Using Web Metrics To Improve Your Site
by Eric Bonnici
Using Web Metrics To Improve Your Site
By Eric Bonnici BSc. - June 2003
This article was first published in issue 61 of High Rankings
Advisor.
http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm
"...Web analytics is becoming one of the hot sectors in Internet
marketing and e-commerce technology. Increasingly, brand and
e-commerce managers -- under pressure to deliver a return on
investment -- are looking to the technology to help shape and
optimize their Web sites." Internet.com, October 28, 2002
The goal of any web presence should be to improve the business as
a whole and complement its offline marketing and sales efforts.
In other words, to help it achieve maximum profitability.
In order to do this, your online strategy must:
Drive targeted traffic to your site, persuade site visitors to
take the desired actions you want them to take, and use Web
metrics to analyze and measure user behavior.
Performing these objectives correctly will ensure that you have
an effective marketing campaign and increased sales for your
business.
Let's look at each of these objectives further:
Objective 1:
Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Site
Driving targeted traffic begins with a search engine marketing
(SEM) campaign including pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and a
search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
It's important to determine which keywords are worth pursuing in
your PPC and SEO efforts. Tools like Wordtracker
( http://www.wordtracker.com/ ) should be used to generate a list
of possible keyword phrases. Determine how frequently each phrase
is searched for, and evaluate which are feasible enough to put
efforts into by checking how steep the competition is. Make your
selections and test them out in your PPC and SEO campaigns.
Researching and selecting effective keywords is extremely
important. Be sure to select keywords that your target market
would use to find you. With web metrics and analysis in place,
you will be able to tell where people are coming from, what
keywords they used to find you, and whether they are taking the
desired actions on your site. If the wrong keywords are chosen,
you may find that you have high rankings, but the wrong audience
is visiting.
Objective 2:
Persuade Your Web Site Visitors To Take the Desired Action
Whether you are selling a product or service, obtaining
newsletter subscribers, or enticing people to download a software
demo, your ultimate goal is getting your site visitors to take a
desired action. In order to do this you must have a compelling
site that draws the visitor in, and then guides them to the goal.
Design and site architecture factors such as usability,
navigation, content, and ad copy all come into play here. The key
is to monitor how well these factors work at persuading your
visitors into taking action. With web metrics you can monitor
everything and see what's working and what's not. Armed with this
knowledge, you can make the appropriate changes to your site;
continue your monitoring, and repeat the process until you get an
increase in the desired outcome.
Objective 3:
Use Web Metrics To Analyze Visitor Behavior
The area of web metrics and analysis is new and evolving.
Compared to traditional offline marketing, the Internet provides
an unparalleled opportunity to specifically measure how a
customer interacts with a business. Web metrics and analysis will
help you to monitor and improve objectives 1 and 2. This is done
by paying close attention to where visitors are coming from,
learning what keywords were used to find your site, seeing how
they navigated through it, and what actions they took along the
way. This information becomes a powerful tool in growing your
business.
The first web metrics were commonly known as traffic logs or site
statistics. These measured things like server hits, unique
visitors, repeat visitors, entry pages, exit pages, first page
visited, second page visited, and average time spent on a page or
the site.
Today's newer log analysis software can show us more
business-specific web metrics. These include conversion ratios,
browse-to-buy rates and customer-acquisition costs. As research
and development in this area continues, we will see new metrics
appear, along with improved tools to measure them.
Currently, with the right tools it is possible to monitor web
visitors' behavior such as how and where they found your site,
what pages they landed on, and whether they took the desired
actions you wanted them to take. For this information to be
worthwhile, however, you need to use it to adjust your SEM
strategies, keyword selection, site architecture and design as
necessary. Basically, you should test and improve what is
working, eliminate what isn't and figure out new approaches that
will work even better. This process will constantly raise your
return on investment (ROI).
For further details on this subject, including software and
vendors, I recommend reading "Web Measurement and Analytics"
by Ashley Friedlein. This report goes into great detail on 12
leading web analytics vendors.It is available at:
http://www.aj2000.com/downloads/econsultancy.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------
About The Author:
Eric Bonnici is the Director of Internet Marketing and
Development at Alexander Joseph and Associates and has been doing
business on the Internet since 1998 to read more of his articles
visit:
http://www.aj2000.com or http://www.brandedemail.ca
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