Analysing Your Website Visitors
A recent issue of eBusiness Live from Enterprise Ireland deals with Web analytics tools, explaining how they allow you to find out crucial information about your own website.
Tracking customer behaviour with analytics
Every visitor to your website has a different back-story. Some will have found your site by searching for the products and services you offer. Others will go straight to your site because a friend, colleague or one of your sales team passed them the URL.
Once on your site, each visitor will have different expectations and desires. Some will simply want more information, while others will want to make a purchase.
Understanding these customer stories and desires can be challenging for SMEs. But if you don't try to track customer behaviour, you won't be able to tweak and improve your website to ensure that customers are getting what they want.
This is where web analytics comes in.
Web analytics tools allow you to find out crucial information about your website, such as:
* where your visitors are based geographically
* how they found your website
* the page most visitors go to when they first enter your site
* the page most users visit before leaving your site (the exit page).
The most popular web analytics tool for SMEs is Google Analytics, which, despite being free, provides all of the information above and more. We'll look at Google Analytics (and other analytics tools) in the next issue, but first let's get some expert insight into how SMEs who are new to analytics should approach this area.
Know thyself
"The main thing for people new to web analytics to realise is that both the advantage and disadvantage of analytics is that there is heaps of essentially free data available," says Brendan Donohue, senior analyst at Dublin-based website usability specialist iQ Content. "This is great because the cost barrier is nil. However, the challenge quickly becomes differentiating the noise from the meaningful bits of data."
With this in mind, the first step to making the most of analytics tools is having a clear idea of what you want your website to do and how important it is to your business, explains Donohue.
"The 'why?' of web analytics is quite straightforward and comes down to 'is the website working for me?' So, the basics of web analytics is about finding out whether your site is performing well for what you want it to do," says Donohue.
Measuring success
Website aims can vary wildly for SMEs. For some, the website is the business (e.g. for online retailers), whereas for others it's simply a portfolio with a 'Contact Us' page. That huge variance has massive implications for how much SMEs should actually be looking at web analytics.
If you simply want customers to fill out a form requesting more information, for example, you can dip into web analytics to track whether visitors are going to the page containing the form or not.
If you want customers to make purchases, you can take a closer look to track whether they are going through the checkout process successfully. Web analytics could inform you that customers are finding your checkout process too complicated or abandoning it mid-way through.
To make the most of the potential power of web analytics, you should have a clear answer in your mind to the question 'What do I want customers to do when they visit my website?'
"For such a simple question," says Donohue, "it's surprising how many people don't have a good answer to it."
Enabling change
With a clear idea of what you want your website visitors to do, and analytics tools tracking whether or not they are doing it, you can start tweaking your website to improve your success rate.
For example, if not enough people are filling out a web form, you could try changing the call-to-action text from 'Sign up now' to 'Tell me more'.
Web analytics tools can then tell you whether your change has been successful, by measuring the increase or decrease in the number of people who filled in the form since the change was made.
"When you get to the stage of trying something new and then figuring out if what you tried actually worked - that critically differentiates the savvy website owner from the not-so-savvy," says Donohue.
Understanding customers
Website analytics enable you to understand your customers better. They also enable you to track whether your website visitors are doing what you want them to do and whether tweaks made to your website are having the desired impact.
This is crucial information for SMEs interested in maximising their web presence.
(Source: eBusiness Live from Enterprise Ireland)