Why Web Analytics?

Marketing efforts are often performed in a highly competitive environment, where the shift to online opportunities has become crucial to overall success. Your company now has the opportunity to reach an entirely different and highly engaged audience in a multitude of ways. However, guessing what drives online visitor behavior is not an option! In order to optimize any online marketing efforts, you need to first understand how visitors "e;use"e; your web site.

Web analytics provides the answers you need most in order to:

  • Measure and Maximize Marketing ROI
  • Target Marketing Efforts to the Most Effective Audience
  • Optimize Conversions and Maximize Response
  • Test Strategy and Messaging to Find the Best Mix

Measure and Maximize Marketing ROI

Optimizing advertising spend is a crucial part to your overall marketing strategy. You need to find the most cost-effective opportunities but often don’t know where to start or how to support your decision. Web analytics can help by:

  1. Identifying the sources that are already sending visitors to your site.

    By monitoring your referring traffic, you can identify potential sources to place banner ads, sponsor content, submit information, etc. If visitors are already converting from a particular site to your web site, you can maximize the potential of this referring traffic by increasing your brand's exposure on these sites.

  2. Gaining a better understanding of the performance of your existing banner ads, landing pages, etc.

    Web analytics provides results on click-through behavior and can even track visitor conversions. It can provide solid results about what banner ad produces the most clicks, which landing pages are the most effective, etc. and conversely which are no longer worth your investment.

  3. Finding out what's working with your offline efforts.

    You can drive offline prospects online and track their progress through the conversion process! By using offline efforts, such as direct mail or email campaigns, that contain unique URL's or drive traffic to campaign-specific landing pages, you are able to track campaign performance -both successes and failures. Discover if a particular direct mail campaign outperformed another, find statistics on which email campaigns drove the most site traffic and how those site visitors navigated through your site, and more.

Target Marketing Efforts to the Most Effective Audience

Tracking web analytics allows you to get a better understanding of who is visiting your site.

  • Are your site visitors from a particular part of the country?
  • Do you have a high drop-off rate with one particular page of your site?
  • Are most site visitors following the same path through your site?

Knowing the answers to these questions can help you identify how to optimize your site to appeal to your site visitors. You can define your site visitors based on the content they read, the actions they take, even the URL they come from. This can help you determine which groups of site visitors are most likely to convert into qualified leads and potential candidates and allow you to speak to your visitors in the most relevant way.

Optimize Conversions and Maximize Response

Using web analytics you can track such variables as the most traveled path through a site and determine the rate at with site visitors convert into leads. By understanding where a site visitor drops off during the conversion process, you can more effectively drive site visitors from ‘beginning to end’ and alleviate the potential for drop-offs and distractions along the way.

Test Strategy and Messaging to Find the Best Mix

  • Will one call-to-action out perform another?
  • Which images resonate more effectively with site visitors?

Web analytics can help answer these questions through testing. By modifying a single site variable and testing the response, you can determine which change will be the most effective. You can also use this testing strategy to proactively understand how site visitors interact with your site, therefore avoiding larger problems down the road.

Uncovering KPIs

Now that you understand the importance of web analytics, it's equally as important to decide what to track. With so many metrics available, you want to ensure that you are paying attention to the most relevant statistics for your efforts and are not distracted by information that does not fit your overall business goals.

Identifying your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a good place to start. KPIs take a data-driven approach to focus your efforts on key business goals in order to help you achieve success online along the way.

In order to determine your specific KPIs, you should first answer these simple questions:

  1. Why do you have a web site?
  2. What markets are you targeting?
  3. What are your online business goals?
  4. How do you measure success?
  5. What level of ROI are you looking for?

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