UAD8: Web Analytics: Shadows on the wall

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

David Anderson, University of Buffalo

He starts with a little back history and then jumps into showing an example of Webalizer. But his internet connection was not working.

Current the program he uses is Mach 5 FastStats – it took them about 4hours to churn over a year of data. Plus it has some cool extras.

  • Hypertext tree view.
    • Cool feature – shows entry and exit points in a visual way.
    • Lets you easily walk down the hierarchy.
  • Tracked files.
  • Scenario analysis.

Clickheat:

  • Open source click tracker.
  • Very lightweight.
  • Need php5 on server (with GD) – extra JavaScript on pages.
  • Output looks very similar to a product we demoed.

Interesting findings:

  • People will click on things that are not really links (maybe they should be made in into in links).
  • Google analytics is really for commerce. It it useful to others, but sometimes hard to use all the features:
    • Goals can be used to see how people navigate an orientation.
    • Rather then a shopping cart, our goals can be registration or admissions.

Leave a Reply

You know you want to...