Hurol Inan: Web Analytics Consultant & Author

Web analytics is about understanding how well your website is fulfilling its objectives and meeting the needs of its targeted audiences. It reveals the aspects of your website that be enhanced to deliver better customer experience.

A good approach to go about spotting areas that can benefit from optimization is identifying and studying the users that have unsuccessful, unsatisfying experiences on your website.

A basic segmentation according to the possible outcomes of the users’ visits can help you isolate the frustrated users and then you can study what might be causing the frustrations. An illustrative segmentation may include:

• Accidental arrivals
• Mismatched prospects
• Unconvinced frustrated prospects
• Successful acquisitions

Each of these segments are described below.

Accidental arrivals: There will always be a proportion of the users that arrive on your website and very quickly determine that it is not what they were looking for and exit out. Various reasons, such as improper search engine indexing, might have landed them on your website.

Mismatched prospects: These are the users who arrive at your website to look for certain information but their needs are not fully satisfied. For instance, visiting your site to look for employment opportunities but not being able to find a suitable position would be the experience of this segment.

Unconvinced frustrated prospects: Theoretically your website could meet the needs of this segment but for some reason these people cannot reach their goals and drop out of your website.

Successful acquisitions: These are the users who have satisfactory online experience by visiting your website and accomplish their goals.

Web analytics should focus on studying unconvinced frustrated website users to determine the possible causes leading to their drop-outs from your website.

The possible causes might be various. It could be do to with the design effectiveness, content suitability, technical performance.

This is the investigative part of the web analytics. You should study the behavioural profiles of frustrated users and contrast these to the successful ones.

To isolate the potential problem areas, concentrate on pages that have high exit ratios. Use filtering / profiling capabilities of your web analytics solution. Many web analytics solutions now allow defining a certain behaviour type and presenting the activities of these users only. For instance, you can isolate the users who have arrived from a certain referral source and performed certain actions on the website.

Your objective should be to figure out simple and smart enhancements to convert as many of the unconvinced frustrated users to become successful acquisitions.