Chapter 3 – Website Measurement
- By Chen Feng
- Published 07/29/2008
Chen Feng
Chen Feng is the Strategy Manager at Webtron.
Chen brings to Webtron corporate experience from China , management practice from Sydney and a first class MBA from the Melbourne Business School and leading US business school Duke University.
Chens detailed business and IT knowledge will be able to assist your company in the areas of Website/Digital,/Web 2.0 strategy and Web marketing.
Analysis of your website users is more like a treasure hunting process. You follow their footprint and reverse out what they see and experience on your website. Through that, a clear map of user behaviour can be generated to help you make better managerial decisions.
In general, the objectives of measurement of website include:
- Observe visitors’ behaviour
- Predict traffic
- Find website improvement opportunities
- Track website performance
At the back side of website, a typical website content management system (e.g. cPanel) will provide some basic statistic of your website, such as unique visitor quantities, pages visited, country of origin, date & time visited, etc. This information provides a comprehensive and reliable source for data analysis. Alternatively, if this data is not available or easy to get, you may try Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). This is a free tool provide you similar result, plus some exciting functions: such as reference for Google index method (for purpose of SEO); users’ internet browser configuration and capability; and, content analysis. It comes without cost: you will need insert a line of code into every page manually, and the data is not as accurate as your content management system provided due to page loading and interpretation issues.
With the raw data in hand, we now need pickup some basic statistic tools to decipher its underlying information. First, we need ask “who”, “when”, “why” and “where”. Excel spreadsheet is not only easy to illustrate the underlying relationship, but to maintain database as well. When you plot the pages they visited, the country they originated, and the time they visited, you could find lots of interesting stories in it. This information may also help you predict your website’s traffic in future, either for new pages or new marketing campaign. A regression model may also help you to identify and prove intrinsic relationships of parameters (e.g. country and page visited).
The high traffic (hot) areas in your website should be carefully examined and customized to match the preference of visitors. You may not know which area is important unless employed the data you gathered above.
At last, you need to keep these data in database for further use. You will also need to record some key changes in your website, such as marketing efforts, launch of new product, as such. Long term data monitoring will bring many benefits which no other way can provide. Through this, you can understand your customer more actually, track market changes, and keep competitiveness on website.
