Website Analytics simplified

y our corporate website can give you many ‘free”quality leads, loyal customers and positive WOM without you spending any amount. But most of the time,we dont know what we want from our website and end up unaware of the benefits that can be derived of our online presence. Website Analytics will give all knowledge at your hand. There are many benefits of tracking visitors to your website.

website analytics

These are the few reasons/ benefits of tracking visitors coming to your website using website analytics:-

• Measuring and maximizing ROI- You can identify which referral sources generate the most revenue and orders for your business.
• Help in Targeting Your Marketing Efforts Better- Determining which visitor groups are most likely to convert into customers, members or subscribers can drastically improve ROI for the investments on website.
• Optimizing Conversions- You should track your Web site visitors to maximize the rate at which they convert into customers, subscribers or members.
• Save On Customer Support- Improving the efficiency of your online support dramatically reduces your offline costs.
• Pinpoint Online Revenue-Enhancing Opportunities- Determine upward and downward trends in a particular product, and which products would function best as loss leaders to attract new customers. You can use discount coupons, online only promo, integrate your store presence with online promo and understand the website visitor behavior.

These are the main benefits of any online presence. Your website can do all of the above. Website Analytics can even give you data on how customers are viewing your website, I mean which section of website is viewed more can be tracked.

Now that we know the benefits of tracking online visitors to website, Lets discuss on the parameters that we should capture nad modify the website analytics and their definitions so that interactions with the IT team or the website management team gets easier.

• Hit – A request for a file from the web server. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity.
• Impression – An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user’s screen. Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.
• Bounce Rate – The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.
• Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User – The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). Here, the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.
• Page View Duration / Time on Page – Average amount of time that visitors spend on each page of the site. For a website not having an e-commerce platform, the above required information is sufficient. A back-of-the-envelope calculation says that divide your total page views by no. of unique visitors and you can calculate the pages a visitor has viewed. Simple, isn’t it? But if you are having an E-commerce platform on your website, then we need to capture few more information from the website analytics, such as

Conversion: Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. This is one of the most important tool/ information to know how you are performing. Some major tools that help assess the conversion rate are:

• 1.1.Google analytics
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• 1.2.Web Trends
• 1.3.Compete
• 1.4.Stat Counter
• 1.5.Quantcast
• 1.6.Visistat

Usability: If a site is usable, it fits its purpose. This typically means that it’s convenient to use. This is most understood and underrated information for any website. There are some tools which can be used to assess the usability of a website.

There are two important usability tools:

• 2.1.ClickTale
• 2.2.Crazyegg

All of the above tools are online based and provide extremely easy-to-understand graphs alongwith various advance features to segment the information required. In all the above tools, a small paragraph sized code is to be integrated with the pages, which will automatically throw the required information. Believe me its 10 minutes job! Happy tracking your visitors