Why Do You Have To Have A Good Understanding Of Web Analytics For Your Internet Marketing

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Using Web Analytics is an vital component of your Internet Marketing Strategy, as well as evaluating the success of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are quite a few web analytics tools on the market, some free and some are paid. You have to understand which one to utilize for your intended use, as well as understand what it gives you. In order to have a better understanding of web analytics, we need to start with the question as to what analytics actually give you. At the very least, analytics give you quantitative data of your website, which means nothing but numbers, where you have to use these numbers to reach to a qualitative conclusion. In other words, you get bunch of numbers from your analytics, and you have to use your judgment to see the quality of your website, internet marketing strategy, the search engine optimization strategy, or anything else that you are trying to implement. Therefore, having a good understanding of the data that you are getting from your analytics is indeed the foundation of your success.

Considering above knowledge, the next question will be, the reason why you need analytics of your website. When you have a presence on internet, you continually have to improve your visibility. In order to accomplish this task you need analytics to give you the basic information to do your marketing analysis to optimize your website. Whether this is your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or optimizing your internet marketing strategy, visitor experience on your site, or any other factor, the information you gather from your web analytics will help you improve your visibility on the net, consequently enable you to become an authority within your industry.

In a nutshell, web analytics will give you some basic information as to where your visitors are coming from, which keywords they are using to find your website, which page they are landing and which page they are leaving from, how long they stay on pages. Yet most importantly, analytics will give you invaluable information as to how successful your conversion is, where the strong spots and weak spots on your website are, and needless to mention many more factors you can add on your own.

There are many analytics tools on the web, where some of them are free and some of them are costly. Depending on the level of the involvement with internet, and the importance of your web presence for your business, you have an option to chose from either free or paid analytics tools to be able to make most of your marketing decisions.

One of the well known free analytics tools is of course Google Analytics, which Google started offering after buying Urchin. After going through some upgrades, Google Analytics started offering quite a few useful data such as keyword reports, visitors geographical location, pages visited, tracking your e-commerce, traffic generated by your social media and more.

Another free analytics tools actually comes from your hosting company, called AWStats. The data you gather from your AWStats is from website logs, yet it will still give you in-depth information of visit durations, traffic to your site according to days, weeks, operating system used by your visitors, and many more.

One of the paid analytics tools on the market is WebTrends, which big corporations use, and pay according to the number of page views their site receives. Because of this aspect, it may cost thousands of dollars, yet it gives detailed analytics and ability to segment your customers in different ways for behavioral targeting.

If we were to mention another paid analytics tool, it would be Omniture SiteCatalyst, which is considered to be a robust and expandable system, providing significant measurement capabilities. Needless to mention, there are more analytics tools such as Piwik, Clicky, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Crazy Egg, and others.

Using analytics is a circular process where you will measure quantitatively, analyze, make a decision as to how to optimize, implement, and go back to measuring again. So the old saying goes; “garbage in, garbage out…”… you have to understand how your analytics data is collected, and furthermore, you need to know what you should, and can do with this data to be able to use it effectively.

We would be very interested in compiling a list of the analytics tools besides the ones mentioned above… Do you know any good ones that you can suggest?