Web Analytics which started out
with data and analysis related to your website traffic details has
evolved into a complex and highly intuitive research methodology.
As a business owner, you can access information not only
about your website visitors’ but also monitor your blog audiences,
track video viewers, measure social media campaigns, and much more.
Follow the trail of your customers
Market research and consumer studies have for long been the
beacons for marketers, offering enlightening information on buying
patterns, seasonal highs and lows, effectiveness of retail store
layout, factors affecting promotions or discount offers, and so on.
With the explosion of online users worldwide, several thousand
businesses face the challenge of not knowing what their customers
really want, how to anticipate their actions and therefore, how to
encourage desired actions, i.e. conversions. The related enigma is how
to deliver and meet online customer expectations before and much better than the competition can.
Analytics has the ability to put your online audiences under
the microscope and study their every move, behavioral patterns and
social networking. Early analytics tools and reporting started out with
measuring the fundamentals, which still hold weight:
Monitoring and measuring
the various sources that bring traffic to your site - landing pages,
search engines, paid advertising, banners, email blasts, internal and
external links, referral sites, directories, online classifieds, etc.
Site stickiness - studying site statistics
and data that reveals which pages keep visitors on a site, for how long
and where they leave the site. A high bounce rate and short time spent
on a site overall results in lower conversions, quite simply because
people are not on a site long enough to respond to the call to action.
Which brings us to the next point...
Effectiveness of call to action - this is
the crux of Internet marketing success - getting a high conversion rate
by ensuring that the objectives and goals of your site are met with
users taking the actions you want them to. Whether this is making a
purchase, downloading a document (whitepaper, article, guide, reference
material, tips, manual, checklist), subscribing to a newsletter or any
other conversion goal.
Volume of traffic -
knowing the numbers. Even though getting qualified traffic that will
ultimately convert is the goal of every Internet marketer, it is also
important to study overall traffic volumes and get those numbers up.
Lead generation and lead nurturing still rely heavily on greater volume
because a busy pipeline creates a better sales funnel and drives more
results.
Going beyond the basics of site data
Today it is possible to measure the effectiveness of your blog,
track your RSS feeds, view statistics about your online press release
hits, monitor your Facebook advertising and profile searches, follow
the "tweets" on Twitter, count the clappers on YouTube,
build your career forum on LinkedIn, the list is endless. With the
ever increasing buzz of social media marketing and sites like
Mashable.com, you can get deep into the mind of your customer and step
up engagement ratios like never before. There is whole new world of
chatterboxes out there and you can leverage word of mouth online to
build your brand. The trick is knowing who is talking, where, what they
are saying and who is listening! Our analytics Reporting services will
give you business intelligence to deliver what your customers want,
when they want it.
You can learn a lot from your website -- especially when it comes to lead generation and nurturing. How did your visitors find you? What pages did they look at? What worked for you, and what didn’t? Paying attention to these metrics, with the help of web analytics tools, can reveal exactly what you need to do to strengthen your company’s attractiveness on the Web. Here are the numbers that we feel matter most:
4. Pages visited. Which web pages did your visitors land on first? How long did they stay there? Most importantly, did they spend time on the pages you really wanted them spend time on -- the pages you feel are most important to driving sales and converting prospects into customers?
Keep a close eye on these critical metrics and you’ll find that analyzing your web traffic isn’t so hard after all -- especially if it means more sales!