What a Tangled Web We Weave with Web Analytics

Photo by josefstuefer As an entrepreneur in e-commerce, an enormous amount of effort and focus is placed on web presence. Countless hours can be spent on the aesthetics of your website, the cascading pages and catchy graphics. While you can have the snazziest website in your industry, if your visitors spend just seconds before bouncing elsewhere then it is all for not. So how do you know if your efforts are paying off? How can you discern where to make changes? Do you need a magic ball to see behind the scenes? No, a web analytics program will capture the data needed.

Web analytics provides detailed statistics that can assist with the analysis and fine tuning of your website or blog. By gathering data, it paints a clear picture of the visitors that find your site and provides the results from marketing efforts and website design. Here are four key areas to examine.

From where they came . . .

Understanding how visitors find your website is invaluable. You’ll discover that visitors come from a myriad of sources. Web analytics provides details about the paths your visitors take including:

• search engine query
• referring URL
• direct input of URL

Several key pieces of information are revealed. By examining this data, three questions can be satisfied:

• What is the mindset of your visitors?
• Does that visitor match your ideal client/customer profile?
• Are your marketing efforts effective?

Desperately seeking . . .

Web analytics provides the key data of what your visitors are seeking in products and/or services. By viewing keywords used in searches you have a better understanding not only of what visitors are looking for but what they are NOT looking for. In addition, keywords can reveal a potential market of products and/or services that you may add to your business.

They came, they saw, they bounced . . .

A great deal of effort was spent in designing your website’s home page. You have injected it with what you think is the perfect material to move a visitor through the site and in the end, convert them to a sale. The caveat to this mindset is that your visitor doesn’t always land on your home page. In fact, the majority of your visitors don’t. With numerous pages for search engines to crawl and use of advanced keyword searches, visitors can land on any within your website.

Web analytics provides a comprehensive look at what pages your visitors land. In addition to the landing pages, the bounce rate for each page is provided. The bounce rate shows how long a visitor stays or how quickly the visitor left your site.

This provides insight into:

• pages that are sending your visitors away
• products and/or services your visitors are interested in
• whether intent of the page and next step actions are clear

If a visitor can not find the information needed or has no clear direction as to what the next-step action is, then they will leave. By analyzing the bounce rate and land paging, you have a clear overview of where your website is succeeding and failing.

Trends, They Come and Go . . .

By looking at the data provided in web analytics over a longer period of time, developing trends emerge:

• number of visits to your site
• number of inquiries for services
• number of orders placed
• value of orders placed

Stepping back and looking at the broader picture using graphic analysis, the highs and lows are revealed. Numbers increasing is a of course good trend and a downward spike is never good. Whichever way the numbers fluctuate, having the ability to compare the data to marketing efforts and events is invaluable. Some areas revealed when comparing include:

• new marketing push/campaign
• seasonal trend
• added product or service
• change in economy

The Point

Looking at what is working and what hasn’t worked will aid in developing a more precise marketing plan, provide insight into the areas of your website that need immediate focus and paint a clear profile of the right visitors for your business. By implementing web analytics on your website and blog, you will arm your business with invaluable data. With this information, you can capitalize on the positive efforts and events and counteract the negative. Google has a great web analytics program. Google Analytics – easy to use in analyzing both your website and your blog.

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