Blog, Getting Started, Web Analytics
Web Analytics - The Basics
Web Analytics -Take Action This Week
A Web analytics software solution is a must-have for your online business. If you don’t have one in place, you are simply flying blind!
- How do you know which keywords are performing in all your marketing channels?
- Which pages do customers see and then leave (often called a page bounce rate)?
- What time of day converts best for you?
- What is the conversation rate of your new visitors versus returning?
Web analytics is the key to understanding your site’s performance
By understanding your visitors’ clickstream behavior (or how they get to your site or how they move around your site either by clicking or search), you will arm yourself with incredible data to make better marketing decisions. Follow these steps below to generate more money for your online business this week.
- Improve your site search – you’ll provide better search results, improved site experience and more. Simply, look at the search terms entered and see the results. How is the customer’s experience? If it’s not your best foot forward, fix it.
- Optimize your most popular pages – go after some of these high traffic, big opportunity pages or templates
- Fix those popular bounce pages - understand and improve your highest traffic pages that also have the highest bounce rates (a visitor sees it and immediately leaves the page - either exits the site or goes elsewhere on your site quickly). Are you marketing program sending traffic to the most appropriate pages? Is this page designed to provide value and meet the needs of your customers?
- Improve your checkout – check your Web analytics data to see where customers may be leaving your site or getting stuck. You probably can’t change the functionality of the pages this week, but you can make improvements. Think about what your customers (especially the new ones) might need to know in order for them to complete an order with you.
Think about implementing more page features on your shopping cart or checkout page(s):- To display your value propositions
- How long you’ve been in business
- What other customers are saying (customer testimonials are great)
- Customer comments from other feedback channels (like Shopzilla’s store reviews
- Shipping information (at least estimated – no one likes a surprise)
- Don’t forget to display the ways to contact you – phone, email, live chat, smoke signals, Pony Express…you get the picture!
Well, the good news is that there are several web analytics solutions for you – some of them are free and extremely simple to install like Google Analytics (took me five minutes – even for a non-techie!).
It is likely that you may inherently have some form of Web analytics tools through your web host or online store software. That’s probably a good place to start if you don’t have any analytics solution. But nobody says you need to just have one analytics solution either.
By having multiple analytics packages, you might find out that one solution has other data or strengths over the other.
Take the time this week to either get your Web analytics software up and running or if you already have one in place, implement the steps above to improve your site performance and generate extra sales for your online business this week.
WEB ANALYTICS RESOURCES:
Google Analytics - free and extremely powerful
Coremetrics - an industry leader, integrates well with other systems
Omniture - the other industry leader, integrates well with other systems
Webtrends - a powerful solution
Clicktracks - good solution for small businesses
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