Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
In other words who's coming to your site, how did they get there, what did they do while they were there? Is your website achieving its goals?
The ultimate goal of web analytics is to improve the structure and layout of your site and its functioning as a marketing tool. To do this, you need to know what's working on your site and what's not. And if something isn't working, you need to understand why not and how you should begin optimizing it. In other words, you need to come away from your analysis with a list of to-do's.
Most users of website analytics read the reports without knowing what to do with them. For most people, reports seem to satisfy curiosity, "How many visitors did the site have yesterday?", more than provoke any kind of action.
Having clean data and actionable reports is one thing, but it is another matter altogether to know how to read them and respond. This articles will help you determine what to look for in your reports and how to relate what you find to your on site goals.
Start with a blank piece of paper and your computer down. Now, ask yourself, "Why did I have my website built?" "What do I want my website to add to my business plan?" "What has to happen for a site visit to be successful?" "What constitutes a visit a failure?"
Starting from this point, begin to create a list of questions. Don't even think about what reports are available yet. Just list the questions you need answers to.
Questions should be focused on your business goals and customer experiences. Rather than asking "How many visitors did we have last week?", ask "How long did the average visitor spend on the site and what pages did they view?" The first question will give you a single metric, the second will take into account the context of the pages, the keywords used to get to the page, the goals of the site, etc. In most cases your goal will be for the visitor to leave his contact information behind. Analytics should tell you what you need to change in order to improve your conversion ratio. You'll find that worthwhile questions will probably require multiple reports to answer.
Your list of questions might be short. That's okay. Your questions will change and grow in complexity as you realize the potential of your site as a marketing tool and the power of the analytics.
In practice, you should be creating lists of questions regularly. Maybe weekly. And as you answer questions, make changes and improve results you will likely replace them with other, more refined questions.
As you complete your list of questions, you still should be logged out of your analytics site. Now comes the important part, and you shouldn't let the graphs and available reports sidetrack you yet.
Now it's time to look at that list of questions and think about what elements would provide answers or clues.
It may be best to think about it anecdotally. For example, if you want to know which conversion (visitor to prospect) strategies are not performing well enough, you might imagine a potential visitor clicking on your Newsletter sign-up page. If they leave immediately,(time on page) that probably means something went wrong. It could be a disconnect between what you were offering and what your were asking for, (too much contact information). If they stay on the site but go to a different area than you expected, it may represent a failure of the conversion strategy to communicate the intended message. Think of all the scenarios that would indicate a failure.
It's important to remember here what is the goal: "To get the visitor to leave his or her contact information."
Now is the time to start matching up indicators with reports. This will vary with each site. You may decide for your site that a mixture of time on site, time on page, bounce rate and conversion rate give you an indication of the success of a particular strategy. Determining how to weight these metrics will depend on the site and the marketing goals.
As an example you might find that by beefing up current content you get more repeat visitors who are using your site as a library but your conversion ratio is going down, thus you may want to only offer snippets of content in a newsletter format and require a sign-up for a full read. You'll see this strategy used by the Wall Street Journal.
After analyzing your reports and building your strategies in this manner, you should be able to create a to-do list. If you can't, it wasn't a very useful exercise. The to-do list could include items like "Perform Brochure Mailing testing on landing page", "Offer a luncheon seminar on a hot topic", "Use more current topics on email newsletters", etc.
As you optimize your site and strategies, your questions will change. They will become more refined. As one area is perfected, other areas in need of your attention will surface. This should be a cycle of asking, optimizing and testing until your site is finally so perfect that every visitor who comes to your site can't help but ask to become your client or patient.
You are probably saying to yourself, "I don't have the time to do all this." If that's the case we may need to talk about your website and the goals that you that you would like to achieve with your website.
Kerry J. Grinkmeyer
The Best of the US
kj@BestofUS.com
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