Improving the web with web analytics (part three)

In this Journalism.co.uk series Brian Clifton, senior strategist with Omega Digital and former Google EMEA head of web analytics, looks at how publishers can make sense of online analytics.

Use these links to read part one, which explains how web analytics are used, and part two, which explores the differences between on-site and off-site analytics.

How accuracy can be improved by using the right tools
It is important to realise that different data collection methodologies bring different metrics to the table.

It is these differences that are their strength as they help you build a bigger picture of the website in question. Think of it as building a jigsaw – one piece alone can be very misleading, multiple pieces together provide a clearer picture.

The solution to maintaining your sanity is to combine on-site and off-site web analytics data in a way that compliment each other, rather than providing conflicting data points.

Here are some recommendations:

1. Use off-site metrics when considering the launch or relaunch of a website. For example, what terminology and semantics are being used on the search engines – blue widgets or blue gadgets?


2. Use off-site metrics to understand your visitor demographics as proportions of the total. For example, 65 per cent of our traffic is female in the age bracket 25-34. Does this match your customer base?


3. Use off-site metrics to understand what websites your visitors go to just prior to yours and just after they visit your site.


4. When using off-site panel based data, bear in mind that the data is more reflective of a US home audience. If your target is more international or a business audience, use ISP data


5. Use on-site metrics if you wish to know how many people visit your website. This should always supersede off-site data


6. Use on-site metrics if you wish to know whether visitors are engaging with your content


7. Use on-site metrics to gauge if the user-experience of your visitors is good or bad


8. Use on-site metrics if you wish to know where your visitors are being referred from – which search engine, keyword, email or banner campaign etc.

In summary, there is no accuracy debate: if you wish to count the activity on your website then only on-site web analytics tools can do this effectively. Assuming a best practice implementation, these can be very accurate for measuring the number of visits, page views, time on site and page depth.

Off-site tools bring additional data to the table - not accuracy. This includes demographic, search engine query data and competitor intelligence information. Combining these pieces of the jigsaw provides a clearer view of the performance of your site and where it fits in the overall web landscape.

Why counting uniques is meaningless
The term 'uniques' is often used in web analytics as an abbreviation for unique web visitors (i.e. how many unique people visited my site). The problem is that counting unique visitors is fraught with problems that are so fundamental, it renders the term 'uniques' meaningless.

Firstly, cookies get lost, blocked and deleted. Research has shown that after a period of four weeks, nearly one third of tracking cookies are missing, which means the visitor will be incorrectly considered a new unique visitor should they return to the same website.

The longer the time period, the greater the chance of this happening, which makes comparing year-on-year data invalid for example. In addition, browsers make it very easy these days for cookies to be removed – see the new 'incognito' features of the latest Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers.

However, the biggest issue for counting uniques faced by both on and off-site web analytics tools is how many devices people use to access the web. For example, consider the following scenario:

You and your spouse are considering your next holiday. Your spouse first checks out possible locations on your joint PC at home and saves a list of website links.

The next evening you use the same PC to review these links. Unable to decide that night, you email the list to your office and the next day you continue your holiday checks during your lunch hour at work and also review these again on your mobile while commuting home on the train.

Day three of your search resumes at your friend's house where you seek a second opinion. Finally you go home and book online using your shared PC.

The above scenario is actually very common – particularly if the value of the purchase is significant, which implies a longer consideration period and the seeking of a second opinion (spouse, friends work colleagues).

Simply put, there is not a web analytics solution in the world that can accurately track this scenario, that is to tie the data together from multiple devices and where multiple people have been involved, nor is there likely to be in the near future.

Combining these limitations leads to large error bars when it comes to tracking uniques. In fact these errors are so large that the metric is actually meaningless and should be avoided in favour of more accurate 'visit' data.

Read other parts in this series:
'Improving web analytics (part one)' - why most of the web is junk and how analytics can help
'Improving web analytics (part two)' - how on-site and off-site analytics work

Brian Clifton is a search marketing and web analytics expert, and author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. He is founder and senior strategist for Omega Digital Media and was previously head of web analytics for Google Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).