Web Analytics : A Primer

Sethuraman Janardhanan
2011

Agenda / Tracker Page

Web Analytics and Advantages Web Analytics process Metrics Used in Web Analytics Analytical Benefits Some Web Analytics Demo Web Analytics Tools Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Social Media Analytics (SMA)

What is Web Analytics

Web Analytics refers to the process of collection, measurement and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website (Increase conversion etc)

Advantages Evaluate visitor behavior according to your business goals Lower customer acquisition cost Improve customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty Increase conversion levels Improve the design and processes of your website Track and analyse the effect of your marketing campaigns

How Web Analytics Process works ?

Response Log Transactions Request

Visitors

Web site

Log files

Web
100 90 80 70

analytics tool

Decision Maker

Generate Insights

All Stakeholders
(Sales, Product, IT Teams)
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What kind of Metrics are Used ?

Bounce Rate The instances of visitors entering and leaving the same page. Click Through Rate Usually used as banner ad success. It is number of clicks/ number of impressions. Conversion An activity which fulfills the intended purpose of a website like buying a product, filling up a form or subscribing to a newsletter. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who successfully convert. Stickiness A websites capability to retain visitors, measured as number of pages visited per session and time spent on website Session Duration Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. Depth / Page Views per Session Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes before ending their session. Frequency / Session per Unique visitor It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the total number of unique visitors. It can measure degree of loyalty

What are analytical benefits ?

Areas
Online Traffic Analysis

Advantages
How do people get to my website ? (Sources: Direct, affiliates, search engines) Where do your visitors/customers come from ? (geography/websites/search etc) Which are the most popular paths taken on your site? On which page or section do your users spend the most time? How engaged are your users on which pages or sections? Where do they spend most time and to where do they return most often? At which time of day do they visit your website? Where are your drop-offs or increases in traffic and do they appear across all metric?

Visitor/Customer Behaviour

What kind of visitors convert on your website ? Is it possible to segregate and study visitors based on various behavior patterns ? Can I segment my online buyers/visitors ? Is it possible to recommend customers with new products or offers ? Is there a pattern in purchase behavior of your customers ? Can I track my loyal customers Who are people doing fraud activities on my website (fraud detection)

Path and conversion analysis (e-commerce specific)

What are the most popular and profitable paths taken through your website? What are series of steps or pages for a visitor to reach the final objective, like filling up a form or purchasing a product. What are the drop-offs at each level ?

What are analytical benefits ?

Areas
Campaign Analysis & Search Engine Marketing/Optimisation

Advantages
Which campaigns generate the biggest increase in visitors? Which campaigns result in the most engaged visitors? At which time of day would your online campaigns be most effective?

Which search engines and which keywords drive most traffic?

Which keywords should you bid for in paid search? Which phrases and words work best on which search engine? Which partnerships send the most referrals to your site? Which referral/affiliation schemes generate the most valuable customers? How do you do RoI analysis on different types of internet campaigns (banners, PPC, affiliate marketing etc)

Usability and Site Reconstruction

Is the content of your site engaging? How many pages are viewed in a session? Are users returning regularly to view new content? Which pages and sections are the most popular and could be streamlined for increased ROI? Which browsers and operating systems does your website need to work with? Can you optimise your website according to the connection speed your users have?

Should you introduce more internal links to keep visitors on your site longer?

Offline Web Measurements Can I know Buzz about new products in markets ? (text mining) Who could be my potential audience for my campaign ?
What people think about my brands (social networks/ blogs etc)?

Demo : Homepage Statistics

July 4 Weekends

6.3%

Demo : Record Descriptions

Demo : My Goal Conversion Funnel

User enters site after Google Search

User visits or uses materials remotely!

Few Web Analytics Tools

Google Analytics Click tracks Omniture (HBX) Urchin Statcounter WebTrends

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Social Media Analytics (SMA)

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What is SMA ?
Social Media Analytics are tools used in the measurement of activity within social media spaces from around the web. They can be used to measure conversation, engagement, sentiment, influence and other social media specific attributes. Social Media Analytics tools are used to monitor conversations on blogs, social networks, video views, ratings, and favorites on video sharing networks, and an array of other activities in other social media destinations. The main uses for social media analytics tools are for brand monitoring and brand audits to provide insightful information for brands looking to participate in social media and already in the space. Most recently, Social Media CRM tools also fall into this category, such tools are used in blogger outreach and community outreach to manage relationships with key influencers.

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Few examples of SMA

The most popular social media platforms right now include Facebook and MySpace (social networks) LifeHacker and Mashable (blogs), Twitter and Tumblr (micro-blogs) YouTube and Veoh (video sharing networks) Flickr (image sharing). Last.FM (personal video discovery), Wikipedia (reference), and Second Life (virtual reality). Sentiment Metrics and Measurement
Analysis on social networks like FaceBook, Orkut etc Analyzing the opinions on Blogs

Website Analytics
Measuring activity on the social media websites

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Blogsphere

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The Blogsphere
The new way to communicate
Millions of text articles posted daily

From all over the globe

A wide variety of topics, from sports to politics Forms a huge repository of human generated content

A high volume temporally ordered stream of text documents Challenge: discover persistent chatter

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BlogScope
Live blog search and analysis engine
Tracking over 13 million blogs, 100 million posts

Serves thousands of daily visitors

Visit: www.blogscope.net

Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas, blogScope: A System for Online Analysis of high Volume Text Streams, VLDB 2007, Demonstration Proposal Nilesh Bansal, Nick Koudas, Searching the Blogosphere, WebDB 2007

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Persistent Chatter
Apple iPhone January 2007
Jan first week: Anticipation of iPhone release Jan 9th: iPhone release at Macworld Jan 10th: Lawsuit by Cisco Jan third week: Decrease in chatter about iPhone

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Keyword Clusters
When there is a lot of discussion on a topic, a set of keywords will become correlated
Elements in this keyword set will frequently appear together These keywords form form a cluster Associated with time interval As topics recede, these cluster will dissolve

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Stable Clusters Apple iPhone

Persistent for 4 days Topic drifts
Starts with discussion about Apple in general
Moves towards the Cisco lawsuit

Note: All keywords are stemmed

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Why Stable Clusters

Information Discovery
Monitor the buzz in the Blogosphere

What were bloggers talking about in April last year?

Query refinement and expansion

If the query keyword belongs to one of the cluster

Visualization?
Show keyword clusters directly to the user Or show matching blogs

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