Watching the widgets

Trainspotters aren’t the only people who collect numbers. More often than not, businesses keep detailed logs of what people view on their website. And like trainspotters, they will thumb through them once in a while to see what to do next. But for both, the numbers are little more than souvenirs of past encounters that can confer bragging rights.

Many companies struggle to put their web analytics data to work in the business. In an ideal world, you’d use it to respond to changing market conditions. If everyone’s searching for the same new product, you’d put it on the homepage straight away. If there’s a close association between two products, with people who view one often buying the other, you’d create a simple navigation link to make it easier for people to jump between them.

There are sites that do this, of course. Amazon’s whole site responds to visitors’ behaviour. Product pages recommend similar products that customers consider and search results return related items even when there’s no obvious keyword match for the search string. But Amazon has invested heavily in data integration to make this possible. For most businesses, particularly smaller retailers, such an investment is unviable.

All that is set to change with the introduction of analytics widgets. These are simple plug-ins to the website which can be added as easily as embedding an image. Widgets turn analytics data into actionable information and use it to serve customers in near real time. The aim is to turn the paths visitors take through the site into proper navigable roads for future visitors, and so to enhance the user experience. The navigation can be shaped in response to visitor trends, for example, by listing today’s most popular products.

The technology is not without its challenges. Websites must ensure the system can’t be gamed, so that people can’t use it to promote silly combinations for comic effect. The usability of the site needs to be protected too: widgets don’t replace good navigation and any confusion they might cause must be minimised.

For most websites, analytics widgets will enable them to make their data more accessible and more useful. That should leave more time for the finer things in life. Like trainspotting.