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Web Analytics: Making Sure Your Online Offerings Are Working for You

Written by: Robert Pothier

Article Overview: With online analytics, you can track virtually everything—where your traffic is coming from, who your customers are, where your customers are, what sort of systems your customers use, how your customers behave while on your site—the possibilities are endless. And these are just the analytics you can collect for free. For a fee, companies like Gomez can give you even more data, including highly technical data both inside and outside your company’s firewall.

Web Analytics: Making Sure Your Online Offerings Are Working for You

Basic fundamentals: to keep moving forward in tough economic times, make sure you spend every dollar wisely. In the nebulous world of traditional advertising, this isn’t always the easiest thing to do. You can run ads in the newspaper, or on the radio or the television, but they’re difficult to track. Not only is it difficult to determine if a particular advertising buy had a direct impact on your bottom line, it’s difficult to track the qualitative response consumers had to your ad as well. Did they like the ad? Did they hate it? Is your ad hurting your brand image more than helping it?

On the internet, however, this isn’t the case. In the digital world, virtually everything can be tracked via analytics. That’s why online advertising is a true game changer.

With online analytics, you can track virtually everything—where your traffic is coming from, who your customers are, where your customers are, what sort of systems your customers use, how your customers behave while on your site—the possibilities are endless. And these are just the analytics you can collect for free. For a fee, companies like Gomez can give you even more data, including highly technical data both inside and outside your company’s firewall.

Collecting data, however, is only part of the solution. Not only do you need to collect data, you need to understand how the data you collect relates to your customers behavior on your site. Consider, for example, bounce rate—what percentage of visitors leave your site without visiting any other page—and traffic source—what sites deliver customers to your site. Independently, these analytics give you some idea of what’s going on, but tied together, you can get a more powerful picture. If the bounce rate from a particular source is high, perhaps that means the audience that visits that traffic source isn’t well-suited to your site . . . and maybe your ad dollars are better spent somewhere else. Or perhaps the audience is well-suited to your site, and your site itself isn’t meeting their expectations. Could that be the case? What’s your user experience like? Is it all it could be?

Analytics can show you where to spend your money wisely, whether it be through more effective advertising purchases or redesigning your website to address user experience issues. In this economy, the last thing you want to do is spend your money blindly, hoping that something you do works through sheer alchemy. Analytics can point you in the right direction, and help ensure your investments will produce returns.

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  Article #38 Simple How To Web Analytics
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Article Tags: analytics, audience, bottom line, bounce, brand image, consumers, easiest thing, economic times, firewall, gomez, possibilities, radio, television, traditional advertising, traffic source, true game



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