The truth is, as crucial as a web presence is to today's businesses, a state-of-the art website isn't much good without data about the people who visit the site. And for most companies - including firms that don't sell over the internet - just tracking the number of page impressions and raw visitors is not enough. Today, businesses need web analytics.
Also known as web metrics, web analytics deliver crucial information to companies about how well a website is performing and, more importantly, whether the site is doing its job. Think about it: a marketing manager might know that 1,000 people visited the company website in the past month, but wouldn't it be even more useful to know whether those visitors live in Ireland, and even what organisations they work for? What if your firm could tell how long each visitor stayed on the site, which products they read about the most, and how often they came back to the same pages? How useful would it be to find out which search terms are directing the most visitors, and what sites visitors go to when they leave your company's cyber shopfront?
Drilling into customers' minds
It is this kind of information that web analytics can deliver; information that many firms can turn into leads, and quite often into sales. "If you can see that lots of people are reading about a specific product on your website, perhaps you could use that information to better position that product," explains Justin Owens, the managing director of Commtech, which distributes a web analytics package called WebTrends in Ireland. "This kind of data lets you drill into the minds of your customers and helps you to know what they are thinking."
For eCommerce sites and advertising-dependent websites, web analytics have long been a must, helping dot-coms to garner a better understanding of their customers' habits. But increasingly, firms that don't sell over the web, and even companies that have small-scale "brochure-ware" type web presences, are looking to web analytics as yet another way to access crucial customer information, information which ultimately will help to drive sales. Indeed, web analytics tap in to the power of the internet as an information medium by allowing companies to see how effective an online outreach tool is. The same cannot be said for traditional advertising, direct mail or even below-the-line marketing campaigns.
Key measurements
Importantly, there are web analytics packages for all types of sites and companies. "If your site directly sells stuff to consumers, you better be going into an awful lot of detail in your web analytics programme," warns Brian Donohue, an analyst specialising in web analytics and content optimisation with Irish web consultancy iQ Content. "The level of depth of your analytics programme should reflect the level of importance of your website to your business... For a relatively simple site, you may just need to keep your eyes on a handful of key numbers. The whole challenge is figuring out what those measurements should be."
Both Donohue and Owens explain that there are free tools on the internet such as Webalizer and Analog that, for small sites, may do the trick, delivering enough information to offer companies a degree of business intelligence. But the biggest risk associated with freebies is the accuracy of the data provided. While these tools should not be discounted - and can serve as a very useful introduction to web analytics - their reliance on what's known as "log files" may result in massive overstatements of visitor numbers.
Appropriate solutions
"Page tagging was much more accurate, but still far from perfect," Donohue adds. "So a crucial factor in choosing a vendor is knowing what method of data collection they offer, and understanding the implications of that. Hybrid data collection - combining both log files and cookies - is usually best."
It's also worth remembering that buying a solution does not have to mean forking out huge sums of cash. There are proprietary tools for companies of all sizes, including hosted solutions that require only a small amount of code embedded in your site but deliver fairly accurate, albeit limited, information.
For big, heavily visited sites and that are designed to have a clear measurable impact on the bottom line, an expert partner is crucial. "It's easy to set up an application and get a load of numbers," says Donohue. "What's hard is to determine what numbers to pay attention to, to make sure they're accurate, and to interpret them so you can make the right changes. The biggest risk of web analytics is that you buy an application, you get it measuring your site, and then you drown in all the data it provides."