If you thought that online profit was a stroke of luck and that not many are lucky enough to win, think again. The incredible power of a scientific approach with Web Analytics will uncover how a pragmatic approach to monitoring your website can ensure long term profitability and a competitive edge.
Web Analytics, also referred to as website traffic analysis, gives you information that can be leveraged to better understand how visitors are interacting with your website and how you can dramatically increase conversion rates; website visitor – enquiry - sale. In our fast-moving world it is important for marketing strategies to be flexible and quickly adaptable to suit changing customer needs and market conditions, I’m sure you’ll agree that this is not always easy to do this with off-line marketing campaigns. The beauty of on-line marketing campaigns is that you can actually use real-time scientific data gathered through Web Analytics to experiment with your website – it is a live laboratory. Only the most successful experiments are continued, while less successful ones are discarded or improved to yield better conversion rates and ultimately profit.
Studying Visitor Behaviour.
You can learn a great deal about who your visitors are and how they interact with your website. Web Analytics can tell you how they arrived at your site – did they arrive via a search engine? follow a link to your site? click on your pay-per-click ad? or type your website address directly into their browser? You can tell how long they stayed on each page, where they clicked, what pages they viewed as well as which page they exited your site from. Once you understand visitors' behaviour, you will be able to identify and eliminate navigational obstacles that slow down or prevent visitors from completing the conversion to becoming a customer. The result will be an improved visitor experience encouraging more conversions and more sales: A scientific, logically progressive way to make more money online.
Identifying Your Website's Vantage Points.
Retailers have long practised the art of store planning and monitoring traffic patterns to identify prime selling space in their shops. Supermarkets are masters at scientific, successful store planning – it's no accident that staples such as milk are traditionally placed at the back of the shop and impulse items are placed near the checkout. Why? Years of monitoring consumer movement, behaviour and interaction have identified the most profitable selling space based on the journey a consumer makes through the shop.
The same rules apply to your website. With the help of Web Analytics you can identify your high traffic areas as well as areas which need additional traffic. By identifying your prime selling space or vantage points - the areas of your website that are most likely to convert website visitors into customers, you can increase your return on investment (ROI) significantly.
Experimenting in Your Website Laboratory
Once vantage points have been identified you can now use Pay per Click (PPC) advertising to test different offers and promotions (also known as A/B testing or split-testing). This is one of the simplest methods of experimenting with your website. With A/B testing you expose one group of visitors to one offer, while a second group sees an alternate version where one element has been changed (eg. keyword, advert, landing page, copy, product image, offer, price). Results are tracked to determine the winning combination that gives you the highest number of visitors converting to customers at the lowest cost. This winning combination then becomes your A offer and you make a second change to test again. This process continues with the goal to find the offer that out-performs all others; maximum quantity of quality website visitors that produces the maximum conversion rate to high-profit customers at the lowest cost – thus maximising ROI.
All of this is possible by analysing your Web Analytics reports and experimenting with different strategies. Your website can truly be a living laboratory, buzzing with online experiments.
As a WSI Internet Marketing Consultant I can:
Assist in selecting the right Analytics package to meet the requirements of your business at an affordable cost.
Help you identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your online business and set-up the appropriate reports to monitor and track performance.
Establish a programme of A/B testing to maximise ROI.
Recommend additional activity to attract even more website visitors with the right characteristics to become customers and thus grow your business.