Web analytics is the study of the behavior of website visitors. This is utmost important for business websites because once business owners have the knowledge about how the web site visitors behave on their sites, they will be able to optimize the page and/or structure of the site to convert more visitors to prospects, and prospects to customers.

Why Should You Use Web Analytics

Marketers can learn a lot by utilizing web analytics. Here is a list of reasons why any business should use web analytics:

• You can determine your traffic numbers. Looking at the stats, you should immediately know how many visitors you had last month, how many people were coming from search engines, how many were referred by other linking sites, etc. Once you see an anomaly, you can start investigating to see if there were new sources of traffic or any problem related to your site.
• Track campaigns and channels. How did your in-house email marketing work? Was it a success? How could you determine if this sale came from your second follow-up postcard? How do you compare in-house email to rented list? If you track each campaign closely, you should know the answers.
• Know your conversion ratio for each product. Which product had the highest customer conversion ratio? Which order now link did the visitors click most? Knowing which of your products sold well and which did’t should help you decide which products to feature and how should you change your sales strategy.
• Maximize revenue. You should be able to know if people are interested in purchasing B in additional to A. Knowing which product(s) to upsell and cross-sell is important for your product offering and maximize site revenue.
• Analyze visitor clickstreams. How people used your site? By using data from web analytics, you could determine which links got the most click and which pages were most popular. This could help in web site conversion.
• Track keyword searches. You can track which keywords the visitors used when searching in search engines before coming to your site. When they used the site search feature, you could track their keywords too and then determine which content or product the searchers are looking for.
• and much more…

Web analytics provide data that can help you optimize your site, increase revenue, and more.

Web Analytics Technologies

There are two main approaches to collecting web analytics data. The first method involves analyzing the server logfile. A script or software will analyze the file and return information about the site.

The second method is by installing JavaScript on each of your web page. This is used to notify a third-party server when certain page is requested and rendered by a web browser.

There are benefits and drawbacks of both methods. With the free web analytics tools that are available right now, you should try or combine both to see which one suits your need. For small businesses who don’t have the budget for Web analytics, free solution such as Google Analytics should be able to get them started immediately.

Web Analytics as an Integral Part of Business Websites

How was the traffic level during holiday season? How many visitors were coming to your site during the last pay per click campaign? How many of them subscribe to your e-newsletter and/or buy your product?

Those are a few commonly asked questions that can be answered with Web analytics. When you view your traffic numbers and keyword searches from search engines in your website logs or analytics software, you are taking advantage of Web analytics.

It is such an integral part of any business website that all business owners should know how to analyze and take actions based upon the data. If you have a lot of traffic and poor conversion, you could use data from the logs or Web stats package to determine what should you test or change to achieve better results.

Conclusion

Web analytics is an indispensable tool that every online business owners should have. Even if you are just in the stage of building your web site, you can start tracking the data and find out a few months later if there are increases in web site traffic.

If you want to monitor the results of your email marketing or web site advertising campaigns, this become compulsory in order to know if each campaign is profitable and what should you do to improve it.

Basic analysis of the logfile and web analytics data is not as difficult as it may sound. You could learn the basics in a few minutes. So there is no reason why you can’t get started today.