Tag: web analytics

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Web Analytics: Everything You Thought You Knew About the Web is WRONG!

It's all about the clicks on the web - or is it?
It’s all about the clicks on the web – or is it?

If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for about 15 seconds, so here goes: many things we’ve been taught about the web are wrong. One of the biggest mistakes – thinking that clicking is the same as reading.

Not your average reader? Perhaps I’ve got you a while longer… We’ve mentioned on this blog before that every business owner should be monitoring their web analytics – we’re even developing a Google Training Course for business owners who want to learn more about the Google products.

What Does Web Analytics Help You With?

Web analytics allows you to determine things like where your visitors originated from, your click rate and your bounce rate.

Google considers any visitor who spends less than 30 seconds on your web page before clicking elsewhere to have “bounced” – and the number of people who bounce from your website is your bounce rate.

Clicks and Conversions

Your click rate is the number of people who have clicked through to your website from a search engine, banner ad, or third party link. The goal is to keep your click rate high and your bounce rate low – this is supposed to demonstrate high engagement with your website, your business or your brand; it’s also supposes to guarantee conversions.

Except that it doesn’t – a fact that’s becoming clear to organisations with large web presences, as web users become more sophisticated as the way we use the web has evolved.

According to Tony Haile, of US company Chartbeat, which provides real-time analytics for companies like Time Inc, Forbes and NBC Universal, businesses should be looking towards something he calls Attention Web and away from clicks and bounce rates.

Time and Attention

Attention Web is not just valuing the number of clicks, but valuing the time and attention visitors give your site. “Time is a rare scarce resource on the web and we spend more of our time with good content than with bad,” Haile says.

For business owners this means you need to give your customers and clients, good, valuable content and start valuing the time they spend reading and engaging with it. Do this and your conversion rate will soar – and in turn, your bounce rate plummet.

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If you’d like to learn more about web analytics and other Google products, you can subscribe to our blog. Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about building an effective website, you can enrol in our WordPress Training Course.

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Eliminating the Guesswork: Knowing Just How to Change Your Website to Get More Business

Believe your copy isn't working? Don't stab in the dark with your changes - try Optimizely, covered as part of our new Digital Business Course.
Believe your copy isn’t working? Don’t stab in the dark with your changes – try Optimizely, covered as part of our new Digital Business Course.

In a recent post we talked about using web analytics to generate more business and we’ve also talked about the value of web analytics to any small business’ website, because it isolates information you can use to increase your conversions rates, among other things.

Because web analytics is something we cover in our Digital Business Course, we’re not going to spend much more time on that here, but we do want to talk about a great new tool that you can use in-conjunction with web analytics: the web optimization software, Optimizely.

Testing Out Different People’s Responses

Web optimization, or A/B split testing, acts almost like a focus group where, without being told, a small number of customers will be diverted to a slightly different version of a web page and their behaviour compared with that of the users on the standard site. If the updated version of the web page results in more clicks, longer visits or more purchases, the updated version will displace the original; if the new version is inferior it will be phased out with very few people ever seeing it.

Web optimization has long been the open secret of high-stakes web development companies, like Google, but Optimizely’s foray into the marketplace makes it possible for small businesses to have the same data and insights available to them as a big businesses — and cheaply.

While Optimizely — which was founded in 2010 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, who were both product managers at Google — may be used by a number of big players like MTV, Disney and Sales Force, it’s most useful for time-strapped small business owners, where making changes to web content has always been a time-consuming process.

If you have been using web analytics and made adjustments to your web content in response to data you’ve received from your analytics software, then you know how tedious the process can be — but importantly you know how much guesswork is involved in making changes to some elements of your web pages, like copy, for instance.

Are Folks Subscribing to Your Newsletter?

If you’re not using web analytics (and you should be!) it goes something like this: you notice users are landing on a particular web page in response to searching at particular keyword, but they don’t choose to sign-up to your newsletter. Why?

You guess that maybe there’s too much copy and it’s overwhelming the user so you decide to reduce it. You check your analytics — still no joy. Now what? Do you undo those changes and try something else? Or keep those changes and try something else? What if that still doesn’t work? Then what? Also, how long is a piece of string?

Eliminating the Guesswork

Optimizely eliminates all of that guesswork and for as little as $17 a month, it’s a lot cheaper than retaining the services of a web developer to provide this information just once, never mind for an entire year.

Optimizely is another tool small businesses can use to increase their productivity and increase their sales. If creating web content that’s efficient and highly targeted to your customers is a priority for your business, we recommend you give Optimizely a try.

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If your business is about to make the transition online, you can find more information on our digital business course here, or by subscribing to our blog.

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Four Ways Web Analytics Will Generate Sales for You

Using web analytics means you don't waste time on marketing that's not yielding results.
Using web analytics means you don’t waste time on marketing that’s not yielding results.

