Results

Long gone are the days of “counters” at the bottom of a web page, eagerly tallying the number of visitors to a site. Not only are they outdated, but they also don’t accurately indicate the success or failure of a site. After all, it’s possible that half those visitors left your site immediately, blinded by the bold red font on a blue background or annoyed by the pop-up ads. Counters also do not tell you what a visitor did on your site and if they were able to find what you were hoping they would find.

Analytics can help where counters cannot by providing more than just the number of views but also more detailed information which can help you fine-tune your website’s performance and usability. They can tell you where a visitor is located, what pages or buttons on your site are particularly sticky, how long they spend browsing, and at what point they left. Analytics, when done right, also present your data in a format that anyone can understand and interpret, and they give you the feedback you need to make your site usable and successful.

Analytics provides the user with metrics, i.e. measurements, that help determine how visitors are using a site. Metrics include any number of the following:

• where a user is located (based on IP address)
• click path throughout your website/application
• what task they did last
• what type of browser they use
• which page is the most popular
• how each of your pages performed
• how many unique visitors access a site
• how much time a visitor spends on a site
• if a visitor is new or returning
• which areas of a page they clicked on
• which page a visitor “bounced” or left the site from

While all of these metrics can give valuable information about a site, some are obviously more pertinent than others, and this largely depends on the purpose of the website itself. If your site focuses on e-commerce, you’ll want to know how visitors found you (what site they linked from), how they found the item in which they were interested, whether or not they purchased that item, etc. Knowing how your site is used will help you better tailor your website for your customer.

On the other hand, if your website is content based, you’ll be more interested in how long a visitor spends on a page, and how they got to your site in the first place. A website like CNN would use this information to determine what types of stories capture the attention of visitors, and they would cycle the headlines appropriately. A popular blog might form partnerships for sponsored links with other similar blogs, directing traffic to one another. A health care provider might set up an FAQ section when they realize users are leaving their site because they cannot find the information they need. This is how analytics increase the usability of a site. The criteria they measure provides the feedback designers and developers to conduct usability studies. Some analytics services, like Clicktale, record a user’s visit like a movie, allowing you to see exactly where they progressed naturally and where they stumbled or failed to find what they needed. The metrics provided by analytics help determine your level of success in making a usable site.

It use to be that only large web companies with big budgets implemented some form of analytics, because the service was often prohibitively expensive and the data was difficult to understand. All that changed in 2005 when Google released its free tool, aptly named Google Analytics. This created an explosion of websites using analytics to track their website’s visitors. Nowadays, only the tiniest of websites go without metrics. Analytics are not a nice supplement any more, they’re a necessity. Smart website owners will take the information gathered by analytics services and implement the changes implied by this data. For example, if the vast majority of your visitors are coming from Québec, consider a mirror site in French to serve those users. If your visitors always bounce on a particular page, put some serious thought into changing the look or organization of that portion of your site. Analytics are only useful if their “advice” is heeded. For those who use this service correctly, analytics act as an ongoing usability test that allows for constant improvements in the performance of the website, making adjustments in the user experience and ultimately ensuring success.

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 Both comments and pings are currently closed.

By Haley January Eckels