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Web analytics

Web analytics is an invaluable tool for your website, as it will tell you a huge amount of information about who's visiting, allowing you to make vital business decisions based upon facts, not guesswork.

A shockingly large number of people still choose their best guess and go with their hunch, sometimes spending thousands on ill-advised marketing campaigns that web analytics could have shown them were definitely going to fail.

With web analytics installed on your site, you can tell:

How many of your visitors come from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft Live search results

How many come from banner ads, other websites, or pay-per-click campaigns

How many type the name of your website directly in to their browser

Which of the above groups converts into paying customers the best (and worst)

How many visits it takes them to do so

Where in the world they live

How many of them arrive at your site then leave immediately

...and so on. Sounds good? As web analytics can help you make informed decisions about what advertising is working away from your site, and what pages are working within your site, it can give you valuable facts about every area of your internet marketing.

Types of web analytics

The kind of web analytics that we typically advise our clients to use comprises an online website that you log in to and which then provides you with a mind-boggling array of stats, graphs, maps, charts and conversions pertaining to your website.

This type of web analytics is more or less dominated by, you've guessed it, Google (Yahoo! has just launched a great web analytics package too, but for the moment Google still dominates).

It works by having a small piece of code placed on every web page on your site. Whenever someone arrives at one of your pages, it logs this, along with lots of general information like where that person is, where they came from, what size their computer screen is, and so on.

From this information, it can compile the rich statistics that you see when you log in.

Are there other types of analytics?

Other types of analytics do exist, the main one being a type of application that resides on the same server as your website and log visitors without the need for code on every page. And then there's Clicktale, a specialised product that actually lets you see what your visitors are doing down to their mouse movements! Read more about Clicktale on the Reedus Design blog.

The Reedus approach to web analytics

Our approach is three-fold:

1. We will set up and test your analytics package for you, ensuring it is functioning correctly and accurately. For instance, did you know that you have to tell your analytics package about your company's PCs so it can exclude staff website visits from its figures, which can otherwise skew accuracy?
2. We will then do some business analysis with you to decide exactly what you wish to measure. Newsletter sign-ups? New leads? Shopping cart completions? What's important to measuring the success of your site? If it is a content site, maybe you want people to hang around for as long as possible. If it is a transactional site, maybe you want to get them from arriving to buying in as short a time as possible. Only once we know this can we make sure that the things that are valuable to you are being reported on.
3. Finally, we will train you on how to read your analytics. At that point, you're in a great position to analyse all the above-mentioned data about your clients, so you can make informed decisions on where to concentrate your resources in order to make your website as successful as possible.

Get in touch today for a free consultation on how a web analytics installation can start helping your website.

© Reedus Design 2009