Web Analytics – understand and improve the user experience

Title: Web Analytics – understand and improve the user experience
Author: Marcus Österberg
Cover: Anna Johansson
Edition: English web version. Machine translation. 1.0 (2026-03-22)
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
Publisher: Intranätverk AB

Whether you are a communicator, strategist, developer, architect or marketing manager, this is the book for you. Marcus demystifies the mystery surrounding web analytics.

– Elwira Kotowska, web project manager

This book is really good for everyone interested. If you are new to the field, this is a goldmine. If you are more experienced, you will be inspired by Marcus's constantly relevant environmental analyses. So regardless of level, the book is well worth reading.

– Magnus Österhult, web strategist at Falkenberg Municipality

Would you rather download the web analytics book?

If you would rather download it as an e-book, it is available for free at Apple Books and Smashwords, among others. You will get it in EPUB format which works perfectly on your phone, tablet, e-reader or modern computers.

Table of contents

• Web Analytics – understand and improve the user experience
  • Before we begin
    • Why you should read this book
    • About me
• Foreword
• Part 1: Introduction to web analytics
  • Introduction to working measurably – start with a baseline measurement
  • Documentation you should have before a new web project starts
  • Personas are useful for web analytics too
  • A week of empathy for your users
  • What stakeholders are there and what competencies are involved?
  • Data quality
  • About segmentation and why it is important
  • Method for continuous web analytics
    • Short version of the method
    • Step 1: Working with measurable business goals
    • Step 2: Develop reports and methods for upcoming analysis
    • Step 3: Analyse
    • Step 4: Implement improvements on the website
    • ...and then what?
• Part 2: An analytical perspective on design, performance and content
  • Redesigning? Create a design budget!
  • Content budget
  • Style guide = communicative style, pattern library and performance budget
  • Pattern libraries provide clearer requirements for suppliers
  • Performance budget, technical values and quality guidelines
• Part 3: Web Analytics: Deep dive
  • It is difficult to evaluate your own website yourself
  • Starting a web project or redesign
  • What content is good (and what can be discarded)?
  • Search analytics is more important than some think
  • What is in the web analytics toolbox?
  • Create a test page to evaluate changes in web design
  • A few more perspectives on web analytics
    • Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
    • The business goals for the website
    • Examples of formulating key performance indicators
    • Standardised methods and metrics
    • About statistics (and common mistakes)
• Part 4: Activity plan
  • Hygiene factors
  • Implement HTTP/2 and HTTPS
  • Ensure that tracking of site search, outbound links, error pages and downloads works
  • Not accidentally leaking personal or customer data to web analytics tools or other third-party systems
  • Three or fewer stylesheets
  • 3 or fewer JavaScript files
  • 3 or fewer design images
  • Only load what is needed, when it is needed
  • Make sure you have access to good data for web analytics
  • Validate according to WCAG 2.0 level AA
  • If you have notifications, follow up on them!
  • Important outbound links should lead to accessible websites
  • Page views should be under one second?
  • Google PageSpeed mobile should be at least 80 out of 100
  • Images should be optimised for the web
  • Do not use fonts that need to be downloaded
  • Follow W3C recommendations for HTML, CSS and JavaScript
  • Minify front-end code
  • Send text files compressed
  • Follow webbriktlinjer.se
  • File lifetime defaults to 30 days
  • Sensible URLs
  • Responsive typography
  • Content published as structured data
  • References to files that cannot be found or do not work
  • Wrong status codes are sent – the website is lying
  • The website can be crawled and indexed
  • Links to pages that do not exist
  • The server returns error messages in the 500 range
  • Good and appropriately long page titles
  • Reasonable file sizes
  • No duplicate content
  • An appropriate number of main headings
  • Have an (appropriately long) description text
  • Media should have alternative texts
  • An appropriate number of links per page
  • Web pages need inbound links
  • Beware of internal redirect chains
  • Do not specify keywords – unnecessarily
  • Appropriate depth in the website
  • Clear link texts
  • Good distribution of link juice
  • Structural CSS included in the HTML code
  • Do not open links in a new window
  • Do not publish PDF files
  • Provide a sitemap
  • Have a robots.txt and a humans.txt
  • Rounding off
• Glossary
• References
• Book and reading recommendations
• Acknowledgements
• Footnotes

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Continue reading – Part 1: Introduction to web analytics