Top 3 Reasons Website Analytics Are Important For Your Business Or Blog
May 16th 2009 2:34 PM
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You may or may not have heard about Website Analytics. Chances are if you have a website with some goals and objectives, you have. If you are not using website analytics on your website, you may as well not have one. The Web Analytics Association defines it as “measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.”
In other words, it tells you how people are reaching your site, how they interact with it, and what they think of it. Is that important to you? It damn as hell should be, if you want to make any progress towards achieving your online goals that is.
Whether you run a business website, your own blog, or both, here are 3 top reasons you need to use website analytics.
1) Measure Your Marketing Success
If you don’t have goals or objectives for your website, get some. If you do, how do you know if your goals are being met? Website Analytics measures your goals and objectives using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Some examples of useful KPIs for both business websites and personal blogs are:
E-Commerce
Internet Blog
Google Analytics is a great free web analytics tool, among its many useful features is the ability to create and measure online goals.
Optimize and Improve
Once you have measured the goals and data that are important to you, it is time to interpret what they mean. Are you goals being met or not? If they are not, you must come up with some insight into how to improve them. The impact the changes you make to your website can be measured using web analytics. Google produces a great tool called Website Optimizer that lets you perform A/B testing to determine the impact of each change to your website or landing page.
Efficiency and Cost Cutting
During a recession, the bang for your marketing buck becomes ever more important, as marketing budgets usually are cut down. Web analytics is a great way to identify which campaigns and initiatives are working and which are not. This lets you funnel more dollars and efforts into initiatives helping your bottom line, and eliminate those efforts that are an anchor on your money and effort.
In summary, without Website Analytics you cannot see how your website or campaign is performing, and the impact of any changes you make towards your goals cannot even be measured.
What website analytics package do you use? What do you find most useful about website analytics? I would love to hear your comments below and get a discussion going.
