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Is Your Website Hurting Your Business? Use the power of Web Analytics to improve website and business performance.
By Rich Fleck, Principal, Cognita Consutling, 303-322-6623
Who's coming to your website? What do visitors do once they get there? Are they finding what they need? Most importantly, do you know if your site is helping you win customers and increase sales?
These are some of the questions savvy marketing professionals ask themselves. With the economy entrenched in a period of uncertainty, businesses are growing more slowly and budgets are being tightened. To succeed in this challenging time, businesses must use sales and marketing tools more effectively.
Times Change for Website Accountability
During the Internet boom a few years ago businesses concentrated solely on establishing an Internet presence - with little thought given to how the site met (or didn't meet) customer needs. Now websites are being held accountable for their performance. They are an integrated part of the marketing portfolio, but often little is known about how effective they are in attracting, converting, and retaining customers.
To remedy this, businesses have turned to Web Analytics to start measuring website traffic and understanding customer behavior. Web Analytics can play a critical role for anyone with a website - whether it's a commerce site, a content site, or an information site. Because most consumers use websites to research products or services before making an online or offline purchase, having an effective website has become a business requirement.
Companies like WebTrends and CoreMetrics provide analytics software that tracks a host of web measurements, including unique visitors, page views, referrers, top pages, popular content, and system errors. This data can be used to evaluate a website's performance - and help adjust it to improve its ability to influence customer purchasing behavior.
For example, using WebTrends, a marketing director discovers visitors click on a product diagram link (explaining how the technical product works) 87% of the time before making a purchasing decision. Because of this, this diagram is an integral part of a customer's decision-making process. To help improve customer acquisition on the website, the manager moves this diagram to the site's home page - providing easy access for all visitors. In addition, she decides to start using this diagram as a key feature in an upcoming print ad campaign. With these changes, the manager helps increase online and offline purchases - by aligning product content with the information customers need.
Niche Companies Help Make Sense of the Data
Because WebTrends and other analytics providers do such a good job, they also generate an unprecedented amount of data. This mountain of information paralyzes the analysis process, leaving people without analysis experience with no idea where to start or how to use the information.
"We find that due to the amount of information Web Analytics can produce, people are often intimidated by the data. They don't know how to begin - and as a result, they tend to only give the data a cursory glance. They also don't have the time to sift through all the information to get to the most relevant details. Because of this, they really aren't using the information to help them understand customer behavior and improve website performance," says Michael Sevilla, a partner at Cognita Consulting.
To help businesses understand what the numbers mean, they are turning to niche consulting firms that are experts in Web Analytics. Instead of being faced with hours of data collection, report running, and analysis, businesses can get a summary of the most relevant performance metrics by outsourcing to companies who concentrate on Web Analytics.
"We're a unique consulting firm because our main focus is Web Analytics. As a result, we are able to cut through the noise and go straight to the relevant information. We tailor our analysis to each client we work with - providing them with a concise report on their website's performance. Using this analysis as a foundation, we also formulate actionable recommendations on how they can improve the performance of their website and their business," says Rich Fleck a partner at Cognita Consulting.
Web Analytics goes far beyond measuring traffic, page views, and hits. Taking the analysis a step further, an experienced analyst can uncover customer behavior patterns and segment trends, revealing what customers use (and don't use) as they visit a website.
"Among other things, we can help our clients understand how effective their marketing campaigns are, how customers behave while they are visiting their site, and what information they use to help them make a buying decision. Basically, if visitors can click on it, we can track it and analyze it - and help our clients use this information to improve marketing, sales, and product initiatives," Fleck explains.
Web Analytics can help you understand how your site is performing, how your customers behave, and what information they need to make a buying decision. Ultimately, this knowledge will assist you in making sure your website is helping you win customers - not silently driving them to the competition.
To find out more about how Web Analytics can help your business and website, call Cognita Consulting at 303.322.6623 or email at info@cognitaconsulting.com. Other good sources of product information are:
www.websidestory.com
www.accrue.com
www.coremetrics.com
www.digimine.com
www.epiphany.com
www.webtrends.com
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