WEBSITE ATTRACTIVENESS & ANALYTICSMIST 7500 MID TERM EXAM

10/15/2009MIST7500BY Warsame Ali

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 2

WEB ATTRACTIVENESS 2

MY INVISIBLE BLOG 3

SEO & SEM 4

APPLICATION OF ATTRACTIVENESS TO MY BLOG 4

WEB ANALYTICS 5

APPLICATION TO MY BLOG(reports) 8

SUMMARY 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY 11

1

INTRODUCTION

A website is an important marketing tool that is viewed by all stake holders, current customers, potential customers, suppliers, employees and even competitors. The web is the cheapest and most convenient tool for any business. I personally pay all my bills online and I find it very convenient, I recently stopped using one of my consumer charge cards because they did not provide for online payment. To the service provider that is lost business. Before I go out to buy anything from any of the retailers, I first go to their website, search for the nearest store location, and get the address and directions. Imagine how many customers do the same? Without the web I would have used the yellow pages, as a matter of fact I even access the yellow pages online. The web is also used by corporations as a means of posting vacancies and by applicants to view and apply for employment. The web is used for booking flights and checking in. The web is also used for entertainment and social networking, the list is endless. On this paper I am going two address two issues, one is the importance of web attractiveness, and what makes a website attractive. I will also discuss ways of measuring the attractiveness of the website, also known as Website Analytics.

Web Attractiveness: What is a good website?

“A successful website meets clearly identified goals and provides compelling content that draws your audience to your site again and again. In addition it is easy to navigate and is attractively designed to complement the content” aksi.net.4

Key factors: What makes a website attractive

You need to Provide Value to Your Audience that draws them to your site again and again. This makes me think of Google, every time I want to look up something I rely heavily on Google, I even use it a starting point when researching for this paper. Another example is dictionary.com; I use it to look up meaning and spelling. If I did not get the information I needed the first time I would never return again and again. Other examples are news websites and weather channel, a user is compelled to return time and again in order to get the latest update.

A good website needs to be focused and cohesive, you need to identify the goals, what purpose will the website serve? If the website is for business purpose it needs to be in sync with the business goals. Audiences visit websites for specific reason.

The Website needs to be visually attractive and appealing. The design is the second most importance component of the good site. Attractiveness of web pages depends on the design. The design will define how many people additionally want to reach and to look at your site.

2

A good website should be easy to navigate and the pages need to be consistent. Any visitor should be able to find the information easily with no dead ends. Not finding what you are looking for can be very frustrating and an instant turn off.

A good website needs to be able to run on different web browsers. Web pages need to be made for multiple web browsers viewing to enable easy access to majority of the web visitors. The Internet remains non-browser specific and a multi-platform medium. Loading should also be fast and easy, avoid overloading the pages with rich content which slows down the user’s browser.

A good website needs to specify a background color or image to avoid the visitor’s color or background being used; this can lead to a blurred images and links. The text color should also be different from the background color in order to be visible.

A good website should have Interactive elements. For example: response forms, quizzes etc. In Addition a good website should use a minimalist style, this will make the site balanced by not trying too hard to standout. An effective minimalistic design does not simply lack substance; it achieves balance and attractiveness without the need for excessive design elements. This also applies to advertisement.

The website needs to be credible, according to Pew Internet and American Life Projects each report large scale surveys concluding that

“Consumers report that they rely on the following types of information: Site owners/sponsors, Reported information sources/citations, Date of posting, clearly distinguished content, editorial content and advertising copy5.

