How many people visit your website everyday? What do visitors do on your website; what terms do they search for, and what menus do they click ?
Google Analytics (GA) has been around for over a decade, and some of our members use this freemium service to get insights into how their website is used, but does using GA clearly show you how your site is used?
I read last week that FullStory had recently made a free version. This analytic suite utilizes some coding on your website to report back to the FullStory servers how your site has been used; from the FullStory dashboard you are able to see exactly how visitors interact with your website. Every click, cursor movement, and scroll will be saved for 30 days. Additionally, you can download a csv record (this feature is marked premium, but I had no problem downloading from my free account) of where every visitor went, what they searched for, how long they spent, where they live, and if they have come back multiple times. There is a lot of data here ready for you and your staff to dig into.
I never would have thought our website had this many visitors. An article I wrote regarding printer cost, circa 2012, keeps on bringing in new visitors. Actually, fourteen individual users since Friday, that is just a couple of folks shy of the amount of visitors we have had go to a post about an upcoming CE event, how odd.
I hope to use FullStory over the next few months to gain a lot of insight into the nekls.org webpage. It is already clear that information isn’t placed on our site as efficiently as one would hope, especially when you work in the business of information.
<EDIT> It occurs to me that this software could sound kind of creepy or even a security risk. I think the reader should feel secure that the data collected does not identify the users and the analytic suite does not receive back end access to the website it used with.</EDIT>