“How many hits did we get?” Whenever, I hear that question it is just like nails scraping a chalkboard and chills go up my spine. Out of all the intelligence that is available on websites today, there are people still stuck on the metric that ruled the dot-com era when it was all about eyeballs not necessarily what those eyeballs were doing. All that mattered was that the eyeballs were looking at your site.
Web analytics has come a long way since those days when they were simply basic data sourced from web server logs and top level data was all you could get. Today, you don’t even need the server web logs to gain information if you are using a javascript tagging reporting tool, i.e. Google Analytics. The amount of information we can now gather is impressive and contains information that is a valuable business tool and can help executives make decisions about the direction of the business, specifically ecommerce organizations.
As web professionals, it our job to educate our organizations on the capabilities of today’s analytic software and advocate their strategic value. There are a lot of resources out there which provide guidance in how to do this but the one I found most valuable for me was Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
If you place high importance on the following metrics, then you probably have a traditional mindset when it comes to web analytics:
- Hits – There is little value in these as each server request gets tracked as a hit and there is no distinction between file types (html pages, images, rich media, etc.).
- Page Views – Too many folks get focused on total number of page views or page views per visit with no focus on behaviors behind those numbers or what they are trying to achieve. For example, you may get a lower number of page views from a prior period but that is okay if the right pages are being at looked at.
- Top Exit Pages – This metric is valuable when combined with a path analysis and conversion goals but focusing on this by itself and trying to make a determination about the quality of the top exit pages is futile yet I still witness people doing it.
If you are placing an emphasis on metrics like the following, then chances are you have moved beyond the traditional method of thinking:
- Click Density – Products like Google Analytics offer site overlay features which tell you which links were clicked and allow you to see if users are clicking on what you want them to click on. I have been surprised at the click patterns that have been revealed through a density analysis and they have proven to be eye openers for me.
- Task Completion – This will tell you how often your users are following through on actions that you want them to do and have designed your site around. These can be purchases or free downloads, it doesn’t matter, what matters is if your website visitors are doing what you want them to do.
At the end of the day, web analytics is all about the what and the why and understanding how they can both influence each other. I have the what part figured out, it is the why which brings me the most consternation and the aspect I spend most of time trying to figure out now.
If you are in the same boat or find yourself trying to explain web analytics to people who only want to talk about hits, then get in touch me as I would love to bounce ideas off each other.
