ANALYTICS MEANT LITTLE more than tracking banner advertising click-throughs in the formative days of the web. With the gold rush mentality of early eCommerce developers, tracking advertising or any aspect of a website’s performance made little impression on webmasters. Today the market has matured, and with it an understanding of how important analytics can be to long-term prosperity of a site.

The internet is set to take more than a fifth of all UK advertising revenues by 2009. The UK has the largest proportion of online advertising worldwide, with 13.5 per cent of ad revenues going to online this year, according to media forecaster ZenithOptimedia. By 2009, Zenith predicts 21.5 per cent of UK advertising will be on the internet, which would mean that the UK is at the forefront of online ad spending, turning its back on traditional advertising like TV, radio and press.

“Analytical software has evolved over the years, and has much more to offer than simply web traffic information and the number of hits using data derived from server log files,” says Damian Reynolds, head of Digital Media, Cicero Marketing Communications. “Over the last few years, both marketing and sales departments have become increasingly interested in the monthly websites reports that we provide and, more importantly, the interpretation of the results. They recognise the power this data has to support or reinforce businessoriginated decisions. Therefore, the ownership of this information has transferred from being closely guarded information for the webmaster and their team, to independent, jargon-free, real-time visitor intelligence for strategic decision makers.”

Web analytics are akin to auditing a store layout in the tactile world. If you know which areas of your store are attracting the most paying customers, you can develop those sites and increase your turnover and profit. Online, you can perform a similar feat with web analytics that enable you to track how the pages on your website are being used by visitors. A simple relocation of a promotional banner can produce significant upswings in interest that directly connects to more lucrative business.

Web analytics has now evolved to the point where any aspect of your site’s performance can be tracked and measured. From simply discovering where your visitors have come from, to how they behave as they move through your site, it can all be captured. Software that can analyse your log files is now sophisticated enough to answer complex marketing questions, but beware that not all log file analysis software is made the same. Think carefully about what components of your site’s log files you want to focus on and choose a log file analysis application that can deliver those answers.

Not to miss a trick when offering services to its customers, Google has a free analysis package (www. google.com/analytics) that can be easily set up and maintained. If you’re looking for top-level analysis of your site’s pages, this application is a good introduction. The system uses page tags to track the activity of each page on your site. For eCommerce sites, page-tagging analysis can be very useful indeed as you can track where your visitors are coming from and how they react throughout your site. You can, for instance, see if your site is suffering from high trolley abandonment. Page tagging can also be combined with log file data to create a rich resource to help you improve your marketing activity.

Dan Robbins, director of marketing at ClickTracks, says: “There are subtle differences and inaccuracies in both log file and page tag collection systems. The important thing is to note aggregate trends that occur over time and compare segmented data. Cookies allow some added insight into longer-term behaviour of visitors and can improve revenue and campaign performance analysis.” Page visits are just one component of the analysis that you can perform on your website. Increasingly, site owners are looking at their web page with even greater detail to identify the areas and components that receive the most traffic and return the best investment. This analysis is akin to high-street retailing where the real estate of a window display has been refined over time to give the maximum return on the goods displayed. Systems like Click Density (www.clickdensity.com) use a heat map analysis technique to illustrate which areas of a web page are receiving the most traffic. This data is invaluable when the time comes to redesign your site. Over time, you can make each page operate at its maximum capacity to deliver high returns on your investment in its construction.

With Web 2.0 technologies showing no sign of abating, analysing these new forms of website is a challenge but one that can be easily integrated into an existing analytical framework. With traditional page-centric systems, Web 2.0 technologies that are now being employed would simply register a single page view even though a visitor has spent many minutes on the page. If you intend to use Web 2.0 techniques on your site, ensure you capture the entire event of your customers visit and not simply the pages they are viewing.

Cicero Marketing Communications’ Damian Reynolds comments: “The speed of the advance within this sector has been rapid since the development of new programming techniques, commonly grouped together as Web 2.0. Many of the leading providers have been developed in parallel to these systems and have therefore reflected many of the changes and advances of the technology. The difficulties facing the analytical community are similar to the situation they faced with Flash, but then they were trying to use existing systems to tackle a fresh problem.”

“The success of such sites such as Flickr and Google Maps and other online applications have changed the way people navigate through sites. Users can now spend hours with one page or view without navigating to other pages. The key metric within this environment is the user ‘interactions’ with the site. This is achieved by measuring JavaScript code from within the page (in the case of Google Maps, over 200,000 lines of code); this in turn can feed the information back to a custom API or mashup.”

What is clear is that web analytics is now big business and is forming the core of commercial websites’ marketing activities. The latest WebTrends report succinctly states: “Since this increase is allocated across many channels, the ability to gain a deeper understanding and optimise results is critical. Organisations are spending their valuable marketing dollars across multiple channels and partners to reach customers in new ways – Google, Yahoo, MSN, online publications, email, mobile and more. The key to success will be to consolidate performance data and customer information into a single consistent metrics framework within a complete reporting system.”

A Unica white paper also concluded: “Analysing the behaviour of visitors to a website is a key step in optimising website and internet marketing efforts – and one component of a cross-channel marketing strategy. There are many approaches to capturing web analytics; determining what solution is best for your organisation depends on a number of factors, including resources, skill sets and the questions you want to answer.”

Whether you are attempting a redesign, improving the return via your website or building a new site from scratch or about to embark on a redesign, placing the analytical components of your site design at the very centre of each decision you make is crucial. Every pixel of your site can now be tracked, and coupled with detailed visitor logs, you can quickly build a detailed picture of how your site is used and who your visitors are. This information is essential for the successful marketing of your site, which in turn will ensure its long-term longevity and sustainable profitability of your business.