How to Make Your Web Analytics More Relevant and Simple

Web analytics are a goldmine - and in some ways, they can be a minefield! They offer enormous opportunities to refine your marketing techniques,, reach new customers, retain existing ones, and even convert previous customers back to fans of the company.

However, the amount of data that they make available is cited as a common barrier to their introduction in a company. This is a great pity, given that in order to be competitive in an internet-based world, web analytics are a critical pillar of a internet marketing strategy. They can be made to work for every single company - as long as the data they yield is kept simple and relevant. We show you how.

Determining relevance in web analytics
The first key step to knowing whether a piece of data is relevant to your business, is knowing the problem you want it to solve. Problems could be identified as:

.A high bounce rate from the site
.Plenty of traffic, but no conversions
.High percentage of customers abandoning the checkout process

Web analytics programs hold the key to solving each of these problems, as well as similar, very specific issues with your site. However, you must first clearly identify the problem you want to solve with your site, or the opportunity you want to maximize, before you can determine whether a metric is relevant to it.

At the heart of relevancy: accuracy
One key issue with many lower-end web analytics programs is that they use inaccurate reporting methods. A new breed of program that relies on first party cookies, rather than third party cookies, to provide you with data is now available. In choosing a web analytics program, accuracy of data should be a key priority. If the data available can't be determined to be accurate within a reasonable percentage, bad marketing decisions could well be made.

This is why accuracy is the key characteristic behind relevance. If a metric is inaccurate, it is as useless as if it were unrelated to your problem.

Simplicity - the top ten rule
When your company first begins using web analytics, it is a good practice to look only at the top ten results. These represent the most important referrers, the highest bounce rates, the best-converting ads. Obviously, all the other data can make a big difference to your business as well. Yet when you are trying to get a grasp on your web analytics 'bottom line', the top ten will provide plenty of food for thought and action.

Stay focused on conversions
A conversion is the ultimate goal of the website. For e-commerce sites conversion would be defined as completing the checkout process, for other businesses filling out a form for a quote may constitute a conversion (the responsibility for taking the lead and actually making a sale still exists, but it has moved off the website).

Look first at conversion-oriented web analytics, if you want to simplify your internet marketing assessment. These are the numbers that ultimately matter most to the health of your site. The component data that goes into making those conversion figures is interesting and actionable ... but on a much lower level than conversion oriented stats.

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