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GCN Home > 04/14/08 issue

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Web analytics software can help improve how agencies interact with their users

By Edmund X. DeJesus

When was the last time your organization’s Web site went down? Is usage of your site going up or down? As Web sites gain importance — serving as the primary public interface at many agencies — these are questions worth answering. You may get some direct feedback from users via email or phone calls, but a much more effective way to monitor your site is with a good Web analysis program.

Web analytics software can not only answer the obvious questions about the flow of traffic to your Web site but also tell you a lot about the experience visitors have when they get there. Among the information you can gather is:
  • Where are visitors coming from?
  • What do they click on?
  • What do they search for?
  • How long do they stay?
  • Are there peak traffic times? Slow seasons?
    • It’s true that Web analytics programs have limitations. “Some basic questions are very difficult to answer, such as why someone visited your site, what they were looking for, and whether they found it or not,” said Joe Pagano, digital media projects coordinator at the Library of Congress.

    Reading the signs

    Still, a skilled analyst can figure out quite a bit about visitors’ intentions from the numbers culled by a Web analysis application. For example, Pagano noticed a puzzling situation in which most visitors to a new Web site were not coming from search engines, as expected, but from e-mail sites. “It turned out that previous visitors were spreading news about the site by word of mouth,” Pagano said. Without that key insight, the search engine information might have been inexplicable or it might even have led the team down a dead end of trying to boost search engine hits.

    You can also use Web analytics as feedback for experiments. Suppose you try a new layout of a Web page. If visitors seem to get their information faster, the new layout could be a success.

    More news on related topics: IT Management, Software Applications, Web Strategies



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