Getting started with Logaholic Web Analytics
Hello! My name is Silvia Todorova and I am a Web Analytics beginner. I recently joined Logaholic as a marketing assistant and sooner or later it was time to start my acquaintance with web stats and analytics. In this blog I am going to take you through the first 7 weeks of my exciting adventure into the world of Web Analytics 🙂
After my first week in the realm of Web Analytics, I can say I am progressing with the speed of a toddler: every day there is something new to get my hands on, which makes my movements more stable and secures me another step to my goal.
The idea behind these posts are to keep a record of my first steps in Web Analytics so I can help other beginners with using such software. However, this is not a user manual: that has already been made and you can find it here. The purpose of my future posts is to help people like you learn from a few practical stories that highlight the essence of any Web Analytics software that you are considering to buy or are already using.
What is the Self Hosted Edition
If you are using a self-hosted edition of Web Analytics software it means that you are “hosting” or have access to your site’s data on the domain server. You could be using the log files on your server to track the site’s traffic or enable javascript tracking, which both entail that you would be able to update the traffic reports at any time and have access to real-time data. However, the point of Web Analytics is to know how to use this data to answer some important questions about your business and improve your website’s performance. The next 6 posts will be dedicated to answering that question.
What Web Analytics is all about
Web Analytics is more than just a bunch of statistical reports. The most important thing is that you need to know your website well and know what you want to achieve with it; what is the goal of your website ? Is it sales? Is it sign-ups, leads, downloads, comments? Every website should have goals. Withour goals you can’t measure your Return on Investment or determine if your website is successful.
Tip: You need to think of at least one clear thing your website is supposed to accomplish for you, and keep that in mind when you look at your web analytics data.
Just like any other business, the business of e-marketing is about targets, and so is Web Analytics. You measure the performance of your site in terms of different targets: will enough people come to the site, will enough see the catalogue, how many of them will buy a product, how many will return, and etc.
So the cornerstone of your Web Analytics will be the targets, or “key performance indicators” (KPI’s). In web anlytics, this term often refers to different target files on your website. A file that denotes a certain action taking place on your site is a target file. A target file indicates one of your goals has been reached. Examples of such files can be the checkout page displayed after purchase online, the confirmation of a newsletter subscription or an email inquiry confirmation.
The point of using Web Analytics is to measure how people entering your site (visitors) convert to (become) buyers, subscribers, readers, contributors, etc. If you are using Logaholic for your own business or to build reports for a commercial site, you will always need to justify the costs and investments made into driving traffic to your site. The way to do that is by measuring the conversion of your site, or in other words, how many visitors turn into buyers or subscribers. In order to be able to measure the conversion, you need to select the files that denote such a transformation from visitor to buyer ( for instance).
I am going to give you some examples here of target files for a typical e-commerce site:
If your site is called: www.e-books.com, some target files might look like this:
www.e-books.com/newsletter_thanks.html ( this is the Thank You page visitors see when they have subscribed for your newsletter).
www.e-books.com/shop/checkout_success.php ( is the Checkout notification after a purchase from your e-shop).
www.e-books.com/catalogue/russian/warandpeace.zip ( if you have downloadable files)
I hope these examples show clearly what a target file is. Of course there are thousands of other files that can be defined as target files, depending on what you are trying to achieve with your site.
After you “tell” Logaholic that these files are your KPIs ( in the profile configuration field, see the manual for more information), it will build reports based on the KPIs you selected. You will measure conversion against these pages and if you ever have a new page for sales or subscriptions on your site that you want to add as a KPI you will simply have to edit this site’s account in Logaholic by adding the URL of this page to the profile settings.
With this practical explanation of KPI’s and their configuration in your Web Analytics software I am thinking of ending this post. Next week when I have enough traffic for reports I will continue with the introduction of the reporting options in Logaholic and some exciting features of the programme. KPIs in detail will also be a topic of a more comprehensive discussion since there is so much about them that I haven’t learned yet. This week was just a whiff over the surface of the deep sea of analytics…:-)
Hope this post was useful to you so you will be back for more next week!