MagnaCounter Blog

A web analytical report can detail each day of the week, to check for example how many hits you got a Friday.  Here is how to find out the days of the week repot in Magnacounter:

1) Click the daily link

Daily stats

2) Click the Days of the week link

Days of week

3) Click the hours link and look how many visits you got at every time.

Make a note of which day of the week sees most traffic to compare it with weeks past - and get ready to compare it against weeks in the future.

Hours of the day

You might discover that night owls are populating your site.  Or you might discover that the early birds are catching the worms that you leave out for bait.  There are several insights you can glean from the Hours report, for example, when does the bulk of your traffic comes ?  You can accurately assume that most of your users are surfing from work if traffic arrives from 9am to 5pm.

In my next post i describe some users behaviour.

The Web Usage Mining is a branch of Datamining techniques whoes target is to discover users behaviour on a system, in this case we do analyze Web Logs and find patterns on the navigation.

Web Usage Mining

The analysis of this Data can help to find valuable information that can help to know better or more about the Users or Customers and to provide them a customized solution, this goes by the hand of a marketing strategy.

What is Data Mining ?

Dataminig is the discovery of information, hidden at simple view, but that can be obtained from large about of data.  It is a powerfull technology with great potential to help in business, it is used to help decition takes.  A DataMining product is the result of large amount of research and development.

From the family of DataMining, exist these branches related with the Web:

Web Content Mining
Web Structure Mining
Web Usage Mining

In the next post i am going to talk about the MagnaCounter WebMining tool.

Start looking your web targets, you are going to notice how the different graphics change every day and every month, it is not the same a holidays than workdays, it is not the same in March than December, before, during and after a crisis.  This is related with Web Site Benchmarking in some way.

When you reach profits, with the monthly history recording you can know when you have reached your objective, and you would be able to tell others how you did it.

Record History Web Statistics

The monthly history recording sets a benchmark so that the montly progress can be measured.  You can compare the number of unique visitors, page displays, users that returned, fidelized users, unique displayed pages as well as how much bandwidth has been used a given month.  With that information the different months can be compared to determine web trends, like busy seasons or effective e-marketing campaigns.

How to archive que monthly history:

Record History Web Statistics

Download the report in PDF.  Even though, MagnaCounter records the report and you can see it at anytime.

The simplest web analysis tool provides the option to inspect the latest visits, which are organized by the visit date/time, the displayed page, browser type, operating system and the country.

This example was taken from magnacounter.com:

Last Visitors

This target is excelent to have a quick look at what the recent visitors did on your website.  If a customer has a problem on your website and he tells you the exact time, date and page that he requested, or you receive an email when a critical error occurs on your website, this tool provides more information of the previous steps to do some peritaje.

You can get a closer idea of what the user is searching, and if this search got the correct answer, which was the entry point, if he had to go to the feedback page to send you an email or the contact page with your contact information.  You can know if the sale has been closed or if you loosed your time.

Last Visitors

If you put the mouse pointer over the world icon you get the ip/domainname where the individual came from.

Last Visits

Put the mouse cursor over the lamp, and get the search that the user did on the search engine and that pointed him to your site.  Click on the search and get the same view that the user got and that took their attention:

Last Visits

TERM: Page View,  Page Displays or Unique Displayed Pages

The number of times a page (an analyst-definable unit of content) was viewed or displayed.  The unique displayed pages is the amount of pages (without counting the same page twice) that were requested by an individual, this is interesting to look to know the performance of the website in time while content was added or modified.

Unique Visits Displayed Pages

TERM: Unique Visitors, Visits, Sessions

This figure displays in an accurate form the amount of unique individuals that visited the website, it is one of the most important values that should increase.  Different tool providers use different methodologies to track sessions. Ask your tool provider how this metric is computed. A typical time-out period for a visit is 30 minutes, but this time period is configurable in many web analytics applications.

Visitors time out

Visits can be added together over time, but not over page views or over groups of content, because one visit can include multiple pages.

The Web Analytics Association defines Unique Visitors as:

The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.

Authentication, either active or passive, is the most accurate way to track unique
visitors. However, because most sites do not require a user login, the
most predominant method of identifying unique visitors is via a persistent cookie
that stores and returns a unique id value. Because different methods are used to
track unique visitors, you should ask your tool provider how they calculate this
metric.
A unique visitor count is always associated with a time period (most often day, week,
or month), and it is a “non-additive” metric. This means that unique visitors can not
be added together over time, over page views, or over groups of content, because
one visitor can view multiple pages or make multiple visits in the time frame studied.
Their activity will be over-represented unless they are de-duplicated.

The deletion of cookies, whether 1st party or 3rd party, will cause unique visitors to be inflated over the actual number of people visiting the site. Users that block cookies may or may not be counted as unique visitors, and this metric is handled in different ways depending on the analytics tool used. Ask your tool provider how blocked cookies are managed in their tool: it is important to understand how this impacts other metrics with regard to these visitors.

TERM: Total Requested Pages

This is the number of total amount web pages displayed from the analyzed website.

Web Analytical tools are very important in the Search Engine Optimization (aka. SEO) strategy.  The keywords used by the customer in a search engine (like google, altavista, yahoo, to name a few) guided him directly to your site, they are important.  The search engine traffic is the most valuable for your business, because it is a fact that they have the higher conversion rate.  The keywords provide information about the kind of problems, desires or needs from our community.  Here is an example of a report for search keywords:

Search Engine Optimization

To know more about Internal Search Engine Optimization look at this article.

In a previous post i started giving my opinion about the benefits of Web Analytics as a tool.  Part of the web site benchmark is to analyze the traffic in a particular point of time, its change can be product of a new website redesign or new photo, video or text.

Scenario #2:

Traffic has to be increased from a specific country or location.

Solution:

New content has to be created, this new material (if possible unique on the net) should be important and meaningful for the segment of the market.  Previous, during and after the implementation of the strategy.  In this case would come handy the possibility to skilfully interpret the visits depending on their location.

A report like this, created in the period that you need is what i most value:

Web Analytics tools are also used to benchmark web site performance.  Performance is measured through different perspectives, the required tool depends on the short term strategy for the website.  Don’t worry, keep reading, trust in me, you are not going to be disappointed.

To benchmark anything it is required to compare the system on a state with another state, on Web Analytics this state is, in most cases, a point in time.

Scenario #1:

You are interested in measuring the success of a newsletter, part of a new e-marketing strategy.

Solution:

Create 3 links on the newsletter, one for each opinion that interests you, for example, at the bottom of the mail you can include something like this:

The user can vote your newsletter generating a two way communication, and this vote goes directly to your website, causing the web analysis software to identify this visit.

What remains is to create a rule on your Web Analysis Software, just as i did on Magnacounter.com, i create a regular expression to filter then my statistics:

After creating the regular expression, i just use it on my statistics:

And to finish, i go to the Custom Reports menu and choose to view the Visits, here is the nice output:

At the Browsers Graph report you can find which browser brands are being used by your kind of users, this graph is different from site to site and it depends on the public that you have.

Here is an example:

You can find out if people is using Mozilla Firefox more than Internet Explorer, or how fast is being accepted the last version of Opera.

The Browsers Stats is important because you can have your web site designer and QA team try the different pages of the Web Site on this Browsers.

It is much interesting if you know from which countries are the users that use a specific browsers, like this graph displays: