Ever wonder what web analytics package your competitors are using?  Or your customers?  Are they using Google Analytics or some of the large enterprise offerings from WebTrends or Omniture?  Or possibly they are even *gasp* using no analytics at all.

Eric T. Peterson, one of the leading thinkers in web analytics, has developed a tool which scans a website and returns the name of any major web analytics packages it discovers.  It works by looking of the index or main page of the website at the domain entered, and scanning it for the embedded scripts used by the different analytics vendors.  It won’t work on every available web analytics package, but it will catch the major ones.

The Vendor Discovery Tool 2.0 is available on the Web Analytics Demystified web site, and is free to use.  Check out some of the excellent free reference material that is available while you’re there.

Ensuring a fast, responsive web site for your visitors is one of the best – and often least expensive – ways to improve the ROI of a web presence.  There is no sense in releasing something out onto the Internet if all your visitors are going to leave early, and miss the message out of sheer frustration, boredom, or a poor overall experience.  On the web you typically have mere seconds to make people happy.

Unfortunately this important component of any good web optimization strategy can get overlooked in the mix of web development, online marketing, web analytics, and SEO programs.  As with most things in life, striking the right balance for your web site visitors is the key, though with the right tools and measurements in hand it does not have to be a painful experience.

Here are a couple of methods to help you judge the speed of your own website from a visitor’s point of view:

1.  Speed testing your web pages.

There are plenty of web page speed analyzers online, though your mileage with these can vary depending on the location of the test server (no sense using an Australian server if most of your clients are from Texas), and the competency of the developer who launched them.  I’ve had pretty good luck with Web Page Analyzer by WebSiteOpimization.com.  Their President wrote the book on Website Optimization (literally, it’s published by O’Reilly), so he knows a thing or two about website performance.  I have also used Pingdom’s free Tools For Webmasters which gives a nice visual report and a little more functionality.

Another useful tool is the Firefox plugin YSlow from the Yahoo! Developer Network.  It analyzes web pages, grades them by performance, and makes multiple suggestion on how to increase performance.  This plugin requires the Firefox Firebug web development plugin as well, so make sure you have it installed as well (first).  YSlow takes its grading criteria from the Yahoo! Developer Network article “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site“, which is excellent reading for the technically inclined.

2.  Load Testing / Stress Testing your site.

If you have a large website, or a corporate site that can expect to get bursts of simultaneous visitors, you will probably want to invest in load performance testing, or stress testing.  There are a number of companies that offer load testing services of various sizes and strengths – including Webperformance and Load Impact.  There are software-based solutions available for this as well like the free Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool and the more complicated Apache JMeter, but they are, generally speaking, best left to the professionals who know what they are doing.

An important note:  NEVER stress test a live site without the knowledge and agreement of the webmaster and the web analyst.  And NEVER NEVER run one of these tests against a shared hosting solution unless you want to make your web hosting provider very angry.  Load testing can bring a web server to its knees, so it’s important to know how to fix this before you start.

3.  Determine your vistors’ connection speeds.

Most web analytics packages, including Google Analytics can give you some idea as to the connection speeds of your visitors.  You’ll want to be careful with this, however, because it’s typically a the solution’s best guess using a combination of testing methods, with “unknown” typically being the largest single group.  Still it’s a useful measurement to consider because if you’re about to roll out a fancy new media-rich web site, and 25% of your visitors are on some form of dialup connection (or even slower DSL connections, these days), you risk losing them due to reduced performance.

Hopefully this post will get you started in evaluating, or at least thinking about the speed of your own web site from your visitor’s point of view.  A couple of the topics are a little on the advanced side, so feel free to contact me (via email or through the comments) if you have any questions, further advice,  and/or experience with similar speed testing solutions.

Generally speaking, I subscribe to the belief that everything a business puts out on the Internet should be measured in some way. Granted, this can seem a little tedious, and there are times where the logistics that go into collecting data can appear to be complex or time consuming to those responsible for managing the message. In my experience, however, the benefits of being able to make informed decisions of where a company and its people should concentrate resources based on solid analytics pretty much always pays off in the long run.

Take Twitter, for example.  Many organizations and professionals have engaged the global conversation that is Twitter in hopes of connecting with potential clients and to bring attention to their own products and services.  Certainly, there can be a great deal of benefit in participating in this form of social media networking when implemented well, though blatant advertising only works under very specific circumstances.  In fact, anyone using Twitter as a communications tool quickly realizes that it is far more effective to converse in a human sort of way than to blindly attempt to herd folks to the corporate web site.  Still, if the end goal of the campaign is ultimately to increase traffic to your web properties, than visits generated by Twitter posts (OK, tweets) is definitely something you want to measure.

You can, of course try and guesstimate traffic coming in from Twitter by having your web analytics package report on traffic coming in from twitter.com, but that solution will omit traffic from stand alone clients (probably the bulk of users these days) and cases where people share the link from your tweet with others via email or some other means.

