Design in Context: A Web Design Blog by Greg Kihlstrom

A Little Help with Web Analytics

If you're just getting started trying to read your site metrics using Google Analytics or another application and don't really know what you should be looking at, here's 3 things that can tell you a lot about who's coming to your site and how they're getting there.

1. Unique Page Visits
It's important to distinguish between visits and 'hits.'  Hits are each time a page (or any file) is served from your Web host.  If your pages have a lot of images on them, or if every employee in the company has the company home page set as the default page in their browser, you might be getting a lot of HITS but not a lot of valuable VISITS.

2. Referring Sources
By looking at where your traffic is coming from, you can tell a lot.  If most of your traffic has no 'referring source' it generally (though not always) means that people are directly typing in your URL to get to your site. 

If they are coming from a Search Engine such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN, you can also drill down and see what keywords (or search terms) they used to find your site. 

If they are coming from another Web site, you might want to see what page they are being directed from.  Maybe your company is mentioned in an article, or a partner link.  I've actually found out that I've won a design award just by doing that, so some times it can be good news.

3. Top Content
By seeing what your most viewed pages are, you can begin to learn about how your Web site visitors are actually USING your site. 

Web analytics is not an exact science, and there is generally a lot of interpretation that needs to be done, even by the most savvy experts out there, but there's a few things that you can detect fairly easily.  First of all, unless you have a lot of advertising or inbound links to very specific pages in the lower levels of your site, your home page is going to be one of the highest traffic-yielding pages.  This is not going to be a surprise to anyone.  Where it gets interesting is when you start to see what the other top content pages are. 

Again, unless you track users' exact actions, you can make deductions that might not always be true, but if your home page is the page that gets the most hits, and your "Services" page that is one level down in your site's navigation gets the second most hits, I would say you can safely assume that most people first come to your home page, then click the "Services" link.  That in itself is pretty valuable information.

And from there you can spend as much, or as little, time as you want to.  I hope that helps a little.

-------------------------------

Greg Kihlstrom is the Creative Director at Carousel30, a Washington DC Web Design and Development firm

Web 2.0 for Small Businesses, Part 1

All this buzz about Web 2.0 has been centering around two things: Large companies and startups.  But there's plenty in this whole thing they call "Web 2.0" for smaller organizations.  In fact, some of the technologies and methods of connecting with customers are a way of levelling the playing field, so smaller companies can appear larger.  You don't have to be a large company to have blogs - we all know this, of course, because large companies have actually come into the blogging game a little late.  But they are catching on fast.  Smaller companies that can make quicker decisions and have more direct contact with their customers are able to build a more personal network more quickly.

And that's what Web 2.0 is really about: tapping into social networks of people that are already talking about the subjects that your potential customers are interested in.  The trick is to get them to notice YOUR product and company and create something that is useful, inventive and unique enough to get conversations going about it.

Does your company need a Myspace account?  That depends, and, I'm going to say it might not.  But there are plenty of other ways to get people talking about you. Part of what my company, Carousel30, does is to help companies and organizations find ways to get influencers to start conversations that involve your company's products or services.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg RS Kihlström is an award-winning Designer and is currently Creative Director at Carousel30, a Washington, DC-based firm that specializes in Web site Design, Video Production and Post-Production and Print Graphic Design.