• Solutions
  • Web Analytics
    • Analytics Platform
    • Ad-Hoc Reporting
  • Targeted Email
  • Search Marketing
    • SEM / Paid Search
    • SEO / Natural Search
    • SMS / Agency Services
  • Site Recommendations
  • Solutions for
    • Content / Media
    • Financial Services
    • Retail
    • Scholarly Publishing
    • Travel
    • SMB
  • Integration Platform
  • Benchmarking
    • Industry Report
  • Comparison Shopping
  • Coremetrics for WebSphere Commerce
  • SurfAid
• Services
  • Client Services Overview
  • Implementation
  • Customer Support Center
  • Coremetrics University
  • Strategic Services
  • Search Marketing Services
• Resources
  • White Papers
  • Client Success
  • Articles
  • Core Insight Newsletter
  • Webinars
  • Conferences and Events
• Clients
  • Overview
  • Testimonials
  • Client Success Stories
• Partners
  • Partner Program
  • LIVEmail
  • Partner Directory
  • Coremetrics Connect
  • Partner Application
• Company
  • About Us
  • Management
  • Investors
  • Press Releases
  • Privacy
  • Careers
  • Contact Us

Clients

• Overview
• Testimonials
• Client Success Stories

It’s All About the Attributes: Get to Know Your Visitors with Powerful Web Analytics 

Dealing with the myriad issues surrounding websites today, online marketers at SMBs have busy schedules. And yet, those who have not integrated web analytics and marketing into their daily agendas are strongly advised to do so. Well functioning websites are not nice-to-have anymore. They must operate with precision, optimizing the experience of visitors and customers. Smart websites have been proven to be key differentiators.

Web Analytics is a Must

Whether your business operates an e-commerce website, a media website, a social website, a lead gen website or any other kind of website, as long as the success of your business depends on your website, you have one flow to consider: build the right website, acquire new visitors, increase visitor conversion, customer satisfaction and retention, and grow your business. Building the right website to accomplish all of that, however, is not simple. To get your website to perform, you need to know your visitors and how they interact with your website.

Getting website visitors to do what you ask of them—such as submit a lengthy registration form—requires a systematic approach. You need to entice visitors to take action, make it easy for them to find a fill out the form, and remove any roadblock that might prevent them from completing the task, or converting. To do so, you need to know how they arrive at your website, how they navigate it, how they use it and where they exit it. Once you understand their behavior, you can take action to improve visitor experience. And ultimately that’s what it’s all about. It’s not what you think is good experience that matters, it’s what your visitors, or, better yet, well defined segments of your visitors think is good experience.

Building the right website to acquire, convert and retain customers
requires web analytics

Building the right website requires good prioritization of time, budget and resource investments. Building a rich websites with all the bells and whistles and expecting that customers will repeat using it just because you think you have an awesome website, is not enough. You need to know that what you’re doing and where you are spending your precious resources, is helping your cause. You need good measurement and analysis tools to make intelligent decisions. For example:

• SEM and SEO are not enough. You need to know which channel should get credit (and how much credit) for each website visitor and customer.
• Funnels and Conversions are powerful tools to understand whether visitors complete the tasks that are important to you.
• You can influence visitor behavior by providing shoppers with intelligent offers about what else they should consider buying.
• Getting visitors to return to your website is key. How do you increase relevance for them?

Today, you can address all of these issues with web analytics.

Integrating Web Analytics into Business Processes

All too often, businesses operate online properties without an overarching strategy. According to a 2008 survey conducted by E-consultancy and Lynchpin Research, only 18% of companies have an internal strategy that ties web analytics data to business objectives. Such businesses often fail because energy, initiative and optimism are usually misdirected. The following scenario is typical:

• The business does not define website objectives and does not tie them with business goals.
  
• Website performance is not tracked at a granular level. As a consequence, root-cause of website problems are not identified and addressed.
• Routine actions are not anchored in web analytics data. The business makes important decisions in a vacuum, with little to no context.
• Although the business makes significant investments in its website, user experience is not improved where it counts.
• This ultimately leads to inability to increase customer acquisition, conversion and retention, putting the business at risk.

Here are a few lessons learned by failed businesses. These are good to keep in mind as you evaluate your current web analytics strategy:

• If you think you know your customer, you better think again! Marketers think that customers are just like them, but that’s not accurate. And while customer surveys, focus groups and usability tests are great ways to collect some customer insight, to truly understand website visitors and customers, you need to regularly track their behavior and analyze it from different perspectives.
  
• Another point is don’t try to do too much, don’t boil the ocean. The more features, bells and whistles you add, the smaller added value each enhancement yields. You have to focus on the few things that matter to the business. And you can find those by looking at your analytics data.
• And lastly, you must plan for the long-term for sure, but execute for the short-term. Solve the top three problems that currently block or halt conversions, and treat those problems one at a time.

You already know this, but it’s worth repeating: users do not need cool websites; they need real solutions for real problems. Make sure your website helps them, not that it impresses them.

