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Rebecca Osborne

MIST 7500 Midterm ExamPiercy – Fall 2009

Part 1: Web Analytics, Checking the Pulse of your Page

Understanding your customer, your website and how the two interact (or don’t interact) is key tohaving a useful website. There are a variety of tools out there that allow you to understand muchmore than just the number of people that visit the site. Web analytics provides insight into awealth of details about your site visitors including: where your traffic is coming from, where peopleare clicking once they have arrived, where they are when they decide they’re done with your site,if they have any loyalty to your site, what technical capabilities they have, what people werelooking for when they found you, and the list goes on.Typical web analytics tools provide information about your traffic sources, your visitors and theactivity by page on your site. You can select a time period for which you would like theinformation, such as a day, a month, a year or from a specific date to a specific date. The toolswill provide reports as well as graphs and tables.

Traffic Sources

The analytics tools will breakdown the traffic sources toyour site into direct traffic, search engines and links. Thenfrom there it will provide more specific information abouteach of these. The search engine overview dissects theamount of traffic from each search engine. It also providesa corresponding list of search words that generated your traffic. It will also provide a list of links with the number of clicks directing users from the source to your site.For instance, the numbers in the accompanying images come from the last month of activity onthe website for the company I work for, Consolidated Risk Solutions (www.c-r-solutions.com).The analytics images come from the Google Web Analytics tool. As you can see, the majority of our traffic is direct. This is what we would expect as we currently have less than a handful of sites linked to us, are not very searchable by industry and there aren’t many people searching“wrap up insurance administration”. Consequently, the bulk of our traffic is directly related to our clients using the client access site that lets them review their project’s status.When we are searched and the traffic reaches us, it is typically through a Google or Yahoosearch of our company name and not our industry.Further drilling down shows us how long the visitors associated with the keywords stayed on thesite. For instance, our top searches elicitedand average time of more than 10 minuteson the site with a 35%bounce rate.

Visitors

A number of visits to the website as well as anumber of unique visitors are provided for theperiod in question. Various views and reportswill show where visitors are geographicallylocated, what web browsers they are using, andthe speed of their internet connection. Thevisitor information is also broken down intodetails that indicate visitor loyalty such as thenumber of times that users have visited and howrecently they visited.The CR Solutions website visitors match upfairly well geographically with our client base.Note that youcan drill down tostate and thecities within thestate. You cansee the majorityof our visitors are from the New York City area, but there is also a little action from our client inBuffalo.

Site Activity

Once users are on your site their activityis tracked by page. This allows you tosee which sites they navigated to, howlong they stayed on the pages, andwhere they typically exited the site.The image to the right shows traffic tothe website’s homepage. GoogleAnalytics indicates that 93% of our visitors arrive on the main page. Fromthere over 70% of them leave. This is likely due to the login at the top of the page that directsthem to the client access site. Yet, collecting data on the access site would be required toconfirm that assumption.

Several tools exist that have these tracking capabilities, including many free ones. Some of thefree tools include Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Stat Counter and Woopra. Each of these tools has their own variations regarding the specific details tracked, the reports available,and capabilities of linking all of information across the data types. Woopra is interesting as itprovides immediate analytics. You can actually watch a user navigate the site while they are onthe site. Then you can take it a step further (albeit a potentially creepy one) and even interactwith them via a chat tool that the service provides (Page).

Keywords

As will be discussed in the next section of this paper, choosing keywords is critical.Keywords help search engines know whatyour site is about and aid in drivingappropriate traffic to your site. Keywordtools, such as Word Tracker, GoogleSearch-based Keyword Tool, GoogleAdWords, and Google Insights for SearchBeta help you understand how popular thekeywords are as well as identify additionalkeywords that can be added to your site or can be used in paid marketing campaigns.To the right you can see that it may bebeneficial for my company to more closely associateitself with wrap up administration, construction wrap upinsurance or builder’s risk insurance.

Other

Google also offers a product called Webmaster Toolswhich helps you understand the strengths andweaknesses of the elements that make your sitefindable in the Google search. The tool helpsidentify crawl errors, view outside links to your site,and identify what keywords are most stronglyassociated with your site. Help sections andYouTube videos are available to aid in the quest toclean up anything that Google’s Webmaster Toolsidentifies as an impediment.While you can spend a lot of time analyzing thebehavior of users on your site, it could also behelpful to get direct feedback on what they arethinking. 4Q is a service, which has a free option, allowing you to solicit that feedback throughonline surveys of 4 questions (Page).These analytics tools allow you to continuously improve your site based on user behavior. Theyhelp you to optimize the traffic to your site by understanding the keyword volume via searchengines. They let you see which of those keywords when connected to your site delivers a visitor that lingers instead of bounces. Available statistics on landing and exit pages combined with user technical capabilities might indicate that a flash page is driving away users instead of drawingthem in. Site navigation numbers can point to the products or services that web users are mostinterested by (Enbysk). Linked traffic that has a high bounce rate may indicate that the linkingsite is misrepresenting your service. These tools allow you to make sound decisions whenoriginally setting up a page and then, possibly more importantly, let you continuously update andadapt to user interaction with the website.