Actionable Web
Analytics
This is the real beauty of a
website --- the ability to track, test and measure what you
are doing and how your customers are responding to all of
your various marketing messages. Many times we find site
owners who do not even have web site analytics in place. Or
if they do they are either not using this amazing data or
are overwhelmed by the huge amounts of it. They don't know
what to focus on (what is truly important) so they don't
look at any of it --- kind of like driving at night without
the lights on.
Web analytics packages do not have to be overly complex and
expensive as they had to be 4 or 5 years ago. With Google
getting into this arena you can get a host of truly valuable
info and all at a great cost - FREE! Now we are very
confident in saying that we have been not only pleased with
Google Analytics but also a bit blown away by what it
offers. We have experience with very expensive
top-of-the-line web analytic packages and we found that the
info that we needed to make the most important business
decisions was easily found in the free Google Analytics
package.
Now certainly getting it set up is not complicated for any
decent web programmer but digging into the info takes a bit
more expertise and experience. You can get hung up on basics
that many site owners do - how many visits are we getting?
But even in this simple stat is not really a great metric by
itself. What is more valuable - knowing that you had xx
number of visits or how many unique visitors you got for the
same time period?
Ultimately what
should you care about? Visits, unique visitors,
bounce rates, top landing pages, time on site, average page
views, keywords that drove traffic into the site, keywords
that led to the desired action, where visitors dropped off
in the conversion process, etc.
What a good analytics program tells you is what has happened
on your site and once you have established a
good understanding
of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) they will be
some stats you may want to look at daily and others at the
weekly or monthly to see trends.
Now this is only part of the equation and depending on how
sophisticated your site is this may well be enough for you
to run a successful business. For other business owners they
may want to take this available information to the next
level. Certainly in staying with the cost effective Google
Analytics you can also integrate a web site optimization
initiative where you can run a series of A/B split tests to
see what customers respond to. An excellent opportunity to
increase the desired behavior --- more orders, email sign
ups, requests for additional info, etc.
Now while all of this data is good it doesn't really give
you that missing piece, the why customers did what they did.
Why did they come to your web site? What where they looking
for? Did they find what they needed? If not - why not?
Getting this voice of the customer (VOC) information can
drastically change the way that a site owner looks at their
business and can truly take you to the next level. We have
utilized a free survey service that allows you to serve the
survey to a sampling of site visitors that gives you this
valuable info.
At Link Juice because we believe in helping you grow your
business from the entrepreneurs perspective, we are
constantly looking to add tools and knowledge to help you
make better informed decisions. You may have gotten to where
you are today because of outstanding instincts but when you
are able to merge your gut feelings with tremendous data you
can take your business to a whole different level.
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