Web Analytics

    "Learn a great deal about who your visitors are and how they interact with your website."

    What is Web Analytics?

    Web analytics is the study of website visitors' behavior. In a commercial context, Web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a website to determine which aspects of the site work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.

    At a general level, data collected almost always includes Web traffic reports. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators (KPIs) and used to improve a website or marketing campaign's audience response.

    It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics.

    Many Web analysts would argue however that Web analytics can be more accurately defined as people analytics. Stats like hits, page views and sessions are good to track and do provide marketers with some idea of the events taking place on a site. But when it comes down to analyzing the effectiveness of a site from the visitor's perspective, it is actually more important to understand how people behave and interact with a site.

    A Single Number is Not the Answer

    Analytics software makes it easy to produce a nice average because it can perform enormous numbers of calculations quickly. Unfortunately, Web analytics data is highly variant and a single average tells you very little.

    Instead, you've got to focus your decisions around the averages for two or more visitor groups. For example, the "average time on site" tells you almost nothing when used alone. It just isn't that interesting that organic search visitors spent an average of 54 seconds on a landing page. When compared across PPC vs SEO visitors (using labeling of course) it reveals a great deal about those two groups. It IS interesting that organic search visitors spent 54 seconds on a landing page when you know that PPC visitors spent, on average, 123 seconds on the same page. You might want to see why there's such a big difference.

    Keep in mind that "the average visitor" doesn't exist. You instead have different groups of visitors that are constantly in flux - this means that they may have an attribute such as "average number of pages viewed" that is higher for some than others. The best data comes from such comparisons, and from frequently exploring the visitor groups by segmentation.

    Web Analytics is a Process

    If anything else, Web analytics is a continuous improvement process. It is not enough just to have reports each month, you need to be analyzing these reports so you can ensure that the website is always responding to the needs of its visitors.

    Once you gathered your data, analyzed the results, proposed changes and implemented these changes you repeat the process all over again.

     

    Fast Facts
    Despite current economic conditions video ad spending is expected to rise by 45% in 2009 to reach $850 million. - Source eMarketer, Dec 2008
    Advertisers will continue to use or increase their Search Marketing budgets in 2009. Expected growth for this online advertising tactic is in the double digits at 14.9% in 2009, to a total $12.3 billion. – Source eMarketer, Dec 2008
    Total US Internet ad spending will increase to $25.7 billion in 2009, an 8.9% growth rate. – Source eMarketer, Dec 2008
    In light of the economy US advertisers are moving millions of dollars from traditional media to the Web, to take maximum advantage of its measurability and cost-effectiveness. The same holds true for the UK and other developed nations.– Source eMarketer, Dec 2008
    Online buyers are shifting a greater share of their total purchases from stores to the Web in search of more convenience, broader product selection and cost savings. – Source eMarketer, Dec 2008