Getting to know your visitors - Taking web analytics further

Really getting to know your website visitor

Taking web analytics that step or two further

Web analytics is fine to a point. But it only tells you about the journeys made by visitors successfully accessing your site - not the ones who tried and failed.

Beyond waiting for the sales results to come in, how best can a Web Marketing Department measure effectiveness? Most web marketers will be familiar with web analytics to measure and track how real visitors use their site, from where they first enter to the key transactions they make. But this usually provides only a part of the picture. Ideally we should be monitoring how users behave - how easy or difficult they found the site to navigate, which parts frustrate them, and most importantly what might persuade users to abort their journey.

By definition web analytics only reports on pages that have been successfully visited and ignores incomplete journeys. Key user transactions - normally more complicated due to the extra technology involved - can be liable to greater error rates, but these will be generally ignored by web analytics. Further, web analytics don't usually give reliable performance measures in terms of page delivery times, and those that attempt this are often unreliable because they are based upon timings of javascript tracking bugs.

User journeys

The answer is to add User Journey web monitoring to your mix of measures. It's much more than simple monitoring of the homepage or a couple of fixed URLs and will allow you to really get to know your website's visitors. Automated scripts are run 24/7 to reproduce the behaviour of typical users. Between the homepage, the page on which the user finds and selects a product to purchase and the 'Add to Basket', the user journey might pass through five or six pages.

User Journey monitoring takes account of this, revealing the error rate of the journey and the speed of transactions.This information will complement your web analytics, by helping to identify why real users bail out more often at certain points in the online process. It may be because they are confused when one page is suddenly much slower than previous ones. Or simply because of the error rate at that point.

Special audits

So, you've got your web analytics in place, and you're doing User Journey monitoring.What's next? There's more measuring to be done - but unlike the above, these are not 24/7, but once-off audit exercises.They can be performed at regular intervals, say once or twice a year, or when the site undergoes substantial redesign. Accessibility, Usability and Load testing are the three main activities that can help here.

Accessibility testing checks the underlying design of the site and how content is presented, ensuring that it can be accessed by those with disabilities.

Usability testing considers how effective the site is presented and how visitors use the site to do the tasks online that you want them to do. It covers simple issues such as content flow, as well as more complex ergonomic and user friendliness issues.

Load/Stress testing is how you'll find out if the site can handle peaks, and comes into its own when you anticipate extra traffic from increased marketing activity for example or seasonal highpoints. By running automated scripts to emulate a large number of simultaneous User Journeys, you can be confident that you're testing as close as possible to a real user scenario.

Load testing needs careful planning. Carried out at the wrong time in the wrong way, it can inconvenience the real users of a live system by clogging up the system unnecessarily. Experienced Load Testing companies will help you take full advantage of this most powerful measure and to overcome such pitfalls.

With these extra measurement activities in place you'll understand far more clearly your potential online customers. Any requests to increase the budget to accommodate system updates can be supported by evidence-based reasoning. Knowledge is key to marketing success. The above extra steps can increase dramatically your understanding of how your visitors behave... leading to a more effective site, less user frustration and greater sales.