From Written Reports to Visualization for Website Analytics

Duo uses a persona-based approach to website designs - which should help answer questions like, “Are potential clients or current clients the most common website visitor and your target for content?” Personas help designers and programmers visualize real people reading and acting on the content they find on a website. But after the design is done and the website is implemented, you have to know what your visitors are doing, how long they’re spending doing that, and whether your website is efficiently “converting” the behavior you want to see - buying a product, signing up for a class, or connecting with other like-minded individuals. So you constantly monitor your website to answer the questions related to your personas’ behaviors.

Visitorville is a visual website metrics tool that lets you go beyond just the numbers - “hits” don’t provide enough inforomation for you to know how your site is being used. But using a helicopter to circle your Very Important People around your website virtually, now that is above and beyond your usual website metrics tool.

Which pages are the most visited? Which personas visit those specific pages most often and how long does it take them to accomplish their goals? You can visualize people coming and going in buses, with traffic in buses and people that look like the Sims (in the 2D view) and they also offer a 3D view that looks like Second Life. The screen shots are really amazing and you can wow your friends and clients alike by showing them around your website in a way they’ve likely never envisioned it before.

I get a little bit creeped out sometimes by MyBlogLog displaying my profile picture while I’m viewing a blog. Every time I read a certain blog and it shows “user from Austin, TX” on a map or list of some sort, I wonder if anyone knows it’s me and if that matters.

Yet, despite my own trepidation and refusal to use such widgets on my site, I know bloggers who find it great fun and a motivator to keep writing. Using Feedjit as an embedded widget on your blog or website may help other website visitors as they browse, who knows?

What are your thoughts? Is it useful and motivating or simply too much information to have these visual methods for watching your web traffic?