Web Analytics

Introduction

• Web analytics is the art of using traffic and sales statistics to

understand user behaviour and improve the performance of your site.

• In the best of all possible worlds, analytics is part of a continuous

spiral of feedback and quality improvement.
Tracking Web Site Activity
• The basic principle “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”
applies doubly to Web sites.
• You must know whether your site is losing or gaining traffic; whether
visitors boogie away after less than a minute; or whether anyone is
bothering to call, e-mail, or buy.
• Otherwise, you don’t have a clue what problem you need to solve, let
alone how to solve it.
• Review your choices to select the best fit for your needs.
• Do the same thing with sales analytics (sometimes called store
statistics), which usually come bundled with store-builder or shopping
cart software.
Identifying What Parameters to Measure
• When you read articles about Web analytics, you might see the term key
performance indicators (KPI). KPI differs slightly for each business and
Web site.
• A lead generation site and retail site both care about the most important
statistic of all: conversion rate.
• However, requests for quote might be a KPI for a B2B lead generation site.
• For a retailer, number and average value per sale are more important.
Because you calculate conversion rate, you must decide what’s essential
to measure.
• Ignore hits. A hit is every little file downloaded as part of a Web page. In
other words, every image is a hit; every text file is a hit. Hit rates usually
overstate the number of visits to a site by a factor of 10 or 12.
Interpreting Sales Statistics
• Here are a few of the statistics to watch for:
1. Internal store reports, often by item, include the number of active items, items missing
images, and store size.
2. In addition to summary sales reports, watch for sales reports broken down by products.
Sometimes called a product tree, these statistics reflect your store organization, with reports
at category, subcategory, and product level.
3. Look for sales reports by average dollar amount, as well as by number of sales.
4. You should have the ability to request order totals for a specific period of time that you define.
5. Sales sorted by day should be available so you can track sales tied to promotions, marketing
activities, and sale announcements.
6. Make sure you can collect statistics on the use of promotion codes by number and dollar value
so you can decide which promotions are the most successful.
7. If you use special shopping features such as gift registries, upselling, cross-selling, wish lists, or
an affiliate program, monitor the items sold and those on reserve for each activity.
Diagnosing Conversion Rate Troubles
• A poor conversion rate is the key statistic to watch.
• Depending on the nature of your site, your product or service, and your sales
cycle, a reasonable conversion rate will probably fall into the 2 to 5 percent
range.
• Retail sites with less-expensive goods generally see a higher rate than that.
• If your problem is low traffic, you have lots of marketing options to try.
• If traffic is good but your conversion rate doesn’t hit the mark you established in
your financial projections, you have three possibilities to address: your audience,
your Web site, or your business fundamentals, including merchandising.
• Web analytics can help you determine the source of the problem and the
solution.
Is the conversion problem with the audience?
• If you see a fair amount of traffic coming to the site (total visitors), but
the conversion rate and repeat visitors are low, you might have the
wrong audience. Look at pages per view or time on site.
• If those parameters are less than three pages per visit and/or less
than two minutes, the problem is with either the audience or the
Web site.
• If those numbers are high, you’ve got the right audience. Check
referrers, search engines, search terms, and entry pages to see how
people arrive at your site
• Have you defined your target audience correctly and narrowly?
• “Everyone over 25 who uses a computer” is not a well-defined market!
How successfully are you reaching them? Segment your market into
smaller slices and target only one segment at a time.
• If you’re running ads, are they specific enough to what you do?
• Does the landing page take people directly to the product or service you
promote in your ad or strand them on the home page?
• Are your keywords and text adequately focused to draw your target
market?
• Fix these problems and watch the results. If these changes don’t work,
the difficulty might be with the site itself.
Here are some additional issues to consider:
• Do you have enough merchandise on the site for selection purposes?
• Are you positioned correctly against your competition?
• Do you have a clearly stated value proposition that sets you apart from
your competition?
• Are your expectations correct?
• Is your viewer researching online but buying offline from you or others?
• Are you reaching people at the right point in the sales cycle? (In either of
the two previous cases, you might see multiple visits from the same
user.)
• Are you reaching the right decision-maker? Most B2B efforts close offline.
• Are you integrating your sales efforts with your Web marketing for follow-
through? A Web site can’t follow up on leads for you!