Actionable Analytics and Reporting
Once you have a variety of Internet marketing tactics in place, you’ll want to get the most out of each one by understanding how well they are working. Website analytics will help you do just that.
Website analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of website data for the purpose of understanding visitor behavior and for making actionable adjustments. Web analytics provides data on the number of visitors, page views, visit duration, conversion rates, and much more.
Why Use Reporting and Analytics?
Just driving more traffic to your website without tracking and analyzing what those visitors do is like adding water to a leaky bucket! To profit from that traffic, you must analyze visitor activity to see why they don’t do more of what you want them to do. You need to define and measure calls to action. You also need to test making changes to increase those desired actions, again and again.
The average conversion rate is around one to two percent, but some top sites have conversion rates at ten, twenty, or thirty percent or more. The Schwan’s online grocery site is said to have a conversion rate of around 42 percent. They got there by analyzing data and making adjustments to their site. So never accept the average, not when there are such great analytics tools available that can help you get much better conversion rates. Online advertising generates a huge volume of data that can be measured and analyzed. When you know exactly what marketing efforts produce the best ROI, you can then confidently and successfully pour money into these areas. This is a big part of why Internet marketing has become so successful and dominant.
Here are a few reasons to consider using web analytics:
- You get the statistical and often surprising facts on what customers are really doing—not just what you think or hope they are doing. You’ll learn about the likes and dislikes of your customers and use this knowledge to revise your site.
- Web analytics can help you understand the conversion rate of your visitors and provide you with solutions to maximize the conversion rate.
- You can determine which traffic sources drive the most traffic and which drive the most conversions for your particular business.
- Preventing users from “bouncing” away from your website may also affect your search engine rankings, so using analytics to improve visitor engagement is critical.
- All this can result in a healthier bottom line for your company and improved ROI on all your marketing efforts, because even traffic from off-line campaigns will make you money if the website works better.
If you don’t already have a good analytics program and clearly defined on-page calls to action, stop right now and do this before you invest any more in efforts to drive traffic. Analytics is at the heart of increasing engagement and conversions.
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