Now that you have a website, are you measuring your traffic? You should be. Before you jump in, there are several things you should think about and plan for first.
Step 1: What is the purpose of your website?
The first thing you need to do is to determine what the purpose of your website is. If the people that visit your website do one thing, what would that one thing be? This “thing” is your macro action, or purpose. The purpose of your site can be anything, depending on what makes the most sense for your business. Some common examples are: purchasing something, requesting information, completing a form, registering for something, subscribing to a newsletter or RSS feed, etc.
Step 2: Determine what you want to measure.
Once you know what you want people to do, you need to establish some key things that help to measure the success toward your site’s goal. These are your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. Once you have determined your KPIs, you should measure them regularly so you can monitor the health of your website.
Step 3: Determine Your Analytics Solution
There are a variety of analytics solutions you can use. Which solution you choose will depend on several factors:
- Do you want to use a page-tagging solution, a log-analyzer solution, or a combination of the two? A page-tagging solution relies on javascript tags that are placed on every page of your website while a log analyzer is used to analyze your web site’s server logs. Each solution has positives and negatives.
- What data is important to you and will support your web site’s business purpose? While there are a number of basic statistics that almost all solutions will be able to provide, some more advanced statistics, and the ability to segment your traffic into different groups are only provided by certain solutions.
- What is your budget? Pricing for analytics solutions ranges from free to thousands of dollars, and can be a one-time fee if you buy a log-analyzer that you install, run and maintain or a monthly subscription-type fee if you use an ASP solution.
Some Analytics Resources:
Want to learn more? Here are some of my favorite resources:
Occam’s Razor – Avinash Kaushik’s Blog
