Tutorial 9 - Rhys Tague

Tutorial 9  Week 12

Introduction to Web Analytics

A. Practical Exercises

Acivity 2: Stat Counter

StatCounter is a free invisible web tracker and highly configurable hit counter which provides realtime
detailed web stats. The web designer needs to insert a simple piece of code on their web page
or blog and they can analyse and monitor all the visitors to the website in real-time.
Go to StatCounter http://www.statcounter.com and click on the Demo tab (second from left on the
top navigation bar)

Look at the reports to answer the following questions about the website being used in the demo –

• What is the most popular page?

Traditional Pans – Cakery supplies – Wilton Cake Pans, Magic Line Cake Pans, Cake Decorating Supplies

• Where do most of the visitors come from (don’t include ‘no referral’)?

They come directly from cakerysupplies.com, followed by Yahoo! Search than Google Search

• What are the top 3 keywords being used to find the site?

www.placecardsholders.com, baseball/softball cake pans, pettinice fondant

• Which search engine brings the most amount of traffic?

www.google.com with 57.45%

• Which search engine brings the least amount of traffic?

Search.aol.com with 2.13%

• Which of the visit length categories has the highest proportion of visitors?

Less than 5 seconds

• Which country brings the most visitors?

Norway with 62.40%

• Which state brings the most visitors?

Rogaland, Norway, with 52.80%

• Which city brings the most visitors?

Haugesund, Rogaland, Norway with 32.40%

• Where does Australia rank in terms of referring countries?

Australia ranks 4th with 1.80%

• What are the top 5 most popular browser being used by visitors?

Internet Explorer 7.0 with 42.20%, Firefox 3.6 with 28.80%, Internet Explorer 8.0 with 19.00%, and Firefox 3.5 with 6.00%

• How many people are viewing the site with a screen resolution of 640 X 480?

From the graph it would have to be less than 5%. The reason for this is because 640 X 480 is not on the graph and the lowest percentage of resolution used is 1600 X 1200 which is 5%.

Date and Time,IP Address,IP Address Label,Browser,Version,OS,Resolution,Returning Count,Page URL,Page Title,Came From,SE Host,SE Name,SE Term
28/05/2010 7:03,84.234.193.51,,IE,7,WinVista,1280x1024,1,http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsChkqty.asp,"Cakery Supplies - Wilton Cake Pans, Magic Line Cake Pans, Cake Decorating Supplies",http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsDeliveryinfo.asp,,,
28/05/2010 7:03,84.234.193.51,,IE,7,WinVista,1280x1024,1,http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsDeliveryinfo.asp,"Cakery Supplies - Wilton Cake Pans, Magic Line Cake Pans, Cake Decorating Supplies",http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsCustomer.asp?Reg=Yes,,,
28/05/2010 7:02,153.110.137.9,,IE,7,Win2003,1152x864,0,http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsDefault.asp?Cat=NoveltyShapedPans,"Novelty Shaped Pans - Cakery Supplies - Wilton Cake Pans, Magic Line Cake Pans, Cake Decorating Supplies",http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsCollections.asp?ID=16,,,
28/05/2010 7:02,153.110.137.9,,IE,7,Win2003,1152x864,0,http://www.cakerysupplies.com/store/WsCollections.asp?ID=16,Bakeware Shop,http://www.cakerysupplies.com/,,,

Activity 2: Other Tools

There are many other tools used for web analytics. These range in price from free through to very
expensive enterprise systems. Two of the most commonly used free tools are awstats and Google
Analytics. Use the web to find information about them.

Write approx ½ page describing each tool with a comparison of them (ie. their relative
advantages and disadvantages).

There are many Analytical tools floating about on the internet, but with all tools some are better than the others. For instance Google Analytics is a robust Analytics tool used by some of the fortune five hundred companies of the world. It is robust and has the capability of collecting large amounts of analytical information. It is a free service available to any web-site owner for tracking their web-site, so even a small to medium sized company can have the power of a fortune five hundred company. Google Analytics has many features that allow you to keep track of your visitors and usage. It allows you to set up goals, track mobile device usage, and much more. 

