Figure8 Information Studio

“Web analytics is the process of measuring various aspects of your web site in order to understand how you can improve your customers’ experience.”

Your web site is the connecting point between you and your customers. You can learn a lot by analyzing the traffic that comes through your web site.

What Analytics Measure: “Quantifiable Goals”

Take a good look into the area you’re looking to improve on your web site, before you head out to purchase a web analytics tool. Analytics provide a tremendous amount of information, but the data you need to focus on is dependent upon your requirements.

If you’re tracking an ad campaign (PPC), SEO, email, or print, then the following results would be beneficial to you:

• Keywords. An analytics tools measures the visitors your web site receives from various keywords they’ve used. It is important to separate the results from your PPC ads versus your SEO results, so you know where your traffic is coming from.
• Click activity. Some of the more advanced web analytics tools track suspicious PPC activity, to help you protect against click fraud.
• Coupon Codes. When you place advertisements in print ads, voucher codes can help you measure their effectiveness. You simply provide a voucher in the ad that gives your customers a code to enter in order to activate the voucher. Your shopping cart system can pick up that voucher, every time someone uses one, and you will be able to tell that they found it through that advert.
• Bounce rate. A bounce rate is the percentage of people who click through one of your adverts, and leave within a few seconds of arriving at your landing page. A high bounce rate may notify you to the effectiveness of your landing page and whether it correlates to your ads correctly.
• Visitor segmentation Analytics tools can compare the behavior of different groups of visitors against each other. Groups are usually broken down by factors such as whether they arrived through a PPC ad or an organic ad, or whether they found you through your search campaign versus your email campaign, etc.

If you’re trying to understand what your users overall experience of your web site is, or want to track your sales process to determine how well your site is converting, you might be more interested in these measurements:

• Unique visitors. This refers to individual computer users, as opposed to the number of times that users come to your web site. It’s a measure of how many people are spending quality time on your web site.
• Conversion rate. This number tells you what percentages of your users actually make a purchase on your web site. A low conversion rate would indicate a problem somewhere in your sales process.
• Funnel report. This measures the conceptual depth of a visitor’s progress into your site. Web analytics track visitors through the checkout process stages to see at which stage you’re losing them, so you know what pages you need to modify.

The fundamental thing that web analytics can achieve for you is performance improvement. It enables you to observe your customers’ behavior and understand which elements of your site are working, and where adjustments are needed, to deliver the best possible customer experience.

“Tracking your traffic lets you recognize what your buyers want and give it to them. Start by defining what you’re trying to improve, focus on the relevant data, and make your decisions based on what that data is telling you.”