lolhtml!

Tracking Your Website

You’ve slogged through the design revisions, worked out most of the bugs; hell it even seems to work in IE6 the way it works everywhere else.

Now all that’s left is to watch the traffic roll in.

A lot of clients that come through the door at my shop are very interested in knowing how many people have come to their site. And I don’t disagree with them, it is interesting information. It validates your spend and effort; it is important information.

But the number of people who’ve come to your site isn’t a success defining metric. In almost all cases you’ve built your site for a reason, and your visitors interaction with that reason is something you should be tracking. Your total visitation becomes the baseline. That’s how you measure your site’s success.

Most analytics applications have functionality that allows you to set up goals for your site.

What goals allow you to do is define an action (or series of actions) on your site that are specifically tracked by your analytics application. By breaking these actions out - by segmenting them - you have have a number to compare against your total visitation. This number is called conversion.

Let’s say, for example, you have built a website to promote the sale of your home. You’ve set up a contact form on the site so people can book a showing with you, along with your home details and a photo-gallery.

What you really want is for people to buy your house. The site is just a conduit to that goal.

Chances are no one is going to buy your house without coming to see it. And since you’ve built a site where they can’t purchase the site online, your point of conversion is the contact form.

To track the real performance of your house-selling website we should monitor how many people are visiting the contact form (goal #1), and then one step further, how many people fill it out (goal #2).

Now we have use for our baseline information (total visitors).

If 1,000 people visited the site and 100 went to the contact form our conversion rate for goal #1 is 10%.

If 10 people filled out the contact form then our conversion rate for goal #2 is 1%.

Because we’re tracking 2 different actions individually we’re able to determine more than just conversion as well. If 100 people hit the form and only 10 filled it out, why did the other 90 not bother?

Properly tracking specific points of conversion in the site allow us to make new assumptions and identify areas for improvement. In our example, perhaps there’s an issue with the form that fell through cracks. Maybe we’re asking for too much information from our users. It could just be tirekickers, who knows? The point is we’re able to ask these questions because we’re able to stay focused by understanding our goals.

By understanding what we’re trying to accomplish on the sites we build we’re able to track the actions on the website that meet our business goals. Once we’re aware of how users behave around these interaction points we’re able to refine and improve our work to get the best possible results. It’s a process that’s 1 part math and 2 parts speculation.

Tagged with analytics, tracking.