Use of Web Analytics in Marketing

September 28, 2006

Every website owner absolutely needs to be routinely collecting web analytics and using them to perfect the site and engage in marketing campaigns. Almost all web servers provide a raw log file, usually generated nightly. You can use a web log analyzer to analyze those logs and provide you reports. Some web hosts provide web-based reports on traffic. Still other services provide web-based analytics and they collect their data from a small segment of javascript code which you embed into all of your pages. Google Analytics is my current favorite such service.

These services provide a LOT of information and much of it you might not know how you can use. Most people who are not into internet marketing usually browse these reports for the pertinent data: page views, visits, referrers, and leave much of the rest of it alone because you don’t really know what use it could be. But, in general, let’s look at how you can use these traffic reports to your benefit.

What to Look For

What you want to find out from your web analytics is where your visitors come from and then what they do on your website. A good analytics package will allow you to link this information, forming a complete picture of where they came from, what they did, and when they left. Now, don’t get into the mistake of trying to track individual visitors. This is not important for marketing purposes. What you want to do is be able to divide your visitors into unique segments, each segment comes from a particular place and comes to your site and views particular things. By looking at what they view on your site, you can determine what they are interested in. Looking at this data as a global view will allow you to break your visitor base into segments. Each segment is interested in certain things and thus, from a marketing perspective, will potentially respond to different marketing pitches to fit their interests.

Where Do They Come From?

Finding the referrer (the sites from which your visitors come) is very important to breaking your visitors down into segments. Most of the time, you can determine the referrers to your site. The big question is: Why are they coming from there to you? Did that site post you on their links page? A blog entry? A forum post? Sometimes its good to check out the referrers and find out.

Now, anytime you have control over the URL of a landing page, set it to something unique. This takes all guesswork out of where the user came from and why. If you set up a banner campaign, set up a unique URL which users will click on to come to your site. It could be as simple as a copy of your homepage with a unique filename. You could also pass referrer IDs in the URL (www.yoursite.com?source=blah). These URLs will show up in your reports and then you can tell where people came from simply by the number of hits to these URLs.

A referrer from a search engine will reveal to you the keywords they typed into that search engine to find you. And your analytics report should provide you information on top keywords, phrases, etc. Now, by combining this fact with the tactic of different landing pages, you can then find out even more about your visitor segments and which keywords they respond to. For example, if your overall site report shows certain keywords are the most popular, your report for a landing page of buyers might show different keywords work on that segment.

Visitor Activity

When looking at what visitors do on your site, you can look at the most popular paths. However, keep in mind that the most popular paths become more statistically meaningless as traffic to your site increases. It is more important, then, to look at the most popular pages on your site and how long the visitor stuck around.

Combine where the visitor came from to what they did on your site and you have a pretty good picture of what’s going on. Now, lets say you get goals here. If they click into your site from a particular place, your goal is probably that they buy something. Or it may be that they sign up for your newsletter. Now, lets look at the paths and pages visited and see if that visitor segment made it to your goal. Look at the exit pages. Did they exit too early? Why? Is your shopping cart too complicated? Is a particular step of checkout stumping your customer? Look at the exit stats and then see where the flows are bunching up. Perhaps you need to change something on those exit pages to keep your visitors in the game and push them toward your goal for them.

Another important thing is look at information your visitor gives you while at your website. What search terms are they typing into your internal search engine? When they fill in forms, this is an ideal way to break your visitors into segments. Get their age, their gender. Look at where they are from. If the form you use asks for basic information in order for the visitor to get information they want (like gender, zip code, etc), you can use the GET method on that form, thereby putting those variables into your URL (i.e. page.php?gender=m&zip=33605). These URLs will show up in your analytics report and you can perform some great tracking on that visitor segment. Perhaps you find that different age groups respond to certain things better. Or people from a particular area of the country respond to your offers better. This is great information to know for marketing.

Summary

For this issue of the newsletter, I will leave it at that. I hope I have given you a look at how you can use this information in marketing. ITs not just raw data to look at and say “cool”. Its very useful, and if you apply a little brains to it you can really take control over what your visitors are doing on your site rather than reacting to it or (worse yet) not paying it any attention.