WEB ANALYTICS

The day to day work of designing and executing campaigns, responding to various “customers” (internal and external), arranging events etc can become all-consuming and Marketing Managers can start to rely on instinct and experience to judge the effectiveness of their marketing activity rather than analysis. While this is understandable it means that key information is never collected or properly analysed and return on investment is not quantified.

At the very least it is helpful to collect basic information about how prospective customers or clients heard about the organisation, company, brand, products or services. This information can be gathered when the prospective customers or client makes their initial enquiry, whether using a form on the website or by telephone, letter or in person.

Ideally this should be taken further with follow-up research or focus groups exploring the effectiveness of different marketing activity, the sales and after-sales experience etc.

While print advertising and other forms of marketing are more difficult to assess, one of the great advantages of e-marketing is that a considerable amount of data about consumer behaviour can be collected automatically.

At the very least there should be a basic site statistics system for your website provided by the web design company at minimal cost. It should be easily accessible online using a password. The system should provide you with basic visitor information like visitor numbers (ignore “Hits”, you need to be able to monitor “Unique User” visits by hour, day, week, month), URL referrals (where people are coming from, enabling you to identify referral sites) and Page popularity (enabling you to spot the most popular and least popular pages on your website) etc.

Thick leather bound monthly reports from a web design company may look impressive but may not be helpful, especially if they offer no commentary with the information provided. Having ready access to website statistics means that you can monitor the success of campaigns, for example if you send out emails inviting people to visit a particular page of “latest news” or product information etc you should be able to monitor the impact in unique visitor numbers to that page.

As an alternative system, or as a supplemental package running alongside whatever system you currently have, "Google Analytics" is highly recommended. Currently it is free and you can register for it by visiting:

http://www.google.com/analytics

The Google Analytics system is comprehensive and has the obvious benefit of being offered by the main search engine for which you are trying to optimise your site, giving you further insights into how Google collects data and ranks sites.

Google have designed Google Analytics to be as accessible as possible while delivering all the features offered by high-end web statistical systems. To use it you will need access to your website’s source code to paste in the Google Analytics code on each page so that it can track visitor’s behaviour. If you have a content management system you can simply paste the Google code yourself at the bottom of each page without worrying about the code appearing on the web.

Google Analytics will then provide regular easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports enabling you to follow how visitors interact with your website, helping you to identify navigational bottlenecks that prevent them from completing your conversion goals, finding out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns etc etc.

[This section is currently being updated - please check back soon.]