How to Triple the Effectiveness of Your Web Site

October 24, 2006 3:46 pm by Jarom Adair

An Introduction to Web Analytics

If you’re like most of the American population, the term “Web Analytics” sounds about as interesting as a lengthy discussion on the National Debt. I doubt anyone can turn the National Debt an interesting article, but Web Analytics is actually a very fascinating topic if you can get past the name. In fact, if you follow what I say below and start monitoring your web site statistics, you may very well find yourself spending too much time playing around with all the interesting information you can find about your web site. Even if you don’t find the information interesting (I very well may be the only one who finds web analytics fun), the possibility of fine-tuning your web site into a money machine should catch your attention.

So what kind of information can you find about your web site once you’ve got web analytics enabled, you may ask? The possibilities are endless, but here are some of the main metrics you’ll want to know…

A Quick Note on Prices

There are several web analytics packages out there. To start I’ve suggest using the free Google Analytics system. If you need something with more kick, try Ominture or Web Side Story. They run several thousand dollars a year, but will give you more information than you know what to do with.

Basic Metrics

A “metric” is a computer nerd’s way of saying “a measurement of what’s happening on your site”. The following are some of the most important:

Where Your Visitors are Coming From

What if you had a sale on your web site and nearly 40,000 people stormed your site in one day and tripled your daily profits? Would you want to know where they came from? Web analytics can help you track not only how many people visit your site, but if they came from an email advertisement, a search engine, or another web site.

In the above example my client usually had 20,000 visitors a day, but it doubled to 40,000 all of a sudden (see graph).

More than 21,000 of these visitors came from a site called “slickdeals.net” because someone put a link to my client’s sale on a community bulletin board. One link made a huge impact on sales for several days. Don’t you think the next time my client has a sale we’ll be tipping off the people at slickdeals.net? You bet we will be. That’s a ton of free advertising, all because we knew how to track where the visitors were coming from.

Ad Tracking

What if you’re advertising online in several places at once? If you get more traffic and sales, how do you know which form of advertising is bringing the people in and which ones are not working?

At one point a client of mine had advertisements going out to four different email lists and banners placed on half a dozen different web sites. My client’s site was doing very well, but we wanted to know where the best leads were coming from so we could spend more money with that advertising and less on the ineffective ones. Web analytics not only tells you where people come from, but which source results in sales on your site.

If you don’t sell items on your site, there are other things you can track. Web analytics can track when someone signs up for your email newsletter or fills out a contact form. Whatever you would consider a “success” when someone comes to your site, it can usually be tracked.

Over the course of a couple months we monitored where my client’s sales were coming from. While every ad brought in site visitors, one particular email list consistently brought more people to the site and had a higher conversion rate than all other advertising combined. As a result we’ve dropped all the other ads and have focused on this one advertising venue that has proven to be truly effective. The return on the money my client has invested in advertising has gone up dramatically.

Search Engine Tracking

Web analytics can also tell you where people find you in search engines. You’ll learn not only which search engines are sending visitors your way, but what words those people found your site under. If you were a web guy (like I am) and a lot of good customers were finding your site under “email marketing” (which they aren’t), you might want to emphasize “email marketing” on your home page to help turn those visitors into customers.

Visitor Behavior

There are many things you can track regarding the behavior of your visitors.

• If 90% of your visitors left your site in under 20 seconds, do you think there might be something on your home page that is scaring them off?
  
• If 75% of your visitors click through 20 pages but don’t buy anything, could it be they can’t find what they came to your site looking for?
  
• If very few people buy your product from a pay-per-click campaign, might it be time to try a different ad to see if it’s effectiveness goes up? Or create a special page on your site for those visitors to land on?
  
• If nobody is signing up for your email newsletter, couldn’t you try making the sign-up form more prominent on your home page or offer something free with your newsletters to see if it boosts subscribers?
  
• If a good number of your site visitors are coming from a city 20 miles away, might you want to set up a satellite office in that area?
  
• If there are 4 pages in your site’s checkout process, and 60% of your customers drop out of the process on the 3rd page, wouldn’t you want to ask your customers what it is about that page that makes them abandon their purchase?

I hope you can see how web analytics can help you make all sorts of decisions. Web analytics won’t tell you why people are doing what they do, but it will show you what they’re doing so you can take steps to improve the effectiveness of your site. If you change your checkout page and your sales rates go up, then you’ve done something right. If you put a picture of the Taco Bell Chihuahua on your home page and your sales go down, you might want to take the picture off. The key is to find out what’s happening on your site, change your site in a way you think will help, and then measure the results.