Outsourced analysis
You don't have to do the work in-house--various companies including ACNielsen.consult, Hitwise, Media Metrix, Red Sheriff, and WebSideStory offer a range of outsourced Web analytic services ranging from free basic services for simple sites to enterprise-class services intended to give insight into complex, high-volume sites.
Some of these services rely at least partly on using panels of users, similar to the way TV ratings are calculated. Panel-based approaches to tracking have the advantage of providing demographic information about users, though some demographics may be available with other methods.
On the other hand, panels are very small compared with the population of Internet users. While panels can give satisfactory results where there are limited choices (eg, TV stations), the Internet's diversity means only the sites with the heaviest traffic are likely to be accurately measured.
Generally speaking, panels comprise home users, overlooking the substantial Web use in businesses, schools and other educational institutions, and government departments. Quite apart from the privacy implications, few IT managers are likely to entertain the idea of adding a research company's metering software to the organisation's standard operating environment.
Proxy analysis takes care of one of the shortcomings of log analysis: if a user request for a page is satisfied from the ISP's proxy server, it will not show up in a server log.
Most ISPs route Web traffic through proxies. Analysing the proxy logs from a number of ISPs gets around this difficulty, and potentially covers enough users in various categories (home, business, education, etc) to give meaningful figures.
Hitwise--one of the foremost proponents of proxy analysis--covers around 31 percent of Australian Internet users, and an even larger proportion in some other countries: approximately 43 percent in Singapore and 47 percent in Hong Kong. Although some demographic information may be available, it is unlikely to be as detailed or exact as that collected from a panel.
Like log analysis, proxy analysis has the advantage of being unobtrusive. Since proxies are now generally implemented in a transparent manner, users are no longer required to configure their software to take advantage of a proxy.
The other main method of collecting data is to embed code (usually JavaScript or Java) in each page that notifies a server whenever the page is loaded.
While this gets around the various caches that exist between the user's screen and the original server, it does raise privacy issues and can be circumvented by settings in the browser or in a firewall.
What does the information mean?
Keeping track of referring sites can be important as it can reveal whether you have done enough to optimise the site's ranking by search engines (whether that's achieved through technical means or by paying for a prominent position). It also shows how much traffic is being driven to your site by marketing partners, banner ads and so on.
Not every visitor will arrive at your home page. Many will go directly to pages deep within your site's structure from search engines, links from other sites, or from bookmarks.
Popular entry points deserve attention to ensure they deliver a good user experience otherwise you risk losing visitors as soon as they arrive. If a substantial amount of traffic is arriving directly and without a referring site, users have probably bookmarked or memorised the page.
In that case it could be risky to make a significant change to the content of the page, or to move the information elsewhere on your site.
By following users' progress as they go from link to link within your site, you are able to determine how well its structure suits their needs. If a lot of people are talking the long way round to a particular piece of information, you may need to provide a more direct route or make an existing link more obvious.
When a series of pages correspond to steps in a transaction (such as obtaining basic information, more detailed information, adding the item to a shopping cart and then completing the purchase), you might spot that an unexpectedly high proportion of visitors are bailing out of the transaction at a particular stage.
You can then investigate the reason why it is happening--abandoned shopping carts could be due to high shipping charges, for example. Knowing where your users go when they leave your site can be valuable.
For example, if a company that sells computer consumables but not inkjet refill kits might discover that a significant proportion of visitors move from its site to those operated by refill specialists.
In that case, it might be sensible to expand the range of products to include refill kits or to form an alliance with a refill specialist. Shopping centre operators know that the longer people spend in a centre, the more money they will spend.
One reason there are so many cafes and other food outlets in the typical shopping centre is that they tend to extend the duration of the average visit. Some Web site operators use the similar reasoning, and assume the longer visits last, the better.
This might be true for some kinds of site, notably a portal that exists primarily to put advertising in front of visitors, but others will judge success by providing visitors with the information they need as quickly as possible.
