Complete Web Monitoring

Chapter 5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics

Think of two web pages you’ve created in the past. Which of them will work best?

Before you answer, you should know that you’re not entitled to an opinion. The only people who are entitled to one are your visitors, and they convey their opinions through what they do on your site. If they do the things you want them to, in increasingly large numbers, that’s a good sign; if they don’t, that’s a bad one.

Analytics is that simple. Everything else is just details.

Before you go further in this chapter, we want you to try an exercise. Find a volunteer, and ask him or her to think of something he or she wants. Then draw a picture on a piece of paper, and get him or her to reply “warmer” or “colder” depending on how close the thing you drew was to the thing he or she was thinking. Repeat until you know what they’re thinking of.

Go ahead. We’ll wait.

How long did it take for you to figure out what he or she wanted? How many iterations did you go through?

Notice that you had plenty of creative input into the process: you came up with the ideas of what might work, and you deduced what your volunteer wanted through small “improvements” to your picture based on their feedback.

The same process takes place as you optimize a website, with some important differences:

• You’re listening to hundreds of visitors rather than a single volunteer, so you have to measure things in the aggregate.

• What you define as “warmer” or “colder” will depend on your business model. ...