Measure Your Online Marketing: Why First Steps with Web Analytics Are Your Best Bet for Profits

Ask any entrepreneur whether running a business is rewarding, and they quickly say yes. But measuring an entrepreneur’s progress towards that reward can sometimes seem daunting and obscure. Because they are tasked with an endless list of to-dos everyday, managing an online presence and measuring marketing get overlooked. The importance is clear if products are sold online, but many businesses are unaware how their website can influence an in-store purchase or B2B (business to business) partnership as well. Moreover, web analytics can reveal the degree of that influence.

The most influential factors that have made Web measurement essential come from consumer behavior and better computer performance. People in general, from techno-savvy early adopters to casual users, have made the internet a default starting point for purchase considerations. EMarketer recently reported that 72 percent of online users will shop online. Taking it one step further, according to marketing service provider Experian’s 2011 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report, 28 percent of shoppers conduct purchases through their phone while in-store.

The reality behind the statistics may seem obvious to an e-commerce retailer. But the Internet can also affect a number of sales cycle stages, such as building brand awareness, gathering product information, and accelerating the pace of referral and purchase activity. As a result, a website with no apparent immediate impact to sales can still influence B2C (business to consumer) and B2B businesses alike.

All of this suggests that ignoring Web analytics has become equivalent to ignoring the canary in the coal mine. Web analytics impact your business by connecting a website influence and a given website layout to a planned business strategy. The insights can be substantial. Omniture, an enterprise level analytic solution provider owned by Adobe once noted in a white paper that a website analysis for popular personal finance expert Dave Ramsey led to a 55 percent increase in online sales and a 20 percent increase in offline revenue.

So how does your business take the first step in a measurement journey? Most businesses add the JavaScript tag for an analytic solution on a website and move on. You can stand out with the following steps:

Define the visitor interaction that is important to your site strategy

Identify what valuable interactions customers will have with your site. The interaction could be submitting contact information, playing an embedded video, or an online purchase. Such intended visitor interaction is called a conversion. Most large businesses create spreadsheet dashboards that contain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — ratios that link a conversion to a business objective. If you operate a small business and examine a dashboard in Google Analytics, for example, arrange the dashboard to monitor those metrics that represent your site objectives upfront. If you are interested a specific engagement, create a custom report and have the results appear in the dashboard. Email alerts can also be arranged to notify you or your team of changes in the metrics. The key is to monitor what works for your site and business.

Set up conversion measurement with goals

Conversion actions can be best measured as goals. Goals are metrics expressed in one of four methods: number of page views, average time on site, reaching a specific page, or a specific action (called event tracking). Event tracking is used for measuring interaction with link for PDF downloads or video plays. If your objectives include demographic targets for site traffic, you can incorporate analysis from panel solutions such as Quantcast and Compete. With marketing choices available such as paid search, embedded QR codes, banner ads, and email marketing, you’ll see that goal setting will help you assess the results objectively.

Incorporate discipline to review results

Many analytic solutions are free or low cost, so one’s priority to review results can be treated as a trivial pursuit because of a lack of expenditure. But the cost for missing reviews is losing opportunities to optimize your site and implementing features that encourages visitors to call your business, make a purchase, or sign up for your cause. Furthermore, objectives can become out of date over time, so establishing periodic reviews can help identify new trends in site visitor behavior.

You should develop your Web analytics data into useful insights — either with a team, a dedicated analyst, or through personal time if you are a solopreneur. The data has no value until it is evaluated. But once you decide to incorporate measurement as a process in refining your online marketing and presence, you will see not only the value of your data but also reap your entrepreneurial rewards.

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Pierre DeBois is a marketing analytics expert. He is the founder of Zimana (www.zimana.com), a small business analytics consultancy. Pierre is not a Pitney Bowes employee and shares his insights on this blog as a paid contributor.