Web analytics and communications evaluation

When evaluating a communications project, I often consider the web metrics aspect of the project, if a website played an important part in the project. Web metrics are statistics generated by tools that measure website traffic, such as how many people visited a web page, where did they come from, etc.

Seth Duncan has recently produced for the US-based Institute for PR a very interesting paper on this subject:

Using Web Analytics to Measure the Impact of Earned Online Media on Business Outcomes: A Methodological Approach (pdf)

The paper focuses on the aspect of referral (e.g. which is the most “efficient” source of traffic for a website) but also contains some intruiging descriptions of advanced statistical methods for web analytics.

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