The Benefits Of Web Analytics !!

First of all, what are web analytics?

The Official WAA Definition of Web Analytics: Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.



Analysis

Web analytics has been gaining steady popularity among the online community, and is showing no signs of slowing. It is a great device to look at your latest internet site trends and your visitors’ or users’ preferences in terms of site features. Here are some very general examples of the benefits of web analytics.

* It helps monitor your visitors and users

With web analytics, you know how long your visitor stayed on your site, who they are and what source they came from. It is possible for you to know their clickstream activity, the keywords they may have used to access your site, and how they came to enter your site in the first place. You can also see the number of times a visitor returned to your site and which pages took preference over the others. All in all, very useful information vital in order to make constructive website changes.

* It can help you optimize your website

Once you have carefully studied the actions of your visitors, you will be able to action some changes. This puts you in a great position to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. You can improve, streamline or reshape site navigation to better assist your visitors, and improve their overall browsing experience.

* It can help you formulate a sales and e-marketing plan

Web analytics will be able to assist you in the preparation of an e-marketing plan. This will be more effective because your plan will be based on solid facts and not mere probabilities. You‘ll know what is popular on the site, and what your market likes and wants. By tracking highly-viewed items, you will learn which features receive the highest interest. You can even use analytics data to enhance other programs that you already have in place - like PPC for example. Then you can work on expanding your client base, as well as retaining your current customers.
Conclusion

An application like Google Analytics can help you achieve all of the above - but in order to turn your data into information - that is to make sense of it and fully understand what it means - it is helpful to use a business intelligence solution which can open your eyes to the real potential of your website in just a few clicks.

Can you think of any more? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Read more: The Benefits Of Web Analytics

Common Web Analytics Issues !!

Having frequently been involved with the web analytics process I have noticed some consistent issues with web analytics both from an agency and in house perspective. I am not talking about data quality or even vendor selection, I am talking about how web analytics strategically fits in within an organization.


Analytics is not a priority: In many cases web analytics is often an afterthought and is not implemented during a site launch or during a sponsored/email campaign. Web Analytics needs to be given more priority and should be thought of before any marketing campaigns are implemented so that you can actually quantify the amount of dollars you budgeted and spent for the marketing.


The right stakeholders are not getting the right data: If the same dashboard is given to every person involved with your online strategy then you're not allowing them to make informed business decisions which affect their part of the overall plan. Customized reporting is an absolute must - show the Marketing Manager leads (SEO vs. PPC), show the online marketing team keyword referrals/ROI by source, show the CEO/CFO sales and revenue numbers, show the IT Team Site Errors/Traffic Spikes and show the usability team barriers within conversion funnels.

Too much data and not enough resources: In both the In-House and Agency worlds there becomes a time where analysts are simply bombarded with so many requests that they simply can't keep up. Web Analytics is an extremely important tool used to show the performance of a business and how to best tweak your business's performance, so WHY NOT add some more resources to it.


Tough and tedious to find good analysts: It is difficult to find analysts who have the technical ability to implement a training solution but also have the marketing savvy to know what recommendations to offer once the data has been collected. However, there are a few good ways to train a new analytics analyst: Get them involved with the SEO/PPC teams so they better understand the business, Give them a mix between reading and scenario based training, give them some work to do which is out of their comfort zone, work with them through an analysis or deliverable, send them to SEMPhonic for some analytics training, and finally see if they're still passionate after all of this.

Source: Common Web Analytics Issues