Analytics

Is your site working?  Lots of ways to measure this.  User feedback  Functional tests (output is what you expect)  But, can we measure what users are doing on our site? YES  That is called Analytics  There are many companies that produce Web Analytic Software....One that is free (and popular) to use is Google Analytics

Hits vs. Analytics  Old days: Log file analysis of hits to your server  Now: Who are these people? Where'd they come from?

Google Analytics  Free!  Sophisticated  Scalable  Campaign tracking  Reports  Free! (...but they get to access all your data.)‏

Dashboard

Visitors

Map Overlay: World

Map Overlay: U.S.

Map Overlay: Minnesota

Visitor Section  Broadly answers: ”who are these people”

Traffic Sources  How did they get here??  Who's linking to you? Is it who you think it is?

Referring sites

Keywords

Content

What ”hits” don't tell you Are they spending time on your content? Or zipping by? ”I came, I puked, I left.”

Trace their path  From here, where did they go? And then?

Exit pages

Goals  What are Goals? Basically: target pages ○ ”Thanks for signing up for our newsletter” But also: almost anything Can assign a $ value to goals

Funnels

Campaigns and Conversions  Campaigns Allow you to track ad links  Conversions goal ”completion” ”time on page” as a goal

Reports: hands free!

Caveats  Potential for wasted time is high!  TRENDS matter!