Posted on Feb 21, 2012 in Technology & Analytics | 0 comments

Analytics Overview Late last summer the good folks at MSN invited me to give a talk on “Conducting Effective Market Landscape Assessments and Intelligence Gathering” where I discussed techniques for gathering competitive intelligence for MSN.com. One of the important topics I covered was how analytics–research based on observational data gathering–is critical to understanding visitor and market behavior. There are actually a few types of analytics. Web Server Log Reports (site statistics) are the oldest form of analytics, typified by products like WebTrends and a host of Open Source products like AWStats. These systems report on the data collected in log files maintained by your webserver, logs that track the time and date stamp of every web page and every image served up by the webserver.  Site stats deliver reports such as most popular pages on your site, top entry pages, top exit pages, overall pages served, and overall number of “hits” (the number of resources served by the webserver, now considered an almost meaningless metric, since these days a single web page with 4 javascript calls and 12 images represents 17 hits). Path Analysis is used to track every individual who comes to a site, and every page they visit. This type of analysis, performed by products like Adobe/Omniture SiteCatalyst and iMedia Analytics, collects a lot of data and delivers a lot of intelligence, including: heat maps, reports that tell you which links on any given page are getting the most clicks, page-dotting, the tracking of every variable in the visitor’s web site session, which can tell you things like which items they abandoned in their shopping cart, click-path analysis, or the most common paths that users are taking through your site, providing insights into things like user interface strengths and deficiencies, and real-time story trending, the ability to see almost instantly which of your stories is “going viral” and which are languishing. Another category is what I call Broad-spectrum External Analytics, which collect a certain amount of page data (generally less than the other methods, but still enough to deliver powerful reports), by adding a bit of code to your web page that sends data to an external, third...

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