Analytics

Here’s why you need Web Analytics…

•“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

We’ve said it once but we’ll say it again. This saying is somewhat of a truism, perhaps, but would you run a business without any form of measurement of how it was working? No form of analysis or reporting? No benchmarking or targets? No means of analysing performance to gauge the best way to invest, cut costs, or resource optimally? A bit like broadband, once you’ve tasted the power of web analytics, there’s really no way you could run a website without it. 

•Measuring and maximising ROI

Identify which referral sources (i.e. search engines, e-mail campaigns, newsletter sponsorships, print ads and affiliates) generate the most revenue, customers and orders for your business. Increasingly companies are creating ‘dashboards’ to allow managers at various levels in the business to gauge how well initiatives are performing in order to optimise them. This can happen in near real time. 

•More effective targeting of marketing activities

Find out which visitors are most likely to convert into customers or subscribers and use this insight to optimise marketing spend. 

•Learn more about your customers

Define visitors by the content they read, the actions they take on your site, and the URLs they come from. Use this to inform your customer segmentation modelling and targeted marketing. Behavioural insight is can be particularly powerful (as opposed to, say, demographic modelling alone). 

•Inform marketing activities

Learn from web analytics about what is working in terms of pricing, offers, products, propositions, landing pages … and what is not working. You can use online as a cost effective, and fast, way to test propositions that you can then ‘take offline’. For example, you could use paid search, with customised landing pages, to trial particular propositions and then tweak until you had optimised response and ROI. You could then use this to inform a direct mail campaign, or above-the-live messaging.

•Increase conversions

Click path tracking allows to adjust navigation and content to maximise conversion rates. Maximising conversions rates allows you to compete more effectively in a number of online marketing spaces: paid search, for example. If you convert better than your competition you can afford to pay more per customer. Actually, if your click through rate is higher, and your landing pages convert better you will also get a better quality score for your paid search. So, in fact, you can pay less AND get more customers. But you need the web analytics intelligence first. The same can be true for affiliate marketing – if your conversion rates are better than your competition then affiliates will get higher earnings per click (EPC) for the traffic they send you. So you’ll get better representation from the affiliates. 

•Help Customers Help Themselves

Analysis can help you find out whether customers are finding what they are looking for on your website. Or, where they are encountering problems. This insight can then help you build knowledge bases, or self-service offerings, to help customers help themselves. This will improve conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and decrease customer servicing costs via other channels.

Business Benefits

• Drive sales and build revenue
  Web analytics can help you understand which levers to pull to increase revenue streams. Combined with real-time analysis and optimisation you can become much ‘smarter’ in meeting your customers’ needs.

• Improve customer retention.
  By understanding what is difficult for customers, and what they are most interested in, analytics can identify causes of churn, and the types of customers at risk.
  

• Increased understanding of customer behaviourBy tracking activity from ‘click to cart’, web analytics can improve customer profiling, helping you to identify the most profitable customers. You can also improve your ability to cross-sell and up-sell

• Make better business decisionsEvaluate trends and spot opportunities/threats.Understand the value of your investments across different areas

…and, of course…

• “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”