Watching brief
- Article 14 of 26
- M-iD, March 2005
Web analytics is often the only way to understand who visits a web site and why
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Nevertheless, these are relatively minor issues. With the goal and metric decided, organisations can then implement the measuring system of their choice, taking care of the legalities when they do so.
Any cookie-based analytics system - not just ASP-based systems - potentially falls under the European Union directive on privacy and electronic communications. Conchango's Paul Dawson advises placing a comprehensive privacy policy on the site advising visitors of the use of cookies for web analytics to avoid problems.
With the analytics in place, the organisation then needs to consider what it has learnt before implementing any changes, large or small. That can be open to a very wide degree of interpretation.
“If lots of people go to your information page, for instance, and then to the 'contact us' page, one interpretation is that people wanted the contact number and they've been able to find it, so the site is a success. The other is they could not find what they wanted so looked for the number for more information,” says Dawson.
So Dawson advises combining web analytics with offline information gathering, including user focus groups: the analytics can highlight potentially interesting parts of the site, while user groups can help explain why those parts are particularly interesting.
Nick Trainor, director of analytics firm Trainor Thornton, advises a more directed approach to web site development. By devising pages and links through the site appropriately, it is possible to lead people through the site and get a clearer idea of what they want from it, particularly in conjunction with the search engine keywords used to drive traffic to particular areas.
Once possible changes are devised, implementation of these changes must be slow unless there's enough traffic for results to show up.
The WAA's Sterne advises against big redesigns unless they are absolutely necessary. “When you do a 'big bang' redesign, you lose all your benchmark material. All the pages are different, all the navigation is different so you're comparing apples with oranges,” he says.
“I've heard lots of stories of companies spending millions of pounds updating their web sites and the convergence rates going down. Your most loyal users show up at your brand new web site and they're confused. They bumble around the new web site, trying to learn how to use it and therefore don't buy as much.” The real competitive edge comes from implementing smaller, incremental changes combined with constant testing, he adds.
Compared to the business intelligence tools available to interrogate data warehouses of customer data, web site analytics is immature and limited. But there is nevertheless a real business benefit available to organisations that implement analytics for their sites - provided that it is implemented and managed correctly.
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