Web analytics is about business, people, and processes, but of course measuring and analyzing traffic, behavior and efficiency of a website or any other online medium has a technical side as well.

When drawing up a web analytics strategy and identifying key performance indicators (KPI’s), we look at business goals and translate these in metrics and data that lead to information.

This process includes defining clusters of related web pages, information and visitor segments.
One of the tasks that will be addressed with this is organizing your content into different groups. Not every page (and function) on your website is of same importance. For instance, you probably find the product and e-commerce pages more important than others like the company news page, if your most important goal is making online sales.

With web analytics, it’s important to bundle different types of content into relevant groups. With relevant, we mean in respect to the stream of clicks that you want to analyze, the KPI’s, the visitors and ultimately the return. You can only have relevant dashboards when the groups of information that you combine within them are relevant as well.

Content clusters and user-friendly navigation

The content on your website often is already clustered: because of the navigation schemas and the menus, you’ve already bundled the pages and content elements into structures that your visitor and you find useful. A typical example: product pages, pages about the company, etc.

The practice of content clustering for web analysis is best combined with a reflection on both the current structure of your content and the current navigation structure.

Many websites are still structured from a company’s point of view, and even more often from a product’s point of view.
It’s better to draw up the structures and groups from a visitor’s point of view, which deals with the business goals. After all, a visitor is a “customer” and by creating clusters to more easily identify his needs, you gain online customer intelligence.

Potential user scenarios which lead the different visitor segments to the right place (as well as the right business goals and processes like data acquisition and conversion) as efficient as possible, are nowadays recommended as the best way to structure and cluster your content.

The author is an interactive marketing consultant and experienced blogger. You can connect with him via Twitter or visit his blog.