Effectively Using Web Analytics

The Internet has progressed to become a major strategic business channel. Internet marketing is now considered a key revenue driver and a cost effective channel for customer acquisition and retention.

Businesses need to assess the economic efficiency of their online initiatives which involves identifying goals to establish key performance indicators (KPI's). Websites should be more than an "online brochure" and managed accordingly. It should be measured and validated to determine it's contribution to revenue against expenses.

Without web analytics, most aspects and decisions to site design, functionality and organization becomes subjective judgements. Would you allow an architect or your construction contractor build your storefront before you finalize business plans outlining your goals, expenses, and finances? Absolutely NOT!

There are numerous ways of using web analytics for a better understanding of your site and how it should be optimized. Some tactical uses may include the following:

Visitor Segmentation: Segmentation allows you to isolate specific visitors behavior on a page by page aspect. This method allows you to identify who is buying, browsing, engages frequent visits and how long do they say, visiting particular pages, or using certain features. You can also isolate behavior by how they reached the site - marketing campaign, search engine or referring site. Segmentation can identify geographic location, gender, age, group, operating system, browser and connectivity.

Cross Sell/Up Sell and Merchandising: Identify the optimal merchandising strategies for information pages, shopping cart and email offers to identifying which products are frequently viewed, purchased for optimal upsell/ cross sell tactics. You can even test site design and navigation schemes to identify the most effective layouts.

Funnel Analysis: For e-commerce sites, the ultimate goal is conversion which means getting visitors to engage the shopping cart through the completion process (purchase confirmation). The conversion rate can be determined by the ratio of visits to the shopping cart page to people that complete the purchase. A funnel analysis will allow you to identify the first step (landing page) and pick out intermediate steps that include the confirmation page. This analysis will display where the drop off occurs and determine what changes could be made to improve conversion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): For most websites, most traffic is generated by organic search. Monitoring your SEO campaign simply by ranking reports does not ensure it's effectiveness. Analytics helps identify keywords that generate traffic and impact conversion.

Optimizing Home Page and Landing Pages: While getting visitors to your site is important, it's equally important that these visitors are drawn into your site. If your visitors are not viewing more than one page or spending a very short time on it, chances are additional optimization is required. Today, so many of these changes are based on subjective issues versus an objective one. Content or design? Functionality or Usability? Analytics can determine the specifics of an optimization tactic so that visitors will go deeper into a site, with the potential of completing more transactions.

Marketing Performance Management: With today's economic situation it's important to know how your specific marketing strategies impact branding, customer acquisition and retention and of course revenue. Consumers are exposed to numerous touch points that influence their purchase and analytics can track all campaigns to determine which work and those that aren't effective.

Depending on your answers to the following questions, the benefits of an effective web analytics program could improve your website performance!

1) How confident are you that your online business is performing as well as it should?
2) How does your website performance compare to your competition?
3) Do you have actionable strategies associated with your current analytics data?
4) Are you able to measure the effectiveness of each online marketing channel that contributes to the ultimate goal?

Analytics have become critical component of all successful websites and those that effectively integrate this will continue to thrive.

Here's to measurable conversions!

About the Author:
Dan League consult's as a Senior Web Strategies with
Market Infusion Dan's functional expertise includes website strategy, marketing management, search engine optimization (SEO), business development, consumer research, market analysis and web analytics.

Market Infusion is a company that aims to develop an overall strategy for your site.

http://www.marketinfusion.com

Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com

Tags: dan league

, market infusion

, SEO

, search engine optimization

, search engine marketing

, web analytics

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