Definition:
The gathering, analysis, and reporting of internet data associated with websites and interactions with the users of the web to optimize web usage.
- What it is: There are immense amounts of data that are available concerning your website and the actual and potential interactions with your customers/clients and potential customers/clients of your website and social media. This information can be used to improve your interaction with internet users and partners.
- What does it do: Having access to information about how internet users interact (or fail to interact) with your website and social media can provide practical options of how you can make your web interface more effective and profitable.
Uses:
- How is it used: Knowing how web users interface (and do not interface) with your web presence allows you to leverage your strengths and modify your ineffective activities on the web.
- Where: There are a number of places where web analytics can help you be more effective: Some examples include:
- Search words: Your website and social media sites are only accessible on the web to the extent that people can use search engines to find them. Knowing what words are being searched on the web can tell you what words search engines need to link to your website. Having a high linkage to words that are seldom searched is not valuable. You want to be on the first search page of commonly searched words and phrases.
- Effectiveness of search hits: If you are receiving a high number of hits from search words and phrases, but those hits are not converting into sales, then the SEO (search engine optimization) strategy for these words is not helpful. You either need to change your website to make it more attractive to the people coming from those search phrases or find out which search phrases bring people interested in buying on your website.
- Effectiveness of AdWords and other paid links: Measuring the number of ad-words (or other paid click sources) that convert into sales can tell you whether or not that advertising strategy is effective. You can also see which words are converting to sales.
- Effectiveness of website partners: Having blog partners, associated partners, and other sites that have links to your website can be an effective way to gain new customers and sales. Web analytics can tell you which blogs and partners are effective in sending new customers to your site and creating sales.
- Website page hits: By knowing which pages get hit and how long users stay on the page and how many purchases on each page can help you identify where improvements need to be made on your website.
- By following the flow of your pages you can see from which pages most people exit and which pages on the website are seldom visited. You can use this information to improve the flow of your user experience and decrease the exit points.
- Effectiveness of Advertising and branding activities: As advertising and branding activities are launched the web analytics can measure the impact on website sales, as well as the source of the most effective advertising and branding efforts.
- Many other applications too numerous to mention.
- Why: By knowing how internet users interface with your website, advertisers, and partners, you can make your website more effective and profitable.
Limitations:
- Where it shouldn't be used: Web analytics is available free from Google and other suppliers, so unless you do not know how to gather and use the information there is never a time you should not use it.
- Any restrictions: There are complexities in gathering and using the information, so unless you have someone who can cost-effectively manage the data for your website, you should not use the web analytics.
- Warnings: There are very sophisticated tools available for web analytics (far more powerful than the free services). So if you have a large web presence, and large amounts of revenue and profit that are generated by your sites, then you should consider the use of paid web analytic tools and the professionals that know how to use them.
Demonstrations:
Step-by-step process:
- Gathering data: There are many data sources, tools, and technologies. Let's look at some of the main categories of data sources and collection techniques
- Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis of a website's potential audience (opportunity), a share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
- On-site web analytics (according to Wikipedia), the most common, a measure of a visitor's behavior once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, the degree to which different landing pages are associated with online purchases. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance and used to improve a website or marketing campaign's audience response.
- Google Analytics (free and paid options) and Adobe Analytics are the most widely used on-site web analytics services; although new tools are emerging that provide additional layers of information, including heat maps and session replay.
- Many of the options for data collection are covered in the SEO tool in this library, see: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Analysis of data into information: Consider the 90/10 rule in web analytics. If you have $100 to spend on web analytics use $10 on tools to collect data and $90 on people to utilize the tools to collect the data and analyze the results. Data is cheap, but the analysis and interpretation are labor-intensive and require skilled capabilities.
- How to Set Up Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- Reporting about visits, page views, top sources, or top pages is just a set of data. Numbers only can be misleading; just because there is more traffic or time spent on site doesn’t mean that there will be more sales. There is much analysis that can be done to tell us what the numbers mean.
- Interpretation of results and Developing KPIs: Avoid providing just data or even the analysis that explains what happened. It is always better to interpret that analysis to discuss the implications and opportunities available to the business and the web site based on the analysis performed.
- Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPI): By understanding what has been happening and developing new targets to meet your goals, you can measure whether you are meeting your new projections.
- Track performance of KPIs: By tracking performance against the planned KPIs you can develop a further interpretation of whether the KPIs are driving the desired performance of the business analytics.
- Developing On-Line Strategies and the Presentation of Results: This stage is concerned with the online goals, objectives, and standards of the organization or business. These strategies are usually related to making money, saving money, or increasing market share. Utilizing your performance against KPIs to determine how your changing web presence is driving sales, you can develop longer-term strategies. Avoid tactics that look at short-term actions and traffic to the website. Develop full strategies that consider branding, traffic to the site, conversion rates in the site, and longer-term monetization of your customer base.Present the defined strategy and the forecast results projected for the business.
Support the strategy and forecast the data, analysis, and interpretation completed in the process.
Template for capturing data:
Ecommerce Dashboard Template: E-commerce-Dashboard-Segmentation.xls
Output representation and recommendations:
Many types of reports are available that you can leverage. See a few examples below:
Examples:
Additional resources:
