Web Analytics and Performance Tuning

Deploying your new website or revamping an existing site or launching an Internet marketing campaign is only the first step in the process. It’s important to analyze the results of your efforts to reap the full benefit from your investment. 

Analytics are essential to tracking the effectiveness of your marketing and optimization efforts. With analytics you are able see what is working and what isn’t. You are able to evaluate how people interact with your content, what words or phrases brought them to your site, and the referring domain.

If you run an Ad on Facebook, post a video on YouTube, or make changes to a pay-per-click advertising campaign, then you need to track and evaluate the effectiveness of of those efforts. If the traffic from a particular site is producing sales, you may want to run Ads or create articles directly on the referring site. On the other hand, if you are seeing traffic but that traffic is not resulting in sales, you need to change your message or you may be chasing the wrong key phrases.

Marketing Campaigns are an ideal way to identity new phrases and determine which messages best resonate with your buyer. As you work to make improvements in your marketing campaigns, you learn which phrases sell and which phrases fail. And as sales improve you can use the results of this research to make on-going improvements to your site.

Do you need help with Analytics and Performance-Tuning?

If you are trying to drive more traffic to your web site, generate more leads, focus your marketing spending, and convert more of those leads into sales – We Can Help!

About Analytics Solutions

Hosted vs. Software Solutions

A number of the Web Analytics products are offered in either hosted or software versions. Each has its strengths. I have come to prefer the hosted solutions, as there are no servers to manage, no software to update, and a hosted solution can be configured to handle any load. As for security, learning that major players in the industry like eBay and Amazon rely on hosted solutions has put my concerns to rest.

Google Analytics

While Google’s free Analytics tool won’t allow you to examine visitor information with the same granularity of a high-end product like Omniture’s Site Catalyst, it is a very capable tool and will meet the requirements of many sites. Google Analytics and Omniture are hosted products.

Web Statistics

Just a few years ago all that existed were web logs. Initially a tool for the IT department, web logs catalog raw traffic and navigation of your website. The logs entries are generated by the server as each access to the website is made. The visitors URL is collected along with the type of computer they are using and the web browser employed. As web use matured, management marketing and other departments began trying to extract usage data. The tools to view the data range dramatically, from basics products such as Awstats (free), to higher-level tools such as Urchin, and Unica which evolved to make better use of the information. Today much of this type of tracking has been surpassed by modern Web Analytics tools, however there is still good information that can be mined from this source. ClickTracks (good and inexpensive) and others offer a hybrid approach, combining web log data with the information that can be gained from inserting scripts on individual pages.

Good Articles on tracking ecommerce variables with Google Analytics:

also see: getting started with web analytics

December 26th, 2009
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