Website analytics for user experience professionals are, I think, quite fun. I think that there are really four parts that you have to consider when you are planning your strategy around understanding and leveraging the findings that you can get out of website analytics. So, the four different steps are: measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting. Those things all happen in the service of helping you to understand and optimize the experience once you've released it and people are using it. Analytics help organizations to understand whether or not the design changes that they are releasing to the live experience are successful. It could be that an original design that you released is working great or not great. But if you aren't actually looking at how people are using it, you won't know whether or not there have been any changes with regard to people's experience with that approach. You want to understand and quantify UX success and failure and as well locate areas of opportunity where you might tweak or add additional features or functions to help people to be more successful using your site. So website analytics help you to tell a story that, supported by data, that helps to explain how people are spending time within your experience. Another consideration is that, to be able to conduct AB testing, you must be collecting analytics via your site because those analytics are what you're trying to impact when you are doing AB testing. Let's delve into measurements. First, you need to decide what it is that you need to know. This is going to be a combination of what your experience does, what the site has to do to achieve those goals, what people have to do in order to support their objectives and thereby drive your goals, what the metrics are for performance that you think are most important, and then what the thresholds are, or targets that you're going to use to gauge success. It takes some time to figure out what all of these things are. Typically, what you'll find out is, you'll start measuring these things and they won't be exactly what it is that you need. So you're going to evolve them over time. The next step is actually to collect that data, which means that you're going to be gathering counts around how it is that people are moving through your site or interacting with elements on pages. Typically, that's collected either through a Web server, using log files or through page tagging. So, that enables you to capture on-page behaviors such as events or interactions with content. From a user experience perspective, analysis really is getting a sense of what the data is telling you so that you can understand what it is you need to do in order to make change with regard to your experience. So whether that is getting a sense for people being successful in converting on a particular page or whether it's understanding how it is that people are moving through a site to get a sense for, can we make this interaction more efficient? You will use the combination, potentially, of tools or spreadsheets to delve into that data. So typically, when you are sharing reports about this information, you're going to be leveraging either a platform or a tool to help show and tell a story of what's happening on your site. Most organizations these days are using either Adobe or Google. Then, some organizations are using custom means of presenting information and findings about behaviors on their sites. Additionally, there are analytics tools that are very helpful in helping to show that story too. So you'll find that software that shows heat maps or even session replays to see what is that people were experiencing, real time, can help you get a sense for how effective and efficient your experience is. When you're taking a look at on versus off-site analytics, what you're really trying to get a sense for is what can we do to understand how it is that people are thinking about using our experience given the context of what's happening in the rest of the marketplace? So here's an example. So one of the things that we're seeing over the last several years is that people are using their mobile phones in different ways, in different spaces over time. So in retail, one of the behaviors that we're seeing is that people are more and more frequently using their phones to browse for information about products, but they're not completing a whole lot of transactions. So they're not doing a lot of buying online using their phones. There may be a lot of reasons why they're not doing that. So a couple of thoughts are, it's really hard for people to use those teeny tiny controls in order to type in their addresses. Or maybe it is that they don't feel confident about the safety of their Personally Identifiable Information or PII. So one of the things that you could be thinking about for those off-site analytics is really getting a sense for what browsers, what devices, and what times of day people are using mobile devices, so that you can get context for what it is that people are doing on your site and whether or not that is average or defers or what you can do to actually optimize your experience to anticipate how it is that people would want to use your site but may not be at the moment. So, the power in looking at both what people are doing on your site as well as what people are doing in general, is really in getting a sense for how it is that you can potentially change the experience on your site to align better with what it is that people need.
