Web Analytics and Business Research

Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to gather meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the leading players such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete for Web analytics processes.

Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring Web site traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. Web analytics helps you to estimate how the traffic to the site changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides data on the no of visitors, page views etc to gauge the popularity of the sites which will help to do the market research.

Further, web analytics gives information on competition and market. Comparison with competitors is a fundamental element of business and business research; even innovators need to know how far ahead they are in their market. The Internet seems to offer fertile terrain for capturing accurate marketing statistics on website usage and position relative to other players in a given market to help to perform business research. Indeed, most of us have often heard web statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings, Alexa or comScore cited in the press and elsewhere, which are all part of web analytics.

Practitioners of Search Engine Optimization and web marketing know that web analytics is not just silo analysis of a company’s website: it also entails looking at how a website and its business performance metrics measure up in the overall web ecosystem. This way web analytics helps in business research and market research.

Importance of Web Analytics Accuracy for Online Business Growth

In the past decade, the Internet has transformed marketing, but anyone expecting to increase their revenue and profitability using the web needs to get their facts straight with respect to web traffic. Of course, the web is a great medium to market and sell products and services. But if you don’t understand the behavior of your web site visitors in sufficient, your business is going nowhere.

So it is no great surprise that the business of web analytics has grown in tandem with business use of the Internet. Put simply, web analytics are tools and methodologies used to enable organizations to track the number of people who view their site and then use this to measure the success of their online strategy.

See Google AdWords and other PPC vendors automatically monitor invalid and fraudulent clicks and adjust PPC metrics retroactively. For example, a visitor may click your ad several times (inadvertently or on purpose) within a short space of time. Google AdWords automatically investigates this influx and removes the additional click-through and charges from your account. However, web analytics tools have no access to these systems and so record all PPC visitors.

Here are some examples of accurate metrics:

• 30 percent of my web site traffic came via search
• 50 percent of visitors viewed page X.html
• We increased conversions by 20 percent last week
• Pageviews at our site increased by 10 percent during March

With these types of metrics, marketers and webmasters can determine the direct impact of specific marketing campaigns. The level of detail is critical. For example, you can determine if an increase in pay-per-click advertising spend for a set of keywords on a single search engine – increased the return on investment during that time period.

So, as long as you can minimize inaccuracies, web analytics tools are effective for measuring visitor traffic to your online business.