Some Things to Avoid

Avoid overusing keywords Don't use the same color text as your background, even in images Try to avoid using frames for important body text

MY INVISIBLE BLOG

Before I started doing my research on SEO and SEM, I thought it was small and that it would take me an hour at most to do it, 6 hours down I am still reading, it’s an ocean to say the least. So far I have learnt so much and discovered interesting websites. I also tried to search for my blog and I discovered one thing, my blog is “invisible”, I tried searching using various words that I thought were keywords but still my blog is invisible. To make it visible I need the following;

3

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the traffic to a website through a search engine by using unpaid and "natural" search results, or ensuring that a site does not become part of the “invisible Web” (the portion of the Web not accessible through Web search engines). SEO tries to increase the chances of a website being listed when a search is done, Hence increasing the traffic to the website. SEO may target different kinds of search, including keyword search, image search, local search, video search and industry-specific search engines. SEO does this by considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content, HTML and associated coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. The quantity and quality of visitor traffic is then measured by how often or how many times a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired outcome, such as making a purchase or requesting further information. Before pages can be optimized, research must be done to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding relevant keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and deciding which keywords can be best supported with quality and relevant content.

Search Engine Marketing or SEM

‘Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion”³.

The difference between the two (SEO and SEM) is one is not paid for and is natural, while the other one is paid for. Most paid for results will appear on top or on the side as a sponsored result or link, while the natural results is listed below. These services can be paid for using by;

1. one-time flat fees2. monthly fixed fee3. pay-per-click4. pay-per-ranking5. revenue sharing

SEO/ SEM and website’s attractiveness

SEO and SEM can improve a website’s attractiveness and visibility by making it visible on search engine results. This involves making pages readable to search engines and emphasizing key topics related to your content. Advanced optimization may include significant research into every element of page design, site structure etc. I personally think Search engines visibility to be a very important tools for any business, I use Search Engines it to do most of my research on this paper and that is how I discovered this site; http://searchenginewatch.com, this website has many articles about the industry, I bookmarked it. My blog is for non commercial purpose so I will try to implement SEO techniques since I don’t expect to use SEM or pay for it.

4

APPLICATION: The process of making my blog more attractive.

Blogger is very rigid to manipulations, as a result I wasn’t able to apply all the changes I wanted to my blog, Blogger offers templates which is hard to play around, the left site is blank and cannot be utilized. However, I was able to play around with the font color, background color and use of contrasting colors, this makes the site more appealing. I tried to balance the images. I also added some interactivity by adding my twitter posts and a website poll or survey. Because of time I am not able to review if the changes have had any impact. I will continue to research more tools and techniques to improve on it.

Image of my blog, after the changes

WEB ANALYTICS

Web Analytics is the collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of multitude of data from the internet from web visits for the purpose of understanding and optimizing website usage. There are two faces to web analytics; Off-site and On-site web analytics.

5

Off-site web Analytics refers to web measurement and analysis irrespective of whether you own or manage a web site. Things measured include website potential, audience, traffic and the internet as a whole. Marketing and PR firms use this to measure website potential before launching of products or campaign.

On-site analytics measure the visits to a website. Some of the measured parameters include the page views, preference, purchases, frequency or site abandonment. Page view is defined as a request made to the web server for a page. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

WHAT IS MEASURED: The Most Common Indicators

The Number of Visits Number of unique visitors Visit duration and page navigation Authenticated Users and visits Number of page views and Most viewed pages, Days of the week (peak and off peak hours) OS and Browser used HTTP referres and errors Search Engines e-mail response rates purchases site abandonment

METHODS USED IN WEB ANALYTICS

There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data. The first method, Log-file analysis, reads the log-files in which the web server records all its transactions and reports are generated from these files.

Advantages of log-file analysis

Log files already exist and are produced as raw data by web servers. Data is stored locally on the company’s server. Log-file analysis initial cost is less since it involves a one-off software purchase Log files record all kind of visits including search engine spiders. Log files record all transactions and do not rely on the visitor’s browser providing information or

allowing access, a host site might prohibit request to certain sites which happens with page tagging. Additionally, some content files like PDF do not have the capability of include tags.

6

The second method, Page Tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is requested by a web browser. It collects data that can be used to produce web traffic reports.

Advantages of page tagging

Page tagging uses Java script and has more capabilities and functionality, JavaScript records additional information, for example, the goods they purchased, the prices and

information about their computer like mouse events, screen size, forms not completed or discarded.

Page tagging manages the process of assigning cookies, with log-file; the server has to be configured to perform this.

