Analytics: If You Aren't Measuring, You're Wasting Your Time

If you aren't measuring and analyzing what visitors do on your web site, you aren't really running a web site. Oh sure, you have a website, but you aren't managing it unless you're measuring what happens, and taking action to improve your website's performance.

One thing for today: if you don't have any kind of analytics program in place, do something about it. In fact, if you're playing the "box of dreams" game with me, just forget about pulling anything from that box until you've got some way to measure success.

This is essential, folks! It's not optional. It's not something to do some day in the future. In the "future," I will have a flying car and a robot maid. Today, I need to know what visitors are doing on my website so that I'll be able to afford all that cool stuff when the future actually gets here.

How can knowing what happens on your website lead you to that promised land of flying cars? Well, here are just a few things you will be able to do once you start measuring:

• Identify important search terms from your organic and pay-per-click campaigns, and create a feedback loop so that your SEO campaign tells you what to add to your PPC campaign, and your PPC campaign tells you what your priorities should be for SEO. This translates to acquiring more targeted traffic to your web site.
  
• Measure the performance of key pages on your web site, using key performance indicators (KPIs) like the bounce rate from your home page, the conversion rate from your landing pages, the opt-in rate for your email newsletter, etc. When you can measure these things, you can test different ideas to see if your KPIs improve.
• Analyze visitor behavior, to see which links visitors click. This can help identify navigation and usability issues, but it also gives you a clearer picture of what visitors want. This allows you to give them more of what they want (and make it easier to find). The result of this activity should be increases in the average time on site and page views per visit, which should translate to a higher conversion rate.
• By measuring and managing to a set of key performance indicators, you can develop a clear direction for the long term and short term management of your web site. Every incremental improvement you make adds to the others you have made. The cumulative effect can easily mean tripling or quadrupling your profitability within a few months.
  

In my free keyword strategy video, I discuss different ways to use testing and analytics to improve the performance of your website's search engine marketing campaigns.

When you start measuring and testing, you will begin to see that small changes can lead to big results. Andy Jenkins of Yahoo Store Profits showed me how changing the wording on his free shipping offer from "free shipping on all orders" to "we pay for your shipping" led to a substantial boost in sales.

You can see Andy's Tapestry Standard store for more examples of little things that lead to big increases in conversion and sales. Those 3-D tapestry pictures aren't there because they're pretty, they are there because people buy more products when they see the product in 3 dimensions. There's no way he could have done any of this without a good analytics and testing program in place.

In terms of getting started, you have a couple of choices:

• Log file analysis: If you have access to the raw access log files from your hosting provider, then you can use log file analyzer programs like FastStats, ClickTracks, NetTracker, and others.
• Page tagging: If you don't have access to log files, you will need to implement a page tagging solution, like IndexTools, ClickTracks hosted, Nettracker hosted, Google Analytics, WebTrends Live, etc.

At this time, I am suggesting IndexTools (tagging) or Clicktracks (log files) for most of my students. My personal preference is to use page tagging rather than log file analysis, because I believe that it works better for tracking visitor sessions. Most page tagging solutions do involve monthly subscriptions and fees, but when you factor in your time/labor, the overall cost of ownership is comparable to logfile-based solutions.

I will continue to post about analytics and conversion as the "one thing a day" series continues, but don't worry, my next post will take us back to the familiar world of SEO. For now, let me suggest a few good resources and let you get on with the rest of your day:

• The Grok Dot Com conversion rate newsletter and Steve Jackson's Conversion Chronicles are very good sources of general information on conversionr rate improvement.
• MarketingSherpa and MarketingProfs both have fantastic email newsletters that will give you a lot of good ideas on different things to test.
• O'Reilly's Website Measurement Hacks and Roger Parker's Streetwise Relationship Marketing on the Internet are both good reads. The former will help you get an analytics program up and running, the latter will help you understand your target audience and their information needs... both of which are important to improving your web site's performance and profitability.

Watch this space.

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