Web Analytics India

- contributed by Sowparnika Gopal

In an already existing site, first learn your current website activity. How USABLE is the site as of now? Well, let’s term this here as ‘Eagle Eye Review’. This will be the overall basic navigational review.

Eagle Eye Review should ideally include:

1. Home Page Dissection

This is an analysis of the home page in terms of the location of each link, the number of people clicking on each link, the part of the home page that best receives clicks, and the part that is most ignored.

Once you have the dissection report ready, it will help you restructure the elements on your home page so that the most important things can be put in those areas which are most clicked and in the most effective ways. There will be lot of experiments before you can come up with one home page that best serves your decided objectives and goals.

2. Routing Analysis

This is also called navigational study. This is the study of the way in which the pages route the traffic to the other pages.

It includes the study of the various navigational elements like the header tabs, the bread crumbs, right links, banners on inner pages, the visibility of links, inter-linking of pages, visibility of sections on the main header tab, the site map and anything that is to do with the navigation.

This study can mainly involve the path analysis to the most important pages in the site, which will help you decide if that’s the right way you want your visitors to go.

3. Panorama View

This is a study of your design and layout. This will include the home page dissection as well as the dissection of every page that has a different look-and-feel.

This study will involve giving the possible alternatives to the way the design elements, banners, tabs are placed in a website. The most effective way can be determined, after looking at the best possible presentation styles.

Some of the factors considered in this study include the theme color of the site, color of the fonts, the way the fonts are distinguished depending on its importance, the degree of contrast of each text color and its visibility with respect to the background, the position and location of tabs, the basic layout and more.

4. Error Reporting

This will mainly involve review of errors on the site, the status codes of the pages, the broken links, bad copy, accessibility issues and browser compatibility check. These are some of the basic errors that can be tracked which have to be first corrected.

5. Content Analysis

This is another of those things that require a detailed study. There are some parameters in analytics that will help do the content analysis. At the initial stages, what can be measured is the bounce rate of the pages. Bounce rate is calculated as a ratio of single page visits to the number of landing visits to that page.

Bounce Rate = Single Page visits to a page / Landing visits to the page

Once you are able to identify the bounce rate of the pages, you should next see the stickiness of the page. If they have been on the page long enough, then they probably got what they wanted, and then decided to leave. Depending on the nature of each page, we can decide if the page and the content on the pages have served its purpose or not.

We shall get into the details of each of these analyses in posts to come.