Today, most online marketers use online analytic tools for measuring and reporting campaign performance. That’s all too well. However, here’s the thing: Number of unique visitors, lead volume, e-commerce numbers, traffic sources, time on site etc. on a daily, weekly and monthly basis is fine from a reporting and measuring standpoint, but it’s possible to do much more from a conversion standpoint.
Here’s how…
Analytics can be used to influence business decisions that will help drive efficiencies and ultimately more revenue from a new market (e.g. more folks visiting your site from another country or from a state that you don’t operate in), or drive a decision to invest in a new line of business (more folks spending time on a non-core product of your business), or lead you to divert resources from one territory to another (higher e-commerce revenue or leads from a territory that hasn’t gotten as many of your promotional funds).
By diving deep into the data, it is possible to influence a website redesign, impact offline sales channels, understand visitor behavior, further segment online campaigns by market (either by geography or product) and effectively integrate media channels.
Here are 5 ways to use analytics to better effect:
- Making a website redesign scientific: It’s possible to view the operating systems of the visitors of a site, their browsers as well as their screen resolutions. This information is important for a site redesign. From a UI perspective, it helps people determine whether a website’s lead form or a specific call to action is within a visitor’s top browsing window. If not, then it can be moved higher up on the page. Understanding the dominant screen resolution that your visitors use helps you decide the resolution of your website and from a browser standpoint, you’ll know what browsers to run your new site on during testing.
- Identifying your best performing products: A simple 80-20 analysis will help you identify the 20% of your product pages that your online customers are spending time on. There’s a dual opportunity here. Here you can continue to further optimize your successful product pages both from a ranking and conversion standpoint. but, the big opportunity could lie in grabbing more search market share by building the next 10% of product pages so that their ranking improves and your get more revenue from those products.
- On-page optimization: It’s possible to identify which pages have the highest bounce rates and then work on improving the stickiness of the page to keep potential customers on your site longer or drive them down the path to becoming a lead. Adding a simple 1 minute video will cause genuine visitors to be curious and they will stick around longer. I’ve seen it happen.
- Understanding visitor behavior: Analytics can help you understand how loyal your visitors are by evaluating the number of times each visitor comes back to your site in addition to their location, the time they spend on a particular product page and even their click patterns. You can also view your site search statistics to understand what your users are actually looking for.
- Support decisions to invest in emerging technologies: Media accessibility and technology tools are constantly changing. A good example is usage of mobile devices. A good analytics tool will help you understand if you require to pay attention to new accessibility tools and technologies. Here you can see if visitors are accessing your site on their mobile devices, and which devices they are using most often. Knowing this data can help support the decision to invest in a mobile-sized version of your site for mobile users.
