Analytics

How Do You Track Your Website’s Success?

Your web strategy would be incomplete if you didn’t take advantage of its key difference from traditional marketing channels - the flexibility to change strategy on a dime. The information you gather from your web site can help you determine which offers are working and which are not, whether your various marketing strategies are effective, and how well which keywords are working in the search engines.

However, it’s very easy to indulge in information overload and begin making incremental enhancements that can be more costly than effective, not to mention time-consuming. R3R works with clients to weed out the distracting details, and take action on the important indicators from web analytics.

More About Web Analytics

Collecting and interpreting this data is known as web analytics and there are a number of basic metrics you can use to track your success. However, before you even implement your campaign - let alone measure it - it’s important to be clear on the goals for our target audience. Your bottom line may be to drive sales and revenue, but your web site can also contribute to lead generation, building a community around your business or generating brand awareness and PR, and you can set up your site to track any interim goal.

Your hosting company can supply web analytics for your site in raw form, and from it you can easily extract some common measures of site performance such as:

HITS: Each file downloaded from your site is known as a hit. Files can include images, scripts and anything else the web browser needs to allow user to view the page. If, for example, your homepage contains four photos and an HTML file, five hits to your site will be recorded, even though only one user has visited your page. As a result, hits are not a reliable measure of visitors to your site.

UNIQUE VISITORS: You can get a more accurate measure of who is coming to your site by looking at the number of unique visitors. Unless you’re setting cookies (see page 23) this will be at best an estimate as there is no reliable way to register repeat visitors.

PAGE VIEWS: Each time a visitor comes to your site, you can find out how many pages are looked at - the number of page views. This is a more useful measure of activity that can tell you how deeply your visitors engage with the various areas of your site.

REFERRERS: The sites from which your visitors arrive. This is an easy way to measure the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing strategy.

To understand the paths, or routes within your site that customers are taking before they make a purchase, a more active measurement, known as page tagging, may be appropriate. Additional code must be added to each of the web pages on your site so that you can record how visitors are interacting with a particular page as well as what path they take through your site overall. Are they coming to your site through the homepage or some other landing page? What links are they clicking on most often? How deep into your site do they go; i.e., how many pages do they visit during one session?

For example, if you have a product slideshow or link to a video on a particular page, page tagging will enable you to see which of these items, or modules, garnered the most interest from visitors. You might consider a service such as Google Analytics, which offers all the tools required at no charge, as well as the ability to examine the results online.

Another option is setting cookies on your web pages. These are snippets of text that are sent to visitor’s browser and then passed back each time they access your site again. This is a good way to screen out repeat visits and so to arrive at a number for unique visitors. Cookies can also hold information about the user (such as log-in details, or shopping-basket information) and also act as an accurate counter of the number of times they visit your site. This type of data can help you better understand purchase behaviors, and make targeted offers to specific visitors.

Whether it’s using web analytics to provide a long-range check on the direction of your site, or a day-to-day tactical tool for staying current you should find a balance between investment and results.