B-to-B Insights : Analyze This

Use Web analytics to drive online sales

Here is a conversation I have at least twice a month:

Client: "I want you to write copy to generate more orders on my Web site."

Bly: "What's the conversion rate of the page?"

Client: "We aren't really sure."

Bly: "Why not?"

Client: "We don't really measure it."

Bly: "Then how will you know whether our new copy has improved it?"

Client: [Dead silence]

Lord Kelvin, inventor of the Kelvin temperature scale, said: "When you can measure something and can express it in numbers, you know something about it." Web metrics are the numbers that let you know something about your Web site's performance and ROI, and Web analytics is the software that lets you measure those numbers.

In the early days of the Internet, Web sites were the online equivalent of sales brochures or general advertising: pages posted online to disseminate product information, establish an online presence and help position the company in the marketplace.

Today's most successful Web sites are the online equivalent of direct response marketing. They have specific marketing objectives and business goals, and their performance and sales can be precisely measured.

Measuring Web metrics is a critical step in determining whether a Web site is producing a positive ROI and serving users in the manner intended. Web analytics is the study of user interaction with a Web site by collecting information about what the visitor does. This data is tabulated and refined into reports and visual presentations to help analysts understand whether a Web site is achieving a set of desired results.

Does It Stay, or Does It Go?
Analytics software can help determine where changes are needed, what content isn't effective, and whether the organization and navigation of the site are optimal. Some of the more popular analytics applications include Google Analytics, Omniture and Webtrends Analytics.

Marketers and analysts responsible for using analytical data to make marketing and business decisions also can benefit from Web analytics. Reports on Web metrics generated by the analytics tool can help marketers understand how users are coming to the site, which segments of the site are driving revenues and whether business objectives for the site are being met. For example, marketers need to know whether the dollars being spent for search keywords are increasing traffic or how effectively recent site changes are driving visitors to an event registration.

Without analytics, online marketers can only guess what site visitors are looking for, what they read and what drives them to action. By installing an analytics package to track Web metrics, marketers can measure user activity and learn what actually works on their sites vs. what they think should work.

Most analytics packages allow users to split traffic and test multiple versions of a landing page or other Web page. By doing A/B split or multivariate tests, you can determine how each change on a given page affects important metrics. You then adopt the "winner" of the test as the new version of your Web page, thereby increasing site performance.

Analytics are of little value, however, unless you look at your analytics reports and also take appropriate action based on what they tell you. With stand-alone analytics, there is a lag, recently dubbed the "action chasm" by Forrester Research, between when the metrics are measured and when the analytics reports are read and acted upon. The longer the action chasm, the longer your Web site continues to perform at subpar levels.

Time to Integrate
A relatively recent innovation in Web best practices, "integrated analytics"—fully integrating your analytics package with your content management system (CMS) and other Web applications—can help reduce the action chasm and implement analytics-based Web performance improvements faster. By integrating analytics with the CMS, content can be updated dynamically to optimize performance levels based on accurate reporting of actual user behavior and actions tracked by the analytics package.

"Seamless integration between analytics reports and the CMS enable performance-enhancing changes to be made to Web pages in real time," says Brett Zucker, chief technology officer of Bridgeline Software. "Because the content revisions are made based on actual user behavior, they can significantly improve Web site performance and ROI."

Zucker's software company uses webinars as a lead-generation method and depends on integrated analytics to improve webinar registration page conversion rates, which are tracked using an analytics package integrated with the company's CMS. The CMS database records which employee authored each page on Bridgeline's Web site. If the analytics package determines that a webinar landing page is not performing well, the CMS notifies the page author that changes are needed. And with the integrated CMS, he can make those improvements in real time.

The analytics chart can be time-stamped with the time and date the changes to the page were implemented, allowing Zucker and his team to compare the conversion rate before and after that date, enabling them to see on the analytics report whether the improvements to the landing page in fact boosted the conversion rate.

When deciding upon your Web analytics strategy, keep in mind that many analytics packages are available as applications served over the Web and accessed with a browser. While this is convenient, you subscribe to—rather than own outright—the Web-based analytics application.

Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books including "The White Paper Marketing Handbook" (Racom). You can find him on the Web at www.bly.com, e-mail him at rwbly@bly.com or phone (201) 385-1220.

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