9 Reasons Why You Should Start Analyzing Your Website Traffic Now

Are you still stuck with your old and dingy website that you keep updating, but you do not know the results of all the changes that you spend time and resources on? Today’s global business, with suppliers, vendors, investors, prospects, customers, and employees spread all over the world, cannot afford to miss out the details of how people are interacting with their online presence. Web analytics is not only meant for big businesses with huge websites, today, even single-person enterprises are utilizing the benefits of web analytics to take intelligent and informed online marketing decisions. Doing online marketing without measuring its effectiveness is an exercise in futility.

If you are not analyzing your website’s performance, you are missing many facts and insights that can help you increase your online profitability. Here is our list of top 9 rationales for you to get into web analytics ASAP:

1. To get solid facts and give-up guess work

Wild guesses and ballpark numbers cannot take you far. When it comes to effective decision-making, it is only meaningful information that works, and that can only be gathered with quantifiable data. Web analytics can help you track not only the visitors, but also their behavior on your website. You can know where they came from and what features of your website did they interact with the most. Not only this, the insights you get with targeted analytics will place you in a better situation, where you won’t be grappling in the dark with just your gut-feel.

2. To understand the behavior of your prospects and customers

It is very important in today’s market to know what users like or dislike. Web analytics reports shows you how many people are looking at which page, what sites your visitors are coming from, who your users are, and more. You can track hits, clicks, unique visits, repeat visits, time spent of each page, top entry and exit points, referrers, search keywords that brought the visitors to your site, visitors locations, click paths, visitor-to-lead conversions, and many more advanced statistics based on your website analytics needs. These insights will help you measure traffic, understand your users’ needs and behavior, and determine how the new content or features work.

3. To track your e-campaigns and explore new facets of online marketing

2010 is tipped to be another “bumper growth year” for online marketing spends. If your company is doing any form of online marketing like email campaigns, blogs, social media marketing, online advertising, PPC campaigns, e-newsletters, webinars, podcasts, online videos, etc., you need to track the effectiveness in order to find out what your prospects and customers like and dislike. Visitors through all your online marketing campaigns can be recorded, your landing page can be tracked and optimized based on visitors’ footprints, visitor to lead conversion ratio can be measured, and many other goals can be easily set. You can also track: comments made on your posts, social media bookmarks created for your pages, new newsletter subscriptions/forms filled, documents and files downloads, RSS feed subscriptions, and so on.

4. To know what works and what doesn’t work

“In U.S., organizations will spend close to USD 27 billion on online marketing and advertising. Marketers can more readily measure the results of internet advertising than with most traditional media, both during campaigns and after they are completed. Those capabilities help produce more efficient advertising and higher ROI, which in turn push traditional media to compete with lower pricing.” (Source: eMarketer). Companies that invest heavily on online media understand the they can track every single visitor and understand the user behavior to know what works for their company. However, you must track the right metrics that you wish to measure. With online media, it is easy to tweak the message content and layout and analyze results under different scenarios.

5. To make tangible improvements on your website

Web analytics and website optimization go hand-in-hand. All your website investments are worthless if you are not gaining out of it. Metrics like top exit pages, bounce rates, click paths, and visitor funnel, can let you know, which content/pages are putting-off your visitors. By setting-up an efficient web analytics tool, you can also identify problems with your websites like broken links, orphan pages, or missing pages. You can analyze the key sources that bring you the most traffic, and optimize your website and landing pages to meet the needs of those visitors.

6. To get new ideas and identify opportunities

With tools like advanced segmentation and cross-channel multimedia tracking you can drill down to the very core of your website traffic. Advanced segmentation lets you isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic like paid search traffic, non-paid traffic, geographically distributed traffic, referral traffic, traffic with conversion, visits from iPhone, and so on. You can even build your custom segments. With cross-channel tracking, you can track mobile visits, internal visits, flash, video, and social network visits, and more. You can measure your exact online advertising ROI and set your own goals for measurement. These insights will give you ideas and help you identify more markets to sell your products or services.

7. To find the pulse of the market, the competition, and the industry

You can utilize the benchmarking tool to compare your website’s performance to those of your competitors and industry rivals. Opt-in benchmarking compares your key metrics against aggregate performance metrics while preserving the confidentiality of your data. With off-site analytics, you can track your industry keywords and competitive brands and follow their activities on the web. By proactively monitoring your industry you can be on the guard and take steps to move ahead in the race.

8. To manage your online reputation

It is all about keeping your ears to the ground. With over 1.8 billion web users, so much activity is happening on the web. People are talking. Moreover, there are very few industries left that do not have target audience on the web. You can set alerts to track your company on the web. Every time your company/brand name is uttered you can know what it is about. This gives you a chance to steer negative opinions into positive territories and help troubled customers with proactive resolution of their problems. You can know the trends your brand name is going through and manage your website accordingly.

9. To make your web presence profitable

According to AMR Consulting Report, only 50% of B2B marketers formally analyze metrics to judge ROI, but those that do find online marketing more effective than traditional mediums. Ultimately, it is all about money. By utilizing web analytics insights, you can make your website optimized and profitable for your business, as it would bring in more leads and more sales. With the world already turned into a global village, web is the next supermarket. So, use all the numbers and information to make sure you are among the ones who get the gold.