Last century, when I was back in journalism school, they drummed into our (then long-haired) heads the fundamentals of a good story: the five Ws and one H - who, what, when, where, why and how.

The same basic principles apply to many facets of the Internet, not just writing copy, but also understanding web traffic. British Internet psychologist and writer Graham Jones recently posted the following on LinkedIn that is worth reproducing in full:

“All methods of analytics miss out a vital ingredient - without which the analytics are largely worthless. None of the systems explain the motivation of your web site visitors. WHY did they visit? That’s THE most important piece of information you need, yet all we get from analytics software is WHAT they did - and to some extent - HOW they did it. Although this provides some useful information, it fails to beat in-depth visitor analysis using surveys which can get at the motivation of visitors. Once you know the motivation you can gain a deeper understanding of how to improve your site. Without knowing the reasoning behind a visitor, you can only “tinker” with the site. If an enterprising software engineer were to work out how to track motivation online - that would be a breakthrough that would revolutionise analytics.”

This is what companies need to focus on when looking at web traffic and trying to work out how it benefits their business. It’s not easy, but understanding and acting on the ’soft stuff’ is what will help companies set themselves apart from their competitors in the increasingly complicated marketplace. You shouldn’t ignore the hard numbers, but you need to blend them with a deeper understanding of your customers and their motivation.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet answer to this. Each company needs to work out its own framework that meshes with its corporate strategy and the structure will depend on the things that are most important to that company. But the insights that can be gained from this approach are well worth the effort.

Tags: analytics, web analytics

Posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 9:47 am under Journalism, Marketing, Technology, e-marketing.

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