Comments on Web Traffic Analytics and User Experience

Anna Rouben — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:57:55 GMT

Good article! There are definitely benefits in doing web analytics. We recently did a study of wikipedia users and used a freely available database dump. Data logs gave us an ability to look at behavior of thousands of users, something not easily done with user testing (time consuming). I think that for the sites that have an existing user pool, web analytics is a very useful method. Google also uses data logs to evaluate changes to the site and finds the method quite effective (Google UX video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6459171443654125…)

Steven — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:44 GMT

We just developed a Flash analytics and user tracking package that helps with Flash-based user tracking and analysis…

http://www.exemplum.com/content/statistician/statistician…

Thought it was relevant to this conversation, but would like to add that it will always require human interpretation and action.

Steven — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:44 GMT

We just developed a Flash analytics and user tracking package that helps with Flash-based user tracking and analysis…

http://www.exemplum.com/content/statistician/statistician…

Thought it was relevant to this conversation, but would like to add that it will always require human interpretation and action.

Shirley Keddy — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:34 GMT

Excellent article! Very helpful for this newbie in the WTA world. We’re finding that our current log analysis doesn’t enable us to obtain good page-level metrics. I’ll be talking with our developers to look into how to put code on a page which will obtain that information for us. We use Cold Fusion – any suggestions would be helpful.
Again – thanks for writing this informative article!

Rich Berkman — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:49 GMT

Greetings,

One of my AI pals forwarded me this article because I have been providing expertise around web site analytics for close to 10 years now.

The most important piece that most of you have picked up on is that focusing on qualitative and quantitative analytics are both important pieces to having your own full picture of your web users.

I very much advocate that those focused on web customers and web analytics leverage both market research and statistical methods for understanding their end users.

Additionally, it is absolutely possible to gain a very good understanding about the “why” people do what the do on your site. Although I understand the analogy to chicken entrails above, I web log and a number of other ways to make sense of the worlds largest web servers is possible and sometimes a lot less challenging that you might think.

That said, if you are interested in reading about some E-metrics to help focus your effort around understanding your web users, have a look at this free white paper for ideas on how to apply e-metrics to your site.

http://www.spss.com/downloads/papers.cfm?ProductID=00067&…

If you have any problem getting it, just send me an e-mail and I’d be happy to send it over.

Cheers and happy designing.
Rich

John Marshall — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:50 GMT

I find it very interesting to read about the problems of finding the *why* that lurks inside the *what* of web analytics. This was exactly my experience and was the driving force behind my decision to build an analytics tool that permitted easy exploration of the data, in an interactive and ‘right brained’ way.

Disclaimer : we’re a vendor of web analytics tools. http://www.clicktracks.com

Claim : our tool does a respectable job of helping people get to the why, within limits.

I really would like to hear from any IA folks about how close our tool comes to solving your problems. We try hard to make it do the right thing, and IAs have very demanding needs. Sometimes we need more feedback than we get.

Fran Diamond — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:34 GMT

Sven makes an excellent point about approaching WTA using “clean” logs. It’s sort of beyond the purview of an introductory article, but there’s all sorts of things that should be done to scrub server logs—some are automated by the web log programs; others have to be done “manually,” so to speak.

Christian—I don’t agree that time spent should be completely thrown out as a metric. It does have limitations, which you accurately point out, but given those, I’ve seen pretty wide variations in average time spent metrics. That leads me to believe that there are differences in the way people interact with a site that is reflected in that metric.

Time spent can be a valuable data point when trending data, but it is worthless when examined in a vacuum. I think it’s less valuable for an overall site metric, than when it gets down to specific pages or site sections. If average time spent jumps in a particular week, I might want to investigate why. Maybe it’s some indeterminant problem, or maybe it could be pinpointed to new content, or some other change.

This metric, like all others, should be analyzed keeping the objective of the Web site in mind; I wholeheartedly agree that a high time spent metric could indicate a problem. In the example I used, the client wanted people to read through and digest the content, thus it was a good thing to see a higher average time spent on those pages.

