Oleg Tulin

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Web Analytics Done Right: Know Your Customer

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Oleg Tulin | 2009-07-01

What if doing business online is only (small) part of the story -- what if our business is more of bricks-and-mortar? Then it may not be optimal to hire in-house staff to run online channel directly -- instead, it may be optimal to hire some Internet agency to take care of our online presence.

Internet agency is an outsourced pool of competence that businesses can use without incurring too much costs to build their own competence in cases when it is not likely to pay off. Folks from Internet agency are busy reusing their expertise running online marketing for multiple clients at the same time, so they are more efficient in their job than similar underutilized in-house staff and in theory they should cost less for businesses with small online presence. Internet agency specializes in online marketing, SEO, SEM, building and maintaining websites, etc. Sometimes they also provide some solutions from web analytics vendors as well as do web analytics for their customers. In general, since there is a synergy between all these functions and they require specialized expertise, those are better coordinated in a single unit -- agency or in-house department.

Regardless of the fact that Internet agencies may do their job well and provide good outsourcing, there is one point that clients should take care of when building relationships with them. Even if online channel is not a major channel of our business for now, it may still be a strategic resource. We should not allow Internet agency to end up owning that resource. And that may happen very easily, since creating dependency is the easiest way for service provider to secure us as clients. One should take care to ensure that every intangible asset, such as systems, data, registrations, access codes, reports, etc., created by agency for us is really transferred to us, not remain with the agency. The contractual relationships should be built accordingly.

To the full extent this applies to web analytics. Ideally, ... Read more...

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Oleg Tulin | 2009-06-26

I often read or hear the popular misconception about web analytics that the main rationale for its implementation is that it can help us identify and diagnose problems with our site's content, navigation, usability and other aspects of its design. Identify and diagnose problems, that's it.

The truth is, however, that this is only a minor one among reasons for implementing web analytics. The main reason is that... well, briefly speaking... web analytics is essentially, and to the fullest extent possible, a business intelligence unit for any business that uses online channel (it's XXI century -- modern, Internet-driven marketplace is right behind our computer monitors).

However, despite I myself tend to overlook that minor reason, "identify and diagnose problems" still applies. It caught me by surprise, recently.

That happened when I was watching visitors sessions on one of the sites that I keep an eye on (it sells electronic equipment for DJs and other musicians). I suddenly came across one session that made me look at it closely. For 21 minutes visitor was repeatedly downloading same file from website. Even worse, he or she was using not only onsite download links, but also download links for that file published by other sites (offsite links).

Thinking for a while, I came to the conclusion, that someone is desperately retrying failed download. I looked at reported response status -- it was OK (200). Puzzled, I came out to download that mysterious file myself and see what is wrong. The file was downloading (200 was reported right), but checking downloaded file revealed that for some reason it was corrupt.

This site undergone CMS change recently and, thus, there was significant probability of surprises -- so I was actually not very surprised. Previously, we had tested that site for broken links -- all links were fine. Still, link testing tool do not go all way to test integrity of downloaded files (understandably, since it is technically not ... Read more...

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This blog is intended to share thoughts with people interested in web analytics, website metrics, analysis of online visitors/customers behaviour, online marketing, online business and (distantly) related matters.

Oleg Tulin, web analytics expert/consultant (olegtulin at gmail.com)

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