Analyzing Your Web Site Traffic
Every web site has the capability of logging information about the visitors that visit the site. There are several software tools available to help web site owners make sense of all the data collected in the logs. I use Google Analytics to analyze the web traffic for the www.nicumc.org web site. You can view the current year's reports here.
Why are these statistics important? As an executive, it is important to know what pages are being viewed, which pages visitors are exiting your site from, how visitors navigate through your site, and if you are running an online business, how many people are actually ordering items from your online store. Google Analytics can help you keep track of all of these items.
As a website developer, it is important to know the technical aspects of visitors browsing your site. Since this is more up my alley, I'll expand on these points a little more:
- Browser/platform version: This is probably the most important item to know because web sites do NOT look the same on all web browsers/platforms! I have about 6 different web browsers installed on the computer I use for web development (and several versions of each). And I test any site I create on ALL of them to make sure that the site is as similar as possible across all browsers/platforms, especially since I use dynamic HTML and CSS on most of my sites. And when a new browser version comes out (like Internet Explorer 7), I test my current design on it to make sure that the new browser will not "break" my current site.
- Screen resolution: Have you ever gone to a site and had to scroll SIDEWAYS as well as up/down? Was it frustrating? This item is important to know so that you can design your site for the smallest screen size your visitors will possibly be using. If a significant percentage of your web site's visitors use 800×600 screen resolution, then you need to make sure that your pages are no wider than about 750 pixels, so that the vistors do not need to scroll sideways. I don't think it is acceptable to put a disclaimer on the page saying "best veiwed at 1024×768" or something like that; it only serves to frustrate the visitor.
- Connection speed: It is important to know if you have a significant number of visitors still using dial-up to visit your site. If so, then you may want to think twice about embedding lots of video and/or flash animation on your site. If you see a significant number of visitors to your site use dial-up, you should not alienate them by adding content suitable only for broadband connections quite yet. If you MUST add the "bells and whistles" that make the broadband experience richer, then you should provide a "narrowband" page (without the fancy bells and whistles) for your dial-up visitors.
Of course, there are other items that are important to know, such as color depth, Flash version, is Java enabled, etc…, but I believe the ones above are the 'big three.'
The following is a table comparing selected items for www.nicumc.org web traffic between January 2007 and January 2008.
| Data | Jan 2007 | % | Jan 2008 | % | % +/- |
| Number of visits | 7,106 | 100.0% | 10,784 | 100.0% | +51.8% |
| New Visitors | 2,351 | 33.1% | 3,094 | 28.7% | -4.4% |
| Returning Visitors | 4,755 | 66.9% | 7,690 | 71.3% | +4.4% |
| Using Internet Explorer (any version) | 5,948 | 83.7% | 8,371 | 77.6% | -6.1% |
| Using Firefox (any version) | 944 | 13.3% | 1,956 | 18.1% | +4.9% |
| Using Safari (Mac) | 106 | 1.5% | 244 | 2.3% | +0.8% |
| Using Windows (any version) | 6,945 | 97.7% | 10,325 | 95.7% | -2.0% |
| Using Macintosh (any version) | 141 | 2.0% | 287 | 2.7% | +0.7% |
| Using Linux/Other OS | 20 | 0.3% | 172 | 1.6% | +1.3% |
With Broadband Connection
(Cable/DSL/T1/OC3) | 4,439 | 62.5% | 7,811 | 72.5% | +10.0% |
| With Dial-Up Connection | 795 | 11.2% | 733 | 6.8% | -4.4% |
| Smallest Screen Resolution: 800x600 | 1,437 | 20.2% | 1,331 | 12.3% | -7.9% |
A few things jump out at me right away (highlighted in yellow above):
- The sheer number of visits increased dramatically (51.8% more visits).
- The use of Firefox is still on the rise, mostly at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
- The number of dial-up users is still diminishing. Broadband is expanding more and more.
- Use of the Mac is increasing nominally among our users, in spite of their cute ads.
- Fewer people are using a screen resoluation of 800x600, so it may not be as critical to design web pages that fit that resolution.
If you want to try Google Analytics, you’ll need a Google Analytics account (you can sign up for one free). In order to have Google keep track of your site's statistics, you'll need to add a small snippet of code to each page on your site. If you don't want Google to analyze certain pages within your site; just don't add the code to those pages. Once you've successfully installed the code, you can see your site's stats anytime by logging in to Google Analytics and viewing the plethora of reports available there.
I think it's a pretty cool tool. Whether you use Google Analytics or not, you should use some sort of web site analysis tool to keep track of these statistics; it will help you build your site so that your visitors have a good experience.
