Data is king: Why analytics are the keys to increasing your conversion rate

December 9, 2009 | Posted by Carolyn Pikoulas
Analytics. Sounds pretty boring, right? Well, for most people, it is. But when you discover that analytics essentially help your business grow, it starts to sound much more appealing. In short, web analytics is the process of collecting, measuring and analyzing user activity to help achieve the intended objective of the website. Content was the former king of successful websites -- now it's data's turn. Tracking web analytics is a crucial factor in maintaining a successful, highly-trafficked site.

Web analytics are the most measurable form of marketing today (not to mention the most affordable). It gives detailed insights on how people learn about your business and respond to your website. Using it along with your traditional marketing efforts allows you to track changes, such as spikes in traffic and how many new visitors are landing on your site each month. Analytics is the best way to determine how to improve your website, whether it's the content, organization, or call-to-actions.

As you study your analytics, ask these questions:
WHO is coming to your site? Are they unique or returning visitors?
HOW long are they staying on your site? Are they visiting multiple pages and actually reading your content?
WHERE are they coming from? Discover which sites are referring the most visitors.
WHICH outbound marketing campaigns (print ads, e-mails, etc.) have been producing the most traffic?
WHAT can you add to the site to turn your visitors into customers?

Getting the visitors to your site is only half the battle. Now your website must get visitors to explore beyond the homepage and keep them coming back regularly. This will, in turn, lead to higher conversion rates. It could be signing up for a newsletter, providing feedback or convincing them to make a purchase. The visitor who performs an action "converts" into a customer.

We stress that it's vital for every business to analyze the behavior of visitors. Let's say you have a Pay-Per-Click campaign, and you've created a specific landing page for the ad. Your analytics show that visitors who enter that page are also exiting right away instead of clicking through your site. That tells you that your landing page has a problem, and you need to reexamine it. Without knowing this from the analytics, you would have an ineffective PPC campaign that's wasting your money.

Before you start any marketing campaign, you should have the right tracking in place. The last thing you want to do is waste money. An easy way to track is to use free or low-cost programs. Here at WDC, we have several tools we use to keep track of visitors including Crazy Egg, Google Analytics, and Woopra.

Crazy Egg is a really cool program that can create heat maps to visually show you which links on your site are the most attractive to visitors. This tells you what's hot and what's not, so you can make necessary changes. You can then share this data with clients, bosses, strangers, and -- above all -- people you may be trying to sell ad space to. Crazy Egg can also block visitor data you don't want included, like your own clicks.

Google Analytics has everything you need to know, from Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser, etc...And it's FREE! Here's a 9 minute video to help you learn about Google Analytics.

Woopra is also helpful to see visitors in real-time. You can track exactly what pages they're currently on, how long they're staying and which pages they go to next. You can also see what browser they're using, their screen size, even their operating system. Pretty scary, huh? But really, the scariest thing is having a website and blindly marketing it, with no understanding of its success or failure.