Ultimately, marketers who are using the web as a channel for their business
are in it to make money on a particular product, service or even ideas. So it is important that they utilize the
right tools to determine whether the digital efforts that they are investing in
are contributing to the growth of the business and providing an adequate return
on investment. We’ve come to a time
where more data is required to help us improve the performance of our sites,
instead of simply measuring our success on the number of “hits” we get. The tool for this job is web analytics.
In a short video, Jason
Koeppe of Manta, eloquently describes how with web analytics, online marketers
are able to track the success of how they stimulate consumer behavior on websites
and maximize their performance by keeping a close eye on some key web metrics,
including how visitors get to the site (page referrer), time spent on the site
(visit duration), unique visitors, and bounce rates.
Uncomplex: The metric needs
to be simple and understandable when presented throughout various levels of an
organization. As Kaushik put it, “If you’re
the only person who understands the metric…, then you have just guaranteed that
your company will not take action.”
Relevant: When considering metrics to monitor, we have
to make sure that they are relevant to the goals and objectives of our
business. For instance, if we are
operating a nonprofit website that is designed to provide information and encourage
people to volunteer at a local facility, we would not need to concentrate on
metrics like recency and conversion rates.
Metrics more relevant might include page referrer or bounce rates to
help determine where visitors came from and if they stayed to interact with
more than one page.
Timely: Give your business leaders the time to react to
web issues by providing data that can be acted on within a reasonable amount of
time. Kaushik notes that “between real
time and three months, there is a sweet spot“ for delivering web metrics. As marketers, it’s in our best interest to
determine what that sweet spot is and ensure that the data that we get from our
analytics can be acted on in time to better the performance of our web
activities.
Instantly useful: A good metric that is easy to understand and can
be acted on immediately once it is delivered can be very beneficial when it
comes to improving the performance of a website. Just the other day, I was able to provide
some information about referrer pages to our company leadership showing the
number of visitors coming from a partner’s website. The data helped us make an informed decision
about a potential new marketing partner.
Another way to think about this is that if you present a metric that is
not instantly useful, it is very likely that the data will be instantly
ignored.
Final thoughts... “How could web analytics have
helped?”
With each blog post, I will try to look back on my career and briefly
describe how the topic subject matter could have helped in a past business
scenario. Today, I look back at a time
when I was in the restaurant industry.
One of the executives of a family friendly restaurant concept insisted
that the website should include a “games section” that featured themed
characters for kids to interact with. Before
the section was created, we could have used web analytics to determine just how
long visitors were staying on our site (visit duration) and the types of pages
that where being viewed most often. We could
have conducted a test by placing a link to a kid-friendly gaming site on our
page to determine if there was any interest in that type of content. This could have
helped us determine if a “games section” would be a worth-while addition that
would increase the performance of the restaurant website with more kid
interaction.
Give me your feedback and let me know, “how web analytics could have
helped” you make sense of a past business decision.
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