With the easy availability of full-featured, free online services like Google Analytics, an increasing number of companies are implementing Web Analytics tools for their web sites. Many of these implementations still focus on older metrics like page views and click-throughs. Although conversions and overall traffic levels continue to be important, today's Web Analytics tools - which have come a long way from the "Log Analyzers" of ten years ago - can provide a rich set of Business Intelligence metrics that allow web site managers to drill down to much greater depth in understanding user behavior.
In this article, we identify the core Business Objectives for a Web Analytics implementation.
Web Analytics Objectives
1. Traffic Measurement and Analysis
One of the primary goals of web analytics is to measure traffic quality, volume and engagement (e.g. time spent on site ).
Traffic can be segmented by source, into three categories:
- Referrals from other web sites and from marketing campaigns
- Free (organic) traffic from Search Engines, which depends on the quality of content and on SEO tactics
- Paid (AdWords) traffic from Search Engines
2. Measure and Optimize the Effectiveness of Conversion Paths
This
is the usual definition of web analytics; it includes an audit of key
navigation paths, calls-to-action, pricing, discounts and the power of
the overall sales pitch. You can also measure the effectiveness of individual web pages.
3. Test and Optimize Conversion Enhancement programs
Closely related to the previous item, this goal is all about enhancing revenues from a current buyer,
by optimizing upsell and cross-sell strategies. It answers the
questions: "How well do you encourage users to buy more? How often do
you get repeat buyers?"
4. Measure "Bounce Rates"
This is one of the simplest and most important metrics,
yet it is often neglected. This metric focuses on discovering which
pages on the site cause users to drop off. This is a critical point of
analysis - it can highlight deficiencies in the web site, navigation or
content.
5. Gauge the Effectiveness of External Marketing Campaigns
Web
site traffic analysis can provide valuable feedback about external
Marketing campaigns: by source, medium (email, web page, print, blog
feed) and campaign. It can be used to test various forms of advertising.
6. User Segmentation
A
site audience is rarely completely homogeneous; it is usually made up
of several distinct constituencies. A highly effective way to enhance
the user experience is to segment users into groups by behavior and
re-orient the site for each group, with special navigation and emphasis.
7. Day-parting
This
is segmentation based on external factors not related to the user
herself; e.g. time of day, geography, referring source, organic vs
paid, and so on.
8. Drive Design and Usability Decisions
Many companies make site design decisions "blindly", without measurement or testing. However, instead of trying to guess what
users will like, we can directly measure the effectiveness
of various web design and usability decisions, individually and together,
using multi-variate analysis and A/B testing. This means that we can
improve a web site in a systematic, measurable way, while minimizing
any adverse impacts.
Conclusion
As we've seen above, Web Analytics provides powerful capabilities to improve online sales and analyze user behavior. Which of the objectives in this list do you use? Do you see any that are missing from this list?
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Posted by: ElinorMcneil27 | September 09, 2011 at 12:20 AM