- Posted by acxede on August 13, 2008
These days, every self-respecting hosting service includes a web analytics package of some sort. Office Live Small Business has one too. It’s called Reports. It may not be the most sophisticated package of its kind but it certainly is good enough for do-it-yourselfers and small-business owners wearing the webmaster’s hat because it presents a few well-chosen metrics in an easily digestible format instead of burying them in an avalanche of numbers and buzzwords.
Novices often look at web analytics as the solution for all the problems they think their web sites have. Not so. Here's a rational overview of what Reports are and what they can and can't do for you. The operative word here is rational. So rest assured you won’t find pairs of eyeballs, click-through rates, cost per click, and other such mumbo-jumbo in this post.
What Are Reports?
So you’ve built fantastic web site. You’re convinced it’s attractive, informative, and user-friendly. The question is whether other people think so too. Obviously you can’t ask them that question directly. Therefore, like Sherlock Holmes, you must deduce the answer based on circumstantial evidence. How do you do that? Elementary, my dear Watson! All you need to do is snoop around for information such as the following:
- How many people visited your web site?
- Which search engines or directories did they use to arrive there?
- Which keywords did they type into search engines to find your web site?
- How long did people stay on your web site once they got there?
- Which pages did they visit the most?
- Which pages appeared to drive visitors away?
- What kind of computers and browsers did your visitors use?
- Did your online advertising campaigns generate enough traffic to justify the expense?
Once you find answers to these questions, you can put two and two together and take an educated guess at the über-question – How effective is my web site?
As it happens, this information is quite easy to find because Office Live Small Business logs each page request your web site gets. The trouble is that only nerds can comprehend it in its raw form. That’s where Reports come in. The package extracts relevant information from the raw logs, compiles it logically, and presents it as easy-to-understand charts and tables that mere mortals can understand.
What Reports Are NOT
Let me dispel a common myth before we go any further. Reports are not a prescription to propel your web site to the very top of all search results. They don’t prescribe the magic pill that would compel people all over the world to ditch their favorite web sites and flock to yours.
I’m sure you’d be overjoyed to receive a bulleted list from Reports every morning that goes something like this:
- Add two more pages to your site with such-and-such content – that’s what people are looking for
- Change the background color of your web pages to white and use Garamond font to attract 63 additional visitors every day
- The third word on the 24th line of the Services page is spelled promtp. It should be prompt. By the way, the copy on the Products page sucks. Replace it with this: [new copy here]. Not only will this increase traffic by 11%, your visitors will start clicking on the AdSense ads on these web pages as well.
Unfortunately, Reports don’t generate such a list. They merely present site statistics in an easy-to-understand format. What you make of those numbers is entirely up to you.
What Can You Do With Site Reports?
Details of a single visit can’t give you a peek into your visitors’ mind, but when you consolidate details from hundreds or thousands of visits, you begin to notice trends in their behavior. Good web sites are built with specific goals in mind. Site Reports are primarily a performance evaluation tool. They illuminate how your web site’s visitor statistics measure up to the goals you’ve set for it.
Analyzing Site Reports is not a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing 3-step process:
- Review Site Reports periodically
- Analyze their contents to determine which of your site’s goals aren’t being met and why
- Make changes to your web site to address the problem areas and go back to step 1 to evaluate how effective your changes were (and to find new problem areas)
The second step is the key step in this process. If you’re able pinpoint the problem areas effectively, you’ll have a better shot at attaining the goals you’ve set for your web site.
How Often Should You Analyze Site Reports?
Statistics of any kind make sense only when enough data is available for analysis. If you analyze statistics of, say, a popular community web site that gets hundreds of thousands of visits every day, you may be able to draw meaningful conclusions from them on a daily basis. The same is not true of a small web site, such as yours, which fewer people visit - you might have to wait for months before you have enough data to analyze meaningfully. It may make sense to look at some metrics every day. Some others may warrant only a yearly review. There are no hard-and-fast rules.
As a new site-owner, you might be tempted to pore over your site statistics several times a day and tweak a few things on your web site here and there. Rest assured, doing so won’t double the traffic to your site anytime soon. Analyzing statistics too frequently serves little purpose. Heck, it may even lead you to the wrong conclusions.