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How to measure your online success: Web Analytics
Conversion, Retention and Engagement are all buzzwords frequently muttered by those involved in web based businesses, however understanding how they relate to your overall business is vital. According to Google, "...analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site."
In today’s online environment we are rich in valuable data that can help influence all aspects of business – however in order to do so, we must understand how this data reflects consumers attitudes and beliefs. We need to leverage marketing activities in line with organisational objectives and help you meet your ultimate business goals.
Therefore, it is important that we stop and ask ourselves ‘how do we measure our online activity accurately?’ A set of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to our organisational objectives must therefore be established. From these, we can use our online analytical data, (typically Google Analytics) to garner a plethora of actionable marketing and business insight for a small-medium size enterprises or global corporations alike.
For any SME looking for actionable insights though, we have devised the following 3 easy factors that should be considered in order to achieve the most out of your analytical data:
Define Your Goals
What is the overall purpose of your site; lead generation or actual e-commerce cash sales? If it the former, it is important to understand the number of leads over time including the time from visit to enquiry. If it is the latter, obviously analysis of all aspects of the sale is important from how many sales to average basket value and the best performing traffic channels.
Defining when someone has completed a required ‘action’ on the site is vital and we should not stop at the intangible. While the bottom line should always be the main focus, it is important from a marketing perspective to understand other qualitative factors such as brand sentiment and customer engagement. We have the opportunity to really gain an understanding of ‘what our customers think of our offering, or how it is presented.’
Understand Your Performance
Analytical data from any campaign is better when viewed as relative rather than absolute. By understanding that data is comparative over time, you are able to gain a much clearer understanding of how a site has or is performing and the associated trends thereafter. This gives us the opportunity to not only understand success, but also predict faltering or downward trends in our business too.
It is also important to remember web analytics is not only for online activities, it can be utilised to help you understand your offline activities too. Imagine testing and understanding the exact response to your marketing message before spending thousands on newspaper adverts or billboard campaigns. Alternatively post campaign, creating specific landing pages or unique URLs can allow you to track offline promotions specifically, in order to gauge their total impact.
Another service which we use frequently at Mediaworks is our ‘Call Metrics’ software, allowing you to measure online to offline performance by simply recording to your analytics package how many phone calls you receive from web visitors, which can highly influence where you place your marketing budget in the future ensuring a constantly high return on investment (ROI).
Breakdown Data
It is important to breakdown your data into bite size marketing chunks. Let’s face it, most other areas of business are broken down, like management accounts, so making this data digestible will mean you can understand it more easily and will ensure you are getting the ‘biggest bang for your buck’.
Breaking down your data can be as easy as asking “So What?”. By doing so you will interpret data more effectively, allowing you to gain marketing insights that sets you apart from competitors.
So you may have a page with a exit rate of 80%, This means that a huge 8 out 10 people that visit that page leave your site at that stage. But “So What?” Well, if this was a shop on a high street and people walked out continuously without buying anything, wouldn’t you be desperate to resolve it and find out why? We need to look at whether a page is designed to funnel a visitor into a customer, if so steps must be taken to review and change this page in line with customer feedback. In the same why you would question the individuals leaving your high street store.
With Web Analytics the marketing landscape has changed with such a vast amount of data at our disposal allowing us to really understand our businesses. We have almost total measurability for our online activities; yet companies and individuals still do not bother to properly look at the data available at their fingertips. While statistical analysis and analytical understanding is a complex field it is one of the greatest developments in marketing in recent years, letting us visualise how our business is realistically performing. Even if you have no time to look and learn, the costs of a specialist company to implement and analysis your business is miniscule in comparison to the long term rewards.
For more information on web analytics or any aspect of online marketing please contact a member of the Mediaworks team who will help you understand the full potential of online business activities.
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