Importance of Web Analytics to Online Marketing
Irrespective of the type of website you have, a storefront, an informational or a little-bit-of-both type, web analytics is crucial in determining whether you are achieving your goals or not. Web analytics can also guide you towards your future development and ensure a constant success in all your web strategies.
Although internet marketing is much more than just emails, to track the progress of your email marketing strategy, a number of helpful metrics can be provided by your email service provider.
What is web analytics?
The fact that customers have the option of taking numerous other paths to reach your website, paths like search engine results, pop up ads, ads in the forms of banners, links that are found on social media sites, etc., makes it crucial for you to track every bit of your customer’s behaviour to understand what works for you and what doesn’t.
You need a tool that lets you track where your web traffic is coming from. What are the kinds of blog posts, the topics, the pages that are diverting the maximum amount of traffic to your website? You also need to know what is the best day and time when traffic is typically the maximum on your website. What are the typical keywords that people type into search engines that drive them to your website? Web analytics tools lets you keep a track on all of this and also how the leads are converting to actual buyers.
This information is vital in helping you marketing strategies be a success. The data gathered by web analytics can help you identify and choose the best strategy that works for you, the best day and they best time to leverage maximum success out of your marketing strategies.
Web analytics can also help you generate new leads and target new markets that might not have occurred to you otherwise.
Ignoring web analytics is like throwing away your opportunities to improve and develop the true potential of your website and also to let go of your chance to expand, focus and develop your business to best meet your target market.
There are equally vast numbers of web analytics providers that you can choose from to help you achieve this goal. So far, Google analytics is the largest provider of web analytics out there which offers a vast number of services yet is absolutely free. You can choose from the vast number of providers apart from Google, that you can buy for a basic annual subscription too. Irrespective of the provider you choose for yourself, you need to have the basic idea of the types of information that are available for you.
On-site analytics
The way your customers behave while they are on your website is referred to as On-site analytics. On-site analytics lets you track how are the users navigating your website, which are the pages that are visited more often than others, are there too many exits after a particular page? How long do visitors stay on your site, how many of these footfalls result into actual conversions or purchases?
The ability to focus on every customer individually is one of the most convenient and useful features offered by web analytics. For example, you can track users behaviours and compare the data between the users who actually ended up making a successful purchase as opposed to the ones who didn’t. It can also help you track the difference in behaviours between the users who make substantial purchases versus the ones who make small ones.
It must be remembered at all times that your ultimate goal is to make successful sales and conversions and not merely increasing web traffic. On-site analytics therefore helps you track what is working for your website and what is not, to determine what is actually the feature/s that is actually driving in revenue and what aren’t.
Off-Site analytics
To understand what your customers are doing while they are on your website, you first need to drive them to your website. You need to use different forms of online advertising, email campaigns, and lot more to lure your audience to your website. Off-site analytics tools will help you track your progress and understand which efforts worked the best for you and which ones didn’t.
Understanding the source of your website traffic is vital. The main purpose of web analytics is to find out how much of your traffic is coming from where – for example, whether they are coming via search engine hit, your banner ads, bookmarks, etc.
A good analytic tool will provide you with a detailed report of which term lead to the maximum number of footfalls to your website when searched, which advertisement drove the maximum amount of visitors to your website and which social media was responsible for leading the maximum number of clicks on your banner ad.
The more organized and efficient your web analytic tool is, the more accurately and quickly it tracks the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Even the most basic tools provide you with information that is almost in real time.
The most vital part of your marketing strategy are online marketing and mobile marketing. It’s a long established fact that good web analytics can help your marketing strategies in the age where new media channels are evolving rapidly and are fast becoming the need of the hour. Choosing just the right tool that matches your business needs will pay you back in fat money.
What is the most important Data?
Depending on your business type, and the goal you are aiming to achieve, the following data should be looked out for,
- Page Views
- Amount of time spent on your site
- Downloads
- Click path
- Click map
- Referral websites
- Referral search engines
- Direct visits
- Offline campaigns and dedicated URLs
- Tracked links and online campaigns
- Keywords
- Visitor’s geography
- New visitors
- Returning visitors
- Conversions and successful sales
- Number of exits
- A/B testing to see which page converts better
3 key things Web analytics helps you do
- Measure
Web analytics makes it easier and possible for you to measure success the way you would measure a projects that has a target of set goals.
The amount of footfall is the key and the more traffic you can drive to your website the closer you are to achieving your desired goals.
It allows you to measure the success of your online campaigns and the number of footfall falling on your website because of this which ultimately helps you decide which would be the best strategies to adopt for achieving success.
- Adapt
Once you learn to measure successfully the failures and successes of your website, and have set your goals, you will be able to identify the best ways to improve your website to help you on the path of successfully achieving those goals.
The data provided by your analytics can be used to adapt to the latest technologies by observing the latest trends and gadgets that your visitors are visiting from. It helps you to figure out the best device to target your marketing strategies on by helping you gather information on which devices are you getting maximum traffic through. This will in-turn let you optimize your website according to that device.
- Develop
Your online strategy can have certain bits of analytical data built into them which will allow you to develop and effective marketing strategy.
The most important of these should be your site’s referrals that are driving traffic to your website. This will help you to assess where your visitors are coming from apart from the SEO you have, and allows you to understand the impact it has on your website.
Once you have this information you can optimize your website by building stronger links, better posts, stronger rapport with external partners and everything else that is affecting the footfall to your website in the most positive way.
It can also help you figure out the pages and content that proved to be the most popular so that you can develop a stronger digital strategy with these pages and contents.
Web analytics can also tell you which regions give you the maximum number of visitors which in-turn opens up new platforms for you to generate new leads and possibilities for your business. If you could tailor your strategies according to the regional needs of the area, you are looking at a possible market for yourself.
