No matter how simple or complex a site is, understanding and tracking the effectiveness of the website is an important part of marketing your products or services well. Whether you have a small lead generation site or a large ecommerce store, the information that can be gathered through website analytics is invaluable to growing your business.
To paraphrase, and expand upon, Sir Francis Bacon, understanding and utilizing information properly can be a very powerful tool. There are numerous website analytics services, which provide a wealth of information about the activity present on your website. This information includes (but is not limited to) the keywords used to find your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs), the web pages which referred visitors to your website, and the amount of time each visitor spent browsing the information contained within your pages. But all this information is for naught if it is not utilized properly.
A Web site analytics service can provide answers to business questions such as:
- What search engines are sending the traffic?
- What are the most important keywords?
- What is my ROI for PPC vs. search engine traffic?
- Which online marketing campaigns are leading to successful conversions?
Of course, there are many more things a Web analytics service can do. With a Web analytics service, you can track "actions or behaviors" on the Web site that are important to your business. For example, a Web analytics service can track the number of downloads for a white paper, the amount of visitors to a page, the browser used by your traffic. It can track the number of people that signed up for a newsletter, and much more.
Over the years, the Internet industry has evolved and developed a wide variety of Web site analytics services. What they do not tell us is that these products basically do the same thing - they collect data about your site and provide reports. Whether you have a "free" service such as Google Analytics or a $10,000 per month service (yes, they exist), they all do the same thing. Of course, the more you spend, the more access you get to more sophisticated data and fancier reports and perhaps some consulting.
It turns out that a great many Web site analytics products and services are analogous to a dashboard of a car. The standard dashboard tells you about your speed, how many miles you have driven, and how much gas you have left. Some services are more sophisticated and they will provide data about the oil pressure, tire pressure and upcoming car maintenance needs.