Web Analytics 2.0

For many, web analytics refers to « clicks » or « page views ». This data, although useful, is but a small part of information that a website can offer. To have a better idea on the website performance and to extract useful and tangible recommendations, you need to go deeper. This is web analytics 2.0!

It’s Avinash Kaushik, the author of the Web Analytics an hour a day book and Analytics Evangelist at Google, who coined the expression in September 2007. Here is his definition of web analytics 2.0:

1. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data of your website and those of your competitors,

2. as a goal to continuously improve the online experience of your actual and potential clients

3. in order to meet your online and offline business objectives.

Measuring 2.0 is a direct response to the notion that all human beings are not identical and do not have the same objectives. Do all the visitors of an e-commerce website visit it to buy? No. In many cases, a visit is for: product evaluation, find comments about the product, find the closest store, and so on. Why when do most organizations measure the conversion rate of their website by dividing the number of transactions by the number of unique visitors? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to only use the number of visitors that went to the site with the goal of buying? To get this type of information, it is necessary to go beyond traditional measurement methodologies.

Here are the 5 sources of data that you need to measure if you want to take a web analytics 2.0 approach:

The Walk Through

This data is analyzed by the majority of organizations. It can be obtained through tools such as Awstats, Google Analytics, Omniture and so on and allow to know the number of visits, the most popular entrance pages, the bounce rate, keywords that generate the most visits and so on. If you only analyze these numbers, you are actually measuring web analytics 1.0!

Reaching business objectives

This data measures the website conversion in terms on different business objectives. Notably you think sales, document downloads and so on. When properly configured, web analytics tools give information like the cost per conversion in terms of different sources/keywords and so on. However, one weak point of many organizations is that they do not measure the offline effects of their website (store sales, brand image and so on) and that they only analyze quantitative data without evaluating the qualitative data. As mentioned before, all the visits of a website are not necessarily to reach fixed objectives. To know the intentions of your website visitors, you need to conduct surveys. That way, if you find out that only 20% of your visitors come to make a purchase, your conversion rate just increased 5 folds!

Testing and Experimentation

No one can pride themselves in guaranteeing that a picture is more convincing than another or that one marketing copy is more a seller than the next. Why not let your client take the decision instead of the boss? Hence, the need to test and experiment. By using tools like Google Website Optimizer, it is possible to confirm a hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt instead of relying on intuition alone.

The Consumer’s Voice.

Still so few organizations use surveys to understand the real intentions of their visitors and to obtain qualitative information. However, this collection could modify your procedures and give insight to aspects that quantitative data just can’t. Think of the reason why the visitor was not able to fulfill their task. Is it because they did not find the necessary information, they did not have enough confidence in your organization or is it because they couldn’t pay through Paypal? According to Avinash, three key questions are often enough to gain a firm understanding:

1. Why are you on the website today?

2. Have you accomplished what you wanted to do?

3. If not, why?

Competitive Analysis

The web is overflowing with your competitor’s information. They know this and they analyze your doings which should be a clear indication of the urgency to analyze their information. The new Benchmark functionality of Google Analytics or the free data offered by Fireclick allows you to compare yourself to a large set of metrics against your competitors. A number of other tools allow you to discover the strategies your competitors use.

By using this data as a whole instead of just relying on clicks and visitors, you can obtain more useful information and make recommendations that bring real improvement and benefits…that you can measure!