Online Traction

If you’re in business you probably want to know how well your business is performing, what areas are underperforming, ROI, revenues and profit etc.

Similarly, if you have invested in producing a website you might be interested in seeing how your site supports your business, where your web traffic is coming from and what visitors to your site actually do.

In short, website data allows you to make well informed managerial decisions because it provides you with almost instant feedback on site performance and the value generated by your online marketing efforts. To this extent online marketing offers more managerial control compared to traditional marketing tactics.

Here is a short and simple introduction to business intelligence as it applies to websites.

Most websites produce data that shows among other things:

• number of visits (’sessions’)
• number of pages viewed (’pageviews’)
• duration of visits
• source of visits (from which website did your visitor come)
• entry and exit pages
• search phrases used to arrive at your site

Where to find this data. Ask the company that hosts or designed your site for instructions on where to find usage statistics aka web metrics. Any web host worth their salt will provide you with free access; if this data is not freely available to you then consider changing your web host. At this point the most popular is probably webalizer. You get the basic data you need, its usually free and doesn’t require you to change the code or the design of your site. This image from ‘webalizer‘ shows a monthly summary of activity and gives you a taste of the reasonably intuitive interface.

Alternatively, google now offers a free service ‘Google Analytics‘ that gives excellent analysis on the performance of your site. Unlike ‘webalizer’ GA requires you to insert a few lines of code into each page that you want to monitor on your site. In my view it is worth the effort simply for the wealth of reporting produced and the fact that it can be integrated with other google-ware such as Adwords (Googles ‘Pay-per-click‘ advertising). At this point Google is not accepting new accounts for Google Analytics because its popularity has exceeded expectations. Here is an example of the ‘dashboard’ view in google analytics*:

How to use this data and convert it to strategic information. The data produced by these and similar programs can be useful by itself. For more advanced analysis you can also perform simple calculations to generate key performance indicators that offer more sophisticated information on site performance (and under performance) and can more clearly inform your marketing strategy and tactics.

• Landing Page Bounce Rate - measures how many visitors arrive to your front page and leave without entering your site and calculated thus: site exits from landing page/landing page visits
• Average pageviews per session - calculated by dividing total pageviews for a period by total sessions for the same period. This a useful metric for sites where there is a definitive number of steps to complete a transaction (typical in an e-commerce purchase scenario). You can then apply lower and upper limits to trigger investigations into why visitors are spending too little or too much time navigating your site.

• Conversion Rate - Many sites have objectives in terms of ‘I want users to buy my product’ or fill in the contact form. Achieving this objective largely determines the success of a website. Conversion then is the percentage of site visitors who achieved the site objective (filled in the form, or made a purchase).

In general you want to identify the parts of your site that generate the most value for your business and focus your efforts there.

A couple of miscellaneous points:

A certain amount of web traffic is made up of non-human traffic such as search engine spiders and automated bots that visit sites in order to include your pages in their directories. A certain allowance has to be made for this traffic and manage your expectations of human traffic accordingly.

Web analytics can be complex or simple. At the basic level it can give you a baseline for traffic to your site. At a more advanced level it can tell you all sorts of important information such as duration of visit, shopping cart abandonment rate, conversion rates and average pageview information that can point to bored visitors or even visitors that can’t find something on your site due to poor navigation or programming errors.

*Needless to say, there is a wide selection of web analytics software available to suit all budgets and levels of anaytical sophistication.

And finally, don’t invest time and money on web analytics if you aren’t in a position to take corrective action if necessary. Just remember the old adage - ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.’