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Use Analytics To Sell More –
By now the question you are probably asking yourself is “How do I know what
route my site visitors are taking as they wander around my website?” To
answer that question, you have to learn about web analytics. As important,
you have to start using the info web analytics gives you, once you know what
web analytics is. The reason for this is that web analytics are the holy
grail for anyone who desires to achieve success in online sales. Considering
that the web plays a progressively more critical role in any company’s
battle for market share, the incremental gains that can be made online
through the use of web analytics can bring you a major competitive
advantage.
Wikipedia defines
web analytics as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of
internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” They
go on to define “On-site web analytics [as the] measure [of] a visitor's
journey once on your website” [Wikipedia’s italics]. For
the most part then, it's all about what people do when they get to your
site.
From this perspective, you can see that more important than what web
analytics is, is the question of what web analytics can do for you. Our
simplified answer can be seen in the following list.
Web Analytics helps you:
Find out where your site visitors are coming from
(i.e., how did they hear about you...).
Identify your most lucrative geographical markets.
Determine which advertising copy gets the most
responses.
Identify which page and content makes the most money
for you.
Find out what the search terms are that people are
using to find your website.
Learn how users find their way around your site,
where they go, and what paths they use to get there.
Determine what kind of pages interest your visitors
the most.
Identify the average amount of time a visitor spends
on each page.
Quantify the percentage of your return visitors.
Identify your top marketing channels.
Determine which pages result in lost conversions or
lost sales.
Determine where all of your customers are going when they leave your site.
PYour
competition is using web analytics. Maybe you should too?
Generally, to gather this kind of information you need a software
application to monitor and watch what is going on with your website. And, as
you can imagine, these come in various forms, from those you pay for, to
those that are free. And lest you think that the whole concept of web
analytics seems like just too much work for you, especially now that money
may be involved, then consider what your competition is doing, and what they
think of web analytics:
·According to a recent
survey, 72% of total websitesworldwide are using or planning
to use web analytics software.
·50% of the companies
surveyed said that they continuously
monitor their web analytics reports and shape their campaigns based on what
they see, while fully 87% either continuously or frequently use their web
analytics reports to tactically direct their selling efforts.
· 74% of companies
use web analytics software to monitor email campaigns.
·82% of companies
use web analytics to test the effectiveness of the changes they make on
their websites. Technically, a
better approach would be to use what is called “A-B testing,” an approach
that evaluates both versions of a change separately so that you will know
which one works best. However, if you aren’t going to go to the extent of
using A-B testing, using web analytics to test the effectiveness of site
changes is better than nothing.
·80% of the
companies surveyed believe that their use of web analytics software has
created a positive effect on their conversion rates.
·Statistically, we know
that companies using web analytics can increase their online conversion from
2%-7% above what they now enjoy. Validating this,
the survey showed that fully 74% of
the companies reviewed said that regular use of web analytics has
helped them increase online conversions by a rate of 3%.
·
70% of companies
use web analytics to monitor customer behavior. From our perspective, this
is one of the best uses of web analytics, as it allows a company to target
specific types of customers.
As
for the issue of free versus purchased web analytics software applications,
clearly, the place to start is with the free tools that are available.
Tools like Google Analytics are great for beginners. Even books like Web
Analytics for Dummies can be of value. Sign up for Google Analytics, pick up
a copy of the book, and use them both to teach yourself what web analytics
is all about. Play with them for a month or so, then, after you think you
have learned enough to be able to not only understand the terminology, but
also see how the information web analytics provides can be used to improve
conversions or sales for your company, move up to a more complex package
that offers greater depth of information. Even here though, there is no need
to spend your hard earned money on a commercial web analytics product.
Instead, look closely at Piwik, or products like it.
As the company behind Piwik says, “Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL
licensed) real time web analytics software program. It provides you with
detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords
they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and much, much
more.” [click on picture at right to learn more about Piwik]
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Understanding Web Analytics –
As for how to use web analytics, start by making a list of KPIs (Key
Performance Indicators) for
your website, and then use web analytics to see
how well you are doing in reaching these goals. What is your website trying
to achieve? How can you measure whether you have reached that goal or not?
Which of the statistics that web analytics gives you will tell you how close
to achieving your goals you are? Remember, the objective is not to learn how
to measure tons of useless information, it’s to help you reach the goals you
set for your website... goals that should be closely associated with
increasing conversions and sales. It's all about goals.
