Webperf
Intro: Why you should read this book
This book is the introduction to web analytics that everyone working with the web needs. Regardless of whether your professional role is communicator, strategist, developer, architect, or really almost anything else. My ambition is to make web analytics less mysterious and at a level most people can understand. Without difficult words or unnecessarily complicated reasoning.
Regardless of your level of technical or communicative competence, there is something for you. For the web developer, there is much that can be useful when trying to understand the hopes of stakeholders regarding content, and for the commissioner there is insight into how to set concrete requirements.
For everyone who cares about content and how to reach out, there are plenty of tips, topped off with a method for getting started with web analytics (while simultaneously feeling that you understand why you do things a certain way). There are also loads of tips on activities you can tackle to improve your website, including how to make the website faster. A bunch of activity suggestions is what concludes this book, among much else including how to make your website a bit faster.
However, the book is not a guide to any single tool. Good books on that topic have already been written by others. At the same time, I raise a word of caution that these books quickly become outdated. Choose one that is as fresh as possible.
Nor will you earn a black belt in search engine optimisation after reading this book. You will notice that the boundary between web analytics and search engine optimisation (SEO) is somewhat blurry, but exploring SEO is not the focus of this book.
About me
Since 1998 I have worked in every conceivable professional role with web as a prefix. Web designer, web application developer, web communicator, web developer, web analyst, web strategist, web evangelist and a few more.
During these years I have worked as a consultant, teacher and as a requirements manager, both in the private and public sector.
What I have done in web analytics?
Since the late nineties I have worked with websites that accepted advertising or used web statistics for continuous improvement. At the beginning of my career, what would today be considered strange, the mobile manufacturer Sony Ericsson's advertising agency could get in touch and buy ad space. In return, as a recipient you would later be able to show how many relevant eyes had seen the ad, how many had clicked and so on. The feeling was that you fertilised with advertising money back then. No relevant requirements were set in advance, rather it was a gold rush – we who sold the shovels (that is, space on websites) had everything to gain from those seeking the few gold nuggets that existed. Now you might wonder what did Sony Ericsson get for their money? The association that had the website received approximately 17,000 SEK per click to show a skateboarding game that a certain mobile model came with – admittedly on a website for skateboarders. Their advertising agency as middleman surely earned some money too.
Furthermore, I previously ran a very popular events guide, festivalinfo.se, and did so through continuous improvements. This was between 2002 and 2009. Active analysis of website statistics was required there to convince the organisers that it was worthwhile for them to update their content on the website. I did not have time to work with the content when the website grew. As a side effect of gathering good content, the website got many visitors. Then my own web editors, the organisers that is, bought advertisements on the website to attract even more visitors to their own part of the website. So I got paid to direct traffic within the website. Bingo!?
Between 2002 and 2007 I was absolutely mad about search engine optimisation, which requires a great deal of research, digging in statistics and comparisons with one's peers on the web.
Since then I have spent less and less of my time on revenue-generating factors and instead focused more on measuring the objective quality of websites. This can be how well the website meets the stated goals around accessibility for people with disabilities. To what extent the organisation's web editors have bothered to provide important metadata, what performance optimisations can be made and much more.
At the time of writing, I work as a product owner for the search and web analytics tools that exist within Region Västra Götaland (VGR). Primarily we use the open tool Matomo to collect data about the usage of all our websites, but we have a number of other specialised tools, such as Kibana for search analytics. My work means that I set requirements for everything that has to do with follow-up and analysis. At the same time, we try to establish good practice for all the websites VGR has. Beyond that, I do plenty of navel-gazing at our websites' quality, am responsible for our performance budgets and provide strategic advice on the possibilities of the web in general.
In other words, I am a practitioner. At least I think so myself :)
There is a certain likelihood that you will be surprised by how much I cover that is not clearly linked to earning short-term money via the web. Although I will include examples of how profitability is measured in the classic sense, you will also get substance around all those things called hygiene factors – what is important for all websites regardless of their purpose.
Foreword
The time when major design decisions were made based on taste and personal preference is now behind us. Nowadays, there is plenty of testing of what works best on a website. Design decisions are often based on tests others have already performed or with the help of visitor statistics from similar websites. Instead of sitting in unnecessary meetings about what colour the buy button should be, you can test different alternatives on real users. Through their clicks they give signals about what works well, what can be improved, what they find interesting and which paths they take to get their task done on the website.
This contribution to the subject of web analytics is about how you can get started with structured work to measure what value the website provides to an organisation and in what way it makes a good impression on its users. Unfortunately, it often happens that content is published even though no one knows what it is to be used for or who the intended target audience is. Nor does everyone seem to follow up on the effects of their website. At least not more than casually noting that statistics show they have visitors. I believe that in many cases this is because people do not understand which parts of the statistics are most useful to them. Perhaps the purpose, or goal of the website, is somewhat vague or whether there are even any goals at all. Or simply that there is no time to reflect on the website's performance. If you do not recognise yourself at all in this description, I can only congratulate you. I assume that many suffer from more or less great uncertainty about what on earth their website contributes. There is material in the book even for you who feel you have a handle on your visitor statistics. Not least all the factors that are not about how visitors use websites, or all the tools and methods that are not about the statistics.
The book is a resource for you who want to start working in a measurable and structured way and get started with concrete business goals for the website. You will get suggestions and examples of how to prioritise your efforts. And also how you evaluate your changes to know if you are heading in the right direction.
This thing about focusing on the user has always interested me. I am not sure why, but it may be due to how helpless I was to figure things out for myself when I got my first computer in the 1980s. At that time I could not speak English myself. My more linguistically gifted older sister had other things going on, my mum was uninterested in computers and my dad (who actually thought it was important for me to learn a bit of "computing") was certainly no expert in English.
Partly that, but I was also raised in a slightly autistic manner with lots of conventions about the state of things. Woe to anyone who did not turn the radio back to 102.8 MHz (P4 Örebro) if they thought there was something else worth listening to. Quarter to five everyone is quiet because the radio news is starting, and much more. Perhaps the most odd thing, I have been told, is the convention that an upright milk carton contains milk, and one lying on its back is empty. The status of the milk carton is communicated visually. No one needs to think about it longer than looking at it. The person who empties the carton is responsible for laying it on its back. Who can stand the disappointment of lifting a milk carton that turns out to be empty? :P
Not everything in life is as standardised as the milk's status was during my upbringing. Out in the world there are people with entirely different conventions. Guess how many times I have laid an empty milk carton on its back to the surprised giggles of those around me.
This book is about learning more about one's surroundings, especially the part of the surroundings that one hopes will appreciate one's website. That is the angle I take as my starting point when it comes to web analytics.
There are many competing interpretations of what web analytics is. At a lecture at a web analytics conference, I described the total confusion about what web analytics is like this:
Web analytics is like teenage sex
- Everyone talks about it.
- Nobody really knows how to do it.
- Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.
That web analytics is a bit like teenagers' approach to sex is probably more true than many of us want to admit. Especially when web analytics comes up during a job interview, a performance review with the boss, and so on.
"Do you know web analytics?" "Yeah, of course!"
This book will perhaps raise new perspectives on what web analytics is about. I happen to have worked many years as a developer. See this book as how a person specialised in usability views web analytics. Mix that with what a web developer knows is possible to construct.