The Benefits Of Web Analytics

First of all, what are web analytics?

The Official WAA Definition of Web Analytics: Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.

Web analytics has been gaining steady popularity among the online community, and is showing no signs of slowing. It is a great device to look at your latest internet site trends and your visitors’ or users’ preferences in terms of site features. Here are some very general examples of the benefits of web analytics.

• It helps monitor your visitors and users

With web analytics, you know how long your visitor stayed on your site, who they are and what source they came from. It is possible for you to know their clickstream activity, the keywords they may have used to access your site, and how they came to enter your site in the first place. You can also see the number of times a visitor returned to your site and which pages took preference over the others.  All in all, very useful information vital in order to make constructive website changes.

• It can help you optimize your website

Once you have carefully studied the actions of your visitors, you will be able to action some changes. This puts you in a great position to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. You can improve, streamline or reshape site navigation to better assist your visitors, and improve their overall browsing experience.

• It can help you formulate a sales and e-marketing plan

Web analytics will be able to assist you in the preparation of an e-marketing plan. This will be more effective because your plan will be based on solid facts and not mere probabilities. You‘ll know what is popular on the site, and what your market likes and wants. By tracking highly-viewed items, you will learn which features receive the highest interest.  You can even use analytics data to enhance other programs that you already have in place - like PPC for example. Then you can work on expanding your client base, as well as retaining your current customers.

An application like Google Analytics can help you achieve all of the above - but in order to turn your data into information - that is to make sense of it and fully understand what it means - it is helpful to use a business intelligence solution which can open your eyes to the real potential of your website in just a few clicks.

Can you think of any more?  We'd love to hear your thoughts.