Abstract

Methods and means of website efficiency measurement

Author: Evgeniy Slakva, DonNTU CS faculty undergraduate
Scientific advisor: Dr. Alexander Anoprienko

Work actuality
Existing researches review
Work objectives
Analysis methods and means
Practical value
Scientific newness
Conclusions and prospects

Work actuality

Nowadays almost each company or organization has own website or at least wants to create one. Times when sites were created just "to be" are all gone, and now when site is created its tasks are determined at first.

It isn't bad when website is used just as imaging and advertising tool, just representing company's contacts in Internet, but this is not enough. Customers and associates will still use that contact information to solve their problems. In the same time those people at first already found this company's website and at second might solve their problems without direct call to this company. This means that website can handle some business processes of this company, thereby decreasing their cost and increasing efficiency.

So, let's think people create websites to solve their certain problems. Nevertheless lot of sites created either don't solve that problems at all or solve them unsatisfactorily. This happens because of various reasons, and site owner cannot be accused in ordering or acceptance of low-quality product. Web studio customer is not obliged to have site creating experience. Sometimes even professional cannot say at first glance why does not site returning well.

So existence of some means for certain site to determine does it work good or there are certain problems is foreseen. It would be good also to determine what the problems are, if any, and how to get rid of them.

Existing researches review

Search for scientific researches has shown that there are works on web servers performance analysis, i.e. technical efficiency. There is only a small amount of works devoted to site users' behavior studies and to website efficiency analysis.

Nevertheless, there are companies which do such researches on commercial basis. Most of these companies work in U.S. and Western Europe because Internet is much more widely used in those regions and there is more demand for such studies. There are only a few such companies in CIS.

None of those companies publish detailed methods of their researches. From one side this is because of commercial interests and know-how. But from other side such confidentiality doesn't allow to make independent audit of used techical means and statistical methods, so customer of website usage study just have to trust promotional words about its accuracy and reliability.

Work objectives

Folowing objectives should be achieved during the work:

creation of software that uses all available browser means that can be used to do web usage mining with maximum accuracy;
creation of methods of gathered statistical information analysis for making reliable decisions from it;
creation of typical problem patterns (correspondence of certain website efficiency problems to certain typical user behaviour who meets such a problem).

Analysis methods and means

Initial technical information for efficiency measurement is gathered from several main sources. Those are:

page appearance;
data sent by client browser by default (visit date/time, ip-address and so on);
data gathered by special software with the help of browser cookies (new or returning visitor, path on site, information about previous visits);
data that can be sent by browser with the help of embedded javascript code snippet (cached pages visits, navigation with browser's Forward/Back buttons, closing of browser, exit link, page view time);
data that can be sent by especially modified java- and flash-content (data about key user actions with that content.)

Gathered statistical data is analyzed then from the point of view of webpages and website users, and main attention is given to weak places in which users are not doing what expected from them on that website. It can be found then what site peculiarities prevent achievement of site goals, or, maybe, what new problems site should solve which users are expecting for.

Practical value

System that is being created can be used by any website owner to get information about website users behaviour; about existing and potential problems with site that may lead to efficiency and ROI decrease; about possibly missed site goals which users are expecting for. At the end usage of this system and data templates should increase efficiency of websites that are using it.

Scientific newness

Scientific newness of this work consists in getting statistical information about website users' behaviour and about users' response to typical decisions used in website structural design. At the end such statistical data should describe design solutions that are accepted well by users, and design solutions that should be avoided.

Conclusions and prospects

In this work software web-system on PHP language is developed which should gather and analyze statictical data of website users' behaviour. Certain website analysis as well as gathering of common statistical data about users' reaction to certain structural and site design patterns will be performed with the help of this system.

Programming platform PHP was chosen to do this project at first because of simplicity and convenience of this language and at second because PHP is most widely used server-side scripting language nowadays. So the system will be able to integrate with most websites that may require it.

One of the essential directions of farther development is to implement this system for other popular server platforms like ASP and JSP.

One of promising research directions is possibility and utility of more delicate users' behaviour data usage for analyzing website efficiency. This data can be, for example, keyboard key presses, mouse pointer moves over the webpage, information about page scroll and so on.