However, if you have invested significant time and money in your website, and in online or offline advertising, you should track results to maximize your return on investment.
For certain, you need to be smart about how you go about using web analytics. Like anything else involving data, charts, and graphs, it can be very time consuming. Cutting the wheat from the chaff is an important concept here, and creating the right reports to look at weekly is critical.
The questions you might be asking are “Why is this important?” and “How is this a better use of my time than another marketing activity?”
Return on Investment
You may have spent $500 on your website, or $5,000. You presumably will want to know what you are getting out of that investment. While it can be as simple as knowing how much traffic your website is getting, it’s likely more important that you begin to see why you are getting that traffic, and what those visitors are doing.
If they are contacting you through a form on your website, or reading deeply about your product and service, than you are likely getting a good return.
If they aren’t, perhaps it’s time to make another investment. Having a website is a necessity. Having a website that converts visitors into customers is even moreimportant.
Customer Data
Google Analytics has made it fairly simple to generally understand what type of visitor is coming to your website, to learn or to buy. Demographic data can tell you many things, from age and gender, to geographic location and other interests of thesevisitors.
By dissecting this data, you can learn more about your potential buying audience, and use that information to aid you in design and language. You can set up your online and brick-and-mortar store differently, or change the way that you speak to people on your website based on their gender, age, or habits.
By comparing this demographic data to goals you have set up in analytics — such as form fills, purchases, video views — you can understand who you are doing a good job of selling to, and who you might be missing out on.
This report from Google Analytics shows the interests of visitors to a specific site. This provides deeper insights into customer profiles, including the industries you serve.
Hot Products and Services
A deep review into the products and services people are looking at on your websitecan tell you a very different story than simply looking in QuickBooks to see where your revenue is coming from.
If you are a retailer with a brick-and-mortar store, you can use this data as a predictor of what you should be stocking up on.
If you are a service company, and you find that 500 people a month look at a particular service, but you only gain a handful of prospects or customers for it, you may wish to alter your pricing or your sales approach.
It’s here, in looking at specific page views, that we start to get a real understanding of our sales success. Are we closing all the deals we could be? Are we driving people to contact us and start the sales funnel? This is mission critical data, and it needs to be looked at and discussed.
Company Policy
Our shipping policy, return policy, and service guarantees are all part and parcel of the entire customer experience. While we can get information and feedback from customers over the phone or in email, there’s another layer to be peeled back in web analytics.
By looking at all those people that view our policy, and then determining how many complete a purchase or a contact action, we can get a feel for the customer friendliness of those business practices.
Suppose 500 people a month look at your warranty information. What percentage of those people went on to become customers? Is someone who viewed that page less likely or more likely to become a customer?
This is the kind of data that can foster meaningful internal discussion on how we handle the customer experience overall, and it’s not always readily apparent in our actual conversations with people on the phone and email.
In Closing
In a way, web analytics is your window into true customer insight, beyond simply following “best practices” as laid out in books and on blogs. Since it’s your data, it’s personalized to your specific circumstances.
To get started, simply call your team together and start looking at analytics. You may be surprised what insights you gain from this. More importantly, it might be the first step in becoming a better, more profitable company than you are today.
