Web Analytics

Web Analytics is a way of using information gathered from a variety of web analytics software to continually increase the amount of relevant website visitors, and increase the conversion of these visitors to being genuine enquirers, subscribers or customers, depending on what your online goals, and objectives are.

Web analytics essentially provides information on which to base your decisions about the design elements of your website, and your related promotional activity, on and offline.

The growing number of web pages, and therefore increasing competition on the web makes a knowledge of how to use web analytics and essential element of marketing today.

The use of web analytics programs on a regular basis can allow you to discover information such as:
• Where your main and most lucrative stream of website visitors are coming from and in what numbers,
• What keywords your website visitors are most interested in.
• How changing your website design, navigation, usability or adding new content can change website visitors behaviour.
• What opportunities exist for cross selling.
• Where the errors are within your pages and within your ‘sales funnel’.

The raw date for the website analytics software packages comes from the ‘log files’.

These are pages / files that are usually stored near your actual web pages on the web server. These logs record all activity within the pages, and different website analytics packages interpret and present the data as information in different ways.

Why Use Web Analytics?
Web analytics should ultimately be used to gain useful actionable data, which can be turned into information that can in turn provide measurements that allow you keep improving the return on investment (ROI) of your online activities. In simple terms, improvement of the performance of the website and profits are the interlinked goals.

Which Measurements Are The Most Important?
These will depend on the goals and objectives of your web pages e.g. selling product online, obtaining leads/customer information. The most important of these goals to you can be referred to as the ‘Key Performance Indicators’ (KPIs). The Indicator that is at the root of website analytics is ‘The Conversion Rate’ of your website. This is the percentage of website visitors that you have actually converted into people who actually subscribe, buy, become a member, or whatever goals you want to achieve with them.

The Conversion Rate is worked out as follows : Divide the number of positive outcomes by the number of unique visitors.

Which Web Analytics Packages Can I Use?

You are likely to already have a statistics package or ‘stats’ running on your website that give a varying degree about the activity on your website. This may be operated from e.g. a control panel that you can reach by typing a word on the end of your URL (website address). This in turn may require a username and password to access. You will need to refer to your website hosting company for these details of you don’t already look at your stats.

Typically, well known stats packages such as cPanel, AWStats, and Urchin Stats will present analytical information in text, link and graphical form. The types of performance indicators for the website they will show will include numbers of visitors, bandwidth, peaks and troughs of activity on different days and times, where the visitors are coming from (referrers) etc. In order to get a more accurate idea of the human activity on the website, certain things may need to be filtered accordingly.

Filters can be used in some analytics packages for this. For example with Google Analytics you may wish to filter out traffic from a certain domain or IP address (to filter out referrer spam), or include only traffic that goes to a certain subdirectory within your site.

What Should I Do Before Analysis?
Set the goals that you need to measure. These would typically be attempting to get a certain number of visitors, certain conversion rate.

These are likely to be tied in with your company financial and non financial goals. Set a budget for the website analytics tools you will require.

What Are The Different Types of Analytics Software Tools?

Surveying Server-Side Software
These are analytics tools are stored on the websites server; they access your log files for data, and are typically similar to the standard stats packages provided by most hosting companies. They are pre-installed, and therefore provide a degree of simplicity - generally give only small amounts of information though.
These server side analytics can be accessed from anywhere, most of them are free, there are no privacy issues to worry about, and they are generally quite reliable.

Desktop Software / Client Side Software
These are loaded onto your actual computer rather than being stored on the hosting company’s server. These solutions allow tracking of many different domains, which is useful if you operate a number of websites. The cost and long term benefits of these are appealing, but downloading lots of large log files to them can create problems.

Hosted Solutions
These aren’t stored on your web server or your desktop, but are hosted by another service provider on their server. These solutions allow you tag only the pages that you want to track, so can provide some very focused information. They do however require monthly subscriptions which can add up to a lot in the long term.

Multiple Tools Leveraging the synergies provide by a combination of these different types of analytics software solutions would be good way to spread the risk cost and benefits. This will of course depend on the goals, your budget, and whether or not you’re prepared to enter a long term relationship with a supplier and face any problems that this may cause.

Further Web Analytics Tool Considerations
Which solutions or combination of them you choose will depend largely on the size of your company, your budget, and how much traffic your site typically receives.