Building solid business practice around web analytics is simple. You don’t need to hire expensive consultants to put you on the right track. The way to do it is to take some time and spec out the fundamentals of your business:

• What are the major goals of your company: increase sales, reduce costs, increase market share, increase brand awareness? The answers depend on the nature of your business, the resources you have, your ability to leverage external resources and your long-term plans?
• What are the goals of your website? How does the website help you realize your corporate objectives?
  
• How do you define success for your website? Which metrics should you track against its performance? Which metrics are your peers and competitors using?
• Who in your organization is accountable for consistently performing website performance analysis and comparing the data against your website goals?
• Who in your organization is accountable for acting on the website analytics data? Is your website development plan informed by web analytics data?
• And finally, what should you fix or enhance right now so that more visitors move through the acquisition, conversion, retention flow?

When web analytics work as it should, you can effectively manage your website by clear objectives. You can put in place a roadmap that is anchored in the realities of your visitors because you took the time to learn who your visitors are and how they interact with your website.

Web Analytics Has a Lot to Offer

Web analytics and marketing cover a lot of ground. Part of the reason why SMBs shy away is because the list is overwhelming, and mastering it seems unfeasible.

This is a mistake. The right approach is to get in a step at a time. Find a couple of metrics that work for your website. Learn to track and analyze them. Act on the findings. Then go back and track performance again. As your confidence grows, you can add more metrics, so that you can take even more specific actions, because now you know your visitors better.

Web analytics isn’t rocket science. It includes a lot of data and some time it’s hard to glean insight when being overwhelmed by numbers, but a slow, methodical approach will help. That’s the beauty of web analytics, even a small set of numbers that is well contextualized will inform you about your visitors.

Luckily, solutions like Coremetrics Online Analytics provide reporting templates that fit your industry. You follow a best practice approach to understand your visitors and customers. Later, you can do more sophisticated things like slicing and dicing data with flexible reporting, such as Coremetrics Explore.

As you familiarize yourself with the standard metrics, you can take it a step further and look at how effectively your website drives visitors to take actions that are important to you. Selecting the goals for your visitors, or their conversion points, depends on the nature of your business and the goals of your website. For instance, travel site owners might want to know how and how often their visitors reach the flight, hotel or car booking confirmation page. Owners of social sites might be interested in data about log ins and user-generated content postings.

Web analytics has a lot to offer, but a step-by-step approach Will get you up to speed fast.

The Power of Attributes

You are probably familiar with the basics of web analytics. If you have a web page that you’re interested in measuring, you can look at, say, the number of unique visitors who accessed that page last month and contextualize the data. By contextualize, we mean that you compare the data against historical data you have for the page, against other pages on your site, against similar pages on your peers’ and competitors’ sites (assuming you have the data) or against a target number you’ve set for yourself. And this is great, if you can pull this off, you’re well on your way to understand how your particular web page is performing for your visitors, and you can take action on that, such as giving the page more prominence on the site, simplifying it or enhancing its content.

But today, robust web analytics solutions, such as Coremetrics Online Analytics, can provide a lot more insight about the decisions visitors make when interacting with websites. This is done through the use of attributes.

Behold the power of attributes

Put simply, attributes are descriptors, they are things that describe other things. Attributes of a person can include things like age, gender, occupation and education level. Similar to people, we can think of attributes of web pages or of elements within a page. Attributes of a page include language and author. Attributes of a product include color and size. Price and brand can be attributes of an on-site search. Transaction attributes include promotion code and payment method. And elements, such as videos, can also have attributes like genre and length.

Attributes help you understand the decisions your website visitors make because attributes are both powerful and flexible. You can report on and analyze endless combinations of attributes and answer key questions, such as:

• Do your customers view a product because of its site placement, its price, or its brand?
  
• Is an article frequently read because of its author or its topic?
  
• Are your English-language pages that feature specific industry more widely read than your German-language pages that feature other industries?
  
• Which promotion codes drive Google Checkout purchases?
  
• Which search refinement options drive conversion?

Whether capturing attributes of a page, a product, a transaction, an onsite search, an event, or an element, this level of description allows you to fully understand the impact of you website on your visitors, and ultimately uncover data relationships that will suggest vital changes to content, media, product mix, offers, site placement, and search results.

The beautiful thing about attributes is that you can aggregate them, filter and segment them, and then measure them against key metrics. This is both powerful and important because ultimately, users don’t respond to web pages, they respond to content inside web pages. And attributes are the windows by which you can peek to learn how your visitors interact with the layout, organization and content of your website.

Robust web analytics solutions that can collapse session data into visitor data, the way Coremetrics Online Analytics does, can even allow you to leverage visitors attributes. This gives you the ability to create specific visitor segmentation that you can apply in your key metrics reports, and see how well your website caters to these visitor segments. If you have not done so already, be sure to check out our web analytics and marketing solutions at: http://www.coremetrics.com/solutions/web-analytics.php.