Last month, we examined Why Analytics are Vital for Your Website to discover why a good utilization of the information provided by web analytics can not only help drive more visitors to your website, by seeing what works and what doesn’t, but can also help properly monetize your site by pinpointing correct marketing approaches. Good web analytics have become a necessity for success, but their initial implementation may raise a number of important questions. Here are the Top 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask About Web Analytics:

1. Why should we use analytics?

As we explored in our previous article, web analytics give you a clear idea on the actions of “the Internet’s one common denominator – visitors. A closer look at their behavior, where they come from, or how long they stay on your site can paint a valid overall picture of your website’s current and foreseeable success. For instance, let’s say you have a website that covers stories on the technology of the net. Applying analytics to your site can highlight in detail which of these stories or topics gains the most views. If articles based on net neutrality gain the most clicks, a further focus on such articles can help retain these visitors, gain new ones, and, chiefly, increase brand awareness and SEO.”

2. Which platform should we use?

A majority of businesses utilize Google Analytics for many reasons – it’s free, comprehensive, and relatively easy to use. While there are many popular competitors out there including Adobe Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Crazy Egg, Google Analytics has in many ways become an industry standard with more than 10 million websites using it as of 2012.

3. Why do we need to know anything more than how many visitors we get?

While it is useful to know how many visitors reach your site, a high traffic flow doesn’t necessarily equate a successful website. Much of the traffic could be due to bots and web crawlers or the traffic may be reaching your site and clicking away fairly quickly (bounce rate).

Good web analytics can determine which pages or products attract your visitors, how long they stay on each page (indicating interest), and how they arrived at your site. Other key performance indicators (KPI), such as page load time, are also measured to help gauge the efficacy of the website. If the page takes too long to load, for instance, are visitors clicking away from your site in frustration? With the rise of mobile 4G LTE signals and high speed internet, patience is not rewarded in the online world. KPI’s such as this can help optimize your website to make it more streamlined and marketable to future visitors.

4. What are our current challenges and can web analytics help solve them?

Web analytics can help determine the source of many website challenges.  For example, if one of your company’s products is underselling, analytics can show if there if there is a hiccup in the customer’s route to the closing sales page. Is there a broken link along the route or a page that is not loading properly? Is the sales page too confusing and losing visitors at a high rate? Or, is the product link on the main page not prominent enough? If your website itself is gaining a high traffic rate but is suffering from a large bounce rate, analytics can pinpoint where that traffic is coming from. Are you attracting the wrong consumer base or is your landing page not supporting the proper marketing message? Search term breakdowns can show which keywords and topics were used to get them there.

While big data reports, such as Google analytics, can be daunting, a good Internet property management (IPM) company can help break it down. At Netsville, for instance, we not only provide our clients with weekly analytic reports but we also dig deep to offer recommendations on overcoming such challenges by identifying them as early as possible.

5. Will the reports be overwhelming and hard to read?

Raw web analytics are indeed complex with lots of information and data to process; however, they can easily be adapted for the needs of the business and the simple comprehension of the reader. Google Analytics provides many graphs and features such as location hot maps, visitor age/gender bar graphs, and a user flow chart indicating a visitor’s journey from source to website to page-by-page. These features keep the reports informative and simple. At Netsville, we further customize our reports according to the client’s goals and overall focus.

Based in Rochester, New York, Netsville is an Internet Property Management company specializing in managing the Digital Marketing, Technical, and Business Solutions for our customers since 1994. For more information, please click here.