Free Solutions Yes, there are a lot of free web analytics solutions which might meet your business needs and have the right technical specifications. Free solutions however won’t provide many full features, or great technical support. They can however be simple to learn and use, and can work adequately for low to moderate traffic sites.

Examples of Free analytics tools include:
Analog
AWStats
ClickTracks Appetizer
Google Analytics
OneStatFree
CrazyEgg

Low Cost, But Not Free Solutions
These are the natural next step up form the free tools, and generally provide more metrics, and are more customisable than the free solutions.
Low-cost could mean between £10 and £50 per month. Examples of low-cost solutions include:
Unica NetTracker
VisiStat
ClickTracks
nextStat
IndexTools
HitBox Professional
MetriServe
ecommStats

Enterprise Level Tools These solutions require higher budgets e.g. £10k per year. Enterprise level tools are aimed at larger companies. The software is very focused on Return On Investment, has a greater number of more sophisticated metrics, and allows for much more customisation of information e.g. in reports.

Examples include:
Web Trends Web Analytics 8
Omniture Site Catalyst 13
WebSide Story HBX
Coremetrics Online Analytics

Niche Web Analytics
Using larger scale general analytics tools may still not provide as much specific information you require if you are targeting a definite niche.

Tracking The Use of Blogs
Tracking the use of Blogs may prove useful. Examples of tools for these purposes include:

Mint (haveamint.com)
Measuremap.com
Bloglet.com
Technorati.com
103bees.com

RSS Feed Tracking Measuring the numbers of subscribers, clickthroughs, and usage patterns for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds can help understand niche activity based around a specific niche. Examples of tools that can help with this include:

Feedburner.com (and FeedFoundry)
Pheedo.com
SimpleFeed

Analytics For Podcasts If you provide podcasts, you provide opportunities for advertising. As with all advertising, this can be measured. Examples of tools for tracking podcasts include: PodTractor (from Podgarden).
RadioTail Ripple (radiotail.com)

Pay Per Click Optimization Analytics
These can help more clearly measure your PPC campaign ROI. Examples of tools that can help include: CampaignTracker 2.0 (semphonic.com)
BlackTrack (blacktrackanlytics.com)

Live Activity Analytics Tools These kinds of tools can allow you to track an individual visitor’s clickthrough activity in your website in real-time and live-time, and even offer pop-up message help if needed. These tools can also help with PPC campaigns and click fraud, and can provide particular help with ecommerce.

Examples of these tools include: Whoson.com
Visitorville.com
Visistat.com

A/B and Multivariate Testing A/B testing allows you to compare the conversions of different versions of your site to find out which is most effective. Multivariate testing allows larger numbers of versions to be compared. Filtering Out Unnecessary or Spurious Data Filtering Out Non-Human Visitors Not only human visitors visit your web pages.

It is likely that it’s only human visits you are interested in. If you are interested in managing your marketing and web design decisions based upon the right information, you will need to make sure that your web analytics software’s able to weed out non-human visits from its information.

Non-human visitors include:
Search Engine robots / spiders / crawlers
Email harvesting software
Uptime companies / hosting monitoring services.
Link checkers and validators.
RSS Feed Readers / Aggregators.
Blog search services / pinging services.

Filtering Out Referrer Spam
This referrers to repeated requests for your website by spammers using a false URL that pints to a spam advertised website.

Filtering Out Non Critical Stats
Decide upon what your most critical KPIs are in terms of your website’s visits and conversion, and focus your time upon them.

Gather Information About Site Referrers
Many web analytics packages will provide useful information about where your website referrals are coming from. For example, you may be able to see that some search engines are referring more than others. Other referrers could include, webrings you are a member of, link partners, affiliate marketers working on your behalf, and email clients (if you have an email campaign).

By taking account of where from and in what numbers these visitors are coming, you can see which of your marketing efforts need more effort, and where corrective activity is needed. For your search engine natural listings, the main 3 likely referrers are often assumed to be Google, MSN and Yahoo.

In reality Google is likely to be providing you with 50% or more of your search engine referrals, and the closest search engine rival approximately 5% or less. Obviously figures may differ for different sites, but this is intended as a helpful rule of thumb. Good page optimisation, high quality, interesting and informative page content presented in a highly readable way, and increasing PPC advertising where necessary can all be good relevant traffic generating tactics.

