Your business has a web site. You were careful in selecting a designer who understood how crucial your site is to your marketing strategy, and who had the skills to integrate and present your content in a way that fulfills that strategy. It’s well designed and optimized. Now you can just sit back and wait for the profits to roll in right? Wrong!

A well designed web site is just the beginning. A good marketing strategy never stops improving, and your web site is a vital marketing tool. How do you improve its effectiveness in bringing in more and more leads and turning higher and higher percentages of those leads into conversions?

You do this by understanding everything you can about the people who visit your site. How did the visitor find your site? Did they find you from a link pointing to your site, a search engine? What keywords did they use for that search? How long did that visitor stay at your site? What did they look at? What didn’t they look at? How far into a payment process did they get before they abandoned the purchase? What prevented them from becoming a customer?

Knowing the answers to questions like these is extremely important in order for you to refine your web site. You want to to use more of what is working for you and get rid of content that doesn’t work for you. It will also keep your site up to date in an ever changing marketplace. Now how do you get this information?

The answer is ‘web analytics‘. Web analytics gathers information about what visitors do when they are at your web site, and then organizes that data into reports you can customize to suit your needs. Analytics can either be hosted online by a provider of the service or can be purchased as a program that you own and manage. There are many different venders of web analytic services.

Analytics packages can be hosted for as low as $30 per month and this price goes up as the amount of data tracking increases. Programs, on the other hand, will vary in cost from free trial versions with very few features, to costing thousands of dollars for complete, full spectrum tracking. Knowing what you need to know about your visitors, will help you decide the level of tracking features you need to get the most out of your web site.

It is important to look at the information gathered in these reports, at the very least, on a weekly basis, and to make changes to your web site based on this information. Trust the data, not your expectations of what your potential customers want. Web analytics is a powerful marketing weapon and sets apart those who are serious about having a web site that significantly enhances their business, from those who are not.

Technorati Tags: SEO marketing, site tracking, track page views, track website visitors

Listen: Your Customers Are Talking

There are a number of web traffic analytics companies, such as http://OneStat.com and http://StatCounter.com, that analyze your customers’ shopping patterns. They follow your customers’ clicks to and through your web pages and provide you with valuable info on how your customers experience your website:

1. You see which keywords bring you, not only the most hits, but also the highest conversion rates. People often find the generic words they use bring them a great deal of traffic, but that traffic averages a shorter stay on the site. The longer people spend on your site, the more likely they are to buy something. Analyzing that data allows you to see which keywords are effective for you.

2. You see the average amount of time users spend on your site. Due to latent conversion, this is a good indicator of how business will be in the coming months. If your users are taking their time, looking at things carefully, that tells you they’re really interested and will likely come back to complete the transaction.

3. You see if your traffic’s leaving as soon as they hit your landing page—if they are, you know you have a problem. As soon as users get there, you want to reinforce to them they’re in the right place. Says John Marshall, founder and CEO of http://ClickTracks.com, “Make sure the keyword the user clicked is associated with, and strongly connected to the copy in that landing page, and throughout the experience… Just paying attention to that could probably get you a 20% to 50% improvement in your conversion rate.”

4. You see where people are exiting your site. This is especially important when you have customers leaving in the middle of checkout. If you see a high rate of users, with full shopping carts, leaving on a particular page, you can pinpoint what’s costing you sales:

• If they’re exiting on the page where you explain shipping costs, you might see your shipping appears higher than your competitors’.

• If they’re leaving halfway through filling out the buyer’s information, you might consider that your buyer questionnaire’s too long.

Web analytics puts you in a position to see what’s working on your website and what isn’t. It’s a way to see where you need to make changes and then measure how effective those changes are.

Technorati Tags: web analytics, site tracking, customer info, track visitors