Lecture 5: Website Analysis Process

Ten years ago, websites are only for web presents. Now, we not only want people to visit our websites but want conversion, that is, people visit our website and do what we want. To improve the website, we should analyze the website and see what we can do. Before starting to analyze visit traffic, there are some critical steps we need to proceed.

First of all, thoroughly understand the website in both content and structure. Knowing the content helps us to familiarize with organization's business and core competences, and what message it wants to convey. From the structure of website, we can see how an organization navigate visitors within website and generate improvements that make website more friendly and goal oriented.



Second, it's important to know the objectives and targeted audiences of website. With objectives, we have direction to make improvements, inducing visitors moving toward our goal, such as increase in our sales. Different organizations have different properties and targeted customers. For example, firm selling kitchen accessories may target married women rather than teenagers. So we identify targeted audiences, and focus on them to design website and marketing events, making website work more effectively toward our goals. Therefore, blindly directing traffic to website by inserting irrelevant keywords may not be a good idea. If you only want high volume traffic, that might be fine, but if you want visitors to do what you want, such as printing online coupon to purchase products in your store, you'd better to hit their needs. But how to know the goal? We can collect requirements from our clients, knowing what they need, or we can observe business/operation and discuss with clients to narrow objectives aligning the mission of organization.

Then, we can start to log into the Google Analytics to observe the characteristics of traffic visiting our website, but remember that the first thing to do as log in is to setup a long period to see a long term trend, seasonality, and how the traffic fluctuated. Only from a long time period, we can see some periods have much higher or lower volume of traffic than the rest of periods. Focus on these specific periods to figure out why and what bring visits in or out. By doing that, we may get visitor's incentives to come to our website and make specific recommendations to achieve the goals.

With the Google Analytics, we can monitor visitor's behaviors by using combination of metrics to interpret situations, say, why people doing that after entering a particular page. Marketing folks can track how their promotions work by comparing prior- and post-event traffic and other KPIs, taking lesson-learned to improve future marketing events. Finally, with these empirical metrics, we are able to make recommendations supported by solid quantitative information.