How to measure your Performance & control your Business?

You have set your business. You have applied all the techniques to promote your business. Now what? How would you know whether your efforts are effective or not? Whether your website is getting the desired traffic or not? What are the steps that users are following to make a purchase? Does your website need any changes to function more effectively? If yes, then where? All such question can be answered by using Analytics in your business.

Analytics? How will these statistics help me?

Web Analytics is all about collecting data, analyzing it and taking the necessary steps to improve the performance of your website. It is also about analyzing the behaviour of visitors to a website.

Measuring your website’s performance is as necessary as promoting it. What if someone came to your website but didn’t do what you wanted them to do? How will you find it out? Analytics gives you a lot of statistics in various formats so that it is easy for you to analyze the data and present it if necessary.

In short, web analytics will tell you how your customers move around throughout your website and what actions they take.

How would the statistics help you? Not only will they let you see the website traffic, but also it will let you compare your marketing campaigns, and access and improve the website’s overall performance.

7 Steps to Web Analytics

There are mainly seven steps in the process of Web Analytics.

i) What is your motive for analyzing your website performance? Do you simply want to increase your brand awareness (website visitors) or do you want to check the flow of the process that the user goes through before making a purchase? That’s right. You would need to define your BUSINESS GOALS.

ii) Identification of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): You can set some parameters to track the goals that you have set. For e.g.: If your goal is to get the location where the maximum users/visitors of your website come from, you can set the “geographical location” (of the device or of the user) as a KPI to measure the goals.

iii) What would you analyze? Data, right? So, you need data to analyze it! So, we should Collect Data that we need to study. So now, we can either collect all the data then select the ones that we need to analyze using KPIs, or we can only collect those data that are relevant to our business goals or are in accordance with the KPIs we have selected.

iv) The next step is to convert the collected raw data into information. For e.g.: if data is the count of something (total number of purchases, total profit earned), then the information could be the ratio of the counts in a particular manner (Profit per purchase).

v) Now, the data and information need to be analyzed and insights are to be drawn out of them. Your key observations and the patterns you find while going through the data will form the desired insights.

vi) Through the insights obtained, we can get some ideas to improve our strategies and provide a better user experience. We can plan out various alternatives and test them.

For e.g.: Let’s suppose you have an e-commerce website for a jewellery store. You would definitely want the visitors of your website to surf throughout the web pages and then go through the portal to make a purchase. However, you find that despite the high number of website visitors, a very few users actually go through and make a purchase. Through web analytics, you find that website traffic reduces the moment they enter the payment portal. So, you try to figure out some alternatives for payment and test them in order to pick up the best alternative.

vii) The best alternative i.e. the alternative which gives the best result for the business goal you have set is finally implemented.

For e.g.: In the previous case of the e-commerce website, the payment portal design that a user finds as the most convenient one (i.e. the design that gets the highest number of sales) is then finally implemented in the website.

Thus, we can conclude that while other methods of Digital Marketing provide a base from where to start, Web analytics provide the direction were to proceed further. It ensures that your efforts bring results and you get a high Return on Investment (ROI). So, get started on Web analytics and scale up to achieve your goals.