Top 5 Mistakes to Start Using Web Site Analysis Tool

Web site analysis tools contribute to decision-making to improve the online experience of visitors. Still, they can also inform site owners and business owners about their websites' performance. However, in many cases, eBusiness Managers, Webmasters, or Web Operations Managers start deploying website analysis tools as a 'nice to have tool. Instead of measuring performance and comparing it to business objectives, they mostly communicate raw analysis data to senior management without further exploration or any recommendations for site improvements. To harness the value that website analysis tools can provide, the following major pitfalls must be avoided:

1) Business Purposes Not Defined for Individual Sections of the Site: In most organizations, the business owners responsible for a sub-section of the Corporate Web site do not define their specific business objectives for their sub-sections. For example, a subsection of a website may be customer support, which is further broken down into self-service tools (such as FAQs, download of drivers, etc.), support contact information, warranties, user manuals, etc. can be done. . Measuring the performance of a site or a sub-section of a site is valuable only if the measured performance can be compared with the intended objectives. If the business owner does not determine the business objective, the analysis cannot determine the site's performance. E-business managers or web operations managers, who are in charge of deploying website analysis tools, need to help business owners define the broad business objectives of their website sub-parts (also read, "Who Should Set Business Objectives," Steve Tellen).

2) Site owners or site section owners are not trained to understand analytics reports: In most organizations, site owners or business owners for a specific subsite cannot leverage Web site analysis tools' reports because Many of them benefit from this kind of measurement approach. eBusiness managers need to explain the benefits and importance of this performance measurement as an integral part of their web performance measurement program as a first step. The second step involves explaining what is measured and how the measured data can help business owners further improve their subsections of the site (for example, by changing the navigation or cross-linking sections, 'most Providing and updating sections with 'more frequently used links,' etc.) ) If business owners are not sensitive and/or not trained how to leverage value from web site analysis reports, they will most likely Chances are they won't even start reading the report and all efforts to measure web site performance using web site analysis tools are in vain.

Could. 3) Data points of website analysis tools are not related to each other: website analysis tools measure data points for a defined time period such as number of pages viewed, number of unique visitors, number of visits, etc. However, these data points do not provide any value. For example, a high number of pages visited may indicate that site visitors are lost within the navigation and browse too many pages to find what they are looking for, which is a low number of pages visited, Which may indicate that site visitors find their information directly within a few clicks due to effective site navigation. Web analysts must relate individual data points to achieve value translated into site improvements. That value is communicated to business owners to inform them of their specific site performance. For example, to measure the effectiveness of online support, web analysts must measure and relate the following key performance indicators (KPIs):

a) Viscosity = the total time spent viewing all pages in the Support section divided by the total number of unique site visitors in the Help section and

b) Focus = the average number of pages viewed in the support section divided by the total number of pages in the support section.

Online support should have low stickiness and focus, which indicates that navigation to specific support is effective (e.g., a site visitor needs a few clicks and a minimum amount of time to get to a specific help page). It is important that the measured data points of the website analysis tool are related to each other and that these data points are measured for a specific section on the site. If the data points are not related to each other and are not measured for a specific segment, they provide no value, or at worst, if interpreted, they can lead to incorrect design decisions.

4) Not enough skilled human resources are available to analyze the reports: Website analysis tools only track and store the online behavior of the visitor. Web site analysis tools cannot interpret the measured data. To derive value from the measured data, dedicated web analysts need to analyze the collected data further. The main duty of web analysts is to interconnect individual measured data to derive KPIs. These KPIs allow web analysts to extract design changes to enhance the site visitor experience. In addition, web analysts need to be able to link correlated analysis data with the website design (also read, "When to Use Web Site Analysis Tools.")