Web Analytics- Follow the footpath

 Why do companies continue to underestimate the value of web analytics?!

The fact of the matter is that if you have a website and you don’t do web analytics either you don’t take your site seriously or you have not set clearly defined goals for your site - which therefore renders your site meaningless.  

Regardless of whether you are a B2B or B2C organisation, every company should know what they want to achieve from their web site, and whether the site actually meets the requirements of the target audience. Using web analytics techniques, companies can establish whether their web presence matches the real needs of the business.

Web analytics should not be confused with web log analysis. The latter simply logs visitors to a site, as recorded by the web server, and uses them to find out how many page views and hits a company has had, and in the best scenario, where the hits actually came from.

However, in contrast, true web analytics provides live data which is based on page by page tracking of movement and people’s different pathways through a website. Companies have access to real-time information about unique and repeat visitors; time of stay per page; where those visitors entered; where they left; and the paths those visitors took through the site.

As a visitor progresses through the site they leave a footprint which means companies are able to identify trends and patterns in terms of how the site is being used, which provides invaluable data. For example, an e-commerce company would be able to get very precise intelligence about how much money a visitor has spent on their site, what products they bought, and how long it took them to complete the transaction.

Some companies still persist in measuring the success of their website by the number of hits but this is a pointless exercise as one person visiting one page can generate hundreds of hits. In technical terms a hit to a website or web server is simply a request to get a piece of content. For example, if one web page contains several images then this could result in 10-15 hits to the web server per visitor, which is a misleading statistic.

Web analytics is the key to understanding an online audience and realising the true potential of a website. Without it, organisations will quite simply fail to achieve any real value from their online presence.

It is only through such analytics that you can monitor, modify and continually improve your website to ensure both the online and offline success of the business.

So why are most companies still missing a trick?