(Shelly Cashman Series) Gary B. Shelly, H. Albert Napier, Ollie N. Rivers-Web design_ introductory concepts and techniques -Cengage Learning (2008)

Web Site Maintenance and Evaluation 203
From the raw data contained in a Web server transaction log, additional measures
of visitors’ behaviors can be evaluated using Web server log analysis software. Web
server log analysis software can be installed on your own servers or might be provided
by your hosting company. However, many large organizations and e-commerce companies
contract with professional marketers that focus on Web site performance evaluation.
Professional marketers, such as VisiStat (Figure 7-17) and WebTrends, often provide a
complete analysis package that combines a variety of data-gathering techniques, including
Web server log transaction analysis, with software that measures and reports on Web site
performance. These performance measurements are called Web analytics.
Figure 7-17 Professional marketers that focus on Web site performance offer products and services used to
develop Web site performance measurements.
WEB ANALYTICS Developing Web analytics, sometimes called Web metrics, involves
combining various types of visitor data — server log analysis, eye-tracking studies, tracking
cookies, page tagging, sales data, and so forth — and then analyzing that data to discover
how visitors act at a Web site. Typical Web analytics reports contain a variety of measurements,
such as unique visitors, repeat visitors, page views, click-stream analysis, and, for
e-commerce sites, conversion rate.
A unique visitor is an individual visitor to a site; the unique visitor measurement can
help determine the success of your Web site promotional efforts at driving visitors to your
site. A repeat visitor is a unique visitor who visits your site more than one time during a
specific time period. A small number of repeat visitors might indicate those who are visiting
your site are not finding useful information or helpful features. The page views measurement
is used to determine page popularity. For example, if you have a page that is seldom
viewed, you might consider evaluating the page’s content and retesting all the links to the
page to see if there is a problem with the page. A click-stream analysis identifies how a
visitor moves through your site by clicking from link to link and might also indicate how
long the visitor stayed at each page. Finally, an important measurement for an e-commerce
Q&A
Q&A
What are tracking
cookies?
Tracking cookies are
small text files stored
on a Web page visitor’s
hard drive, usually
without the visitor’s
knowledge. Tracking
cookies installed by
Web marketers are
used to monitor which
sites the visitor visited
and other visitor behaviors.
Many visitors
consider tracking
cookies an invasion of
privacy and most popular
computer security
software packages,
such as Norton, locate
and remove tracking
cookies.
What is page
tagging?
Page tagging is a
technique used by Web
marketers to track
visitors’ behaviors,
similar to tracking
cookies. A site publisher
adds JavaScript
tags to its Web pages.
When a visitor views
a page containing a
tag, information about
the visitor, similar to
that recorded in a
server log, is gathered
and transferred to a
database. The information
is analyzed later by
the professional Web
marketers and the site’s
publisher.