December 9, 2009

Web analytics solve the puzzle

In today’s competitive business climate, it’s not only important to develop an aesthetically pleasing Web site for your existing and prospective customers to browse, but it’s also critical that your Web site includes tracking software to gauge the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

The goal of Web analytics is to measure, collect, analyze, and report online usage data to ultimately optimize your Web site’s effectiveness. Once you’ve implemented an analytics program on your Web site, ask yourself these questions:

• What are my goals?
• Which metrics will help me achieve my goals?
• What changes can I make to improve the outcome?

While this may seem overwhelming, Sire offers a number of Web analytic and search engine optimization services to help your site and online marketing efforts work more effectively for you.
A strategic Web analytics program can help you not only improve the usability of your Web site but also increase your marketing return on investment.

The endgame for any company seeking to conduct business on the Web is to convert visitors into buyers in as few steps as possible. Web analytics will help you put together the pieces of the puzzle to achieve your goals.

Specifically, you will want to review how visitors are finding your Web site, how they navigate through your site once they are there, and what steps they are taking to complete the sale and/or transaction.

Google Analytics, for example, answers these and many other questions, such as what keywords your visitors typed into search engines to find your site and what pages they visited while on your site. This click stream data spells out what is of value and interest to the people who are visiting your Web site, and can be beneficial in determining what content needs to be strengthened, altered, or eliminated from your site to improve results.

Another key statistic to analyze and improve is the “bounce rate,” or the percentage of visitors who landed on your Web site but did not click on any other pages or links prior to leaving the site. A key behavioral measurement indicator, bounce rates ideally should remain under 25% at all times.

In addition, when developing E-mail marketing campaigns, analytics software can reveal a great deal of information about what’s working and what’s not working in your campaigns. If you focus on carefully targeting your E-mail marketing campaigns to segmented lists, you stand a far better chance of increasing your click-through rates and reducing your bounce rates.

At Sire Advertising, our award-winning creative team can assist you with developing a strategic Web site, complete with Web analytics and search engine optimization programs, that will serve as a valuable 24/7 online sales tool. For more information, please contact info@sireadvertising.com or call (570) 743-3900.

Click here to download a printable PDF.