For now the topic is called Web analytics, but be aware that more and more it will be mobile. We look at analytics in more depth in eMarketing, but it is important that you start to become familiar with some of the terms, and also with some of the benefits (and limitations) of web analytics. Start by reading (or listening to) the Web Analytics page on the Digital Enterprise. http://digitalenterprise.org/metrics/metrics.html Analytics is a huge topic, one important to both financial and marketing managers and it now touches all aspects of business. One of the great benefits of digital business is the ability to count every click, but knowing what do do with the data is the main challenge.
Background to analytics
Everything that occurs in a digital transaction can be recorded in server logs and databases. when you think about web sites, for example, like Amazon, and the large number of people who use those sites each day, each click of that mouse is creating a data stream.
By reading or listening to the Digital Enterprise podcast on metrics, and answering the questions, you should have some understanding of –
Common web metrics and how they are used, and understand the limitations of commonly used measures. You should also examine the characteristics of a range of measurement techniques, from passive to cookies. Any data analysis is open to interpretation and sampling methods may also effect results. Simple language is needed when sharing metric results with management - it is easy to sound like a nerd in a meeting. Management usually wants to know if sales are up, down or flat. Well a bit more than that, but it is important to use plain language. Information is also only useful if it pertains to decisions that need to be made. Therefore, firms should be clear about what their information requirements truly are and plan accordingly.
Questions
I have one of my Google Analytics pages accessible for you. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ and logon using the email address
I have one of my Google Analytics pages accessible for you. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ and logon using the email address:
myebusinessanalytics@gmail.com and password ballarat. This is a read only view (I hope) of my ePortfolio Business Foliosapces and my blog (which is associated with the business).
Whilst the numbers are interesting it is important to realise that you really need to know the business objectives to apply much sense to the data. It iewsis a good marketing trick to just pluck numbers that sound impressive for clients (who don't really understand). For example the Foliospaces total page views look great!
Then click on view report and answer the following questions:-
1) Looking at the site useage, what does the terms visits, page views and pages/visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean and does it vary much from day to day?
Term visits means the individual number of people that have viewed the site.
Page views means the number of pages ever viewed on the site.
Pages/visit means the average number of pages viewed per visit per user.
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert” (http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986).
The bounce rate can vary from between 28% to 48% daily.
2) Now look at the traffic sources report. What are the three sources of traffic and where has most of the traffic come from?
Direct, referring and search engines are the three sources of traffic. Most of the traffic has come from direct traffic.
3) What was the most popular web browser used to access the site?
The most popular browser used to access the website was Internet Explorer (dinosaur!!!)
4) How many countries did visitors to Foliospaces come from and what were the top four countries?
Visitors came from 73 different countries, and the top four were, Australia, united States, United Kingdom and New Zealand.
5) Having clicked every possible link on my analytics, make a few comments on
(a) What you can track, Lots of different things, for example the total number of unique visitors, how many pages they viewed, how long they were on the site, and also where in the world they came from to name a few.
(b) What you can track over time, total number of visitors, the bounce rate, where they came from.
(c) What you can’t track, what they did on the site.
6) What do the following terms mean? These are just a few, you may like to add some more and perhaps include them on the Moodle glossary.
High bounce rate – A high bounce rate means a lot of people are leaving your site from the landing page without going any further.
Key words – “...keywords can be defined as the specific terms used by person to search for something on the net. To find this page, you may have searched for “keyword definition” or “define keywords” or some such thing. This application is of great interest to Internet marketers. We want to know how you search for something so we can get our sites listed under those keyword phrases” (http://www.marketingtitan.com/a_definition_of_keywords).
Average Page Depth – “The average number of pages on a site that visitors view during a single session” (http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32974).
Click through rate – “Percentage of a website's users (or visitors) who click on an advertisement to go to the advertiser's site. Advertisers rate a website on the basis of its CTR which typically ranges from 1 to 3 percent. Also called ad click rate” (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/click-through-rate-CTR.html).
Click – Using your mouse, please ‘click here’.
Cookie – “A cookie is information that a Web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time. (More technically, it is information for future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a client/server communication.)” (http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/cookie).
Impression -
Hyperlink – “A method of moving between one web site page and another, indicated to the user by text highlighted by underlining and/or a different colour. Hyperlinks can also be achieved by clicking on a graphic image such as a banner advertisement that is linked to another web site.” (http://www.davechaffey.com/E-marketing-Glossary/Hyperlink.htm).
Navigation – The way in which we move around the internet.
Pageview – “A pageview is each time a visitor views a page on your website, regardless of how many hits are generated. Pages are comprised of files. Every image in a page is a separate file. When a visitor looks at a page (a pageview), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits.” (http://www.opentracker.net/article/hits-or-pageviews).
Session – “ The session of activity that a user with a unique IP address spends on a Web site during a specified period of time. The number of user sessions on a site is used in measuring the amount of traffic a Web site gets. The site administrator determines what the time frame of a user session will be (e.g., 30 minutes). If the visitor comes back to the site within that time period, it is still considered one user session because any number of visits within that 30 minutes will only count as one session. If the visitor returns to the site after the allotted time period has expired, say an hour from the initial visit, then it is counted as a separate user session.” (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/user_session.html).
Unique Visitors (or Absolute Unique Visitors) – “A count of how many different people access a Web site. For example, if a user leaves and comes back to the site five times during the measurement period, that person is counted as one unique visitor, but would count as five "user sessions.”
Unique visitors are determined by the number of unique IP addresses on incoming requests that a site receives, but this can never be 100% accurate. Depending on configuration issues and type of ISP service, in some cases, one IP address can represent many users; in other cases, several IP addresses can be from the same user” (http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=unique+visitors&i=53438,00.asp).
URL – “the address of a web page on the world wide web” (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn).
Visitor – someone who visits a website.
Visitor Session – “Interaction by a site visitor. The session ends when the visitor leaves the site” (http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:visitor+session&sa=X&ei=zdGRTeyTE8qecdn0gc4K&ved=0CBUQkAE).
Comparison shopping – Shopping done online whereby a consumer can compare prices, items, services etc.
Additional reading
This Techcrunch article on Hitwise questions the reliability of some data collection.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/QTdCl2iAHhM/
A Video on Google Analytics (not great quality or very exciting but good content)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsPzslyV1U4
Summary
Obviously, there’s a great wealth of information and data about customers and users that can be collected as people interact with you in the digital world. There are commercial and non-commercial tools out there that help you analyze this data, as well as for very large enterprises, home-grown tools which enable you to understand what it is that your customers are looking for, how they interact with you, and how you might be able to optimize that interaction.
Clearly the most sophisticated digital enterprises are moving along quite quickly to do just precisely that. And so the Amazons, and Ebays, and
Googles of the world are doing everything they can to understand and draw meaning from this data.
In the future, the challenge will be – too much data, too much information, and a high noise to signal ratio. And so the kinds of things that we can do to build analytics that help us really understand the nature of our customers, and how to serve them better is still going to be a major issue as we move forward.