News and Media

Understanding Website Analytics

April 2008

Analysing your website can help your business to understand exactly who your customers are, where they are coming from and how they are converting to products and services offered via your website.

It wasn’t long ago that website analysis was limited to examining server log files, cookies and page tags, which provided you with broad statistics and a limited ability to track the sales lifecycle. This arcane process has thankfully been laid to rest with the introduction of more sophisticated systems, such as the excellent web-based Google Analytics (a favourite at Certus!), or enterprise software packages such as WebTrends.

There are major benefits to understanding the web analytics integrated within your website, including:

Visitor profiling - a detailed view of your website visitors; how long they browsed your website, what pages they viewed, where they came from and how they found your website.
Keyword tracking – track keywords entered into search engines that have sent visitors to your website.
Optimisation – once you begin to see statistics on your visitors, you can begin to optimise the content on your site based on search keywords entered into search engines.
Track sales conversions – with visitor data you can track enquiries, calls to action and sales through the website, allowing you to optimise how to ‘pitch’ your product(s) online.
Track eMarketing performance – measure the success of integrated marketing campaigns by measuring hits, sales and performance of search engine advertising.
Technical statistics – fix broken links; identify visits that bounced, view visiting IP addresses, computer resolutions and internet connection speeds.

When you combine this information into a meaningful report, you can begin to develop a comprehensive view of your customers and the performance of your website. With a little practice you can setup detailed reports, allowing you to analyse the performance of items such as the number of clicks on Google paid advertising and resulting sales, seasonal marketing campaigns, sales promotions, visitor trends, customer segments and a range of useful business data.

Sounds good.....where do I start?

A number of our clients are right into web analytics already, and if you aren’t doing this or at least considering it – remember that this WILL change the way you market yourself online.

If you have already built your site without analytics and search engines in mind then you will definitely experience some difficulty trying to retrofit these features. The best practice approach involves considering what you need measured before building your website as there are a number of technical decisions that can affect what you can measure and the accuracy of what you receive.

To get up and running with web analytics, almost all major solutions use ‘client-side tagging’ to collect data, meaning that the user must generally have cookies enabled for tracking to work . For example, if you are using Google Analytics, a small snippet of JavaScript code must be placed throughout your website which looks like the following:

_uacct = "<tracking number goes here>";

urchinTracker();

</script>

It’s then critical to ensure that every page in your site includes this tag, otherwise there is no way of tracking all of your site content. For larger sites with lots of templates, applications and functionality, you can easily miss or overlook areas such as sales pop-ups, microsites and third party sites, so therefore make sure your content management system or development process ensures that all pages are tagged automatically.

Tracking Conversions

One of the most important features offered by a package such as Google Analytics is "Goals". Goals are effectively page views for key areas in your site and they help track conversions be it the completion of payment towards the purchase of a product / service or a simply a page holding some important information. Any analytics offering would be incomplete without the ability to track conversions.

Goals can also be associated with funnels which are nothing but a series of steps that lead to the accomplishment of a goal. For example, the series of steps followed by a user as they land on a shop catalogue on your site through to completing the purchase of a product would form a typical funnel. You might find that a significant number of users drop out at a particular step in the funnel which would might lead to uncovering an issue that would have been overlooked otherwise. Funnels are particularly effective in identifying critical usability issues that might have a direct impact on your website's conversions and in turn its overall business value.

Easily track sales conversions

Keep an eye on your Search Engine

A search engine is another area of analytics that allows you to report on search queries and the number of results for each search. When setting up a search application within your website, one approach is to make sure that the query/keyword and numbers of results are visible in the results string. For example, if a user searches for “website solution” at our website, the end of the URL looks like:

Searchblox keyword reports

For example, if a user searches for “website solution” at our website, the end of the URL looks like:

Search?query=website+solution&x=12&y=9

This enables a report to be configured which measures top site searches. You can then begin to analyse what people are typing in as keywords and ensure that your content appears in the search results.

If you want to simplify this process, products such as Searchblox automate this process and deliver keyword reports through an online reporting system.

Get it right from the start

Like most things in business, planning is the key to ensuring your site delivers the right data for you to analyse. You need to understand what type of data you want to measure before implementing a web analytics solution. This is an important step as every business has different goals and priorities.

For example, an online retailer might be interested in measuring sales conversions and the link between an email promotion and related hits on the site, while a news site might be concerned more with time spent reading articles, advertising that was served up and click-through’s to similar content.

In Conclusion

Web analytics can provide an impressive range of reports on your site performance and should be part of every online Marketers toolkit. If you are in the process of re-designing your website we highly recommend making these metrics an important part of this planning process. Getting it right now will save you a lot of time and money and is far easier than retrofitting your site down the track.