Maximize the Success of your Website with Web Analytics

How can you maximize something? By fixing the minimization, of course. And to make something successful, you obviously have to figure out why it's not successful in the first place. Then the next step is taking action. By using web analytics, ("the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web site usage" - www.wikipedia.com), you can take positive action for your site. Here's why everyone with a website needs web analytics.

Marketing: How to market, and Whom to Market to

Marketing (internet) is the act of selling products or services over the internet. Ok, great - you have your product (let's use infant cribs, for example) but who can you sell to? You're probably not going to get that much traffic to your site by advertising on gamer's forums or sites. But if you advertise on parenting sites, children's sites, even in the baby section on some classified ads, you'll see a dramatic increase in traffic compared to the gamer's site. You can write ads, articles, forums, blogs, emails, get pay-per-click ads; there are hundreds of ways to advertise (market) online. Web analytics shows you which marketing style brings the most traffic to your product.

Track your Traffic

Actionable intelligence means "having the pertinent information readily available in an instant to handle a situation that needs attention". Actionable intelligence is what you acquire by doing web analytics. It's like profiling your customers to see what they'll do ahead of time. When you can track people who come to your site (via ads, emails, search engines and what keywords they used) you are better able to understand what they look at, what they look for, how long they spend on each page, what time they visited your page, how many pages on your site they looked at, where they are geographically located, and whether or not you were able to transform them into a "convert".

See if the person from England that visited your page at 03:16 your time, visited four of your pages and signed up for an email from your site actually bought a crib.

Converting your Traffic

Making someone a convert sounds like a hard thing to do, if you don't know how to use web analytics. Making someone a convert, in this sense of the word, means making them into a buyer for your cribs instead of just a looker. If they buy your product, it makes everyone happy, right? By determing their actionable intelligence by looking over the data acquired, you can best choose what to stock your site with. If 56% of people look at Site 1, 22% look at Site 2, and and 22% look at Site 3, which site are you more likely to keep up? Site 1, it's got the most traffic. But if Site 1 has 56% looking at it, Site 2 has the full 22% of people looking at it buying products, and Site 3 has 22% of visitors that don't buy anything, what are you going to keep up? Site 1, because it generates the most traffic, and Site 2 because it's making the most sales. Now you read website analytics to find out why one site has higher traffic rates and one has higher order rates.

Using the data obtained from tracking your site traffic and reports logged by the website analytics software (or service if you chose to invest) will show you easily how to maximize the success of your website. All you have to do is act on it.