Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Watching brief

Watching brief

Web analytics is often the only way to understand who visits a web site and why

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Typical goals might include selling more advertising space or to increase sales generated from the site. Public sector organisations will want to ensure that their services are easy to use for as many people as possible and often need to abide by e-government “priority outcomes”.

For example, priority outcome R25 states that councils must test and monitor their web services and publish figures to show that they are offering 24/7 availability, while outcome R26 says that they must perform web analytics and publish the results to show their services are being adopted by citizens. The organisation then needs to decide if it has the skills and the software to understand the information it gets - which is usually more than enough. Paul Dawson, head of user experience at consultancy Conchango, warns that the out-of-the-box analysis from most statistical packages is “a bit hit and miss”.

“What you tend to end up with is a statistical analysis package that is extremely wide ranging and complex,” he says. “Customers tend to find all the data extremely overwhelming and so focus on just one or two metrics, such as hits or page impressions.”

Initially, the best policy might be to hire someone with a web analytics background. This person can then set up the processes and analytics packages that will provide data back to the rest of the organisation on an ongoing basis. When the processes are in place, less specialised or highly trained users can be brought in.

Reliance on the standard output of software packages can also hide important information. Often packages will report information, such as the top 20 browsers and platforms used by visitors; they may even perform analytics based on what users with particular browsers did, to see if the web site is poorly configured for particular browsers and is causing their users to abandon the site.

However, assisted browsers for visually and physically impaired users will invariably appear very low down in the rankings because of the small number of users. As a result, investigations into site accessibility may be defective since many web site operators will ignore the reports from these browsers since they are so low down the list.

An appealing alternative to in-house analytics for many organisations is to deploy a third-party application service provider (ASP), such as WebTrends or RedSheriff, to analyse the data. However, passing information to ASPs can also cause problems.

Privacy
Simon Halberstam, partner and head of ecommerce law at Sprecher Grier & Halberstam, says that web site operators need to inform site visitors that they intend to pass data on to third-parties. “To be safe from the consequences of breach of the Data Protection Act, the web site owner needs to force the site visitor to scroll through and accept its privacy policy prior to registering personal details on the site,” he suggests.

Another issue is Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 browser, which will refuse cookies that do not meet particular security requirements. IE6 is far more likely to reject third-party cookies than cookies provided by the site being visited, thus potentially ruining all validity to the analytics.

Other browsers may be set to delete cookies when the user closes the browser down.

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