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.