If you don’t have Web Analytics installed you really are crazy
It really does surprise me that so many companies still have no form of web analytics installed on their sites and moreover the amount of companies that have it installed but do not spent time analysing the data made available to them.
In the past I’ve worked for large organisations turning over millions and they just don’t know what to use it for – they had no idea how many visitors they have coming or more importantly what they do.
So let’s look at what you should use Analytics for:
Referral insight
Do your customers come from google, yahoo, email, affiliates or other marketing sources? Web Analytics will not only let you see where traffic is coming from but you can install conversion scripts that also show you the true ROI from these marketing channels, helping you allocate budgets in the right direction.
See your popular pages
You may have spent hours creating pages of content that you think that your users will love to read but before continuing down this line it’s worth seeing what pages on your site are popular and if those hours have paid off. Web Analytics will allow you to see what path your users are taking across your site and help you to understand more about their behaviour.
Fix Checkout Woes
Hopefully even without looking in depth at the web analytics software you know what your site conversion rate is, but did you know that you can create what are known as “Funnels” which will give you more insight to where potentially problems lay and where users and dropping out of the checkout process?
To prove how powerful this information can be let me give you an example. We recently helped analyse a clients website after putting google analytics (which is free) on their site. By some very small suggestions we then managed to increase the conversion rate from 3% to 6% resulting in over £1m of additional online revenue in the past 6 months.
This is why you really are crazy if you don’t have Web Analytics installed - get in touch if you need some help.
Hi Ya
Yes I agree, so what packages should merchants chose?
Depends on Budget really - Google Analytics is a good start (as it’s free), but some would say it’s not yet enterprise ready.
WebSideStory and ClickTracks have well priced solutions and a step up from this is the likes of Webtrends.
Apparently Microsoft is bringing out a free solution later this year too. Even DaveN is at it with getclicky.com!
A lot of clients have web tracking software but just don’t know what to do with it.
You bring up an excellent point about not knowing what to do with the software they currently employ. The issue is that in order to be a strategy-focused organization you must (1)set criteria for success, and (2) look at information, including web analytics, as more than academic. Purpose for information comes from the way that it is applied. A change in mindset toward this end is good but automated solutions that use web analytics to more effectively market are even better as they provide the mental bandwidth to optimize and innovate in new directions.
What do you think about privacy issues, and (for instance) Google having access to not only your keywords, your web analytics, your ROI’s etc etc?
Google analytcs seems as good as any programme out there, but it must be too good to be true…