Web analytics: What's the big deal?
You may have already heard about web analytics. It's a loosely-used term that describes the tools, the collection, reporting, and the analysis of data gathered from users that are accessing your website or application. The web analytics industry has matured a great deal in the past decade, moving from the more primitive Logfile analysis to today, where analytics solutions are robust and extremely powerful.
A while back, I summarized why you need web analytics in your Flash or Flex apps on my personal blog. Weakened economy or not, getting data for how people are using your application is an eye-opening experience. Web Analytics can provide you with some valuable bits of information. Here are just a few:
Where to Start
You're ready to start collecting and analyzing, but how? Consider the following steps:
1. Choose your web analytics solution.
If your company has already purchased an enterprise solution, this decision may have already been made for you. Otherwise, if you're looking for cheap as free analytics, your options are going to be a bit limited, but definitely not useless. Google Analytics is now a prominent player in the web analytics industry, and you guessed it, it's free.
2. Understand the "page view" paradigm.
Web analytics software is still emerging from a Web 1.0 world, where every page is its own and should be tracked independently.This unfortunately still applies today, and looking at your RIA in terms of individual page views may prove to be difficult. However, web analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Omniture have provided a great deal of customization when you're sending a tracking event. Google Analytics, for example, also allows you to track "Events," not just individual page views.
I would recommend sitting down with stakeholders and defining how you want your application to be viewed on the web analytics data collection side, what transactions are meaningful, and how deeply you want to go with your collection and analysis.
3. "Analyticise" your app.
Web analytics providers will be able to give you access to add tracking calls to your application, mostly through Javascript, or, in some cases, full ActionScript API's. This will require you to dig into your code and, based on your previously-defined strategy, add the appropriate calls. It might be advisable to set up a "test suite" of sorts before going live, so you can ensure that your content is being tracked accurately. In some cases, such as Google Analytics, you can enable a "debug" mode.
4. Now what?
Your first look at the data that's being collected will be both fascinating and overwhelming. There is most likely far too much for you to analyze and make sense of at first glance. Furthermore, there is even debate among experts about what metrics are most important.
Here lies another crossroads: if your company already has a web analytics hire or consultant, then you may not need to concern yourself with analytics analysis. But if you're like me and you want to get your hands dirty with analysis, then you'll probably want to start training yourself to be a developer by day, web analyst by night.
Here are some fantastic getting started resources for analyzing your data:
Conclusion
Web analytics solution providers have made it remarkably easy to integrate your applications with tracking. At worst it's a Javascript call, at best an integrated API. With tools like Google Analytics so easily available and useful, there's no good reason why you shouldn't start looking for places to put your tracking codes. All it takes is some time, planning, and a little research to get you on your way.
Some resources I used for this article:
I used it as an excuse to learn how to get Flash to talk to ga.js and to learn how people were using the player.
Every button has an event tied to it named according to the function of the button. Ok, that should have been obvious. But I also trigger events if the video reaches 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent viewed. This lets me know how much of the video people are watching to determine their attention span or maybe just how interesting the video is. It's not that detailed but it does give something I didn't have before.
It's just a video player but the info I've gathered will be very helpful in the next one that I build in terms of which functions I make more prominent in the player. I agree with Cahlan that having analytics in your web applications is rather useful and should be considered when planning the app.
]]>It's an amazing live web analytics application.
]]>One of the things I didn't even talk about was how more integrated and detailed tracking can tell us so much more about an application than simply sticking the tracking code on every page. Your video player was a perfect example. Thanks for sharing.
]]>I really liked the idea of Woopra and signed up for the beta ... but it seriously took me like a month to get approved. Haven't had much time to play with it since then. Any idea why the long lag time? Maybe it was just me.
]]>We believe as well that having feedback analysis based on user behavior of your UI maybe critical. Media advertisers should be asking for this allready....
]]>Another thing I did was trigger an event once the player loaded (event = initialized) and triggered another event if a user clicked to start the video (event = start).
Therefore I have a decent idea of how many people were given an opportunity to even see the video and how many from that number chose to start it. That was one of the most helpful bits of information I got out of it. I can compare the initialize event to the pageviews for the page to determine how many people fail to see the video in the first place for various reasons, such as a Flash blocker.
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