Web Analytics
Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and
reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web
usage.
The focus of
web analytics is to understand the users of a site, their behaviour, and
activities. The study of online user behaviour and activities generate valuable
marketing intelligence and provides:
·
Performance measures of the website against targets.
Web Analytics
Tools
An average web analytics tool offers hundreds
of metrics. All of them are interesting but only a few would be useful for
measuring the website’s performance. Focus on what is important to get
meaningful insights on your website, and start your web analytics initiative by
defining realistic and measurable objectives for your site.
·
In order to identify the users, web analytics tools
need to report
on user sessions (also referred
to as visits). There are different techniques to identify users such as IP addresses, user agent and IP address
combination, cookies, and authenticated user.
·
Nowadays, the most common user identification
technique is via cookies which are
small packets of data that are usually deposited on the user’s computer hard
disk when the person visits a website.
When reviewing metrics, there are a few
things to keep in mind to ensure you are encompassing the set of data that best
evaluates your efficacy:
No doubt, technology is important, but you
need to go beyond it. Take time and care to thoroughly understand your
stakeholders’ measurement needs.
Segmentation
There’s more to data than just total number
of page views. Many organizations unfortunately still report on total page
views and miss out on all the non-page view interactions such as video,
downloads and rich media.
Analytics platforms such as Google Analytics,
MixPanel, Flurry and others, are very powerful
and allow us the ability
to go beyond simplistic hit collection, and really dive into
rich data and patterns.
You can easily report and derive insights
with visitor segmentation, have quick visibility into buyer or non-buyer
behaviour, group content
by asset type, measure gated or ungated content consumption, and with
relatively ease run a cohort analysis. These are just a few views that could be
utilized while segmenting your data.
Think Visitors, Not Visits
Explore data such as where visitors came
from, what course they took between pages while on your website, and where they
spent the most (or least) time during their visit. Later, after two or three
visits they got converted to customers. With this information, you’re able to gain increased awareness
of visitors and how they interact with your content throughout the buying cycle.
Optimize What Matters Most
Optimize conversions on all things digital.
Take it one notch higher and optimize on the Lifetime Value of a customer. Put into place a system that gives you the ability to measure
behavior and interaction across multi-devices and multiple channels for (most)
users that come from mobile, web, etc.
Maximize Returns
You’ll maximize the return on gathering,
reporting and analyzing data, when you do so consistently. Commit to the
process and develop a list of priorities and a measurement “roadmap.” Audit
what you have periodically. Websites and mobile apps are constantly evolving,
so ensure your analytics implementation is in-line with such changes.
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