A far better way is to treat Twitter traffic as you would any other online marketing campaign.  And, as most web analytics packages have the ability to track campaign traffic separately from regular web site traffic, you will be able to then track the effect of your Twitter communications as it relates to your web traffic as a whole.

For example, if Google Analytics is your web analytics package of choice, simply create a URL with the campaign tracking parameters using the Google Analytics URL Builder as shown below.

Then, take the generated URL (the big long one at the bottom of the image above, with the utm codes included) and use a URL shortener (another set of utilities that have sprung up as a result of Twitter’s 140 character limit) like Bit.ly or Tinyurl.com to convert it to a version much more suitable for use with Twitter.

Bit.ly Conversion Step 1:

Bit.ly Step 2:

Now, whenever you use the shortened URL in Twitter, you will be able to track and analyze the traffic resulting from those links because they will be grouped in to the Twitter campaign (or whatever name you’ve given the campaign).  If your Twitter profile has a link to the web site, you may want to replace it with the Google-generated URL as well, so you can track traffic coming in through that link.  The image below shows the results of the campaign tracking in Google Analytics.

From this point you can further refine your analysis based on region, operating systems, etc., as with any other online marketing campaign.  And obviously this method of tracking has applications far beyond Twitter.  It can, and should, be used for other social media campaigns, email newsletters, etc.  It really allows you to get a much better idea of what your audience is interested in, and provides some guidance as to the best ways of engaging social media tools in a much more intelligent way.  Good Luck!

Incidentally, I have covered a fair amount of information in this post, and it is a fairly broad example, more to illustrate the point that provide step by step instructions.  Anyone interested in learning more about using this technique, or if you’re wondering how to implement something like this within your own environment, feel free to leave a comment, or contact me directly.

As an aside, the jump in Twitter popularity has produced numerous services and tools designed to measure the success or impact of a Twitter campaign.  Twitalyzer will evaluate the activity of a Twitter account against a number of social media indicators including influence, signal to noise, generosity, velocity, and clout (see their page for definitions). With Twist you can identify key word trends (your company name, perhaps), and see how they are trending over time.  And TweetEffect matches your tweets to your followers in an attempt to give some idea of what messages brought you the most attention. There are a myriad of utilities, and even most of the large Web Analytics vendors are including some level of Twitter analytics tools in their enterprise level offerings.  Being as the bulk of this post centered on Twitter, I thought it might be useful to flag some of these for anyone just beginning their Twitter conversation.

In a perfect world all of a company’s web based marketing and online communication initiatives would entail an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach involving almost every facet of the organization happily working for the greater corporate good.  Marketing and Product Managers would steer the message, the IT and Web Team would provide guidance, implementation, and support, with input collected from other relevant divisions – Customer Service, Research, Sales, Finance,etc.

Unfortunately it is a rare organization that can informally achieve the level of collaboration required across various departments and spheres of influence to accomplish this state of being.  The more typical approach is to assign “ownership” of different facets of the online presence to different levels of the company, and have them sort out the best methods of implementation through some combination of internal and external resources.

This segmentation of the online presence of a company, however, almost inevitably leads to conflicts amongst the different areas of the business simply because the level of innovation required to be effective online tends to cause problems for those tasked with maintaining the integrity and security of existing systems.  In fact, a whole industry of consultants and hosted solutions has grown up around the perceived need of one department to do an end-run around another in order to satisfy their own responsibilities.

One method for dealing with this problem is through the creation of a Web Intelligence Steering Committee.  This committee is made up of the main corporate stakeholders and is tasked with overseeing all aspects of the organization’s web presence – from existing web properties, to social media marketing campaigns, online advertising, web analytics, to establishing clear methods for responding to any external “buzz” about the company online.

To be truly effective, a Web Intelligence Steering Committee requires, if not the direct involvement at least the strong backing of senior management responsible for guiding the company’s marketing messages on the Internet, as well as the support of the most senior technology managers.  It should have two main positions: a Program Manager, typically led by Marketing; and a Technical Manager drawn from IT or the Web Team.  The Program Manager takes the lead in defining the business processes, goals, and needs collected from every other department affected by the web presence, while the Technical manager brings the technical innovation of the company to bare on the business requirements put forward by the committee, and identifies where new technology or external resources may be necessary.

Beyond simply leveraging the resources of the company and ensuring integration of the company’s online presence across different divisions, having a dedicated Web Intelligence Steering Committee allows a company to better respond to external threats on the Internet, such as negative blog or twitter message, or even serious malicious damage to a web site, before it reaches a critical mass in the eyes of the public because established lines of internal communication are already in place to deal with a crisis.  Moreover, having such a committee can be a significant cash savings where external solutions are providing redundant services to different areas of the business.

Most importantly, though,  a Web Intelligence Steering Committee can bring a new synergy to the organization, based on the combination of innovation and technical expertise required to operate effectively on the web today.

So what’s your experience?  I’d love to hear about anyone’s experience with similar committees in a corporate environment.