9 Web Analytics Strategies That Work
Nine concrete web analytics practices for 2002, from choosing between log files and page tags to segmenting visitors who convert.
The tools have matured since the late 1990s, but most businesses still aren’t getting much out of their analytics beyond a raw hit count. These nine practices come from what’s producing useful decisions in 2002.
1. Pick page tagging over log files if you can
JavaScript-tag-based services like Urchin count actual browser visits and handle caching and proxy servers far better than parsing raw server logs. If your hosting setup allows it, tagging gives you cleaner unique-visitor numbers than log analysis ever will.
2. Define your goals before you look at a single report
A “goal” here just means a specific action: a completed order, a submitted contact form, a newsletter signup. Configure tracking to measure completion of that action specifically, not just traffic to the page it happens on.
3. Tag every campaign link consistently
Use a consistent query string convention across every banner ad, email link and directory listing so your reports can tell you which source drove a visit, not just that a visit happened. A missing or inconsistent tag on even one channel makes your comparison across channels meaningless.
4. Separate new visitors from returning ones
These two groups behave differently and often convert at different rates. Reviewing them together hides which one is driving your revenue and which one is mostly browsing.
5. Track the funnel, not just the endpoints
Knowing your total visits and total orders tells you the overall conversion rate but nothing about where you’re losing people in between. Track the intermediate steps (product page, cart, shipping details, payment) so a sudden drop has an obvious place to start investigating.
6. Watch referring sites, not just referring categories
“Search engines” as a category tells you less than which specific search engine, and even less than which specific keyword, sent a visitor. The more specific your referrer data, the more specifically you can act on it.
7. Review exit pages regularly
A page with an unusually high exit rate relative to its traffic is worth investigating on its own, whether that’s a confusing product description, a broken link or a page that simply doesn’t answer what the visitor was looking for.
8. Build one weekly report and use it
A short report reviewed every week beats a comprehensive one nobody opens. Pick five or six numbers that map to real decisions and put them somewhere your team will look.
9. Change something based on what you find
Every finding should end in a specific action: rewriting a page, fixing a broken step, cutting a channel that isn’t converting. Analytics that never changes anything about the site or the campaign isn’t earning its keep, no matter how detailed the dashboard looks.
None of these strategies require expensive software beyond what’s already widely available in 2002. What they require is treating analytics as a habit tied to real decisions, not a report that gets glanced at and filed away.
More Marketing Analytics coverage, or browse everything published in 2002.
