Generate UK - Digital Marketing Blog

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One of the major contributors to the growth of online marketing is the fact that it is very measurable. It is quickly possible to check your results, tweak, rinse and repeat. We’re used to analysing the data that is available to us, it’s a good habit to be in and it is great to be able to measure the total cost of ownership.

Unfortunately, this thirst for figures and information does not always transfer to the web site. We’re constantly amazed at how few businesses check their web logs, traffic status and information. Your web site log is a real time snapshot of the browsing habits of your prospects and customers. You can find out who they are, what they do and do not look at, how long they look at things and where they enter and leave your site. All of this information should be treated like gold dust. If you find out that a high percentage of your visitors leave on a certain page, that’s a pretty strong message that you need to work on the stickiness of that page.

If you’re used to applying key performance metrics to your marketing activity, it is easy to extend this to your web site. Access to the core data will explain where you are today in terms of targeted traffic, users, search terms etc and will enable you to set goals and success factors for the future. If you’re in the fortunate position of receiving all of your traffic via natural search engines, then you might want to consider alternative sources to drive additional traffic, such as pay per click or an email campaign.

If you have not got an email list, you might want to use your web site to capture your visitors details. This is a great objective for a web site and is a perfectly sensible way to increase your sales and opportunities. If the majority of your traffic is delivered via pay per click, then it is a very good time to look into ways that will increase your free natural search engine traffic.

The point is, even the very best web sites can be improved, there is always a little gem of information available to you that you can use to increase the effectiveness of your site. We would all love to double or treble our traffic, yet we know immediately that this is only beneficial to us if that traffic is targeted, if it stands a chance of being converted. Web site analytics provides us with that insight, it helps us to understand what types of phrases these people use to find us, it helps us to understand what pages they buy from or contact us. It provides us with the raw data to enable us to act, to do something that will improve the performance of our web site.

Our favourite story involving web analytics is about one of our customers who asked us to help them with their Internet Marketing Strategy; in particular increasing the effectiveness of their web site as they felt that they were not getting much value from it. Interestingly, this customer had never looked at their web logs or statistics, it never occurred to them that there was a wealth of information to look at.

We had a look at the logs and they were receiving a decent amount of traffic from a forum. Our customer is in the garden centre business and the forum was about gardening. The referring site in this case was a post from a user in answer to another user’s question about where one might find a certain type of rock for their landscaping.

This one link and referral from another user contributed to a good chunk of business, however it was done without the knowledge of our client. The reason that this link was so powerful was that it encouraged very targeted users to click through to their site and ultimately buy the rocks. Once the customer realised this, it was not long before we were sponsoring the forum, holding regular forum competitions, posting authority pieces, giving away vouchers and driving highly targeted traffic to their web site via the forum. Then it is a case of tweak, rinse and repeat, a perfect example of how using web site analytics can increase the effectiveness of your web site.

If you would like us to have a look at your web site or marketing plans, please contact one of our consultants today. You never know, we might unearth that hidden rock for you too.