In order to have a successful holiday season online you need to first review what has worked (and what didn’t) up to this point. That means we need to take a good hard look at your analytics data.
Why Analytics?
Analytics is an integral key to online success – without it you might as well close up shop now. Yes, it is that important. Let me make it clear: IT IS THAT IMPORTANT.
What exactly is analytics? Well, it has many definitions depending on who you ask but for this post we will define it simply as:
The proper collection, reporting and review of visitor interactions throughout your website to improve performance & satisfaction.
What does analytics tell you?
From a top level view:
1. What is working in your business, website & message
2. What isn’t working in your business, website & message
When you ask the right questions and use the right analytics tools you quickly discover:
1. Why your AdWords or PPC campaigns are having trouble
2. Where your most valuable customers are coming from (and how to get more)
3. What online advertising channels are wasting your money
4. How your e-mail campaigns measure up and what to improve
5. What landing pages are working and the ones that need immediate help
And much more.
What analytics tools should you be using?
Well there are quite a few out there but I will touch briefly on several that I have used and work well:
Google Analytics – Well known as the best free in-depth analytics tool with many powerful features including AdWords linking, motion charts and custom reports just to name a few! X-cart has an option for enabling this so be sure that is turned on. Unfortunately that doesn’t really cover it – if you want to ensure your coverage just request your Free 7-Point Analytics Audit Report.
Web Logs – Your web logs provide a great source of data but you need to use a good log analyzer to really uncover the important stuff. Web log storming is a great tool and I’m sure there are some good free ones out there.
Statcounter.com – Great ‘hit counter’ resource. Statcounter shows you (in somewhat real time) each visitor and what they clicked on. Helps you quickly uncover any error pages or problems with your site. They have a free and paid version. (You can’t track HTTPS pages with the free version).
ClickTale.com – Lets you see your visitors’ mouse movements like you were at their computer! Their javascript tag captures visitor interaction on your site and plays it back as a movie so you can see how they moved around your site. Great for evaluating landing pages and overall usability. They offer both a free version and paid.
Crazyegg.com – Crazy egg is a ‘lighter’ version of clicktale in that it shows you where users clicked (even if it is not a link – great for discovering things visitors mistake as clickable) and generates heatmaps based on this data.
That covers collecting & reporting but those two alone won’t improve your website. You need to review your data. This can be difficult at first and you can definitely fall prey to information overload – but we will try to sidestep that.
Reviewing Your Analytics Data
The most important concept to grasp with analytics is to ask questions. You need to become a master detective that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame if you wish to generate more sales. Use the data to try and answer those questions. The more specific your question – the more actionable you can be on that data. Let’s do an example:
Question: What is my conversion rate?
Answer: .75%. This doesn’t help us much yet. It is safe to say that whatever this number is you want to improve it, so let’s ask a more specific question.
Question: What is my organic traffic conversion rate?
Answer: .50%. Now we are getting somewhere – this tells us right away that something needs to be investigated with your organic traffic because the conversion rate is 50% lower than your sites average.
This will lead us to another question
Question: What are the individual search engine conversion rates?
Answer:
Google: .10%
Bing: .70%
Yahoo: .70%
Holy cow what is going on with my Google traffic? What keywords are generating the most traffic from Google? What are the top landing pages from Google? Do they match well? – These questions would hone in directly to an actionable problem that you can now address.
Key Takeaway From Play 1
Ask specific questions to uncover what has worked (and what hasn’t) so far in order to build your marketing strategy around this information. At the very least – even if you can’t make use of it or don’t understand your data now you should still be collecting it. That way when you can (or hire someone else who can) analyze your data you have plenty of history to review.
Tags: 2009, analytics, e-commerce, Google Analytics Help, holiday sales, marketing plan, marketing strategy, q4