In a recent post we talked about using web analytics to determine your website’s conversion rate, which can be used to generate sales leads. Web analytics is something we cover in our Digital Business Course, but for those still unconvinced on the usefulness of analytics, we thought we’d break it down a little further.

Jump On Board the Web Analytics Train

If you’re not on board yet, here are four reasons why you should be!

  1. Search engine optimization: like it or not, SEO is still plays a huge part in how your customers arrive at your website. Using analytics you can see exactly what keywords and key phrases your customers are searching. Know this, and you’re able to create content that makes it almost impossible not to sign up for that newsletter, download an ebook, etc.
  2. Socially active: everyone knows that social media can drive traffic and result in leads, but what platform is best? Analytics answers this question without even breaking a sweat. For some businesses Facebook is the must-have platform, but for other businesses LinkedIn is more useful, so why waste your time on the wrong one if you don’t have to?
  3. A/B split testing: by combining the new-fangled world of web metrics with old school metrics like A/B testing, the internet doesn’t combust, but does, in fact, make fine-tuning your call-to-action strategies a cinch — particularly which ones to use and which ones to ditch. We recommend using another piece of software called Optimizely, but more on that later.
  4. Personalise email marketing: ever wondered how to increase the open-rate of your newsletters and emails? Wonder no more! Say a user arrives at an ebook download and then subscribes to your newsletter — does that mean they’re interested in a certain product or service? Probably, so why bother them with irrelevant information? This is a particularly useful given the sheer number of emails most people receive today.

By now you should be asking yourself how and where you can find this analytics train so that you can board it. In our Digital Business Course we recommend using Google Analytics because it’s free and easy-to-use, which are maybe two of the most important things small business owners care about, right?

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For small businesses wondering how you can best transition online, either in part or entirely (like EzyLearn did not so long ago), our Digital Business Course has been especially created to demystify this process.

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Web Analytics Made ‘Ezy’

If your business isn't using web analytics then you're still not using your website to REALLY understand what makes your customers tick.
If your business isn’t using web analytics then you’re still not using your website to REALLY understand what makes your customers tick.

Ok, so you’ve got a website and on it you have all this information about your company — who your people are, what you do, how customers can contact/connect with you — and best of all: you get heaps of page views every month! Talk about winning the Internet! You’ve got this website marketing business down, am I right?

Except that maybe you don’t. And for this reason, we’re currently developing a new Digital Business Course to help businesses transition into the online world. A big part of that transition involves understanding how web analytics work, which is the bread and butter of any successful website — and indeed, successful business.

How to Use Web Analytics

To get the most out of web analytics, you kind of need to change the way you view your website. You need to see it as a form of marketing, just like an advertisement in a newspaper or a piece of direct mail. Once you start treating your website the same as you would any other marketing activity, it’s likely you’ll have some questions you’ll want answered.

Your Conversion Rate – Do YOU Know It?

Somewhere on this list — though we imagine that it would be on the top — should be “What’s my conversion rate?” To answer this question, you need web analytics. We recommend Google Analytics, namely because it’s free and extremely easy to use.

Your conversion rate is the number of people who have visited your website and carried out some form of action — signed up to a newsletter, made a request for more information, downloaded an e-book, and so on. In short, it’s any action that involves the exchange of information that you can later use to develop into a sale.

Constant Improvement

But the real genius of analytics lies in how it allows you to isolate problems with your website’s content and refine them. For instance, if you have a rather average conversion rate, but a high bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website within 30 seconds of landing on it), there’s a good chance that’s there’s something wrong with the keywords you’ve selected for your SEO. Or you’ve selected keywords that your website’s content doesn’t address properly. Either way, you need to fix this.

Finding Out How Your Customers Think

Once you do, you should see you bounce rate drop off and your conversion rate increase, which means more opportunity for more sales. And just think: if you didn’t have analytics, you’d have never known. This is what makes web analytics invaluable for small business owners, because it gives you rare insight into what makes your customers tick — what are they really looking for, and how can you adapt your business to meet their needs? — and provides you with the opportunity to meet those needs.

In essence, small business owners now have the same resources at their disposal as large multi-nationals, who typically spend bucket-loads on research and development, focus groups, and the like, trying to ascertain what exactly their customers are looking for — and even then, often don’t get it right.

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At EzyLearn, we use web analytics extensively to ensure we’re constantly meeting the needs of our students and potential students. Through web analytics data, we ascertained that a number of small business owners were looking for a cheaper alternative to MYOB, so we developed two new cloud-accounting courses: the Reach Accounting Training Course and a Xero Training Course to satisfy that need.

For more information or to receive alerts about our forthcoming Digital Business Course, subscribe to our blog by clicking here.