You do have a set of goals for your website, don’t
you? I mean, you set goals for your sales staff, right? So, considering that
your website represents an online salesman,
why wouldn’t you set goals for your website too, just as you do for those
salespeople on your staff that are actually breathing (note: if some of your
human salespeople are not breathing, or showing signs of rigor mortis,
that’s a whole ‘nuther problem you need to work on… I’m afraid we can’t help
you there)?
As for what to do first once you have a web analytics program, our advice is
to try your best to understand who your visitors are, and what brought them
to your website in the first place. Try to find a way to quantify these two
previous points, and measure them. Then move on to who is doing what, when
and where. Use your new web analytics package to focus on specifics like
these, and other classic sales tracking criteria of the type you use in your
bricks and mortar retail operations.
If
you’re like most companies, your website will be structured to appeal to a
number of different target market segments or buyers. Each
segment will be designed to appeal to the expectations the buyers that make
up that market group have, as they surf your site. On a practical basis,
this is no different than what you run across in normal field or retail
sales: these people represent different types of target audiences. And, just
as in the case of traditional sales and marketing, you need to know as much
as you can about the aggregated demographic and psychographic information
that applies to each of these segments. Web analytics can provide you with
this, as well as help you track each group as they interface via your
company’s online presence.
To carry this one step further,
if you integrate your
online data gathering capabilities with the database that supports your
customer service department, the CRM package that your sales people use,
tracking data from you shipping and receiving department, and the dashboard
reports your mid-level managers receive from the accounting department each
day, you’ll be able to get a view of each customer and each customer
segment, across all of the customer facing touch points where the public
comes in contact with your company. What good is this kind of information,
you ask? Well, how about knowing, say, how Facebook users between the ages
of 25 and 35 engage with your company, versus those from Twitter? Or how
those who use a mobile device go about placing orders, versus the process
that is used by normal PC users? These, and more, are the kinds of questions
you can get answers to if you begin to embrace the world of web analytics.
Remember again, the objective is to measure customer interaction and
activities based on objectives.
To do this, the only thing you need
to do is break down the end goals of your website, based on the actions that
need to be completed in order to achieve the conversion (or sales) rate you
are trying to achieve. If you do this, you can tailor your website so that
each action can be incrementally improved upon in a way that increases your
conversion percentage.
Is it all too much to remember? Are you lost? Then
consider this…
It's all about helping a customer make a buying decision while they are on
your website. To provide that help, you need to support the normal "buying"
process that people use to make online purchases. As an example, these are
the steps you must cause a customer to go through in order for a sale to be
made:
It looks simple enough, but without a doubt, if you look
at your website closely you will find that in some of these steps
there are numerous opportunities for you to lose your customer. The question
is, which steps, and where? Seen from a positive perspective, each of these
steps provides you with an opportunity to improve how you channel your
customers through the buying process, such that every one of them completes a
transaction. The question is, how do you improve the process, and where? Web
analytics will give you the answers to these questions. It tells you the
types of people who are making it to each step, what they are looking at
when they get there, where they are dropping off, and much, much more. With
web analytics you can make informed decisions about how to improve each
step, rather than assumptions. As important, with web analytics you can
measure the impact of the changes you make, assess the impact, and then
refine the process even further. With web analytics, your options are
endless, and best of all, the changes you make to your site are almost
guaranteed to increase your conversion/sales rate.
Take our word for it: web analytics is not only useful, it can make the
difference between success and failure when it comes to online sales and
marketing. With web analytics you can go beyond the basics of online
eCommerce, and turn your website into a true second channel to market. With
web analytics you can measure everything, and miss nothing. Want to gain a
sustainable competitive advantage? Then start learning about and using web
analytics today.
As
for the issue of free versus purchased web analytics software applications,
clearly, the place to start is with the free tools that are available. 
If
you’re like most companies, your website will be structured to appeal to a
number of different target market segments or buyers. Each
segment will be designed to appeal to the expectations the buyers that make
up that market group have, as they surf your site. On a practical basis,
this is no different than what you run across in normal field or retail
sales: these people represent different types of target audiences. And, just
as in the case of traditional sales and marketing, you need to know as much
as you can about the aggregated demographic and psychographic information
that applies to each of these segments. Web analytics can provide you with
this, as well as help you track each group as they interface via your
company’s online presence. 