Know and Listen To Your Customers
The Clickstreams or navigation reports form your analytics software can help take a lot of the guesswork out of how your visitors are behaving on you pages, and allow you to test, measure, and change things to improve conversion rates. Studying the most popular search terms, requests for things you don’t yet offer but could, can all bring beneficial insights to your continued marketing efforts.

Know Your Most Important Pages
Generally search engines categorise pages according to how relevant they are to specific search terms, and how important they are (with quality incoming links). For this reason there may be a number of entry pages into your website depending on the search query, and so it stands to reason that the main entry pages are likely to be among the most visited pages. There may also be very highly visited pages that are not main entry pages, and these are likely to be significant because visitors have purposely navigated to them of their own accord. The main entry pages and most visited pages identified by your analytics software are likely to be the ones that drive your website traffic, and should therefore should be seriously examined with a view to maximising conversion form them.

Examples of Key performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are the metrics that show how well your web pages are performing against your goals. Some popular examples of the more universally relevant KPIs are as follows: Average number of page views per visitor.
A low number hear could indicate that the pages are not engaging, providing the right or expected information, are not relevant enough etc. This means that they require attention with regards to the conversion aspects.

Average amount of time spent of the site
Usually expressed in seconds this is an average for all pages, so is not greatly useful, but can be just one indicator of doing something right if the number is high. You may be able to assume that the longer a person spends on pages, and the more pages they view, the more interested they are in your product or service and the more likely they may be to convert.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
This is valuable figure because higher number may indicate that there are faults or complications in the buying process that could have an adverse affect on your conversion rate. Different KPI’s are related to different educated assumptions that can be made about the website’s effectiveness.

Here are some examples of some KPIs and what they are related to:

Traffic and Growth
% of new visitors
% of search engine traffic

Content Effectiveness
Ration of New/Returning Visitors
Average Page Views Per Visit

Search Effectives (Internal)
% of visitors using the search facility
% of zero result searches

Marketing Effectiveness
Average cost per visitor vs average revenue per visitor.
Average order value vs average cost per conversion.

Shopping Cart Related
Shopping cart abandonment rate.
Cart completion rate. Your main website conversion KPIs show how well overall your website is performing in terms of conversions related to your goals.

Important KPIs here include:
Average visits prior to conversion
Overall conversion rate.
New visitor conversion rate.
Returning visitor conversion rate.

Conversion rates for specific campaigns. Different KPI’s can help with different types of sites (depending on your goals).e.g. e-commerce, content, lead generation or e-commerce sites.

Obviously, at the end of the day you will choose the KPIs that are most relevant to your particular website. When sorting through the top search terms on your website, you may find that visitors are arriving at your website using terms that are not the most relevant, or most likely to bring the best profit. On the other hand, people may be using search terms which could point out a hitherto unimagined opportunity.

Using common misspellings in your web page text can also be a way of making the most of traffic that you may not even otherwise receive, particularly if the misspellings are based around popular key phrases. There is however little point in getting visitors to your website if you are unable to convert them to leads / enquirers / subscribers / customers. There are many keyword tacking and selector tools out there which enable you to choose the terms that are likely to attract the most relevant high quality traffic to your pages, and software that will track conversion points in your website

For example, see:

• www.wordtracker.com
• www.agentinteractive.com
• www.potentinteractive.com
• www.103bees.com

Measuring Search Engine effectiveness and Improving SEO
Search Engine Optimisation can help towards improved rankings. The first step is checking your current rankings so that you can measure your progress. Determining which are the top performing keywords for you can allow optimization of the pages toward these phrases.

Making use of a large number of your less well performing (long tail keywords can also be a lucrative tactic. Although Google PageRank isn't everything, it is an important indicator of the effectiveness of your incoming linking strategy. Alexa rankings can give an idea of the weight of traffic your website is receiving in relation to competitors. Translating the website in a relevant (in terms of website visitors) and widely spoken language can also bring benefits.

Strategic Alliances can also bring more online business. Affiliates i.e. people who put banners or ads on their websites that click through to your can be useful. Link exchanges can work but may not provide the highest quality links which are important to improve PageRank.

