Improving Results with Web Analytics

1. Improving Results with
Web Analytics
By Anubhav Singh
Assistant Professor

2. In This Chapter
• Measuring as a management tool
• Discovering the key traffic statistics for success
• Surveying store statistics
• Keying in on the conversion rate

3. • Set up your Web site as a separate job in your accounting software
• Segregate online advertising expenses from other marketing and
advertising costs in a unique cost category.
• Decide how you’ll allocate labor, benefits, and overhead costs to your
Web site.
• Figure out how development costs will be amortized over how long a
time frame.
• Become familiar with your site goals and objectives, help measure
financial results, and prepare a custom report monthly or quarterly
• Review your Web and store statistics software to see what data should
be fed into the accounting system.

4. Tracking Web Site Activity
The basic principle “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” applies doubly to Web sites.
You must know whether your site is losing or gaining traffic; whether visitors boogie away
after less than a minute; or whether anyone is bothering to call, e-mail, or buy. Otherwise, you
don’t have a clue what problem you need to solve, let alone how to solve it
Identifying What Parameters to Measure
When you read articles about Web analytics, you might see the term key performance
indicators (KPI). KPI differs slightly for each business and Web site. A lead generation site
and retail site both care about the most important statistic of all: conversion rate. However,
requests for quote might be a KPI for a B2B lead generation site. For a retailer, number and
average value per sale are more important. Because you calculate conversion rate, you must
decide what’s essential to measure.

5. Which statistics to fret over
• Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Page Views
• Page views per visit
• URLs viewed
• Referrers
• Search engines
• Conversion Rate
Which statistics to scan casually
• Time of day
• Day of week
• Browsers and OS
• Length of Visit
• Search strings
• Countries
• Hosts or sites
• Entry pages
• Exit page

6. Interpreting Sales Statistics
• Internal store reports, often by item, include the number of active items, items missing images, and store
size.
• In addition to summary sales reports, watch for sales reports broken down by products. Sometimes called
a product tree, these statistics reflect your store organization, with reports at category, subcategory, and
product level.
• Look for sales reports by average dollar amount, as well as by number of sales.
• You should have the ability to request order totals for a specific period of time that you define.
• Sales sorted by day should be available so you can track sales tied to promotions, marketing activities,
and sale announcements.
• Make sure you can collect statistics on the use of promotion codes by number and dollar value so you can
decide which promotions are the most successful.
• If you use special shopping features such as gift registries, upselling, cross-selling, wish lists, or an affiliate
program, monitor the items sold and those on reserve for each activity.

7. Diagnosing Conversion Rate Troubles
Is the conversion problem with the audience?
Is the conversion problem with the Web site itself?
Is the conversion problem with business fundamentals?
Here are some additional issues to consider:
• Do you have enough merchandise on the site for selection purposes?
• Are you positioned correctly against your competition? Do you have a clearly stated value
proposition that sets you apart from your competition?
• Are your expectations correct?
• Is your viewer researching online but buying offline from you or others?
• Are you reaching people at the right point in the sales cycle?
• (In either of the two previous cases, you might see multiple visits from the same user.)
• Are you reaching the right decision-maker? Most B2B efforts close offline.
• Are you integrating your sales efforts with your Web marketing for follow-through? A Web site
can’t follow up on leads for you!