Web Analysis

All of the Content Management and E-Commerce solutions we build are designed to ensure that they are web optimised and offer areas where header content can be altered to help maximise results. However, site owners need to do work to ensure these settings are correct and make tweaks to the header and page content to ensure their site are working to their best advantage.

Every visitor to you web site leaves a trail. This core data is stored in the site log files and contains information such as  date & time of visit, method of connection, page viewed, the query string, the IP address of the visitor, the browser used by the visitor and so on. Sadly referral logs are not always what they seem because although the logs can show you the pages that people have come from whether blogs, news sites, forum threads, search engines etc and help you keep an eye on what the Internet is saying, they fail to deliver meaningful data.

Your site can be returned using a range of headings or by simply using the site IP address and so, if the link doesn’t use your site’s name or simply uses an image from your site, you may never discover what your visitor was truly seeking. These type of links are logged and when analysed will lead to confusion.

Ultimately we all want more traffic to our sites but more isn’t always better. Sometimes more visitors simply mean bandwidth consumption. Many site owners go to exhaustive lengths building links with others to help drive traffic to their site but this too may not be as it seems. Some who claim to be referrers may not link to you at all. Faking a referral is extremely easy and used by spammers who hope that you will publish your logs somewhere so that they’ll get links to their fake sites at the expense of your bandwidth. Also fraudsters, who target your interest in seeing what people are saying about you to try and make you click on a link to them personally. Then there are the thousands of links which saturate your stats making the genuine information difficult to find. Remember that spammers don’t care what they do providing it has a remote chance that someone will click the link.

Your site should have goals such as to gain sales. Therefore any stats must help you access whether these goals are being realised. Keywords and query strings are often the most valuable resource in this regard because drilling down to the word level can make it easier to see how your site is represented on the web. If insufficient visitors progress to the purchasing section or key phrases you want yourself to be associated with aren’t there, or a tiny proportion of irrelevant results, then it is time to either overhaul the site as a whole and target your market more directly, or to start investing in the likes of Google adverts and other methods to draw traffic.

Most analytical tools fail to give you the full picture. A good web analytical solution will collate data and organise it into meaningful sets such that information can be extracted to enhance your knowledge and understanding of what’s happening on your site. All too often the tools simply deliver the collected data and fail to aid your knowledge and understanding of what the visitors to the site have been doing.

Some solutions use page scripts to manufacture an alternative log. Whilst these only run when the page is actually loaded and therefore eliminate some of the false info mentioned above they can be used to collect additional data that can prove beneficial in understanding visitor activity.

We have many solutions created to address specific client requirements that deliver detailed site statistics but recognise that each clients needs differ and that numerous solutions exist that might better suit our customer requirements. So, if any client wants any particular web analytical software added we will be happy to oblige.

Last altered Sunday, 18 March, 2007 © Brian Watson & Co. 2000-2006