Website analytics
The most common uncharted territory for the marketers these days. It is now among the frequently asked questions. How to create an effective Web Analytics strategy and get most of their website traffic. Recently I have encountered a request to capture web activities of prospects/customers. Then further use the information for marketing purposes in a Marketing Automation cloud.
What exactly is Web Analytics?
Keeping record of traffic your website is generating and tracking activities of the visitors to further optimize your web content and methodology.
Analytics is a tool that answers questions and provides insights.
Analyzing your websites traffic and then finding ways to improve.
Why do Web Analytics?
A strong online presence can be the key to a business’s growth with increased exposure and better communication. Better communication with potential and current customers alike. But what is the point of a fancy website and lots of online activity without a carefully thought out strategy? How can you develop strategy without accurate and up-to-date analysis? This is where web analytics come in.
Web Analytics is important to determine if you are meeting your objectives. This is true, whether your web presence is a storefront, an informational site or a mixture of both. Additionally, web analytics helps you define your future plans for web strategies, so that you can ensure a continuous improvement of the user experience on your website.
How to do Web Analytics?
In early years of my career I would just slap Google Analytics code on a site I was building and think to myself, “Bam! Analytics done!” Raise your hand if you’ve done that (or still do). It’s alright, this is a safe place and I won’t judge you. Luckily, after haphazardly approaching web analytics for years I learned my lesson about how to actually be strategic with my data analysis and create a plan that gives insights and can make our online marketing much more effective.
Identify ‘What to Analyze’
There is one thing that you need to do prior to set up your analytics practice that is Identify what you want to analyse. One of the challenges with implementing an analytics strategy is that every business is different, has different goals, challenges, and metrics. It’s tough to choose a one size fits all answer to tell you what to care about and what to start tracking, but there are some great practices to lead you in the right direction. First off, what does your business care about–is it making money? (It’s probably making money). Is it getting a list of email subscribers to market to? Is it how many people download and install your app? You need to figure out what those key metrics should be so that you can work out the value of what makes you successful. That will give you a good baseline of where you should start tracking and interpreting data. It boils down very simply to: find out what information you want to know and then figure out how to track that. In other words, start tracking from your end goal and that will tell you what you care the most.
Starting ‘How’
Implementing Analytics is similar to what you use to do with Google Analytics, it says just add a code snippet to your website. This will allow your tool to start tracking your web presence quality.
If your objectives include making people read your content and share further, you should be focusing on these. First, from where you are getting the most traffic. Second, which content attracts the most. Third, how long the reader is spending on your website. Fourth, how much traffic is organic vs in-organic.
And if your objective is to make people register/subscribe and fill-in their details on your website, you should be focussing on these. First, what CTAs are the most resulting. Second, what offer/tagline makes most of the registrations.
There are a few more which are common to every situation:
Which heading of the page attracts most,
What type of image results highest traffic,
How styling affects the traffic and bounce rates etc.
Conclusion
To Summarize, we can say this is a topic that could span much more than a blog post. But it is a truth that Web Analytics is an important part of a Marketer’s toolkit and its importance is increasing day-by-day as digitalization is putting itself in every domain. There are a lot of tools that can help you start your web analytics, most famous of which is Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, Woopra, Clicky, Chartbeat etc.