Unlocking the Power of Your Website: A Guide to measuring impact content with data analytics.
I wrote a book for United Nations about it. You can download it below.
A guide for UN and CGIAR Centers to evaluate the usage, usability and usefulness of their websites.
This guide provides essential insights into measuring the usage, usability, and usefulness of your website. Learn how to evaluate the impact of your site, tailor it to meet audience needs, and improve its functionality and user experience. With the help of web analytics, surveys, and other tools, you can evaluate the 3Us (usage, usability, and usefulness) to achieve your objectives and make a meaningful impact. Whether you are a communication specialist, information manager, or IT technical specialist, this guide is a must-read for anyone looking to enhance their website’s impact.
Measuring the 3Us (usage, usability and usefulness) of your website is key to making sure that you are meeting the objectives and impact you set out to achieve when you built your website. Knowing how many people visit your site, who they are and what they do while they are there (usage) will help you tailor your site to deliver, share or pull in the information or messages your audiences most need, in the way audiences want to receive and contribute to it. Knowing how easily visitors find what they are looking for and their perception of your site (usability) will help you improve its functionality and the user-experience—encouraging more use of your site. And knowing how well your site meets your visitors’ information needs (usefulness) will help you improve both your content and its organization to meet those needs.
This guide provides an introduction to measuring these 3Us together with suggestions about how you can use Web analytics, surveys and other instruments to improve the 3Us and ultimately the impact of your website. Examples provide a step-by-step guide to putting this knowledge into practice.
This document is targeted at the broad range of people who contri- bute to the CGIAR’s websites, including communication specialists, information managers, management and IT technical specialists.
This guide provides an introduction to measuring the impact of your website based on the 3Us—usage, usability and usefulness.
Each section presents a general discussion of how to measure each characteristic—‘the theory’—and, examples of how to apply this knowledge—‘putting it into practice’—and suggests approaches and resources for further learning.
it must be stressed that using web analytics, usability testing and feedback surveys, to name the principal tools of these respective undertakings, is definitely a non-trivial pursuit. it is not something that can be immediately mastered simply by reading a short guide. scores, if not hundreds, of books have been written on these subjects. nevertheless, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. hence this brief introduction.
it also must be emphasized that none of these activities will be useful unless they occur in the context of what the owners of the website want the website to achieve, both in general terms and in terms of any specific aspects. As Jason Burby of the web business consultancy ZaZ inc. said in a clickZ article, the three reasons that web analytics most often fail companies are:
- the goals for the analytics program are ill- or un-defined.
- information generated from analytics projects is not effectively shared within the UN organization.
- companies don’t take action based on the data they collect.
the key then is for the website to be purpose-driven. only then will evaluating the impact be meaningful. this means maintaining a constant creative process involving both those who measure the impact of a website and those who possess the tools, access and authority to improve it.
