Web Analytics In E-Business Success
Since the dawn of information technology in the twentieth century, computers have aggressively filtrated into every aspect of our lives. The business world is no exception.
Due to the accuracy and efficient response times as well as seemingly infinite storage capabilities, computers have enabled businesses to run more efficiently, be more accurate, and ultimately become more profitable. The introduction of the internet and web surfing has given way to a new form of business: e-Business.
The advent of e-Business creates a whole new form of business marketing and advertising strategies; these new means of promoting a business in the online world requires a new form of analytics and measurement systems.
Web Analytics
Web analytics provides companies with accurate and efficient analytic and measurement systems. Useful web analytic tools can assist with many critical areas of business such as:
- Marketing Strategy
- New Product Design
- Applying and Creating New Business Processors
- Strategic Business Planning
Needless to say, web analytical research has become the core centre of business strategy. When designing core strategies, companies can benefit from web analytics which help to:
- Position companies closer to their target market
- Provide analytical forecasts to make necessary amendments to accommodate shifts in marketing trends
- Give a competitive edge
- Place you at the forefront of new business initiatives
Web Analytics Helps You Become Customer Driven
By having access to vast research material and data from a variety of categories will position your company to:
- Identify your target market
- Identify the needs in that target market
- Create products and services to meet those needs
It is therefore a vital and useful marketing and research tool that empowers companies to be driven by the needs of the customer base, always delivering the right product at the right time, in the right place.
Understanding E-Business Within Your Business Model
The Internet has now become a tool for businesses to provide services to customers.
Everyday, products and services are bought and sold electronically; companies and clients communicate via email, instant messenger and webinar services. E-Business initiatives that drive these activities require the same principles for management as are used in the offline world. With strategic planning, execution and analysis, businesses will be able to achieve their online business goals.
Because it is estimated that nearly 50% of all e-Business initiatives will fail, using web analytics in e-Business is crucial. In order to succeed, companies must carefully measure and monitor ROI ( Return On Investment ) based on results driven by KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). These KPI’s are designed to measure whether or not e-Commerce objectives are being met and serve as warning signs to inform when things are going wrong or may be headed off track.
Today, many companies realize the importance of a closed loop analysis of their e-Business and e-Commerce divisions by using web analytics. This helps to keep track of exactly how their online strategies are performing.
Realize the Benefits of Web Analytics
Web analytics positions companies to run more profitably by enabling better strategic operations. Overall this can help reduce the cost of sales, increase brand awareness and assist in improving customer satisfaction ratings.
Researching the best strategies to maximize the use of web initiatives will help you identify your target market and measure the results achieved.
Web Analytics provides regular access to the information required to make important decisions and the information required to fine tune your execution skills. Alterations or changes can be made as to how your web analytics data is stored and how your company’s decision makers can use it to strategically gain advantage, ultimately allowing executives to maximize benefits and minimize losses.
Choosing User-Friendly Web Analytics Products
For the average person, finding a suitable web analytics product may seem like a daunting task, especially if you are not familiar with many of the features a good web analytics product should include.
Let’s admit it. We are not all IT geeks or webmasters or even marketing analysts. We may not know all the measurement and tracking tools and features technology is capable of today.
Because of this, some businesses struggle to find suitable web analytics aid. In particular, small businesses on a shoestring budget who may not have the resources to purchase a complicated advanced analytics tool and may not know what type of analytics product is sufficient for their needs.
Choosing the right web analytics product is vital and being informed is the first step to finding the right fit.
Starting With The Facts – What are Web Analytics?
Web Analytics can be seen as a study of online behavior with the intention of improving upon and encouraging a desired behavior or outcome from a desired target market.
There are two types of web analytics: on-site and off-site. On-site web analytics measure the performance of your own website while off-site web analytics measures a website’s potential audience on the internet as a whole.
Advantages of Incorporating Web Analytics
Web analytics products are mainly used to improve and manage a website. When applied to a website it generates a report on all activity and transactions of visitors that occur within the particular website.
The purpose of tracking visitors’ behavior is important to observe whether marketing is effective or not. The visitor tracker therefore is not only used to determine the amount of visitors a site has but also understanding why visitors are attracted to the site and also how.
This visitor tracker function of the most advantageous tools of web analytics. This tool helps in understanding the visitors’ decision making process and eventually functions to help make the website more user-friendly. The information received by the tracker can be used to identify where visitors enter the site (landing page) and at which pages they drop off (exit page). By focusing on making the landing pages more inviting and improving the exit pages to entice visitors to stay, a webmaster can make the website much more useful and targeted towards visitors’ expectations.
More specifically, this study of behavior done by the visitor tracker can help a company to improve marketing in various ways. They are able to tell what keywords brought the visitor to their site, the navigation paths the visitor followed, what web pages are interesting and those that are not, and finally how marketers can improve and adapt their marketing strategy to address any negative behaviors.
The focus is on analyzing visitor behavior and not merely looking at statistics and numbers. By doing this, the company not only stands to benefit but the visitor or customer also stands to benefit from a more useful website.
Why Choose HitslinkWeb Analytics
HitsLink is proven to be the most reliable and cheapest web analytics provider AND it is just as efficient as its competitors, Webtrends and Google.
Hitslink is an easy to use free service with great features. For companies testing web analytics waters for the first time HitsLink could be the safest option to consider since it is absolutely free. This means that you can play around with the product, figure out how it works and become comfortable with its features before you commit to an expensive, more advanced analytics tool.