Tracking and Measuring Online Marketing
Setting up tracking URLs can help determine the effectiveness of online ad campaigns by providing information about the source of the click. Other tracking methods include campaign analytics such as CampaignTracker and BlackTrack. Evaluating your e-mail marketing campaigns can be achieved using software such as webtrends.com, coremetrics.com and digitalrover.com.

The main email-mail marketing KPIs to monitor include:
Bounces - the emails that weren't delivered.
Opt-outs
The Open rate - the rate of people that open the emails.
Clicks - clicks through from the emails.
Cost per lead is a main metric in measuring e-mail campaign effectiveness.This is the cost of the campaign divided by the number of leads. Keeping a record of your website's analytics history can, over time, help foresee potential positive and negative trends ahead. Benchmarking your conversion rate over time can also help toward continued improvement of this important figure.

Getting The Most Out Of Your Web Pages
Paying attention to good search engine optimisation (SEO) of your pages can help to improve page rankings for your chosen keywords. Website analytics can reveal ways in which the design of your web pages could be improved in order to boost the conversion rate. These tactics should be employed with a view to improving some key metrics such increasing the average time spent on the pages, and increasing the number of pages viewed within the site.

It is also important to measure and pay attention to the main negative factors of the website such as what makes visitors leave i.e. what increases the bounce rate. This can encompass many things including a lack of clarity in the selling propositions, over-complicate navigation, and any aspect that forces the website visitor to 'think' unnecessarily about what they should do next or how they can accomplish it.

Optimizing landing pages for ad campaigns e.g. pay-per-click, can also bring down costs, reduce bounce rates, and increase conversion rates for those campaigns. Shopping cart abandonment is a major problem that needs to be studied in order to improve conversion on e-commerce websites. For example, abandonment of the purchase process can occur for a number of reasons including, concerns about security, the process taking too long or having too many steps, or asking website visitors for too much irrelevant personal information. By comparing the cart completion rate, and the checkout completion rate, you can better understand what proportion of conversion you are missing out on.

Guiding Principles in Website Analytics
It can save you time and money to only concentrate on the Metrics and KPI's that actually matter the most to your goals and objectives. Segmenting the behaviour of visitors can help you to better understand the various groups of your target customers and which ones are more likely to convert. Studying clickstream / navigation reports can help determine which pages are the most important, can help you make educated assumptions about user behaviour, and can allow educated design changes in pages. Close studying of keywords can show which are your top performers, which convert the most, and can uncover new keyword opportunities.

Optimising landing pages can decrease cost in PPC campaigns (because the Google quality score is higher) and can increase the conversion rate because of improved relevance. Keeping track of your conversion rate and the benchmarking of it is essential for continued improvement of the rate. Saving the website historical data can help you identify and plan for trends. Making gradual changes that don't confuse regular visitors is an important consideration when trying to at least maintain conversion rate.

A commitment to continual improvement of the conversion rate relies upon continued use of web analytics.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Nearly 80% of website traffic comes form search engines, and most people don't look beyond the first 2 pages of search engine results. The two main types of search engine listings are paid for e.g. pay-per-click advertising, and the natural/organic listings.

For the long term benefit of your website rankings, getting high up in the natural listings should be your goal. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help in this aim by making pages particularly relevant to certain search terms as far as the search engine robots / crawlers are concerned. As well as relevance, pages rank highly for importance. This is measure by how many good quality incoming links a page has.

This is indicated by the Google PageRank number (form 0-10). Submitting your website domain name to Google, whether the website has any content or not, is a necessary move to establish a website history in Google. Using keyword selector tools enables you to optimise pages towards key phrases that people are actually searching for, rather than what you think they may be searching for (see www.wordtracker.com). Target phrases rather than single keywords, and develop a keyword strategy. This is more likely to bring your desired target customer to the website, and improve the conversion rate when they get there.

As a rule of thumb, a 2% keyword density rate is something to aim for in your web pages. This means that 2% of the web page text copy will be made up of your chosen keywords. This will help to avoid search engines from assuming that you are spamming them in some way. Your important keywords should be used in the document / page title, in links, in headings, in the main body text of the page, in the meta description, in the meta keywords, and in the Alt IMG Attributes of the images. Search engines need to be able to access the text content of the website through link paths that run through the website.

