The Importance of Web Analytics Strategy for Achieving Business Goals
With so much emphasis and activity in the online world, any business will have understood the importance of a web analytics strategy. Every business must set aside resources for internet marketing activities like lead generation, social media ads and PPC ads. At the same time, web analytics plays an equally important role among all these. Without an analytics strategy no other online marketing activity can be moulded to bring desired results.
What Does Web Analytics Tell You?
Web analytics can provide all kinds of insights for your website and marketing campaigns. The collected data is analysed to understand user behaviour, optimize traffic, SEO and PPC efforts. Web analytics is also useful for market research.
Some of the metrics that you can track with web analytics include:
- Demographics
- Geo location
- Traffic source
- Bounce rate
- The number of website visits and many more.
What Is Web Analytics Strategy?
A web analytics strategy is the process of mapping out important parameters of your business strategy to your data analytics. While this may seem obvious, many companies are skipping this. Every business has its own industry-specific KPIs and the analytics strategy should focus on optimizing for those goals.
Determine Your Primary Business Goals
The first step in developing an effective web analytics strategy, you need to identify the goals of your website. You need to understand what you have your online assets for. If you want to measure success you need to set goals and define relevant metrics.
Websites that are aimed at directly influencing revenues should focus on promotion of products in order to boost their on-site purchases.
Businesses that don’t sell online products such as healthcare should focus on increasing the number of qualified leads they generate.
Businesses that have inefficient conversion funnels often focus on decreasing the overall cost of conversion. Ecommerce businesses may aim to decrease the cost of conversion by decreasing the number of steps required for purchase. Analytics helps businesses understand where customers leave their website to improve every stage of the buying process.
The Ultimate Goal
High amount of page views, number of sessions, and unique visitors is an indicator that the website is performing well but those are not metrics indicative of business success. The more important metric to gauge website success is how users engage and how they convert. An ecommerce website may attract many visitors on the product page but may fail to convert them. Your web analytics strategy should focus on optimizing website pages with the primary goal to boost conversion.
Every marketing dollar you spend from your budget should help you achieve your goal directly or indirectly.