Web
analytics, in its most basic form, is used to measure traffic on your website.
This information can be used to show you who your visitors are, what they do on
your website, where they are coming from, how long they looked around and when
they left (TopTenReviews, n.d). It “provides
easy access to valuable insights — not just for content governance but also
content planning. However, when used poorly, it can confuse and mislead rather
than guide and inform.” (Allen, 2012).
It is important to know why you want
to use web analytics and what you hope to achieve by gathering this
information. Also, as a marketer and analyzer, you should learn what web
analytics can and can’t do. For
instance, while some may like to believe that it is the most accurate data, it
is not because of many third party issues that could compromise information
(Allen, 2012). On the flip side, it can offer a way to challenge and
validate assumptions about the use of your website. Web analytics can provide
you with so much valuable information that can be used in order to see what
your customers are really looking for. This provides you with the opportunity
to learn how you can make their experience on your website better (Blogging
Sense, 2013).
In
order to decide what kind of software your business wants/needs you should look
into a comparison of features and benefits of several options. The Top Ten
Review gives you the ability to do just that. Currently, the top companies
include Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, HitsLink, VisiStat, OneStat,
Clicky, GoStats, and NextSTAT. Each company and software has its own features,
exporting ability, traffic stats, referrals, report stat intervals, events,
visitor details, as well as help and support modules.
File
Exporting - The files can now be exported a number of
ways which include PDF, CSV, XML, Excel, Word and HTML.
Traffic
Stats – The stats available include pages views, unique visitors,
visit history, entry pages, exit pages, exit links, events per page, events per
visit, time spent on page, time spent on site, average visits per day, most
popular pages, and visitor path.
Referrals –
There are a few different types of referrals and they are each trackable.
Internal referrer, referring domain, referring search engine, search keywords
and phrases are the ways tracked as of today.
Report
Stat Intervals- At certain times you may need to review data
different ways. Today software can provide you with lifetime, yearly, monthly,
weekly, daily, hourly and custom date range searches.
Events – Click-through,
downloads, flash events, multimedia streams, error pages, favorites/bookmark
stats, and RSS feed subscriptions are the available event that we are able to
track. While there is quite a variety none of these are standard across the
board.
Visitor
Details – Many details about your visitors are great to
know in order to help you market to them effectively on the web. These include:
browser, operating system, screen resolution, cookies enables, JavaScript
enabled, internet service provider, IP address, Organization/host name, Username,
Country, state/region, city, time zone and language.
Help/Support – If
assistance is needed with your analytics software you can reach customer
service or help by telephone, email, FAQ/knowledge base, online chat, user
moderated forums and training/tutorials.
Of the
top analytics providers two of the ten are offered as a free service. In
comparison to the others they are quite competitive except for the events.
References
No comments:
Post a Comment