{"id":62838,"date":"2019-03-12T20:50:41","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T03:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/?page_id=62838"},"modified":"2019-04-01T11:13:02","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T18:13:02","slug":"google-analytics","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/analytics\/google-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What is web analytics? The Web Analytics Association defines it as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and marketing initiatives.”<\/p>\n

Remember the days when you just had to wonder which half of your advertising was wasted because there was no way to fathom what worked and what didn’t? Not any more! With web analytics, you can understand your visitors, traffic patterns, marketing campaigns, conversion dynamics and more. This tool can make it easy to fine tune your website and campaign performance to maximize your return on investment (ROI).<\/p>\n

Step 0: Introduction to Analytics<\/h2>\n
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Marketers want to know if their websites are attracting visitors and whether or not their investment is paying off. With web analytics, you can identify website trends. You’ll also understand how visitors interact with your website. You can identify the navigational chokepoints that prevent visitors from completing their conversion goals. By segmenting visitors, you can also find out how profitable your search marketing campaigns are across search engines and\/or search strategies like Search Engine Optimization, pay per click and Pay-For-Calls advertising.<\/p>\n

Learn exactly where your best customers come from and which markets are the most profitable. PPC and SEO analytics can show you how your site operates and how your visitors interact with it.<\/p>\n


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Continuous improvement should be a fundamental part of your web analytics goals. It’s not enough to just measure. You have to distribute the results of measurement to all key personnel, especially those in sales and marketing, to continuously improve your website and marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n

You should also recognize there are obstacles to implementing the actions suggested by your SEO and PPC analytics reports. Sometimes it is not crystal clear just what actions should be taken. Other times, management fails to share the reports with all the right people. In the end, many companies do not take action based on their data because of the uncertainty and\/or a lack of resources.<\/p>\n

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This can be avoided by establishing a Continuous Improvement Program based on your Key Performance Indicators<\/a>. Once your CIP is established and understood, changes to your website will be made based on principles guaranteed to produce expected gains – and the gains will be reflected in your bottom line.<\/p>\n

In order to understand what web analytics can do for you and to get a handle on what to measure, why, and what these metrics mean to your business, it helps to apply the Customer Life Cycle framework<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Need More of the Basics? – Key Performance Indicators<\/a>, Customer Life Cycle Framework<\/a><\/p>\n

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Step 1: Determine Needs<\/h2>\n
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Most business websites offer visitors a number of activities to engage in that will satisfy the visitor’s goals and contribute to the businesses’ bottom line. These activities usually consist of a multi-step process by which visitors can fulfill their intentions. It is important to make these processes as user-friendly as possible for customer satisfaction and for business success.<\/p>\n

The most important of these processes is that which culminates in a purchase through a sales path. A typical sales path has three or four steps, including a shopping cart. Unfortunately, the road to
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\nShopping cart abandonment rates still hover between 50 and 60 percent. This means that more than half of the online shopping carts are abandoned. DoubleClick estimates that shopping cart abandonment results in $4.51 of lost revenue for every $1.00 of revenue made from sales.<\/p>\n

Analytics process analysis tools enable the measurement of loss between any two steps in your sales path, also providing the total loss from start to finish. Knowing which steps have the highest abandonment rate will identify areas for improvement. Loss reduction at any step within your sales path should have a positive effect on your overall conversion rate.<\/p>\n

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Step 2: Identify Goals<\/h2>\n
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The next step is to identify the key activities and actions that you want to improve, quantifying your objectives. Your objectives will depend on the nature of your business website. For instance, you might state an objective to “increase website widget sales by 10 percent in January by reducing the steps in the conversion funnel from four to three.” Note that it is important to define a specific change and set expected goals.<\/p>\n

Four Commercial Website Archetypes<\/h3>\n

There is consensus in the web analytics community that there are four classifications for commercial websites: e-commerce sites, content sites, lead generation sites and self-service sites. Below are some generic objectives for the four basic commercial websites. This information can be helpful in defining your own business objectives.<\/p>\n

E-commerce Sites<\/strong> – The objective is to increase sales and decrease marketing expenses. Basic measures include sales, returns and allowances, sales per visitor, cost per visitor and conversion rate. Advanced measures include inventory mix, trend reporting, satisfaction, RFM (recency, frequency, monetary analysis) and other predictive modeling techniques.<\/p>\n

Content Sites<\/strong> – The objective is to increase readership- level of interest and time spent on the site (stickiness). Basic measures include visit length, page views, and number of subscriptions and cancelled subscriptions.<\/p>\n

Lead-Generation Sites<\/strong> – The objective is to increase and segment lead generation. Basic measures include white paper downloads, time spent on the site, newsletter opt-ins, reject rates on contact pages and leads-to-close ratio.<\/p>\n

Self-Service Sites<\/strong> – The objective is to increase customer satisfaction and decrease customer support inquiries. Basic measures include a decrease in visitor length or fewer calls to a call center, as these are measures of customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n

With clearly defined objectives and a good analytics tool, the job of measurement becomes a reality. Your objectives state what you want to do with your website or your marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that your objectives must be quantified:<\/p>\n