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In my last article I introduced you to a brief summary of analytics and some of the benefits and disadvantages of both log based analytics and real time analytics.

I also gave you an idea of some of the really great features of analytics.

Today we will look at some of the other data a good analytics package can show you.

For example, did you know that an analytics package will show you where your site is lacking?

There is usually a report which deals with technical site issues – this is where you’ll find out what page requests generated errors (such as 404 page not found errors) as well as what other files were requested that weren’t available.

One error you might see a lot of is a request for robots.txt.  This is the file that search engine crawlers look for when they come to a site to index it.  The robots.txt file is used to tell the crawlers which files they can access and which are disallowed.  If you don’t have one that’s not such a big deal, as the crawler will index the site without one, but if there are things that you don’t want them to find, then you should use this file.

You may also see a request for favicon.ico – this is the little image you see in the address bar of your browser, just to the left of the URL.  While not having it is not a big issue, it does help brand your site.  Therefore if you can you should have one.

Another thing you will find here are broken images and links – this is generally because many times designers or web programmers will use relative links to these, and if the site is poorly constructed, the relative links may break.  This could also be caused by browsers which can’t properly form relative links into absolute links.  For example, some crawlers will see img src=”/images/image1.gif” and won’t be smart enough to append the http://www.site.com to the front of it image url.

What else can analytics do for you?

One feature not often used is the browser type and screen resolution.  Too often designers build sites using obscure references.  I remember working on a site once that was built to conform to Netscape 3.0.  In other words, any feature that would work in Netscape 3.1 and above was not allowed as Netscape 3.0 wouldn’t support it.  A note to you designers who may be reading this – Netscape 3.0 is used by 0.00001% of the population – do you really want to limit the design of the website to accommodate the 16 people in the world who are still using this browser?

As mentioned above, screen resolution statistics can help you ensure that your website is useful to the majority of your users.  For example, if you find that most of your users use an 800x600 resolution, but your site is built to span 1024x768, then you are forcing most of your users to scroll to see the whole site.  This may frustrate some who will leave.

What else are analytics good for?

While I mentioned keywords in the last article, I haven’t touched on the page elements.  That is, you can use analytics to find out what the top paths through your site are.  From here you might be able to get an idea of any roadblocks to conversion.

For example, if it takes 5 or 6 clicks to get to a converting page, you may want to change this – and move the conversion closer to the site entry point.  This is because most web users have notoriously short attention spans and will not click a long path to conversion.  You want to get your conversion to within 3 clicks of any entry point.

Take a look at some of the top paths and go through them yourself – put yourself in the shoes of your customers.  How satisfied are you with the path you have taken.  Would you seriously consider buying from your site?  Do you clearly see a conversion path?

Also, look at the abandonments on your conversion paths to see if there are any trends.

For example, if you have an exceptionally long form – do you need to gather all that information just to allow your customer to download a catalog or request more information?  In general, you want your conversions to be as quick and painless as possible.  Don’t give your visitors a chance to back out of the conversion.  Therefore if you need to collect personal information, make it the absolute minimum such as name and email address.  You can always follow up later with a personal email which they may appreciate more.

What else is there?

A nice thing about many real time packages is that they can overlay stats on top of your site pages.  So if you wanted to see how many clicks each link got on your homepage for example, you could quickly and easily do this.  Generally many packages will allow you to open a sidebar in your browser where you can view the page on your site, with hotspots showing statistics (such as the clicks per link), and providing a more detailed analysis in the sidebar.  This can help you get a more detailed idea of what your site visitors are seeing and doing when they visit your site.

If you see, using this tool, that a conversion link isn’t getting clicked, perhaps all it would take is to move the link to a more prominent spot on the page.  Or, if you see that 80% of your visitors are coming to the home page but leaving the site right away it’s time to dig into why.  Are they finding what they expected? What about the page is turning them off.

Of course some of this takes some speculation on your part, but as you get to know your sites visitors (and more importantly get to know the paying customers) you can begin to develop a profile of them and understand what they like and don’t like, and what they want to see and don’t want to see.

In the end, analytics should become your best friend if you plan to become a serious online business.  Whether you are selling online, or providing free information, or gather leads for future follow up, the analytics package you choose can greatly improve your sites success.