So, you have a website. Your
site is accessible from various search engines and other linking websites on
the internet. Visitors are finding your site and viewing your content. But how
do you know your website is performing optimally? More specifically, is your
website doing exactly what you want it to do, as effectively as
possible? It's a fairly basic question but, judging by how difficult it is to
navigate some websites, it's an often overlooked consideration.
Any website is inevitably
created with certain goals in mind, tacit as they may be. For example, at a
minimum it suggests the goals that someone actually views your website and understands
basic information derived from its content. A website created for a company or
organization likely has specific core goals related to business functions. Often
companies and organizations have a lot at stake based on their websites'
performance of these goals. For example, the viability of a company which only
takes sales orders online depends on the viewability, content, layout, and
order-placement functionality of the company's website.
Because so much is often
at stake regarding website functionality, a process has evolved for evaluating website
performance. Web analytics is the
process of quantitatively measuring the number of visitors, performance, and
overall effectiveness of web sites. Utilizing analytics tools – typically
software placed on an organization's web server – web analysis provides
quantitative measurements, called “metrics,” about the site's accessibility,
design, content, and efficacy. Use of these metrics allows a series of
specific, measurable, business-driven performance goals to be specified for any website. Performance against these
goals can then be used as the basis for business decisions about the website
and, sometimes, even the business itself.
Web analytics tools
generate a series of statistical measures (for example, summaries and averages)
about how the website is being accessed and navigated. Generally speaking, the purpose
of web analysis is to create actionable information gathered from two realms of
focus: external and internal. The statistical measures related to how users a
website is accessed, linked to, located by users, or related to the internet
generally is external web analysis. All
other statistical measures and analyses related to how a website is navigated,
its content and functionality as viewed by visitors, how long visitors view
specific pages, why they leave the site, and how performance goals are being
met within the website itself is internal
web analysis.
Most web analytics tools
(e.g. Google Analytics) are very effective at external analysis, however very
few provide an adequate set of internal web analysis functionality, so it’s
important to select a web analytics tool (or a combination of tools) that excel
at both. For example, with a typical e-commerce site it’s critical to measure
and analyze the number of visitors who leave the site either because they can’t
find what they want to buy, or because they get frustrated with the buying
process. With careful analysis, the reasons for this visitor “friction” can be
determined and its impact significantly reduced (and measured quantitatively).
Once organizations define
clear performance goals for their websites, web analysis can be extremely
effective in not only assessing website performance and functionality, but also
wider considerations like company marketing campaigns and programs. Even non-commercial
websites may set specific and tangible goals for its visitors (such as user registrations,
surveys completed, views of relevant information etc.)
The key to effective use
of web analytics is establishing clear goals for the website and accurate
methods of evaluating performance – especially as they relate to business
functions. There's little benefit in collecting wide-ranging metrics that are
irrelevant to the desired performance of the website. For example, web analysis
that focuses on how visitors link to the site but ignores the sequence of pages
viewed, and the steps a visitor performs, to successfully place an online
order, misses the mark. Successful web analytics depends on integrating the
relevant external and internal metrics as they relate to clearly defined goals.