Optimisation and Web Metrics
Saturday 30 July 2011 - Filed under Usability News
Web Metrics are a method of analysis used to demonstrate how e-commerce customers use a website. Web Optimisation is nothing new and if you are an organisation or individual with a web presence chances are you will be involved in this or aware of it’s potential benefits to your activities.
Web Metrics on the other hand are mostly unfamiliar. Though some organisations in particular e-commerce companies invest heavily in them, the news of their benefits hasn’t quite reached most organisations on the web.
Arguably the most important Web Metric is the web log and I bet most of you have heard of it and many are using it. I am writing to tell you though that Web Metrics dig a lot deeper than you might expect.
Firstly lets take a look at the web log. This is the most obvious metric and one that has come along way with the development of Google Analytics and incorporation into web design packages of all different budgets. This has both strengths and weakness, as do the other data sources at your disposal. Yes it’s become clear that whilst this method gives you access to exact figures and precise bar charts it lacks the user involvement necessary to really understand user motives behind their use of your website. Clickstream data and Clickstream analysis would seem to address this problems in that clickstream surveys can ask users the questions ‘why’ and ‘how’, thus discovering more about the user’s motives and also give competitor analysis and comparison, but it’s no secret that like so many Usability metrics it can be very hard to extract and analyse this day
Business leaders recognise that Web Metrics provide the key to optimisation but no ‘one method’ seems to stand out as an absolute solution.
Changing pretty much anything about your website now is a lot easier than it used to be. New text, products, pages, links and so on can be added and deleted at the click of a button. The technological advancement’s of the internet has made web design and maintenance much easier than it was just a few years ago. This development and a never more so competitive world has led to Business’s and Organisations looking for ways to improve their online experience for customers and of course to ensure that the website is serving the purpose it was built for. So analytics is booming as a way to gain insight into how customers use a site, I searched on Google and for ‘web analytics’ I got in excess of 30 million results. This can’t tell you though why they empty their shopping cart and leave without saying goodbye.
This is where web metrics come in. They hold the key to web performance and usability.
There have been many significant studies conducted in the last 10 years or so with the purpose of understanding web metrics. Many refer to User Technology Acceptance as key particularly when it is applied and used to optimise e-commerce functions, whilst others talk about eye tracking data and how it can be applied and used well to optimise resource websites like Government agencies. All of these studies look to view web usability from a users perspective but the research shows most of the business’s and organisations who want to employ web metrics as a way to test users put their faith in web metrics based on Clickstream data. Hofacker and Murphy (2009) referred to clickstream surveys as “direct, instant & automatic internet feedback”. They also point out that with so many usability metrics now available to produce masses of data, the analysts enthusiasm to extract and quantify it is put into question. Why would you want to sit through 100 un-quantified user testing videos? Why would you want to look at chart after chart of analytics which don’t tell you ‘how’ and ‘why’? So far it seems the relationship between optimisation and web metrics is missing the integration and presentation necessary to make it comprehensive and usable in the ‘real world’.
Put simply for the most part web metrics for optimisation aren’t quite the full package.
2011-07-30 » Sam
