What is Web Analytics?
Companies maintaining websites today have an incredible wealth of customer information available to them in the form of implicit clicks, actions and behaviours. Recent studies have shown that best-in-class companies use web analytics tools widely to track these metrics and increase conversion rates. They also better appreciate the value of analytics data and disseminate the results throughout their organisations more fully than the less successful companies. Web analytics is the gathering and analysis of data via the Internet; this may include clickstream data from your website or online campaigns, customer, business or industry data. Encompassing any information that can help you to measure exactly how successful your marketing is, or to give you more intelligence to hone business and marketing strategies. The targeted result usually being some measure of increased income generation or reduction in costs. Clickstream analysis is the most common use of web analytics. Which includes reporting on the number of clicks, time on a page, entrance and exit pages, cost-per-click, campaign costs, number of sales, conversion rates, revenue per sale and total revenues. You can see which part of your site is performing and producing sales and which isn’t. It also shows you how long visitors stay on a page so you know whether the page interests them. It presents all this information in graphs and pie charts to make it easier to get an immediate grasp of trends and comparisons.
“89% of Best-in-Class companies currently use or plan to use analytics as a method to measure corporate goals such as compliance with sales and marketing objectives and elevation of customer experience. This majority group uses analytics data to influence decisions and impact change across multiple business units.” – Aberdeen Group
The best use of analytical data is had through comparing campaigns, people and time periods. This is called traffic segmentation and it lets you see who your visitors are and what they do at your site over time. Which campaign is bringing the best success, whether newsletters, banners, pay-per-click, organic search engine traffic and from multiple sources. Which group of people brought the best sales results, perhaps Google brought more visitors than MSN, but MSN had the higher sales conversion rate. This kind of data helps you make intelligent budgeting decisions on where your advertising dollars are best spent. You can do split testing, using more than one landing page, email subject, page format, copy format, or any other aspect of your online marketing. Gather data from the different result streams and see which gives better results, giving you another way to target greater success. Offline analysis of campaign data often takes months to assimilate. With web analytics this data is available almost instantly, due to online response times and tools available. Once you have the data, you need to be able to interpret it to make the decision on what to change to increase success. It all comes down to competitive advantage. Most online companies are still not using analytical data to their advantage. Any organisation that masters web analytics can steal a lead on their competition and benefit from the subsequent cost-savings, increased brand awareness and increased sales.
“In the Best-in-Class companies segment 75% measured percentage of new visitors, 83% improved the average page views per visitor, 75% measured average visitor duration, 68% improved customer conversion rates, 67% measure percentage of returning visitors, 64% improved the number of visits per visitor.” – Aberdeen Group
Goals for using Clickstream Web Analytics · Compare pages by the amount of time, clicks and conversions to see which are popular or not. Test different page versions to see what works best. Never stop improving. · Compare different groups of customers. Do customers from different geographical locations prefer discounts? Do women have a higher conversion rate than men? The testing breakdowns are endless, so you need to know why you are doing the comparison beforehand. · Compare time periods to spot trends, whether it be daily, monthly, annually. What is causing the trend? Can you amend any aspect of your marketing to improve the figures? · Compare campaigns, pay-per-click, email, banner, newsletter. Monitor the visitors, clicks, page visits, registrations, sales. Run multiple campaigns and track the progress of them all, then decide how to re-allocate your marketing funds. · Use funnel analysis to track the visitors through the steps in your sales process, from initial page hit to conversion. Where are they leaving the site? What in the sales process is enhancing, and what blocking, the ultimate conversion rate? · Compare the profits and ROI for each campaign, time period, customer group, etc. What does this tell you can be improved?
“Early findings.. showed that over half of the 1300+ senior executives surveyed, reported that analytics would be one of the top two technology investments supporting their sales and marketing efforts in 2007. Businesses now realise that analytics hold the key to identifying customer behaviour and will use this intelligence to convert more customers and elevate experience across all facets of their business.” – Aberdeen GroupSummary The amount and variety of data available with the online tools of today is enormous. The smart online marketer will know which data is useful and which to discard though careful planning. It is very easy to set up a host of reports until you are drowning in information you never look at. When starting to incorporate web analytics in your marketing, start simply. Gather some basic stats on how your website is performing, and has been performing historically. Try to discern the strengths and weaknesses in your site. What small improvements will bring the biggest changes? As you get to know the workings of your site better and how it processes visitors, you can start to widen your intelligence gathering. Never gather any analytical data that you do not know the value of or what you are going to do with it.
Tags: data analysis, data optimization, internet marketing, web analysys, web analytics
