Web analytics is a thermometer for your website, constantly checking and monitoring your online health. How would you determine whether your search engine marketing is effective, or even sufficient, for capturing your potential audience or whether your investment in creating a social media buzz has been worth it? Is the visitor experience a good one, encouraging engagement, repeat visits, and sales, or are visitors bouncing off your website after viewing only a single page?
An important early step when deciding on a website measurement strategy is to define the value that web measurement can bring to your business. Website measurement tools can be used to identify growth opportunities, measure efficiency improvements, and highlight when things go wrong.
Some people will say, ?We are only interested in visitors who convert,? that is, become a customer, ?and not the rest of the reports,? but that is misguided thinking. The conversion rate?the proportion of visitors that build a relationship with you (download a brochure or fact sheet, for example) or become a customer directly?is usually only 1 to 3 percent of your total visitor traffic. While this is clearly a valuable segment of your current business, the other 97-plus percent represents the greatest potential for future improvement.
To do business effectively on the Web, you need to continually refine and optimize your online marketing strategy, social search strategy, site navigation, and page content (as well as how your offline marketing, press releases, and communications interact with your website). A low-performing website will starve your return on investment (ROI) and can damage your brand. But you need to understand what is performing poorly?the targeting of your marketing campaigns, poor reviews of your products or services on the Web, or your website?s ability to convert once a visitor arrives. Web analytics provides the tools for gathering this information and enables you to benchmark the effects.
Offsite tools are used to measure the size of your potential audience (opportunity), your share of voice (visibility), and the buzz (comments and sentiment) that is happening on the Internet as a whole. These are relevant metrics regardless of your website?s existence. Conversely, onsite tools measure the visitor?s onsite journey, its drivers, and your website?s performance. These are directly related to your website?s existence.
The differences in methodology between offsite and onsite web measurement tools are significant, and this leads to very different results. Even for basic website numbers, such as the number of visitors a website receives or the total number of pageviews, the values can vary dramatically. This is a constant and exasperating problem for site owners, media buyers, and marketers alike who attempt the futile task of reconciling the metrics. The truth is that metrics obtained with offsite methods cannot be reconciled with those from onsite tools?it?s like comparing apples to oranges, and often the differences are large; for example, ?100 percent is not uncommon.
Offsite web analytics tools measure your potential website audience. They are the macro tools that allow you to see the bigger picture of how your website compares to others. Onsite web analytics tools measure the actual visitor traffic arriving on your website. They are capable of tracking the engagements and interactions your visitors have, such as, for example, whether they convert to a customer or lead, how they got to that point, or where they dropped out of the process altogether. It is not logical to use one methodology to measure the impact of another. Offsite and onsite analytics should be used to complement each other, not compete against each other.
If you are implementing web analytics for the first time, then you will want to gain an insight into the initial visitor metrics to ascertain your traffic levels and visitor distribution. Here are some examples of first-level metrics:
??? ?How many daily visitors you receive
??? ?Your average conversion rate (sales, registration, download, and so on)
??? ?Your top-visited pages
??? ?The average visit time on site and how often visitors come back
??? ?The referral source or channel that is driving the most traffic
??? ?The geographic distribution of visitors and what language setting they are using
??? ?How ?sticky? your pages are: whether visitors stay or simply bounce off (single-page visits)
If your website has an e-commerce facility, then you will also want to know the following:
??? ?The revenue your site is generating
??? ?Where your customers are coming from (channel and campaigns)
??? ?What your top-selling products are
??? ?The average order value of your top-selling products
These metrics enable you to establish a baseline from which you can increase your knowledge. Be warned, though, Google Analytics gives you statistics so readily that you can become obsessive about checking them. Hence, as you move deeper into your analysis, you will start to ask more complicated questions of your data:
??? ?Where do my most valuable visitors come from (referral source and geography)?
??? ?Which of the most valuable visitors are most likely to make a purchase, and which of those visitors are most likely to make the highest value purchases?
??? ?Which are my most valuable content pages; that is, not just popular pages, but pages that also contribute to the conversion process?
??? ?How do existing customers (or subscribers, downloaders, or social media followers) use the site compared to new visitors?
??? ?Am I wasting money on campaigns that bounce; that is, attracting visitors that only view a single page and then leave?
??? ?Is my site engaging with visitors; that is, does anything on the site help build a relationship with an otherwise anonymous visitor?
??? ?Is my internal site search helping or hindering conversions; that is, can visitors find what they are looking for once on my site?
??? ?How many visits and how much time does it take for a visitor to become a customer (which affects promotion campaigns, email follow-ups, and affiliate relationships)?
All of these questions can be answered with Google Analytics reports.
Keep in mind that web analytics are tools, not ends in themselves. They cannot tell you why visitors behave the way they do or which improvements you should make. For that you need to invest in report analysis, and that means hiring expertise, training existing staff, using the services of an external consultant, or using a combination of all of these. Often, you may need to employ multiple tools to gain an insight as to why. These include the use of voice-of-the-customer tools (surveys, customer ratings, and feedback) as well as offsite analytics measurement (market size, social network mentions, sentiment, and so forth).
Google Analytics is an onsite visitor-reporting tool.
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