Page tagging is available to companies that outsource their website management, or companies that do not have access to the web server.

Page tagging reduces responsibilities and long time overhead cost. You don’t have to maintain data, keep up with software updates and maintenance.

SOME TOOLS USED IN WEB ANALYTICS

Server log

A Server log file is a file automatically created and maintained by the server to record history of page request. Information recorded includes page requested, visitor IP, date, time and much more. The data can be recorded into one file or separated into different files. These files can only be accessed by the Website admin or webmaster.

Web Log Analysis Software

Web Log Analysis Software also called web log analyzer is software that parses the log file and web server and compiles data with visitor information, pages visited, frequency of visits. The reports are then generated. One of the solutions I used on my blog is Google Analytics by Google; this is a web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. See application and reports for more information.

Cookie²

A cookie is a text-only string that gets entered into the memory of your browser; it is saved to file for future reference. It records information about the visitor to a website like pages viewed, user preferences, shopping cart contents etc. They are neither spyware nor viruses.

Web crawlers or Web Spider7

A web Crawler or spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Mostly used by search engines as a tool to provide up to date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later time processing. This is done by indexing the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Web Crawlers can also be used for perform automating maintenance tasks on Websites. Crawlers can also be used to check and validate HTML codes.

Examples of Web crawlers

Yahoo Crawler (Slurp) by the Yahoo Search MSNBot is the name of Microsoft's Bing WebCrawler Google Crawler by Google

Web counter

A web counter or hit counter is a computer software program that indicates the number of visitors, or hits, a particular webpage has received. These counters will be incremented by one every time the web page is accessed and is displayed mostly in digital format. Counters are very basic and simple.

OTHER TYPES OF WEB ANALYTICS

Mobile Web Analytics

Mobile web analytics is very similar to web analytics, only that it measures the same set of parameters but in a mobile context. They measure site popularity with mobile phone users or which mobile marketing campaigns work best for the business; this includes mobile advertising, mobile search marketing, text campaigns and desktop promotion of mobile sites and services.

Application to my Blog

On my Blog I used the following three tools;

The Hit Counter

I was able to download a hit counter from www.pax.com, I then selected the hit counter design, created an account and retrieved a code which I added to my blog as a gadget.

Hit Counter Meter from my blog.

8

Google Analytics

Google Analytic offers enterprise level web analytics and is the most popular, it requires you to sign up. I used my Google mail credentials to create an account. I retrieved a block of code and pasted it on the html file on my blog, just before the </body> tag. I then Saved the edit. I went back to my Google Analytics account and I was able to view, retrieve and send a copy of the report to my email account. Some of the indicated metrics measured on the report are; site usage, bounce rate, page views, and average visit time including a world map with the geographical location of the visitors. There was also a technical profile report and a traffic source report. The only disappointing thing is that the report does not show much because not so many people visit my blog, this is just the beginning and hopefully I will enrich my blog and increase the traffic. Please review the reports bellow.

Google Analytics Overview Report

9

Dashboard Report, Google Analytics

Geo-Location Report, Google Analytics.

The reports above have more specific detail when you click on the view report link.

STAT Counter

The last tool I used is the Stat-counter from www.statcounter.com, the process is the same as the

Hit counter above, I registered, selected format and added to my blog as a gadget. I also made it

accessible to the public, anyone can view my stats by clicking on “view stats”.

10

Analytics Reports from Stat-counter.

SUMMARY

In this age the web is very important and no business or industry can do without it. The web is a vital tool

In Marketing and business in general. The website needs serve the business goals, and to be competitive

by being attractive and appealing. The Performance needs to be measured to see what works and what

does not. There are many tools and technologies available and the choice depends on the company goals,

size and industry.

Bibliography

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software 2. http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/#1.1 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing 4. http://www.aksi.net/website-design-tutorial2.htm 5. http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/mar03.asp#

11

Other References

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting http://www.statcounter.com/ http://www.pax.com/counter/styles?page=12 http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/search_engine_optimization/ http://searchenginewatch.com

12