System iNetwork

August 6, 2007

Wanted: A Web Analytics App for i5/OS

One problem that's surely contributing to the underutilization of the System i as a web site host is lack of a native web analytics application. (I realize there are other challenges as well, but let's focus on this one today.) This is an important tool. The "user-friendly" web site is a moving target, after all. We humans as a whole are a fickle bunch -- what attracts and fascinates in April is old hat by August.

This principle seems to apply to web sites about as much as anything else. Maybe you've set up a dynamite web site, but how do you know six months later that you're still attracting as many eyeballs as you want? In fact, how do you even know for sure, for example, that your home page is still the main landing page for your web site? Unless you've got some sort of web analytics solution, you really can't. Maybe those clever enticements for your products that you're dangling on your home page are being bypassed completely by many visitors. Wouldn't you want to know that?

Web analytics software documents and helps users analyze how people use your web site. It can show what pages are visited most frequently, what web sites people coming to your web site came from, how much time people spend on your site, and even what combinations of page views are the most common, among other metrics. It's vital to gather this information in order to make your web site good enough to attract return visits -- how else are you going to diagnose how well you're doing and look for signs that site traffic isn't following your mental picture of it? People laugh today at web sites with static pages. How long will it be until even dynamic web sites that don't reinvent themselves periodically to conform to their actual use aren't really considered "dynamic" any more? (And will we call them "static dynamic web sites?") How will you know if it's time for you to consider an overhaul? How will you get the funds to carry one out without some concrete evidence to justify the expense?

Your potential customers won't be waiting around for you to get a clue, though. For example, WebCollage, a web content-management company for manufacturers, recently published its "2007 Survey of Online Consumer Product Search Habits," which showed 37 percent of online retail shoppers would go to a competitor's web site, and 55 percent would go to the manufacturer's web site, to find product information if they couldn't find it easily on the first site they checked. I would imagine your personal web habits are similar, why wouldn't your site visitors do likewise?

There are many nonnative products that provide web analytics, but wouldn't it be nice (not to mention more efficient) if such functions could be part of an entirely on-board web-administration package for System i? IBM sells IBM Web Administration for iSeries, which runs on Apache and offers some web site administration tools but not web analytics. WebSphere Commerce offers this capability via IBM's Tivoli WebSite Analytics product or in conjunction with Coremetrics' Surfaid Analytics service (which Coremetrics bought from IBM last year). But unless you've got a better reason than web analytics to pony up that kind of cash, that solution may be out of reach. (If you're interested, there's even a Redbook on using web analytics from IBM, but it's naturally from the WebSphere-user point of view.)

There are several web portal solutions for i5/OS, but they don't include tools for dissecting web page visits. (If I'm wrong about that, someone please correct me.) There are also some products that run under i5/OS that include "web analytics" in their descriptions, but these are primarily business-intelligence tools that offer functions such as online database analytics, which isn't the same.

Would you buy an i5/OS web-analytics solution if one was available? Or do you think existing nonnative solutions of this type are "good enough" and having one that's integrated with other native web-site administration tools wouldn't be a valuable enough investment? Perhaps you think this is a DIY project. Is there a vendor out there that considered providing a tool such as this but decided against it who'd be willing to share their rationale?

Posted by at August 6, 2007 1:39 PM