When you are part of a company that has implemented web analytics to
track the activities that occur on your website, how can you be sure that you
are using the tool correctly and that it is benefiting your business? Does the tool help you improve your website’s
conversion performance? Can you
accurately determine where your web traffic is coming from? Do you have someone who is actually reviewing,
interpreting and using the data from your web analytics tool to meet business
objectives?
It turns out that these questions and many more are likely to be
overlooked when companies implement a web analytics tool. In many cases, these companies are simply
implementing the tool… just because they hear it is the smart thing to do.
Sounds like a very serious investment without actually understanding the
strategy behind it.
A company that had to go through this same type of self-interrogation was
multinational technology retailer, Best Buy.
"We used to gather
information from our web analytics program just in case someone should ever ask
for it," says Lynn Lanphier,
Director or Digital Analytics at Best Buy. "But doing that wasn't the best
use of resources."
During a presentation delivered
at the eMetrics
Marketing Optimization Summit San Francisco in 2011, Ms. Lanphier and Eric
T. Peterson (Senior Partner and Founder of Web Analytics Demystified) talk
about the journey that Best Buy had to go through to get to a point of
realizing efficiency in using web analytics.
Ms. Lanphier described how
before 2009 the company had never maximized and
optimized the use of their analytics tool (HBX) and the data it produced. The company had many internal users who did
not understand the systems and data.
They also collected a host of data without regard to how that data would
benefit the overall business needs and objectives.
“We had tons of reporting going out and that report may have had only one
metric on it. No one questioned the data.
They just used it. We were not
using the data for business analysis… only business cases and product
management” she said.
According to a survey
of 50 ecommerce sites revealed just last year, there are still many
companies who are not properly using web analytics tools like Google Analytics.
In fact, only 50% of e-commerce businesses are tracking the main conversion
points achieved by their customers resulting in inaccurate tracking against
business objectives and overall campaign effectiveness. Among the sites surveyed, 60% of accounts that
indicated using Google Analytics were not properly synced with Google Adwords,
resulting in inaccurate reporting on the return on investment of paid search
efforts. Also, 67% of the websites had
not integrated any form of social media tracking to determine if their content
was being shared across various social media networks.
During the eMetrics Summit,
Ms. Lanphier also talked about a defining moment that encouraged Best Buy
leadership to take heed in the importance of web analytics – the fact that data
was not readily available for people and that they did not understand it made
the Best Buy leadership team start to understand that it does take money and
people to drive the capability of web analytics and get the value out of it. The company also realized that it was
important to first develop a strategy and roadmap before fixing their analytics
tool to meet their needs.
Now after a couple years of
building out the company’s web analytics capabilities to better meet company
objectives, the digital team at Best Buy is focused on maintaining better
analytics reporting and understanding while avoiding information overload. The company has learned that a better and more
effective way to measure web data is to tie analytics in with specific end-user
business requirements. In their efforts
to streamline the requirements of the organization’s web analytics program, Ms.
Lanphier says Best Buy now collects and measures data based on the top priorities
of each e-commerce department within the company.
"We went to each of the
departments, asked them to tell us what was really important to measure and
then made up a list," says Ms. Lanphier.
Best Buy now uses analytics to measure
transaction and traffic data more precisely, view data on a priority basis and
extract the best data to act on. "We are incorporating top user
requirements and effectively measuring what's happening across new channels,
such as mobile commerce and social media," says Ms. Lanphier.
For other businesses that are beginning to realize the importance of
web analytics when measuring an e-commerce website, Bill Gassman research director at Gartner notes an
interesting perspective on the future of web analytics.
"Analytics will be used going forward to measure more data on a real-time basis and that will give web merchants insight into immediate customer behavior and how that behavior has changed over time," says Gassman. "Shoppers now interact with retailers through new channels, such as mobile commerce and social media, and will generate new types of behavior web merchants will need to track."
Final thoughts... “How can understanding web analytics for e-commerce sites help?”
In my short time of learning the best practices of using web analytics, my best advice to merchants is to keep it simple at first. Concentrate on the metrics that make the most for your business. If your company sells books, a few metrics that might be of use to you include frequency of new versus returning visitors, referring sites, and average time on site. You will learn whether you have gained a loyal following of readers who frequent you site, how these readers were led to your website and how engaged they are with the books available for purchase. See, it does not have to get too complicated. But for savvier web analysts, monitoring more advanced metrics (funnels, map overlays, and conversion goals) will come in handy especially with ecommerce sites.
Blogger, Caleb Donegan notes the top five metrics on Google Analytics to watch when launching an e-commerce site:
1.
Percentage of New Visits – Is your site
delivering more new visitors then returning visits?
2.
Pages Per Visit | Average Visit Duration |
Bounce Rate – How engaged are your visitors in your content?
3.
Landing & Exit Pages – Where are your
visitors entering and exiting the site?
4.
In-Page Analytics/Event Tracking – What are your
visitors doing on any given page? Are
they finding what they are looking for?
5.
Multi-Channel Funnel Marketing – How many
visitors from a specific marketing channel are converting on your site?
Again as Best Buy learned, it is important that companies establish their
own unique goals and objectives for their web analytics tool before implementing
one on a website. These objectives may
provide better insight into which tool is the best one for your business. Even though it is free, Google Analytics many
not always be the best web analytics tool for your company’s needs. You might find that the data learned from a
paid analytics tool like Webtrends, Adobe
SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture or Kissmetrics is worth the
investment.
Give me your feedback and let me know, "how using web analytics
for your e-commerce site can help” you sell more online.
