It’s one thing to look at your reports, its another to start to draw conclusions from your data. Different people will look at the data in different ways. Most often, the reports are looked at by the marketing department/person to see how to better market the site, what Search Engine optimization needs to occur, and measure the effectiveness of their pay-per-click ads. All of these are important uses of the web analytics, but they are not the only uses.

I want to look at a specific example of how I, as a web developer, recently went about making a site faster based upon the results of some analytics reports.

The 80/20 rule of the web

We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule. On the web it would 80% of people only use 20% of your web site. In reality however, depending upon your site, it could be more like 90/10. A novice web developer will try to optimize all of the pages. An experienced web developer doesn’t bother with those pages that receive only the smallest amount of visitors.

On an Intranet web site I maintain, which tracks the employees’ internal education process, I was looking at the internal search feature. The search results are loaded into the same page. When you count the results from the searches, this page accounted for 24% of all of the page views, making it the second most visited page on the site. (The #1 page is mostly static text, so no real improvements could come from there.)

This means for every 2 people to visit the site, approximately 3 searches were performed in addition to the normal page load. So almost 1 out of every 4 page views was to this internal search engine, and some people were searching multiple times.

This became an area to consider improving. As a little improvement here, would have more effect than a large improvement on a page that is only viewed 1% or less of the time.

Too combat this, I decided to load the results in with AJAX instead of reloading the whole page. This process would improve search response in 3 ways.

Network Connections

Each time a file is downloaded over the Internet, the web browser checks to see if there is a newer version on the server, or if it can use a local file it has already downloaded (cached). Each time it checks to use a local version or downloads a new copy, the server is using up resources, and your end-user has to wait for the files to finish checking/downloading. Because the number of network connections has been reduced, other people can be accessing the site at a faster rate, and the end-user appears to be faster as they don’t have to have their computer do as much work.

The search page referenced 15 external files, plus itself. Of those 12 wouldn’t have to be called anymore. So I was able to reduce the number network connections by 80% for the search results. This was our biggest savings. The number of network connections on a web server is limited by both number and bandwidth speed, therefore the more connections, the slower each connection appears.

Processing of Files

Knowing in advance that it was going to be a popular page, I had tried to make the page as efficient as possible initially. However, with some of the features, like remembering the previous search criteria, because you never left the page, no longer needed, I was able to simplify the page.

The initial page load took about the same amount of time, however when the search results displayed, it appeared to be less than 1 hundredth of a second faster to process the file, about 4.45% faster. While individually it does not yield much savings, when applied as many times as it is with the popularity of the page, the savings adds up, especially during peak times.

Size of Results File Download

I knew I would save a lot in this area. The search interface, consisting of 6 controls, and a variety of other HTML sections, would no longer have to be duplicated in loading the results. This would mean faster downloads, and improved “perception” of the speed of the web page/server. Based on the same sample set of data, there was an 11K reduction in the overhead of the search results, or approximately 14% smaller download. This was for a search with over 100 results. However, many times fewer results (20-50) are returned. So the savings in bandwidth, while still approximately 11K, would be a much higher percentage (30-75%).

Final Thoughts

Because I could determine from our analytics package which files were being processed more, I was able to get the most bang for my buck. This update will take some load off the server, and allow all the pages to benefit from this enhancement. Likewise, almost every visitor will notice a performance improvement in the site because of how often this page is viewed.

This is how a web developer can effectively use web analytics to improve the performance of the web site.

Learning how our web site works is an important task, which is often measured incorrectly. We have to look at not only the data, but we also need to know what questions to ask when looking at the data to put it into the correct perspective.

Without understanding how the data works, we can run into all types of problems by drawing the wrong conclusions.

