Web analytics: for online businesses and the web vendors who work with them.

Most articles that you find these days that mention web analytics talk about how valuable and indispensable the information is that you get from web analytics software. This information helps businesses identify the profitability of their marketing campaigns, where users are falling off, the effectiveness of goal funnels,…

For online businesses this is great information and should be paid close attention to. This same information also has a benefit to firms other than the company being measured. A good online marketing or web firm will always want to make sure that they have happy clients, and web analytics helps you achieve that goal.

As a web service vendor you can use your client's web analytics to create a sense of trust between you and your client as the value of your work can be measured with respect to ROI and breakeven point, as well as you can offer suggestions for improvements that may not have been on the clients radar. Clients want to know that their vendors have their best interests at heart. So when you call up an existing clients and pitch them an idea that will help them improve their users experience, generate more leads/transactions,… and you can back your suggestion up with data, then you've got a much stronger chance of increasing the scope of your engagement with them.

Not all web vendors will have a relationship with their client that gives them access to their clients' web analytics, and not all clients have web analytics implemented on their website. If your clients don't have any analytics software implemented we strongly suggest that you discuss this with them. If they are small and don't have much budget then Google Analytics is an excellent solution that is quick and easy to implement. If they are a larger client that will need more sophisticated data analysis then solution providers like Omniture provide a great solution.

How this has worked for us lately.

Recently we have contacted two clients as a result of learning that has come from reviewing their analytics.

In the first instance we were able to show that our SEO efforts had increased their organic traffic by 10 times. The client was very happy to see these results. They weren't surprised to see these numbers as they had already noticed an improvement to their bottom line. In addition to that we were able to talk to them about their internal site search technology. They had no idea how many searches were done within their site, and what sort of results users were getting. Upon further review it was determined that the search results returned in many case were poor and that this was an issue that needed to be addressed to improve their users' experience. Currently we are looking into SLI-Systems Learning Search to help solve this problem.

The second case is one from a lead generating site. In the past we had pitched them on several ideas to help improve the sites usability with the intention of increasing their conversion rates with respect to lead generation. At that time they weren't interested even though they recognized that it was a high priority for them to increase the number of leads they were generating. With analytics we were able to show them what their lead generation conversion rate was and compare it to another site that had already implemented the same suggestions (the comparison site was kept confidential). This allowed the client see how much room for improvement there might be to forecast an ROI and breakeven point. With all of this information it made for an easy decision, and they decided to go ahead with the proposed improvements.