In this issue

Web site analytics - what are they.

 "Gee", I had someone hyperventilate last week, "we had over a million hits last month, that is an awful lot of people visiting our site".  I sat him down.  Repeat after me: “hits are not visitors”.  It did no good – short attention span I am afraid.  Anyway no one wants to hear that a million hits is probably only a few thousand visitors. 

So let's de-mystify some terms.

Unique visitors

I visit your site, I look around, I go away. This makes me a visitor.  So the first number you should be interested in is the number of visitors to your web site, because that is the number of different people who have tried to get information about your product.  The jargon term is ‘unique visitors’ to avoid confusion with …

Visits

If I come back tomorrow am I another visitor? Obviously not. But I have made another visit.  The other term you hear is visitor session or just session.

Page impressions or page views

I look at your home page, I look at your contact page and I look at your home page again. That is three page views or page impressions.

Hits

This is the number of individual files that have been downloaded from the server.  A single page might have :

• The page itself
• A style sheet or two
• Half a dozen images
• A JavaScript file

Each one counts as a hit.  So if a visitor looks at (say) 10 pages, and each page has (say) 10 files, your million hits comes down to:

• 1,000,000 / 10 =100,000 page views
• 100,000  / 10 visitor sessions = 10,000
• and even less actual visitors – maybe only 5,000 if people come back more than once. 

The hits figure has virtually no value and I won’t spend any more time on it.  Except if you want to impress your friends and double the hit count, just divide all your graphics into two.

How do you get these figures?

There are three ways of getting this type of information.

Put a counter on your home page.

This shows every visitor (and you) how many other people have seen the page.  If the numbers are not in the millions I think this looks cheap.  The information you get is limited to just this one number and is not very accurate because a lot of people come into an interior page from a search engine and never get to your home page.  Not on my recommended list.

Analyse log files

Every hit is recorded in a log file by the web server.  Quite a lot of information is recorded and these files can get quite big.  By processing these files you can get an amazing amount of information.  There are a number of free log analysis programs and a lot of service providers use these.  They give you all the basic information.

The leading commercial products in this area are Urchin and Webtrends.  We have been using Webtrends for many years and it is quite a good product.  As standard we have been running monthly Webtrends log analyses for sites that we host.

Online

The third way of capturing this information is to put your web site in touch with a central log analysis service that records every page view in real time. This involves a small piece of html that you need to put on every page of the web site.  Yes, every page.  If you don’t have a content management system this could be a chore.

Which is best?

Accuracy

Web browsers save information to improve efficiency.  So if a page is visited several times the browser simply loads the page from its memory (cache) rather than downloading it again.    The online method will count every page viewed whether cached or not, the log will only contain information about the first download.

On the other hand, the special html is often put at the bottom of each page. If the user stops downloading a page before the end this won’t get counted by the online method but will by the log analysis. 

So don’t expect the numbers to tally.  On balance, the online method is more accurate.

Information

The online method will not record hits.  Period. This doesn’t matter because the information is useless.  However, it will record very useful information that the log files do not contain such as the connection speed and screen resolution of your visitor.

Speed

The online method is – well – online.  The results are available quickly, typically every 24 hours. The log analysis method depends on how frequently you run the program.

Cost

The log analysis method involves a once-off cost for the software.  The online method is a service and therefore there is (or was) a significant monthly cost.  Now however a service is available for free from Google.  More on this next month, when I will go into Google analytics in depth . 

Business intelligence - eye tracking

Eye tracking is fascinating.  They sit users down at a computer screen and measure the bits of the web page that they look at, and how long they look at it. 

The company who specialise in this is at www.eyetools.com and they have just started a company blog at http://blog.eyetools.net/. 

Before and after studies on web sites show the effect of different design styles.  Every designer should get up to speed on this. 

A really good example is in the middle of other fascinating data in the teaser slides for the marketingsherpa benchmark study.  http://www.marketingsherpa.com/tele/EMBG1_24.pdf

Spin down to page 12 and see how a change in design dramatically increases the impact of the copy.

News from the web

December was a bumper year for internet stores.  $30 billion in the US.  I don’t have the figures for the UK, but if the stores we are associated with in the UK are anything to go by it was good here too. 

This month Microsoft shut down a Chinese blogger who said the wrong things.  Nasty!

Of course Google caused a lot of fuss by going along with Chinese restrictions on free speech. It hit the headlines here, but they had a choice that no one would envy.  They could follow the other big players or lose out on what could be the biggest Internet market in the world in a few years' time.   Chinese Internet users hit 111million last year. 

Google meanwhile is planning to open a video store.  It had to happen.

Google have introduced a PC software pack.  Mainly stuff you would have downloaded anyway such as the google toolbar, a screensaver program, Firefox, Adobe pdf reader, Real player etc. Reminds me of the cover disk on a PC magazine.  However it includes a six month Norton antivirus subscription which is worth something 

The world definitely needs a Euro search engine doesn’t it.  And here it is – Quaero.  Or at least will be at some point in the future.  Uh… who thought of that name.  And as www.quaero.com is already taken – um – how do you find it.

Blackberry is that little box you see everywhere on the tube these days, providing email to the corporate types who must be in touch all the time.  Now they won’t get lost while they read their mail because Google is adding maps in a partnership with Blackberry.  They are also adding Google IM.

Salesforce.com is the most successful web-based sales force automation and CRM tool by far.  They have been very successful with what is a great product.  But now they want to go into online applications.  I can see there is some sort of synergy with the calendar and work scheduling that is inherent in Sales Force Automation, and sort-of synergy with word processing.  However I am concerned that these guys are going to be way out of their depth competing with Microsoft and Sun for a market which I am not wholly convinced exists at all.

However check it out at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange and you will see that these are pretty much niche products.  So it may work for them.

Skype adds video calling to its service.  I don’t get it.  Online chat, audio chat, video chat....  MNS has had this stuff for years yet this is launched as if it was some breakthrough rather than just a belated catch-up.  These Skype marketing guys are good!  I take my hat off.

Internet users can give a web site a thumbs up or down in less than the blink of an eye.  This research  was just published in the Behaviour and Information Technology journal.

And finally, the US Consumer Reports organisation announces the Oyster Award for the hardest to open packaging.  The longest to open was the American Idol Barbie at 15 minutes 10 seconds, but the winner was Uniden’s digital cordless phone.  It won not because of the time to open but because its sharp edges made it the most deadly.