Web Analytics 101 – Part 1

Every business decision that you make has a reason or a goal. For web presence, it is usually to improve sales, exposure, or various aspects of your business. If that is the case, then design and development is step one.

Step two is just as important in the success. Some terms and ideas that go in line with this topic are shopping cart abandonment rate, referral sites, length of stay on your site, and several other metrics. These metrics, and the proper evaluation of them, can be the golden ticket to your e-commerce marketing strategy.

For this blog I decided to scratch the surface of a couple of these terms, and then revisit them later.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

This term refers to the percentage of customers who create a shopping cart on an e-commerce site, and then later choose not to buy something. Initially this is simply a ratio, but there are ways to track at what point in the process the customer left your site and their purchase. If this data is properly analyzed, it can be used to improve your sites e-commerce site in the future. Action: Review where visitors are leaving your site the most and try to fix that.

Referral Sites

These are sites that direct your current site visitors to your page. An example of this could be a link on your blog to your company’s website. Another example of this type of site is Facebook and Twitter. At the end of each month, you can track whether you are getting more traffic from Facebook, Twitter, your blog, or affiliate marketers, and re-evaluate your internet marketing strategy to take into effect those statistics.

Keywords

Understanding keywords and how they relate to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key in driving traffic to your site via search engines. When you are looking for something on Google, you are going to type in the words or phrases that you think will get you to the site you want. If someone types in “Airport Milwaukee”, they would expect for General Mitchell Airport to come up. Action: Think about your target audience online and brainstorm the words or phrases that they would be likely to type into Google in order to find your website. Once you have an idea of what keywords will be important, make sure that you are using those words in Meta Tags, Alt Tags, Titles, and other descriptive portions of your site.

Be sure to keep an eye out for future blog posts discussing other topics concerning web analytics! Also, don’t forget to comment below and let us know about some of your favorite web analytical tools.