Web analytics serves web marketing optimization

The role of web analytics in web marketing optimization

Very basic webstat data can give you a great deal of help trying to allocate your marketing budget and optimizing your ROI. You’ll be able to tell what works for you now, what doesn’t and which sources of traffic have the best potential.

Referrer data

The most basic way of getting more from your web marketing efforts is to have a look at referrer data (Referring Source) and then find out how well the visitors you get from these referring sources are converting (reaching your goals). Checking your conversions for referring sources will show you where your most valuable traffic comes from. The obvious gems in your referrer data are sites that are currently giving you a small amount of traffic, but their visitors convert really well. The better the conversion, the higher the potential – that’s a rough guide.

Beware – if a particular referrer is giving you high-quality traffic through natural ways (e.g. a link in an article, a links section, a blog post etc.) there’s always a chance that these visitors followed your link for a particular reason and that means that advertising on this particular site is no guaranteed success. A recommendation from a peer forum users is a much more subtle (and objective) motivation than an advert obviously. It’s up to common marketing knowledge to decide what tactics to use to attract more traffic from a high-quality source. In this particular example getting an independent product review with a link to your site/product posted might be a good option, for example.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)

Impressions and clicks tell you how well your PPC ads are doing in attracting visitors but what happens beyond that point is much more important. Do your landing pages provide visitors with what they expected to find when they saw the ad text and clicked, or do they abandon the page or the conversion funnel early on?

Google Analytics enables you to track performance of your AdWords PPC traffic in terms of conversions. Please refer to the setup section to learn how to link your Google AdWords account to Google Analytics.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a very powerful marketing tool, of which a number of basic forms come standard with Google Analytics. A loose definition of segmentation in web analytics is dividing your website visitors into groups (e.g. according to geographical location, referring source, loyalty etc.) and tracking how these individual groups behave in terms of web usability and more importantly in terms of conversion. Probably the most universal form of segmentation used in basic web analytics is dividing groups by referring source (e.g. organic SE traffic vs. direct referrals or vs PPC traffic).