Some Analytics is quite hard to understand, especially when it is presented in raw format (numbers and text). One advantage with Google Analytics is that it has a diverse range of graphs and visualisations to present this data in a meaningful way, so you don’t have to be educated in the area of analytics to understand your site usage. Google Analytics also allows you to benchmark your web-site to another. This allows you to see if your web-site is out-performing or under-performing your completion. 

There are some disadvantages with Google analytics. The first off the rank is that the data is only collected at a minimum of 12 hours, so when it comes to e-commerce you want to know how a new advertisement or product is moving straight away. The second is that the tool is limited to javascript enabled computers, so if a user has turned off their javascript Google Analytics no longer works for that computer. It is minor, but it is still a disadvantage. Thirdly you can’t look at log files that you may have generated from your servers, you’re at Google mercy.

We have looked at Google Analytics as one of the tools out there, but there also Awstats. Awstats is a log file analyser. It allows you to look at your log files from your web-servers, web-streams, ftp or mail-servers. As mentioned with Google Analytics, Awstats also presents the analysed information into graphs and visualisations for easy interpretation. As Awstats looks at log files, the analysis of server errors or server related information can also be analysed and interpreted, this feature is not possible with Google Analytics. 

The disadvantages that are associated with Awstats is that firstly it is designed more for administrators and engineers, not the small business owner trying to build their website. Secondly as Awstats works on server data, sometimes multiple visits are not recorded. The reason for this is that a individual might be looking at paged data and not necessary data from the server. This means that the server will never know if a user returned unless the page is refreshed. Finally, Awstats only looks at IP address, therefore it cannot tell if a user is looking from behind a proxy or shared connection, so one individual might actually be more.

B. Independent Exercises

Independent Activity 1: Split Testing

One of the most powerful ways to improve a website is to use split testing.

View the following two online videos (ignore the sales pitches in them) in order to answer the
following questions –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgV9ak2LGiI (4 min 25 sec)

http://www.5min.com/Video/If-Youre-Not-Split-Testing-Youre-Leaving-Money-60360958 (4 min 50 sec)

NOTE - copy and paste the URL as the link isn’t working after converting to pdf.

• What is split testing?

Split testing is the process of using multiple page or multiple elements to test which one increases overall conversion. It might be minor tweaks to the element or it could be major overhauls to the structure of the site. It is to find out which works best and go with it.

• Why is it important?

Just a small increase in conversion can return massive amounts of income. It allows you to capture more users than you have previously captured, and it also allows you to understand your user’s wants.

• Besides websites, what other forms of advertising can be improved by split testing?

Any type of advertising can be improved through split testing. Be it billboards, posters, news paper ads or more. What you could do is run an ad for a week see how it goes and then try another. At the end you find which one performed the best and then start tweaking that.

Independent Activity 2: SplitTester: An Example

Paying for ads on Google, Yahoo or MSN (called Pay Per Click or PPC) can cost a lot of money, but if
done well can generate a lot of sales. Typically, people using PPC run 2 or more ads and split test
them to see which one is the better performer. Once they find the best they try another ad and test
again until they have a very good performing ad. Performance is measured by the Click Through Rate
(CTR). The more people click on your ad, the better its performance. However, all of this testing can
eat up a lot of advertising dollars. SplitTester is a free tool which helps choose the better performing
ad based on only a small number of ads …
Go to SplitTester http://www.splittester.com and test the following ads in the two different case
studies to see if one ad is more likely to be a better performer in each scenario –

Case study 1 –
Ad A gets 20 clicks with a CTR of 2%
Ad B gets 20 clicks with a CTR of 2.5%

• Can you be confident that Ad B is the better performer (higher CTR)?

You are not very confident that the ads will have different long term response rates.

Cast study 2 –
Ad A gets 20 clicks with a CTR of 2%
Ad B gets 25 clicks with a CTR of 3%

• Can you be confident that Ad B is the better performer (more clicks, even higher CTR)?

You are approximately 90% confident that the ads will have different long term response rates.