You are Sherlock Holmes, i.e., Understanding your Web Users

There are many ways to track usage on your site. There are plenty of services out there where you generate a snippet of code, put that on your pages, and voila!, you've got tracking.

These are great, because they tell you about what is being done on your site, who is visiting, where they are from, when they are coming, how many pages they've seen, how long they've been here, what browser they're using, and so on.

Although these services provide you with information, do they provide you with insight? Do they tell you anything about what people are looking for? Why they came here? What they are expecting or hoping to find?

The answer is no, not really. You can, of course, study stat reports and infer some things. You can be like Sherlock Holmes and make conclusions based on certain pieces of evidence. But these are inferences, after all.

This is where I will argue for having some kind of search functionality on your site. You know, that helpless little search bar at the top right hand corner of your site which every web developer puts on just for the sake of it, and because "that's what everyone else is doing anyway."

The search bar provides you with more opportunity to gain insight into not just usage, but also an understanding of what people want, hope, and expect from your site.

 Take a look at the image to the left. This is a tracking function that we developed for a medical device client of ours. The red bars on the left hand side are graphs that show the number of specific keywords that were entered into the search bar on the web site. The right hand side shows the number of results that the search function provided based on the keyword. If there were results, you could then see which pages produced those results.

In this case, most searches did not produce results of any kind for users that were utilizing the search function. What does this tell you?

If you can simply know what your audience is looking for, you can start to create content that will address those needs and desires. In the case of this client, we developed a CMS where meta keywords were the determining factor that drove search results. If people are looking for a particular product, for example, and this manufacturer does not produce that product, but produces one similar, the manufacturer can then create keywords based on queries which will produce relevant results for the user.

Thus insight. Which is a little more than just tracking, and really brings into focus just why you have a web site in the first place.