Web Analytics Works Shock!

Web Analytics, or the science of Guesswork (subtitled We take the Guesswork out of Heuristics).

Having struggled with Webtrends for more years than I care to remember, I have a healthy disrespect for the Snake Oil known as Web Analytics.

Two problems really spring to mind.

Firstly the difficulty of trying to work out what happened by looking at log files where you never know the ending. The stateless nature of HTTP means that you never know when someone has gone. [aside, I was going to put a neat link on stateless to a good definition, but I can't find one so...... Stated Communication is like a phone call where you dial a number and a connection is made with the far end, you can communicate over that connection until it is terminated, Stateless Communication is really impersonal you dial the number with a question, it responds and forgets about you, you call again and it doesn't know who you are!] so all this bollocks about "average time on site 21 minutes..." is just that, bollocks because you never know when someone has gone.

The second is trying to display the log files in a way that is understandable to man. I mean you've got a load of garbage data in.......

However, we recently started running WebDruid (which I think is an offshoot of Webalizer) which does seem to work. And has the most intuitive "Paths Through Site" diagram that I have ever seen.

I once sat through a meeting with a large corporate client trying to explain Webtrend's Paths Through Site diagram, a complete disaster. Even Webtrends can't explain what the diagram is, so mere mortals like myself are just lost.

Anyway, we were looking through the logs to one of our own sites, Enabler our email marketing software and we noticed that, we were driving traffic to the Contact Us page which we could see clearly from the diagram but were't getting many enquiries. Strange, we thought. But looking at the page we realised that Contact Us had no email address to contact us by (grim for an email marketing product!).

Fixed it now, lets see if we get more enquiries.

So the sequence of events was, looked at the web analytics, noticed an anomaly, checked it out and found a problem, fixed problem.

I should do more of this for both us and our clients.