Web analysis: Get the facts

Posted by John Kilroy May 21st, 2008

Web analysis is how you discover who comes to your web site and what they do there.

It is one of the most important, flexible and useful of all web marketing activities and can help you optimise the design, development and marketing of your website – both in general and in great detail. It is also the quality-control tool par excellence, and provides insights into:

• your web site’s large and small-scale development opportunities and priorities;
• design flaws in certain pages, or across your whole site, that reduce the number of leads or purchases you should get;
• how effective your marketing is;
• your customers’ ‘demographics’, overall performance data and lots of other information that helps you build up a picture of who is using your site, when they are using it, where they are coming from and how they are using it.

A web analyst relies fundamentally on your web site’s access logs. These log files come in various formats; some formats are better than others for web analysis, but all hold raw data that can be broken down into an impressive range of useful information. While data mining programs are used to extract the data from the log files, it is the web analyst who decides what to extract and how to interpret that data. The log analysis software can also generate automatic reports, useful for gathering data according to time and date ranges, ‘hits’, the volume of data, geography, etc.

Despite the obvious advantages web analysis gives to a site manager, it is still one of the most under-utilised marketing activities, particularly among smaller businesses who ironically have the most to gain from it. I believe that’s because:

• they don’t understand how useful it is;
• they don’t have a marketing or development strategy for their web site;
• none of their acquaintances do it, so they don’t either (sheep mentality);
• it’s not an ‘active’ activity (a bit like financial reporting);

If you are the kind of person who likes to run your business in a haphazard sort of way, ruled by guesswork and hunch, then you probably don’t need web analysis and probably will never see the benefit of it. Yet, for the right kind of business, analysis provides the ‘intelligence’ to help you make good decisions and be a good manager. It is the only available source of website performance data, and people who believe they can manage a business-critical website without it are, in my experience, little shy of deluded.

So what is the right kind of business? Well, if any of the following ring any bells then you should be doing web analysis as a matter of course:

• your business relies on your web site, and/or getting people to it;
• you are an ecommerce business;
• your web site is an integral part of your company and has a development budget;

Web analysis has had some bad press though, and many people have the impression that it’s limited to providing large round numbers of general and semi-useful (except for bragging purposes) information. And unfortunately, they are often right, which is the fault of unscrupulous, if not downright dishonest, web companies who peddle such services. But that is to proper web analysis what Bernard Mathews is to healthy eating.

Web analysis can answer subtle questions like:

• how much of my advertising actually leads to sales or enquiries;
• which campaigns are the most successful (and which are failing);
• do my visitors come back – if not, why not;
• what are my visitors interested in;
• are my products well-placed, is my shopping cart designed well, what about my enquiry form;
• does my web site have any structural problems that prevent people reaching places I’d like them to reach;
• which parts of my web site might be most worth expanding?

You can hypothesise use-case scenarios and story-board notional users all you like, but in the end that’s all just a dress-rehearsal. You can live on hunches and guesswork too if you like gambling. But you don’t have to settle for either option because, ultimately, analysis will tell you how good your web site and marketing strategy really are.