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Blog -
Marketing
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Written by Dennis Reinhardt
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Friday, 21 August 2009 17:33 |
I am starting a project to make a major revision to HtmlApp Studio. Already I have made significant alterations to the menu structure to make the program logic more obvious and fluid.
I am a long way from finished with the program revisions. Today, I wondered if the HtmlApp.com web site might not benefit from major revisions as well. That requires getting useful data on how people are using the site. ... and getting that data was aa far worse problem than I imagined.
I did not lack for raw log files. I have saved them daily for years. I have 3 different log analysis tools, one of which I wrote myself. For final analysis, I can import into Excel and see data any way I want. After several hours, I really didn't have a good insight into how people were using the site.
A basic problem is that separating human and robotic visitor is difficult. A script I wrote does that by comparing the browser string to known robots. It also looks at behavior (does it read robots.txt?, does it read image?, etc.). Even so, I did not think I was getting real human data.
On looking at the log files, it occurred to me that robotic visitors were not recording the referrer field. It was filled in only for human visitors. Granted, many fine human visitors might not allow their browsers to record the referrer out of concern for privacy. But the presence of a referrer field seemed a perfectly fine and easy to apply filter human.
I know that almost all visitors arrive at the home page and most of them go no further. I wanted to know what the visitors who got past my home page did and where they went. So, my filter was that the referring page was within the HtmlApp.com web site itself. I was not looking for referrals from search engines or anywhere else. I wanted the answer to the question, what interested humans once they got to my home page.
The results were very surprising to me. Out of 2050 human records, 1700 of them saw my video with the next most visited page the pricing page. I would never have guessed that 85% of those getting beyond the home page would have chosen the video.
There is jump out and grab you obvious message here. If I want people to know the price and encourage buying, one place to put it is at the end of the video. I know know that video will be emphasized more in the new site design. It took me an entire afternoon to pull this out of almost 100,000 log records, but I am thrilled to learn this.
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Last Updated on Friday, 21 August 2009 17:35 |
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