Those of us old enough to remember when the interstate highway system was being built can relate to the scope, rapidity, and life-changing sweep of Web evolution over the past half-decade. The most mind-blowing statistic to me is that the original designers of the federal highways underestimated the average traffic load by an order of magnitude and completely misunderstood the usage patterns -- that is, the behavior of interstate motorists. The same is true of the Web. Whatever your site's role, you are almost certainly not fulfilling it well if you don't have a clear grasp of its traffic.
If you have no means of performing site traffic analysis, you're relying on supposition and guesswork to tell you what your Web site is really doing. Site analysis gives you copious details regarding the patterns of use followed by visitors to the site, telling you where they came from, which objects on your pages are grabbing their eye and inspiring them to click, which pages bore them and send them elsewhere, and many other useful items.
ClickTracks does these jobs and more -- and it's the more that makes it worth your attention. It's lean and mean, powerful and uncomplicated, and easy to put to work, but it's more than a gadgety turnstile. They're quite pleased over at ClickTracks to have recently won a ClickZ 2003 Marketing Excellence Award, and they won it by putting more good stuff into a smaller and friendlier package.
Three stepsSite analysis is broken down into several clear steps:
- To begin, ClickTracks needs the Web server log file. This can be gathered remotely or locally. It's able to read IIS 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0, Apache, and NetScape / iPlanet. An FTP utility is built in for downloading log files.
- A dataset is assembled. A ClickTracks dataset may be described as all the information needed to analyze a site. When log files are imported into a dataset, they are reformatted. Before analyzing this data, you can set up data ranges and visitor groups via the toolbar (Figure A).
- You can analyze the data in summary or detail form. Summary reports give you page activity -- the percentage of visitors clicking on page features, average viewing time per page, and so on -- while detailed reports provide comparisons between the behaviors of different user groups, which you are free to define.
| Figure A |
 |
| ClickTracks toolbar |
The cool thing is that you can display the page live, in ClickTracks' built-in browser, and see usage data overlaid at each screen object. This is an incredibly clear and simple way to see what screen items are grabbing user attention. Page Analysis reports show activity of entire pages, rather than object usage. This data can be viewed by day, week, or month, and the available data range depends on the amount of data you have in the dataset. This is where you see average page viewing time, the percentage of site viewers who visit a specific page, how long it takes users to get to a particular page once they've entered the site, whether users generally go to another site page or exit the site altogether from a particular page, and so on.
