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Of site traffic and empty seats

There were about a dozen people there when Varun Arora of Planetasia sat down after speaking on Site Usage Analysis: Understanding Your Online Customer. It wasn't Arora's fault. He had put his point across well and clarified misconceptions in a matter of minutes.

He spoke of how Planetasia could track your consumer base, in a smaller way than probably Jupiter Communications does in the US.

"Knowing what your customers are interested in goes a long way when planning your site, and its content. And this is done through surveys which track your logs, not hits which are mere computer functions of file transfers.''

He spoke of ways to recognise logs, cookies that help you find from which search engine your user has just come in, page views and page impressions. He also elaborated on the navigational path each user takes, which can be quite confusing. But this would provide a good profile of the user, he said, adding a site shouldn't be built just because it's cool to have a URL.

Some reasons a site becomes a winner is because "relevant visitors come in for a purpose and move accordingly. Their frequency, their principle areas of interest can help you determine how to better hone your site, variance of interest by geography (an Indian logging in from the US may not follow the same path as his brother in India would), the degree of participation and the navigation, all help you create and maintain a better site,'' he said.

The bottomline, of course is to collect log data, to analyse them, examine them for trends and to document them.

Also important was communicating about your site with people not just within your organisation but also outside. This would give you further insights on how to correct your mistakes and to understand the medium better, he said.

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