A site map is a single page that contains links to all pages of the website, and can be a good way of providing the search engines with a single p[point of access to all pages. This can help them to discover as many pages as possible within your website, thus increasing the likely amount of entry pages. Incoming links are a vital element in improving your web page rankings, and the quality of the links is as (if not more than) important as the quantity. Good links contain the main key phrase of the page they are pointing to in the anchor text. Quality links also come form pages that have good Google PageRanks, and don't have large numbers of other links coming form them.

Incoming links can be obtained from:
• Directories
• PR from submitting your own articles to article websites Obtaining the right number of high quality incoming links is a long term project. Search engines may also penalise pages that get too many incoming links to too little a space of time. For this reason, it may not be a good idea to buy in large numbers of links form links companies. The main steps to getting a high ranking can therefore be briefly summarised as:
• Using the most important keywords in your web pages.
• Getting lots of high quality incoming links.
• Including lots of relevant, information rich text content that is easily readable, and is updated regularly.

Glossary of Website Analytics Technical Terms and Jargon Hits
A request for amount of elements that make up a whole webpage. These include the page itself, the images, photographs, text files etc, all counted separately, and all added to the hit total. For example, a visitor landing on a page with 4 photos in it will count a 5 hits – 1 for the page and 4 for the photos. This is why using this term hits can cause confusion – hits are not the same as visits.

Bandwidth
Usually expressed as ‘bits per second’ (bps) or ‘million bits per second’ (mbps) , this is a technical term for the amount of data activity that’s transferred from a website in a certain amount of time.

Page Views
The amount of times a web page is looked at by a web page visitor i.e. the actual amount of times that website visitors have arrived at that page for however long. Page views are good for gauging how popular your page content is.

Visits
Also known as a session / user session, a visit could be a number of page views by the same website visitor

Unique Visitors
The amount of actual individual visitors who have been to your website – this number is tracked using an IP address (the identifying numbers of a server / computer). This is essentially the measure for judging how many actual people are visiting your web pages.

Referrers
The URL / web address of where your web page visitors came from before reaching a certain page within your website. This could be from an external website or search engine e.g. Google, or from a page within your website.

Keywords / Keyphrases
The words that people use in search engines to find a product or service.

Search Engine Spiders / Search Engine Bots
This refers to the automatic software scripts used by search engines to index, categorise web pages, so that search engine query results can be returned accurately.

Abandonment
Visitors leave your website when they are in the middle of some king of activity e.g. filling in a form, using an online quote feature, buying online. Bounce Rate
The amount of visitors expressed as a percentage who leave a page immediately after arriving there. As a rule of thumb, approximately 50% is an average bounce rate for a home page (as the main entry page).

Entry Page
The page at which a visitor enters your website for the first time, probably after being referred there by a search engine. The main entry pages are often your most visited pages for this reason. Which entry pages you have depend upon the search query, and which pages the search engines have decided are most relevant and most important for which keywords you used in your search engine query.

Opt-in
Usually incentivised, this is when a website visitor offers their personal details voluntarily in the hope of receiving some benefit e.g. a website visitor gives their name and email address in order to receive a monthly newsletter. Navigational Analysis / Path Analysis / After-Click Tracking (ACT)
The study of the routes taken by visitors through your website form entry to exit.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
A figure (often a percentage) used to show how often something is clicked on compared to how often it is viewed.

Conversion
This is the goal of you pages. For example you can convert a website visitor to somebody who calls you, fills in an enquiry form and becomes a lead, or who makes an online purchase and is therefore converted to becoming a customer.

Session
This is a visit, and is taken from the time a website visitor enters the site (at the entry page) to when they leave (at the exit page).

Duration of Visit
The time taken for a session/visit. This is commonly expressed in seconds, and often expressed as an average. Landing Page
The page a website visitor arrives at when being referred form a search engine, or from an advertisement e.g. a banner ad, or a pay-per-click advertisement.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The practice of increasing the ranking of a web page / of web pages in the search engines for certain relevant keywords.

Search Engine Marketing
The practice of improving web page visibility and ranking in the search engines using marketing methods additional to SEO e.g. pa-per-click advertising campaigns.

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