Since we’ve got a site, there must be a reason for its existence . . right?  We bothered to put something up – there must be a point.  But often many sites don’t consciously know why they created their sites in the first place, and this may be a result of not taking the time to articulate the goals of the site – its raison d’être.

By mapping out your goals, you’ll find it much easier to translate them into things to look at to make sure that you’re achieving your goals. These “things to look at” are also called metrics.  AKA KPIs.  AKA all those other silly names that denote some sort of accountability.  At any rate, it turns out that wachingwebsites.com’s goals are pretty simple.  In no particular order:

1. Create a cool site that supports the book well.  This includes information about the book, its chapters, changes, updates and so on.
2. Inform people about our services.  Tell them about the company “Watching Websites”, and let them know what we do.
3. Blog about things related to our areas of expertise.  Anything goes: industry trends, anecdotes, lessons learned; as long as we provide content that our readers think is valuable, we’ll have a great start.
4. Encourage visitors to stick around by providing free resources (including presentations, whitepapers, notable conference lists, etc)
5. Be full of win.

Your goals are undoubtedly different.  Example might be “increase retention by 10%”, “party like its 1980″, “increase conversions next quarter by 1%”, “increase blog readership by 2%”, “wear cool shirts”, “increase bottom line by 25% over 2 quarters”, etc.

We’ll come back to these goals, over and over and over again during the course of this series of blog posts.  Knowing what your goals are can help you save you alot of time, by painting a clear vision of where you’ll likely want to end up.  Now that i’ve got these four things to work with, off I go to create sketches of what I envision! baseline the site to figure out how it’s doing first!  (woops, jumped the gun!).

This is an article in a series of blog posts that will look at the process of building the new Watching Websites website, focusing on metrics & analytics.  The posts include:

Part 1: things as is aren’t looking so good

Part 2: goals?  what goals?

Part 3: baselining the existing site

Part 4: mocking up the new site

Part 5: marketing requirements documents (MRD) made easy

Part 6: requirements definitions documents (RDD) made easy

Part 7: analytics requirements documents (ARD) made easy

Part 8: choosing the right platform

Part 9: watching websites – the back end

Part 10: watching websites – the front end

Part 11: watching websites – going live!

Part 12: post-upgrade analytics in practice

Part 13: optimizing the site

Part 14: lessons learned & conclusions

I have a problem with web analytics.

The whole notion of a web visit as a rigid set of steps that users follow is incompatible with how we use the web today. Visitors browse around the site, taking their time, exploring and interacting. Occasionally, they complete some kind of action we want—inviting their friends, buying something, and so on.

For a couple of years, I’ve been thinking about web visits in terms of two fundamental building blocks: Places and tasks. If you look at your site as a series of places and tasks, you’ll think differently about how and what you should be watching.

Places: Where users hang out

A place is somewhere on the site that a user hangs out. On Reddit, this might be where they’re reading submissions. There are small actions they can take—opening linked stories in new tags, or voting things up and down. On Wikipedia, they might be reading a story. In Google Apps, perhaps they’re working on a spreadsheet.

When a user’s in a place, we care about their productivity. Are they able to vote up or down smoothly? Can they read the story quickly, and do images load? Are they successfully building a business projection in that spreadsheet? We also care about disengagement—a user who gets bored of reading articles and goes elsewhere, for example.

Tasks: When users have a mission

By contrast, a task is something the user sets out to accomplish. It’s several steps, and some of those steps don’t happen on the website itself. And a task puts the user in a different mode of operation. It’s the Reddit user creating an account for themselves, or submitting a new link. It’s the Wikipedia reader deciding to edit a page. Or it’s the Google Apps user sharing their spreadsheet with someone.

When a user’s trying to accomplish a task, we care about their accomplishment of the task. Did the invite result in a new enrolment? Did they complete the purchase? Was the edit of the article ultimately saved? Were they able to add the widget to their dashboard?

A new way to look at sites

Looking at websites as collections of places and tasks quickly underscores the limitations of page-centric, funnel-minded web analytics.

For one thing, you quickly realize that you need to instrument places and tasks very differently: Places need analysis of actions within the place (How many videos did he watch? How often did he pause them? Did he see the ad?) while tasks need analysis of progress (Did he send the mail? Did it bounce? Did the recipient act on it?)

What’s more, traditional page-centric instrumentation won’t work. Actions happen at the sub-page level, with components of a page; often, this involves a Rich Internet Application like Flash or Silverlight.

To further complicate matters, tasks often involve steps beyond the view of analytics, such as e-mail invitations, instant messages, RSS feeds, and third-party sites. Tracking the accomplishment of a task across multiple systems is a challenge, with all manner of tracking cookies, dynamic URLs, and embedded GIFs used to try and follow the task to completion.

Paving the way to places and tasks

There’s lots of good innovation going on in this realm. Steve Souders’ Episodes model creates a way for designers to instrument user actions cleanly even within a page, which is ideal for “places” analytics. Google recently unveiled the ability to send back events (like upvoting a story) within a page.

At the same time, Kissmetrics’ Product Planner, which showcases design workflows, is all about tasks. In some cases the tasks are linear—buy something—while in others, they’re part of a feedback loop such as inviting others that leads to viral adoption.

What can you do to get started?

Most web operators have a mental map of their site. Some even draw it on a wall. You can map out a site, consisting of places and tasks, in this way.

For each place, make a note of all the events you care about. Including timing events (“a video starts playing”) and user interactions (“user upvotes and the button’s color changes.”) Also identify the actions that initiate a task (such as “share this spreadsheet.”)

For each task, make a note of all the steps you want to track, including those that aren’t on your site. Identify the key metrics you should know (for a mail send, for example, this might be bounce rate, open rate, and click rate.)

Then the next time you’re presenting your web monitoring results, overlay them on the map. For each place or task, show the analytics (what the users did) and the user experience (whether they could do it.) If you have psychographic information (why they did it) such as surveys, or usability metrics (how did they do it), include that as well.

The end result is a much more accurate representation of the ebb and flow of your online business. It will probably reveal significant gaps in your web visibility strategy, too—but at least now you’ll know where your blind spots are.