One of my first projects at Less Annoying Software is to build a system we can use to track the visitors to this website. That's right, I'm spying on you right now.
In case you don't know, most websites use tools to track all your online activity. This data is called "analytics" and using the information, website creators can make intelligent design decisions based on the actions of their visitors. For example, an online store might notice that lots of people leave their site from the "create an account" screen during checkout. They might respond by changing the order of the checkout screens to increase conversions.
Analytics are generally all about trends and high-level data. For companies with millions of visitors per month, it's impossible to pay attention to the actions of any one visitor, so it's common to summarize the results with various statistical categories. One of these categories is called the "Bounce Rate" and it measures the percentage of people that come to your site and immediately leave without viewing any additional pages. There are all kinds of aggregates like that in the analytics world.
Because that's how big companies need to view their data, that's how most analytics tools display data.
Google Analytics seems to be the most popular tool for tracking website activity and it really is a great service, but it's clearly not meant for small companies. That's because small companies don't have millions of visitors per month so they can't rely on the aggregate information the same way a company like Google can.
For example, because we only launched this website a week ago, we are only getting about four visitors per day. Measuring bounce rate isn't particularly important when you only have four visitors. With low-traffic websites, you want to be able to see exactly what pages each visitor looked at and in what order. At this point, every single hit generated by search engines is incredibly important to us.
Additionally, many companies don't necessarily need to work well with high-level data. Amazon must process millions of transactions per month which means they can't really afford to care about the specifics of each one. Less Annoying Software, on the other hand, might only need one customer per month in order to be hugely successful. This is both because we currently only have two people to pay and because each job could potentially be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more. This means that even if we end up with serious traffic, we still are focused on finding the hits from the perfect customers and we can ignore the rest.
I encourage anyone with a website to use a tool like Google Analytics to track general information about the effectiveness of their website. However, if you can afford to consider each potential client individually, you'd be doing yourself a huge favor by adopting a more granular system also. When I get my analytics system working, I'll probably put up a screenshot demo and make the code available to anyone that wants to give it a try.