In this section, I assume that we will be looking at data from some source such as Google Analytics and we are wanting people to purchase something from us. Not all web sites are built with purchasing in mind, some want to allow answers to be found, collect user registrations, etc. We will group all of these into a generic “end goal” that you have predetermined. It is important to know what your web site is supposed to do, so you know this end-goal. Is it selling products, providing information, getting someone to arrange an appointment with you, or letting people find answers on their own so they don’t have to call you?

Another key thing to note, is that your metrics information is going to have flaws. There are a wide variety of reasons for this, but you must know and be willing to accept this. We must be willing to assume a certain level reporting errors in our data. While I cannot go into all of the reasons why there might be errors, I will try to point out some obvious reasons why there might be errors as we go along the process.

The obvious measurement

There are a couple of “obvious” measurements. Everyone looks at these because they are often predominately displayed in your analytics tool. They would be:

• Visits,
• Page Views, and
• Unique Visitors.

A Visit is one of the two most commonly looked at pieces of information which people look at. It is also one of the most useless pieces of information when it is looked at by itself. A visit is when a user goes to your site. Their entire experience there, be viewing only one page, or 100 pages, is summed up as a single visit. It generally assumes that this is an active process, and the user does not break for more than a few minutes between any two pages. If the user leaves the site, and returns the next day, or even an hour later, this is a second visit.

Why it is important to know: Without visitors, your web site sits idle and unproductive. By measuring visitors you can start to track other, more important, pieces of information. namely how many people are completing their “final goal”. By using the number of visits your web site has, vs. the number of final goals completed, you can start to determine what your conversion rate is.

Why it can be misleading: There are a couple of things that can get in the way of you understanding your visits metric. First, not every visitor is tracked. This is usually for technical reasons beyond your control. For example, if your software relies on use of a JavaScript, your visitor might have JavaScript disabled. If you have to send a cookie to a third party, these can be blocked by your web browser, of if it looks at log files from your web server, your pages might be cached and accessed by a Internet Service Provider. Each of these, and other reasons, are beyond your control, and can effect the quality of your numbers. You have to be willing to live with these errors, and work to establish the best information you can even with these problems, knowing that you don’t have 100% accurate data to work with.

Of course if there is a metric which someone loves more than Visitors, it has to be Page Views. This is approximately, see “Why it can be misleading” for visitor counts, how many web pages have been viewed by users. People love this number because it is often “big”. However, this can be the most misleading metric of all time. Why; because Page Views mean nothing by themselves. Page views, unless you are using an advertising based model, mean and show nothing. However, at the same time, Page Views are extremely important. For without them, you cannot move someone to the end goal. But you must remember that they are not the end goal.

Why it can be misleading: Number one, psychology. We love to see this number go up, and it can cause us to look solely at this number, without seeing how the end goal is affected. We cannot be distracted by the sirens call, and so the first problem with this metric is we cannot focus on it. Second, this number is often artificially low. Depending upon how your metric tool works, page reloads/revisits may not be calculated as they could be cached either by your end user’s computer and/or their web host to reduce the amount of bandwidth they use.

A Unique Visitor is someone who has gone to your web site. If they visit your site five times throughout the reporting period (day, week, month, etc), they should only be counted once.

Why it is important to know: By understanding how many unique people have visited our web site, we can start to determine if we are providing a site which users want/need to return to. Many web sites are built with this purpose. As people return to our site, we develop a sense of authority with this person, which can allow them to return, and/or encourage them to complete the end-goal.

Why it can be misleading: This number might be inaccurate however because we must track a person to a computer. So if I were to visit a site twice while at work, once on a mobile phone while commuting home, and twice later that evening, it would show as three unique visitors because I used three devices.

It can also be wrong because of technical reasons. For example: the cookie, which was used to track the user, was deleted between visits. Now the device, which was used to visit the site, appears to not have visited before, and we show a second unique user when in fact only one exist.

Once we realize that our data will never be complete, that is OK.  We can move forward a lot easier knowing we are 70-90% accurate, and just have to make decisions with that in mind.

In our next article we will  look at how many pages your visitors see, as well as how long they are on your site.

