Today’s blog is by a guest blogger: Pierre DeBois is the founder of Zimana – an analytics company he founded in 2009 to help businesses improve their strategic marketing and profitability through optimizing analytics data. SEO and SEM should be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy. Welcome Pierre to the SciSpeak Community!
What is web analytics (and what does it mean to your consultancy)
You’ve made the step to launch your business, and decide that a website is needed. But before you launch, you may want to make sure you have a web analytics solution installed. If you don’t know, read below for a basic run down.
Web analytics is the measurement of your website performance
The beginning of web analytics is linked with web development. Originally it was meant to track and help account for webpages being served – in essence, a diagnostic tool. But with the advent of paid search, combined with newly introduced Javascript tags, marketers realized that web analytics could provide a means to manage marketing campaigns, thus raising results and reducing costs.
The importance of analytics has increased exponentially over the last few years. People of all ages review websites before making a purchase. The advent of mobile devices has changed perception of website properties. To your business, it means you have to understand what marketing is best drawing people to your site, and if the effort leads to your site objective.
There are more than a few ways to start using analytics. It is not difficult for small sites to get acquainted, but data can become complex based on the amount of marketing you have planned and the site layout.
If you are unsure where to start, here are a few simple ideas that will help you at least monitor what you need.
– Identify how your web presence will be laid out. Web designers use wireframes to lay our each page navigation, but you can do so on a piece of paper. This will also help assess cost not only in launching but in maintaining associated components such as a microsite for an app, e-commerce, and subdirectories typically used for a blog.
– Choose your downloadable material for the site – these can be tagged in the analytics through event tracking, a minor code typically added to the HTML links for the documents.
– Decide your metrics that are related to your business through your site. Usually called KPI (Key Performance Indicators), these are typically a rate, such as percent of new visits. For a simple site, the key is determining which kinds of measures represent the activity you plan for your site.
– Identify a goal page from your website. This will aid reporting on how well people are navigating on your site. An aside – In most analytic tools, like Google Analytics and Piwik, you can also set time on site goals or pageview per visit goals.
– Plan your marketing beyond search. Search traffic is a no cost way to being discovered, but you may need to select marketing that will augment your search and create more exposure that will be a sales lead. Digital marketing can include sharing papers in social media, creating videos for YouTube, running paid search ads in Google, Bing, Linked In, Facebook, or Business.com, creating downloadable white papers, and integrated offline materials through QR codes.
– Install an analytics tag is on each page. Most analytic solutions use a Javascript code added into the HTML coding of the page (for Google Analytics, there are several checkers available). Be prepared to modify the code for e-commerce, CRM, and other features that are not included with standard reporting (a web developer or analytics professional can install within an hour or two, depending on the size of the site)
– Make a plan to check your reports on a monthly basis – more frequently if you are using paid search. You are looking for traffic trends that contribute to the goals you have set in the solution. If the task is taking hours to complete, you may want to seek help. Basic setting questions can be asked in Linked In and Quora, but many time in depth answers to fit your business requires a web analytic specialist to delve and create solutions.
– Be prepared to update your analytics goals and marketing at least once a year. Also consider that websites can become outdated as you gain more material and as social media platforms are further incorporated into your site – 2 – 3 years is about when a redesign should be considered. Budget accordingly.
There’s more to this, of course, such as segmentation. Your best bet as a business owner is to as try to relate the measurements to your business activity. When you feel you have, you are on your way to making analytics work for you.
