09 March 2010

The benefits of Analytics

Submitted by: Carla
{pp}It is important to measure what happens on your websiteand to measure these actions easily you can make use of analytics programmes like Google Analytics.

The importance of having a well-designed and user-friendly website has been highlighted many times, yet once the website design and development processes are complete, that’s really only the beginning! Maintaining a website requires a constant investment of time and effort and in our opinion a website should always be regarded as “a work in progress”.

It is important to measure what happens on your website; for instance how visitors find it, where they enter the website and how they engage with your content and navigation. To measure these actions easily, web marketers make use of analytics programmes like Google Analytics.

One of the main benefits of web analytics is that it helps website owners gain a better understanding of what visitors want by analysing their actions on the website. Among other things, Analytics will show you:

- The source of your traffic; for instance direct traffic, traffic from search engines or referring websites
- The average amount of time visitors spent on the website
- Visitor loyalty (whether the majority of visits are new or returning)
- Your most popular content
- Geographic locations of your visitors with a map overlay that shows where in the world visitors are accessing your website
- You will also be able to see technical details such as which are the most commonly used Internet browsers, or the connection speed of your visitors

The above mentioned are just a few of the aspects of a website that can be measured. Analytics will highlight the areas on a website that can be improved (i.e. pages with a high exit rate) and areas that are performing well. As part of an optimisation strategy Analytics will point out which keywords are performing well. This information can be used to increase organic traffic to the website.

Since Analytics is focused on measuring user engagement, it is important to allocate goals to your website. Goals can include visitors filling in a contact form, downloading a brochure, signing up for a newsletter and so forth. The conversion rate indicated the percentage of visitors to a website that complete an assigned goal or task. As such, it’s an important benchmark used to show a site’s effectiveness.

Within Google Analytics there is a very useful and insightful benchmarking function (found under the Visitors tab) that allows website owners to compare their website to similar-sized websites in the same industry. Comparison criteria include visits, bounce rate, page views, average time on the website, number of pages visited and new visits.

Essentially, Analytics will help you improve your website on a continuous basis to provide your visitors with the best content and usability in order to increase conversions. Do you have questions about Analytics? Ask us, we offer one-on-one or team Analytics training on request.

About AlterSage
AlterSage offers tailored online marketing solutions that achieve targeted exposure for your website. Goal focussed and driven by return on investment, services include search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, web design an d development, persuasive web copywriting, brand building, conversion analysis and many more.

Contact information:
AlterSage
18 Roeland Street
First Floor
Cape Town
8001

[0ffice] (+27 21] 462 0036
[Email] This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
[Website] www.altersage.com