Web Analytics: What on Earth Are Your Visitors Doing?

By Chris Wain

Web analytics, the study and interpretation of website traffic data, began modestly (do you remember those website hit counters that resembled odometers?). Today, web analytics encompasses such highly sophisticated techniques as attitudinal analytics and marketing performance measurement.

The goal of these techniques: to give businesses a rich understanding of their website visitors, as well as insights into their customers and markets. The uses of analytics are as varied as the uses of the web itself. Intel has used web analytics to help software engineers download development tools more quickly and easily. Orbitz.com, a travel site, uses analytics to manage a portfolio of 1.5 million search keywords!

In the first meeting of the new Internet Professionals SIG (after the merger of Internet Professionals Northwest and SAO), three local analytics experts shared the latest developments with a sellout audience.

The tools for web analytics
Analyzing your web traffic starts with the measurement tools. Mike Wills, a web-marketing specialist, outlined the two principal types of tools for web analytics:

• Hosted: where your website sends information to a third-party server for analysis and reporting
  
• Installed: where you have tools installed on your own web server to monitor your traffic and generate reports
  

Portland-based WebTrends is a leader in the web analytics market segment; other vendors include Google Analytics, Omniture, WebSideStory, and CoreMetrics.

Web analytics for user research
In conducting user research, Julie Booth (from ID Branding), draws on attitudinal analytics – a new discipline that “seeks to use web analytics with other research techniques to understand user intentions.”

With web analytics in general, you get lots of numbers. The challenge, she said, is how to validate all these pages of data. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative assessment can provide a richer view of how visitors interact with your website. Quantitative information shows what a large number of visitors do over a long period of time. Qualitative data probes why they take particular actions.

Combining these techniques in an attitudinal analytics process will follow a multi-step sequence (with cost increasing at each step):

1. Analytics review: this can, for example, identify a page with a high attrition rate. Visitors may be having a problem completing a task.
2. Survey: you could launch an exit survey on the problem page; this will help determine the causes of the attrition.
3. Interviews: by interviewing a small group of target users, you can clarify the problem or better understand how users expect to interact with that web page.
4. Competitive analysis: you can also ask users about their experience when they attempt similar tasks on competitors’ sites. For example, how easy do your competitors make it to download a software development tool?
5. Usability testing: with in-person observation of your visitors’ interactions with your
   site, you can pinpoint the specific design issues. Usability testing also allows you to evaluate new site designs during development (for example, by testing your target audience’s interaction with wireframe designs).
   
   

“This layering of research techniques,” she said, “is also a way of leveraging the ‘teeny tiny’ dollars allocated to research.”

Using web analytics for Internet marketing
WebTrends’ Jason Palmer delved into the emerging discipline of marketing performance measurement, which encompasses three areas of web analytics:

• How to profitably acquire new customers
  
• How to strengthen the customer relationship
  
• How to measure and optimize the site for users
  
  

Each of these areas will have at least one type of user in a typical organization. For example, a web producer wants to know how visitors are navigating through the site. Product managers need to track how prospective customers are moving through the sales funnel. Online marketing people look for the most efficient ways to drive traffic to the site. “Senior marketing executives,” he said, “just want to know if the site is good or bad.”

WebTrends’ analytics tools helped a motorcycle superstore ferret out differences in purchasing behavior between new and repeat buyers. Compared with new buyers, the store’s repeat buyers were purchasing higher-margin products and spending between 50% and 85% more per order. This allowed the company to tailor their promotions to these more profitable customers. “The company's management could move very quickly,” Jason related. “Sometimes it’s better to be lean and mean like that, because there are fewer decision makers to debate about the website.”

Search marketing
Search marketing is the fastest-growing area of the marketing spend, Jason said, because searchers are highly targeted prospects. By some estimates, 65% of all web shoppers use search engines to find sites for their online purchases.

Web analytics are helping optimize companies’ search marketing campaigns. Search keywords are becoming more expensive to purchase, and web analytics can help with developing the right mix for search marketing.

For example, a travel company might consider bidding on search keywords like ‘Cancun’ or ‘Tulum’ on Google and Yahoo. Web analytics tools from WebTrends can help determine how much to bid, and then test multiple variables in the campaign, including

• Which keywords are most effective
  
• Which position on the search page yields the best results
  
• Which creative approaches and offers on the company site’s landing page yield the most sales
  
• Which search networks are most effective (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, or others)
  
  

Analytics tools like WebTrends Dynamic Search can help a company choose the most effective combination of keywords, offers, creative treatment, and search site – and then calculate the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

The complexity of search marketing can grow exponentially. When testing a single keyword with two different search positions, two offers, and two landing pages, the results for the eight possible scenarios could be calculated with a spreadsheet. But there’s no alternative to Web analytics when a company scales its search marketing to include hundreds – or even thousands – of different keywords across multiple networks.

As the Web increasingly becomes the hub of a company’s marketing programs, web analytics becomes a critical enabler of a company’s growth.

For more information

Presentation: WebTrends and Strategies for Digital Marketing Success

About The Speakers

• Mike Wills is an independent Web marketing consultant
• Jason Palmer is VP of product strategy at WebTrends
• Julie Booth is director of Interactive Strategy at ID Branding and was formerly an Intel human factors engineer
  
  

About the author
Chris Wain is a 10-year veteran of eBusiness and Internet marketing. His eBusiness experience encompasses website management, communications, and training; managing a user experience team; and most recently transition and change management. The common thread in these roles is a passion for understanding the customer or end user, and ensuring the quality and value of the solutions being delivered to them. He can be reached at chris.wain@comcast.net.