One thing I’ve noticed, is that while working on other companies web sites, the one web site which tends to get updated the least is…. my own. This apparently isn’t specific to me, as I’ve talked with many other web designers who have the same issue. I’ve even heard of web designers hiring other web designers to do their web site.

Since it has been a little while since I did a major update to my site (this past summer when I added the blog), I decided I should be performing some updates. Some are for aesthetics, others provide speed enhancements, and some improve search engine ranking and results.

• Simplified my right column on the blog. This has done several things.
  • It makes the site faster to download. Fewer widgets to process and download, result in faster page loads and less work for the server to perform.
  • It reduces “duplicate” content for the site. When the same content can be accessed from several different links, it makes it harder for search engines to determine which is the best one to display, so the results get spread thin, instead of showing a stronger single page more often.
• I’ve edited my pages to make them more efficient. By reducing the processing on the server, I’ve increased the responsiveness of the web server.
• Gearing my pages to be more about web design instead of web development. Why? Well in searches web design is searched for about 4 times as often as web development. So while I technically do more web development work, most of my customers will know it as web design, and I need to cater to them. This has included adding more and better meta tags, re-writing some of my menus, and adjusting my content.
• What you can’t see yet is adding more images to my site. After working and reading about how I’m optimizing my site to be faster, you might wonder why I’m adding images and flash content. Simple - it aligns with giving users what they want and expect. By giving them more of what they want, I expect to see higher conversion rates from my prospects.

In our last posting, three things that make up a website, we mentioned the three things that you need to have a website, your domain name, your host, and your files.

We also talked about picking and getting your domain name. Remember to talk to your web designer/company, they should be able to help you come up with some good names. If not, you might need to consider a different web design company.

Get some web server space

This is the next item that needs to be taken care of. Your website, while a virtual thing out on Internet, has to reside on a physical server some place. When you request a web page, a computer will send the page and accompanying files that are requested. Most modern servers will also handle databases, sending e-mail, and e-commerce activities.

Web hosting will vary in cost from $4/month on up to tens of thousands of dollars a month. The reason for this difference is the levels of service that are provided such as:

1. Number of tech calls
2. Applications loaded on the server
3. Number of servers
4. Type of server
5. Etc.

Most web servers have multiple sites on the same server. The cheaper the cost of the server, the more sites they have to put on each server, which can cause the performance of your web server to degrade as more and more additional websites are loaded on the server.

In my experience with different hosts, working with different companies, I have found that host charging less than $7 or $8 a month are not worth having if you are going to host your company on it. This does not mean that more expensive is better; it is just a general rule to follow. Cheaper hosts may work wonderfully for a little while, or be fine for personal websites, but I generally do not trust them for a professional website.

I usually recommend this to be second, because until you have a host, the company that you register your domain name through will put up a “parking page”. What this means is that you will see a page that looks like the image on the left. This is allowing the domain registration company to earn money until you have web server space of your own, and update the DNS servers. (Your registration company should be able to tell you how to do that.)

You can always have a “temporary page” what is displayed while you have your main site being developed. This is something I commonly do for companies, that way we can express some information, while allowing your company to build a brand for itself on-line.

Depending on the type of site, as well as your host, you might have the choice between several different hosting “packages”. Each will provide you with different options for different prices. The two biggest line items to change will be your storage space and your transfer amount. You will probably want to find a host that will allow you to upgrade your hosting package easily, if you need the extra space/transfer allowance, as your website grows. This will allow you to save some money while your site is young and not as popular, and then expand as your on-line needs grow and you can afford the changes.

Publish the website file(s)

This is the only step that many people think is required. However, while it is important, without the previous two steps, it is for naught.

This is where you go and hire a web designer, or do it yourself, to generate and create a website. Now you upload the files that make up a website to the server space that you acquired in step two. Now when someone accesses your domain name (acquired in step one), they will see your website.