Getting the Numbers
The first step in measuring the performance of your website is to ensure that you are capturing the information somewhere. The good news is that there are a number of ways to do this — and many of them are free. If your website is powered by web server softwares like Apache and Microsoft IIS, then you can use the software’s built-in mechanism to record all site action and activity to a “log file”. Just make sure that the site developer has enabled this functionality, and that the log files are actually being written somewhere, every day. As good practice, you should have a backup of the log files for future reference.
Once you have the log files, you will need a log analysis software to process them, and produce some meaningful numbers. A number of free and commercial log analysis tools can be used to process log files. But, all of them will need to be set up and configured before you can use them. Once set up, log analysis is easy to use—and can answer a number of questions about the performance and effectiveness of your site.
An alternative option to measure your site is to use a technique called “page tagging”. All you need to do is put a special piece of code on every single page of your site. Whenever, the page (with the embedded code) is displayed to a site visitor, the action is recorded on a server, or by a remotely hosted service provider. Google Analytics is one such service that offers free web traffic recording and analysis. You need to register for the service, and incorporate the Google Analytics code into your HTML pages. Within hours, you can view the statistics. If you have a very sophisticated or complicated site, you can use a paid service like Omniture and WebTrends that give you enhanced analytics and reports.
Other tricks you can use to get more information about people who are visiting your site is to use cookies (small bits of code) and advanced Java scripts.
Using the Numbers
All web traffic analysis tools can produce a wide variety of standard reports, and can often be configured to output many special reports too. But, it is easy to get lost in all the data. So, let’s look at the stuff that is important:
- The visitor report will tell you how many unique visitors came to your site, and what proportion came back (repeat visitor). It will also tell you where your visitors came from (which IP address or domain). This will enable you to identify how many people come to your site, and where they are coming from.
- The visits report will tell you how often people come to your site, and how long they stay there. While longer is not always better, having visitors leave your site within seconds is also a problem.
- The referrer report will tell you how visitors found your site. It is important to know whether they came from a search engine, from a marketing campaign, from a link on another site, or just by typing in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Use this report to measure the effectiveness of pay-per-click and SEO (search engine optimisation) programmes.
- The page report will show which pages were viewed by site visitors, and how specific pages were viewed. Use this report to evaluate if people are seeing the pages you want them to see, and whether you need to make changes to the site. Keep an eye on the bounce rate (the number of visits where just one page is viewed, before the visitor exits the site).
- The navigation report will show you the sequence in which the pages are being viewed, and popular paths in your site. You can use this report to measure the effectiveness of sales funnels, and to improve the navigation and effectiveness of your site.
- The keyword search report will list the search terms that were used by visitors to find your site. Use information from this report to optimise your search engine marketing programs, and to tweak the design of the site to make it search-engine friendly.
- The errors report will give you information on what’s broken or non-functional on your site (i.e. pages and links that are generating error messages). Use the data in the report to quickly fix problems—before visitors give up on your site.
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