‘In God we trust. All others must bring data.’
W. Edwards Deming, statistician
IDEA No 32
WEB ANALYTICS
The inventor of the department store, John Wanamaker, was the first person to buy advertising space in newspapers. He famously said, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is, I don’t know which half.’
That was before the Web was invented, the most measurable medium the world has ever known. The collection and reporting of website visitor data is called web analytics. The earliest online measurement tools, common across GeoCities in the mid-90s, were milometer-style hit counters. These days, web analytics is an industry in its own right.
At a basic level, you can measure the number of people who visit your site, and what the most popular pages are. Dig a little deeper and you can discover entrance and exit pages, the number of repeat visitors and the number of pages viewed per visit. ‘Bounce rate’ is a favoured measure. It reveals how many people came to your site and disappeared without getting beyond the homepage. If it is high, you are either attracting the wrong visitors or not providing the right content. Either way, your website is not working!
For those who do not like numbers, heat maps illustrate at a glance where people are clicking. Visualizations show that users often read webpages in an F-shaped pattern: they scan the top of the page, then make a horizontal sweep across the middle before skimming down the left-hand margin. Collecting this information allows you to make informed decisions about where to place the most important content on a page.
In addition to the huge amount of data that can be collected about visitor behaviour on your website, further analysis can also identify what happens off your website. Links from other sites, search engines, emails, banner ads and social networks can all be tracked.
Links from other sites tell you who your friends are and where else your audience hangs out. By looking at search logs you can see the keywords that led people to your site. This helps guide the type of content you provide and the language you should use. Stats from email and banner campaigns reveal how successful your marketing efforts are. Social media has been called ‘the largest and most honest unselfconscious focus group in the world’ – just be careful what you look for.
We have more data than ever before. The trick is not to measure everything you can, but to collect the data that will lead to meaningful insights. As with a Formula 1 car, lots of small tweaks can make a huge difference to the performance of the overall machine.■
‘Social media has been called “the largest and most honest unselfconscious focus group in the world.”’
For those who don’t like numbers, heat maps illustrate at a glance where people click.