Traffic Patrol

by Mark Wheeler, Technology & Business

We’re all familiar with the idea that there is only six degrees of separation between almost any two people. By moving from one person’s circle of friends and acquaintances to the next, six times over, any two people can, theoretically, be associated together.

Of course it didn’t take long for someone to wonder how this might apply in the virtual world. In 2000 the notion was reinvented to assert that there are typically just 19 clicks of separation between any two websites.

Making sense of people’s information-seeking behaviour has received a lot of attention in recent years. Those of us interested in marketing and optimising websites have taken a particular interest.

Online marketing is all about promoting a website, while search-engine optimisation (SEO) is the name given to the fine tuning of a website—improving it in such a way that search engines such as Google will be more likely to find your site—ideally ahead of any competitors (see Courting Google, July T&B).

A well-used axiom in marketing circles says something like: “I know that half of my advertising spending is wasted, I just don’t know which half”. In the online world people have quickly begun to see that by making an adjustment to a website—optimising it (or by running a promotion or ad campaign) and then monitoring the number of hits the website receives—they can actually begin to measure its impact.

Web analytics, as it is called, is the measurement of the behaviour of visitors to a website. Its great advantage is that it is able to provide real data relating to how people are actually using a site, so rather than relying on your sense or guesswork for marketing and promoting your site you can instead operate on an empirical basis.

SEO combined with analytics becomes a very powerful tool. In the online world the question of “which half is wasted” suddenly presents less of a problem when analytics tools are in place. Every interaction, every event on a web page can potentially be tracked.

Half of the firms surveyed by Forrester Research in late 2005 said they expected the number of people using analytics within the company to grow by an average of 23 percent. The research company expects the potential of web analytics to continue expanding, with frontier businesses integrating analytical data with other more general customer analysis platforms—“customer analytics” as Forrester has coined it.

In an August report from Forrester titled The Business Case for Web Analysts, it described web analytics as “must-have technology—a real no brainer”. The case it goes on to argue is that you should actually employ a dedicated web analyst to really try and take advantage of analytics tools. It develops two models showing the range in benefit, one for a retail-based site and one for a business-to-business site.

Forrester’s conservative estimate shows ROI benefits for the retailer of more than 1000 percent, and more than 550 percent for the B2B example—after one year.