Web Site Analytics – Are You Getting Visitors From Prisons?

December 20, 2008 by Carl Tambeau
Filed under: eCommerce, Internet Marketing, Marketing Tools, Web Site Analytics

Web Site analytics is widely used by business to business as well as business to consumer online merchants. This data is used to examine a multitude of markets and track customers accurately.

Tracking visitors accurately is very important for most websites – as an advertiser you should use web analytics to get customer conversion rates, page views, length of time visiting the site and other related data.

Usually, web analytics software tracks visitor behavior by putting in a piece of tracking code on every page of the site. The tracking code transmits info to the analytics application utilizing a miniature gif image or a compressed JavaScript code. To identify returning visitors, tracking ID stored in a cookie is used.

A key point of analytics is understanding the multiple channels sending traffic to your website. Google,Yahoo,MSN and Ask are the primary sources for direct traffic for 90% of the websites. There still remains a collection of data that reports data coming from natural references on various other sites. As an example these could be referrals from well-established social networks, link building efforts, and/or affiliates who send traffic.

Over the past decade, e-commerce retailers have become proficient with web analytics and have improved website designs to compliment customer navigation, in an effort to ease the purchasing process.

Many retailers have become overloaded with additional data that adds no further obvious value. It is difficult for the majority of business to analyze the information and extract important data so they can plan what should be measured next. Web analytics software applications provide a wealth of information that can let them do that.

There are many variables which can hinder analyzing the conversion process of this data. Human error is part of this process when tracking codes are placed incorrectly, users often delete cookies, some users simply don’t accept them. Users without java script enabled don’t track correctly.

All of this can have a huge impact on conversion rates – repeat visitor rates will be skewed as will conversion rate metrics, which in the long term undermines your analytic process.

Pages which load too slow and pages which fail to administer the full tracking code, also interfer with reliable tracking.

Only by using web site analytics, as well as usability testing, can companies get a true picture of user behavior and their experience when visiting your website. This is a very powerful method to understand your customers and make improvements to your site, based on customer needs.

Find out more on how to improve tracking and properly analyze data to increase your bottom line. You could be leaving thousands on the table for others to take into their business – know your business better today! Click Here For More Information.

Carl Tambeau
Founder of Pro Marketing Resource

http://promarketingresource.com