Keep the comments coming—and thanks for reading!
-Fran

Christian Watson — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:34 GMT

Nice article. One point I would make is that time spent on the site or on a page is not a useful metric and should be put in the discard pile along with hits.

There is nothing useful you can tell from this metric as there are too many unknowns surrounding it (e.g are your pages interesting to read or is the right content just hard to find; did the visitor go off and make a cup of coffee while on your site, etc).

Furthermore, to put another nail in the coffin of ‘stickiness’, I would suggest that it is most likely actually a better thing if visitors spend *less* time on your site, indicating that they have completed their task successfully and moved on to the next thing they want to do.

Gerry McGovern says some interesting things about this point—you could say that quality of user experience may be inversely proportional to time spent on site.

Kyle Pero — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:01:29 GMT

This article was great because it drives home the point that analysis goes hand in hand with usability/IA.

In my opinion, there is no reason in putting any effort in making things more usable or better organized if your not going to also put effort into tracking to make sure your changes are actually working. Too many times I see people making “enhancements” to their site without ever really finding out if the changes they made are making things better or worse for the user and/or business.

I think that people assume right away that if they change something it’s always for the better. Tracking is really the only way to know for sure.

Sven Körber — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:33 GMT

I really enjoyed reading this article. Web-tracking can really be a valuable tool in the toolset of UX professionals.

Just one big caveat: If you’re dealing with http server logs, it is easy to overlook the influence of search engine spiders crawling the respective site.

You really need to keep your user agent exclusion list up to speed, otherwise you’ll inflate the overall quantity of accesses. What’s even more problematic: spidering patterns can be irregular, going only to the nth level of the site and excluding pages a spider cannot reach.

Bottomline: Before computing anything from log files, clean up the raw data.

Eric Diamond — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:33 GMT

To Peter’s comment, I think slicing and dicing is one tool of many. It is vastly overrated if it is your only tool, but as a starting point, it can be very cost effective and it can yield surprising insights when carefully reviewed. I think the problem is that so few actually analyze their data. they look at hits or sessions or whatever and then it’s “have a nice day.”

It’s a classic problem of intelligence (of the CIA variety) in that when you have an overabundance of data it becomes too overwhelming to delve into it and actually learn anything. This is especially true for non-technical person or marketing department.

And I completely agree with Peter’s views on the subject of chicken entrails. I can think of far better uses for a chicken. Especially one breaded in Panko bread crumbs and oven-fried. Yum.

;)

Eric

dharana — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:31 GMT

Really interesting article. Thank you, Fran :)

Peter Fraterdeus — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 03:39:50 GMT

Fran
Thanks for this article. In fact both of this week’s features in B&A eLetter are exactly what I’ve been looking for just lately.
Of course, I’m always reminded of Mark Twain’s famous quip that “there are lies, there are damned lies and then there are statistics”
I would far rather ask users about their experience than try to figure them out at arm’s length by reading the entrails of a chicken ;-)

Nonetheless, the ability to define a baseline and get a sense of movement from that point forward is obviously useful.

Still I wonder if slicing and dicing all this log data isn’t vastly overrated. It’s really looking in a rear-view mirror, when well-written user surveys and testing will get right to the heart of the matter.

With regards

Peter Fraterdeus
semiotx.com

Fran Diamond — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:31 GMT

I totally agree that WTA is about the what – I am huge advocate for the WHY as well. When I had a job that was 90% “what” and 10% “why” in terms of user analysis, I was desperate for more “why.”

Understanding the actual user behavior on websites provides a good balance to user testing—and can help frame what questions to ask, and understand what areas need work.

Joe Sokohl — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:31 GMT

WTA can tell us WHAT, but not WHY. WTA is important—and your article nicely describes its importance as well as some practical approaches. Yet these statistics don’t tell us why users did something, only that they did it. Observations of real users in real settings helps us understand why.