One of the key advantages of online marketing is the ability to accurately measure your campaign’s performance.
You can see the result of your investment almost immediately by using analytics to check the number of click-throughs and responses. This will show how successful a new call-to-action is and help compare the success of different campaigns.
To measure the success of your online presence and improve its performance, you will need information about your visitors. This information is easily collected and analysed with a good website statistics solution.
Your hosting company may provide you with a basic website statistics tool, or alternatively there are a range of professional solutions available, either free or at a cost.
In most cases, website statistics are generated by a small piece of purpose-built code that is built into your website.
Once implemented, a good statistics tool will monitor your website traffic and provide you with detailed information including:
the number of visitors to your website
the location and distribution of visitors to your site
what website they came from (known as the referring site)
the landing page (i.e. the web page they enter your site on, which may or may not be your homepage)
the number of pages viewed
the time spent on your website
the bounce rate, which tells you how many visitors reach your website and leave it again without clicking further into it.
With all this information at hand, you have a picture of your website’s performance and popularity. In particular, you can identify which pages and products are more popular than others and feed this back into your business and online plans.
By testing various features (for example, modifying the designs of calls-to-action) you can get an idea about what works and what does not.
It is possible to simultaneously run different combinations of content on your site—with different visitors seeing different images, headings and body text. Using this approach, called multivariate testing, you can use your website usage data to tell you which content elements are most popular.
The types of products that can help you with this kind of testing include:
Google Analytics Content Experiments, a free website optimisation tool that is part of Google Analytics’ set of features
Test&Target , a commercial website optimisation tool
Personyze , a commercial website personalisation tool.
Consider your website a work in progress, if you aim to keep your site fresh. Use of analytics data can improve your content and calls to action. Continual testing and modifying helps maintain currency. Over time, you can build knowledge to improve and target your activities to get the best results.
Website statistics and usage analysis