The fact that Hitslink is free is not to say that it is not top of the range. In fact with Hitslink analytics you will be able to compare behaviors and profitability of visitors from ads, keywords, Search Engines and emails, thus gaining insight into how to improve your site overall.
What Is Google Analytics Value All About?
Google offers a free service called Google Analytics that extracts information from websites and generates statistics about the visitors to that website.
The History of Google Analytics
The original developer of what we know as Google Analytics today was the Urchin Software Cooperation who originally named their program ‘Urchin on Demand’. Google saw the value of the company and bought Urchin Software in 2005, renaming the program ‘Google Analytics’.
Google is still sells the software ‘Urchin on Demand’ and released the sixth edition in April 2008. Urchin on Demand is different than Analytics because it is sold through agents who also offer value added services. Google Analytics, on the other hand, is available for free to all users, even if they do not advertise through Google.
There are, however, some generous limitations that apply to all users of Google Analytics that do not also advertise through Google. Once these limits have been reached there are nominal service fees charged for the use of the tracking software.
How Does Google Analytics Work?
Users are simply required to add Google Analytics Tracking Code, also referred to as a ‘page tag’ to every page of their website. This tracking code loads a file from the Google server and creates a link between the website and the user’s account number.
The tracking code also installs cookies used to store anonymous information about visitor recurrence, time stamps and referrers on visitors’ computers. Google Analytics processed this data on an hourly basis and is only processed a few hours behind real time.
Some people are concerned with giving confidential information such as sales figures, conversion rates or advertisements costs to Google. However, you will ultimately need to feed this type of information to some software tracking company in order to receive detail reports.
What Can Google Analytics Do for You?
Visitors can arrive at a website via a link on e-mail, search engines, pay per click advertising or digital documents; Google analytics keeps track of all of these sources and delivers detailed reports on this information to the client.
Pay per click campaigns on Google can be intensively monitored and conversions to sales easily determined. Sales conversions are monitored by gathering information from the funnel pages on a website, these are the pages leading directly to a sale.
This can give you vital information about abandoned sales, indicating possible problems in the purchasing process. This program is very flexible and can run reports weekly, monthly or any other periods that you may select.
How Can I Benefit from Google Analytics?
Save Time and Money
Most companies do not have the professional resources to perform website analysis in-house. If they did, it would become extremely time consuming and would require a large amount of disk space.
Save on Advertising Expenses
Google Analytics can help you determine which PPC advertisements are not generating many sales and which advertisements are performing very well. By canceling the ads not delivering the desired return on investment and allocating those funds towards effective campaigns, you will save a considerable amount of money and maximize your advertising budget.
Maximize Return on Investment
Ads that lead traffic to your website and contribute to high conversion rates can further be optimized to capitalize no high ranking ads. Google Analytics reports can easily be used in return of investment calculations and used in budgeting and other marketing decisions.
Using Web Analytics Feedback To Increase Profits
Companies are always looking for new ways to increase sales and decrease expenses with the ultimate goal of maximizing profits.
One highly effective way of doing this is to incorporate web analytics feedback into your website. By placing analytic feedback on your website you can study your visitor or customer behavior in order to shape it into highly profitable behavior.
Unfortunately, few people actually understand the value of using a web analytics service to optimize visitor behavior. Consider this: web analytics feedback helps you become aware of any activity (both positive and negative) that occurs on your website.
The systems that report these activities are very user friendly; reports carry only the necessary information on where your website is or is not performing well. One is also able to pick up on whether other companies’ websites (such as competitor sites) are useful or not. Thus, by determining this, you can increase your profits simply by using the feedback from web analytics and applying it to make educated decisions.
Web Analytics – A Useful Decision Making Tool
As mentioned above, web analytics are handy in decision-making.
How they do this is by tracking visitors on your websites and recording all their actions. What you will be able to see is which links they click, what pages they visit and in what order, how long they spend on each page as well as where they drop off of your site.
A hit link is a type of web analytics aid used in a similar way to detect who visits your site and how they found you. It will show if they buy or transact on your site and also how effective your advertising is. The information received can now be used to decide what ads to keep, what links to improve on or whether people are interested in the site at all.
Understanding Performance Leads to Increased Profits
How can you take the information you know about your website’s performance and apply it in a way to increase website profits? How exactly will knowing the performance of a website increase profits?
Is the website not only but an additional source of advertising? True, a company’s website could be seen as another way of promoting their business but what needs to be remembered is that some companies rely solely on the internet to not only market their business but sometimes it is their business.
All correspondence is done via the Internet and all sales transactions take place online. Making use of web analytics feedback in these circumstances is vitally important. To be able to work out the trends on the site and know the activity thereon ultimately helps in decision making but also increases profits.
By incorporating HitsLink, one is able to monitor the amount of people entering their site daily. With this, they will be able to see where they can improve their products more and also try to figure out why there is low activity. They will be able to tell at which point a potential customer drops off and then make the website more captivating to prevent this in the future.
Statistic Geek Not Necessary
With various hit link services readily available on the internet web analytic aids are beneficial in the sense that instead of hiring a stats professional or your IT guy to monitor web activity, business are empowered to measure on their own how engaged users are; this is yet another way of saving money and indirectly increasing profits.