, or you could find out what content is attracting your target market segment. You may think that the answers to these questions are obvious to you, but there are always lessons to be learned from your visitor’s behaviour on your website.

Once you have made the decision to proceed with web analytics there are a few things you should know.

1. A web analytics implementation is not a 1 hour process, in fact to do it properly a project should be created to ensure that the process is properly managed from start to finish.
2. Web analytics is an ongoing task and not just a one time fix for all your marketing woes. Web analytics may start at just one hour a day but in my experience I have found that once you start providing detailed web information, people in your company will sniff the coffee and wake up to the realisation that this is real and actionable information. At that time the web analyst becomes the provider of information and becomes worth their weight in gold. We have seen this happen in America where web analysts with only a few years experience are being hired for $100,000 a year. The UK is following suit with a growing market in web analytics.
3. The other important thing to know before you embark on your web analytics voyage of discovery is to outline your desired outcomes.

Outlining your desired outcomes means that you have to write down somewhere what you want to do with your web analytics information. Do you want people to interact more with your brand? Buy more of your products? Do you want to grow your website traffic?

You should create these outcomes and put them in a table with three columns as shown below.

Overall Objective	Desired Outcomes	Who Cares?
Generate more income from the web	Increase website traffic	CEO Marketing Manager

In the first column you should define your overall objectives for your web presence.

In the second column you should put all your desired outcomes in order to reach your objectives.

In the third column you should match up the desired outcomes with the person who cares about that outcome. Let’s say your outcome is “Write content that attracts your target market share.” I would imagine that the marketing department and especially the person/people who write your website content would like to know what content is attracting the ‘right’ traffic.

This table will be useful when customising your web analytics solution to your business and sending the right information to the right people, as in the people who can take action.

The way in which this information reaches people is vital.

If your content writer is sent the number of views, visits, visitors, bounce rate and view:visit ratio then they may get overwhelmed with the technical jargon. However if they are sent the number of readers, the reader to comment ratio and the article relevance numbers then they might mean something a little more obvious to the content writer.

So information is near useless unless it is given some context, this is where Key Performance Indicators come in. They allow information to be presented in a way that is familiar to the business. Importantly, these metrics should be ‘key’ to the business and provide an ‘indication’ as to whether the website is ‘performing’.

Part 2 of the web analytics methodology will continue with how to define KPIs for your business along with the next steps of your web analytics journey.