Home E-mail Tips Website Metrics   Scenarios     A/B Testing     Search Engines     Layout/Design Tips   Book Reviews Web Resources    Explore M5 Subscriber Web-based list management made simple! Simple subscribe tool Opt-in confirmed Track reads and clicks Custom matching look Free for up to         5000 contacts Explore M5 Mailer Take the bulk out of email! TM Use your own data Personal email merge Handy email templates Scriptable with JavaScript, PHP, VBasic Explore M5 Analyzer Get great site statistics directly from your web server log files. Optimize site design Track campaigns Performance Metrics

Scenario Analysis

Visitors coming through your website likely go through several stages, as follows:

Landing Page: This is the page they land on when they go to your site. They get there either from typing your site name into a browser (probably rare), finding it on a search engine, or from a referral partner who links to you from their site. Presumably, on each potential landing page, you have some general idea of what you want them to accomplish once they are there.

Intermediate Queries: Visitors are either going to see what you have to offer with interest, hunt for something specific that they can't find, or some combination of these which is most likely. It would be great to know the difference! But that's rather hard without asking them directly what they are doing while they are doing it. However, you may have a general idea where they should go from each landing page, and you may want to measure whether or not they actually did go there.

Goal: If your landing page has one or more goals that you'd like to see your visitors eventually reach, then this would be, in an ideal situation, the last thing a visitor does on your site before going off to do something else.

Of course, visitors can leave at any stage.

Scenario Analysis lets you see how many visitors go through each stage in sequence. To define a scenario, set up "milepost pages" or some wildcard that matches the milepost, so that you can measure how many visitors go through each one during their session. That's where good site design comes in: Name your pages with good file names.

The importance of Names

If you know you will be doing some scenario analysis, which is important for measuring usability, then you can design your web page files with good names that share some common phrase for the same purpose. For example, on there may be several pages that deal with investments on your site. If you make sure that "stock" is in the name of the page, then you could make "*stock*" one of the steps in your scenario.

FastStats Analyzer has built-in scenario analysis that's fairly easy to set up. Just define each of your stages, and then run your analysis.

Home   |   Site map   |   Analyzer   |   Mailer   |   PopMonger   |   Resources   |   Customers and Partners  |   Contact
Mach5 is a trademark of Mach5 Development, in use since 2000.