I am building a new and hopefully interesting way of displaying information about how people use web sites. I have for a long time thought that most web statistics software is blotted with lots of information that is of no interest. The larger web statistics software seems to be only concerned with advertising and e-commerce conversion rates. The rest are often very dry and technical. My friend Andy Budd just wrote a post “Lies, Damn Lies and More Server Statistics” where I think his opening comments represents a lot people’s frustration with current offerings.

What I am more interested in is how people find my site, what they like about it and what they don’t. I would like information that is focused on helping me write and design better sites. So for me the following short list is of most interest:

• How popular is a page
• Did they think the content had value
• How did people find the page
• Did they move on to look at other pages on the site
• How did they use the navigation
• What did they use to view the page

My question is what would you really like to know about how people use your site. If you had the choice of only a few measures, what are the most important to you?

14 January 2006 14:11