Presented by Michael Beasley, MSI, on September 7, 2012 at the third annual Center for Health Literacy Conference: Plain Talk in Complex Times.

1. Measuring How People Use
Your Pages with Web
Analytics
Michael Beasley
@UXMikeBeasley

2. What is web analytics?
Web analytics = tools + practice
A quantitative source of data
A way of measuring what users do on your
website and how they got there
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3. How it works
1. When the user’s browser loads a page, analytics
records:
1. What page was loaded
2. The time it was loaded
3. Where the user came from (another page on this site, from a
search engine, etc)
4. Browser version, operating system, IP address
2. The analytics tool processes these data and makes
them presentable
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4. Here’s
what
Google
Analytics
looks like
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5. What you can and can't measure
"What" questions, not "Why" questions
As in, "what have people done in the past?"
as opposed to "why are they doing it?"
You get to see what people do in aggregate,
but not what individuals do
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6. Why web analytics?
• What pages are people looking at?
• How long do they spend on those pages?
• How many pages do they visit?
• How do they get to your site?
• What do they search for in search
engines? On the site itself?
Today we will focus on how users interact
with your site’s pages.
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7. Let’s look at
some data
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8. Pageviews and unique pageviews
For a selected time range:
• Every time a user goes to a page, that’s
one pageview
• If the user goes to the same page five
times, that’s five pageviews
• If the user goes to the same page five
times, that’s one unique pageview
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9. Average time on page
Web analytics tracks how long users spend
on any page before moving on to another
page.
For any page, you can calculate the average
amount of time users spend on that page.
You don’t know what they’re doing on that
page, but a higher time on page means
users have more time to do something.
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10. Entrances and bounce rate
Users can enter your site on any page. An
entrance is when a user enters your site on
whatever page you’re looking at.
Maybe they found it in a search engine or
bookmarked the URL.
The user bounces if they leave without
looking at any other pages on your site.
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11. % Exit (AKA exit rate)
Of all those pageviews, this is how many
were the last time a user looked at this page
before leaving the site.
This is different than bounce rate—those are
only the users that entered your site on this
page.
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12. Analysis: Look for the outliers
What are the pages with the highest values
for a metric?
Which have the lowest?
Which pages deviate the most from
average?
Are there any numbers that just surprise
you?
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13. Analysis
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14. Long average time
(2:10)
This is very long and
the beginning is dense
The second half is
easier to skim
Users are perhaps very
motivated to read this?
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15. Low average
time (1:08)
Much shorter
but broken up
very well
Users are
probably
skimming the
whole thing
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16. Even lower
average time
(1:00)
A lot of text in
huge blocks, no
easy-to-harvest
tips
No one is
reading all this
text
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17. What pages do users view?
It can hurt to find this out, sometimes.
Do the numbers reflect how interesting the
content is?
Or how easy it is to find?
Or both?
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18. Look at the pages people visit
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19. … and the pages they don’t visit
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20. Acting on your findings
If people aren’t spending a lot of time on or
bouncing a lot from an important page:
• Does the writing need work?
• Were the links to this page misleading?
• Are there links on this page that are too
enticing for users to resist?
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21. Acting on your findings, continued
For very popular pages:
• Can this topic be expanded (to more
pages)?
• Are there opportunities to link from this
content to other relevant pages?
For unpopular pages:
• Do you need better links to those pages?
• Do users really want to read it?
• Can they find it?
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22. What’s next?
You may have questions you can answer
with usability testing.
Another great idea: add a survey to gather
data about why users behave as they do.
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23. But wait, there’s more!
Unsurprisingly, you can measure more
aspects of user behavior with web analytics,
such as:
• How they move from page to page
• What they searched for in search engines
• What they searched for on your site
• How many fill out a form/register on your
site
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24. Context is everything
Web analytics give you a piece of the
picture.
It’s a pretty awesome piece, though.
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25. Questions?
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