What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is essentially about monitoring how visitors are using different pages and features on your website - for example, how many people read the top articles on an online newspaper or view different products on a retailer's site?
This information (known in the trade as clickstream data) can then be combined with other customer intelligence you have gathered to tweak not only your website, but also other forms of marketing such as online advertising or discount campaigns. At a basic level, it's the internet equivalent of how major retailers and supermarkets track your movement around stores so they can learn where best to position products in order to maximise sales.
What are the most popular tools and how much do they cost?
Web analytics has become much more widely available to smaller organisations through the launch of free measurement tools. In particular, the release of Google Analytics in 2005 has greatly increased awareness of analytics among small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Around 32% of the Top 500 Web Sites use Google Analytics! The bigger players include Omniture, who were recently acquired by Adobe, Webtrends, Clicktracks, Coremetrics etc...
As a rule of thumb, hosted solutions are where most businesses will start, but for bigger companies where the web plays a more serious role, the licensed route might be a better fit. So, in terms of broad costs, Hosted solutions: range from Free up to £30,000 per year and Top-end solutions: range from £50,000 per year upwards.
Before deciding how much to spend on a web analytics solution and pulling out your wallet, why not consider the following process: Implement a Free Tool > Learn > Upgrade Analytics Skills > Fix Data Capture > Evaluate > Now Choose? This will help your decision making and your ability to identify the most suitable tool for you to use.
What can I measure?
You can measure all kinds of different things, but the reality is that you don't want to be overloaded with data. Like Einstein said: "Not everything that can be counted counts." With that in mind it is best to identify the key metrics that matter to your business. Some of the most popular metrics include:
- Number of unique visitors
- Most popular pages
- Entry pages
- Exit pages
- Page / site bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- Where visitors came from
- Search Engine keyword analysis
- Search Engine referrals
- Visit length per particular page / entire site
- Browser stats
- System stats (monitor resolution, operating system etc)
We'll run a post next month on some key metrics and their definitions.
Vendor selection - what to consider?
In order to identify the right web analytics supplier it is important to understand that different companies have different approaches and technologies. As well as price, important criteria when selecting a web analytics vendor include:
- Type of model (i.e. licence or ASP)
- Ease of use and functionality
- Customer profiling ability
- Integration capability
- Reporting and quality of support
- Training and consultancy
Some excellent resources & blogs to use