Generally analytics being used for gathering insights to build strategy or bring improvements in the business. Analytics widely used everywhere and by everyone. From business to policy making, from individuals to the organizations, analytics being used everywhere knowingly or unknowingly.
How the business benefits from web-analytics?
Before knowing ‘How can businesses benefit from using analytics on their website’, we need to understand what is the medium of customer relationship and how the businesses can benefit by doing web-analytics. Every business has a customer relationship plan and medium by which the customer reaches to the company or the company reaches to the customers. By analyzing these mediums will help the businesses to optimize their deliverables.
Different mediums for customer relationships are :
- By Website
- By Online/offline Advertisement
- By Customer Referrals
- Manual reach by Sales Person
So Considering Websites as a medium for customer relationships, businesses analyze it to obtain certain insights out of it. That is called Web Analytics. This usually helps the businesses to answer certain relevant questions. Those questions I have explained below.
- How does the customer reach your website?
- How much time spent by the customer?
- How are the customers navigating on your website?
- What are they searching on your website?
- How is your conversion funnel performing?
- Where do they come from?
- What is the age/sex/ethnicity of the customers?
- Which product has high customer intent?
- How is your widgets are performing?
- Key benefits from web-analytics
1. What is the sources of customers?
How does the customer reach your website?
By using your website cache/google cache, you can find out what is the source of the customer. Where they are coming from. They are coming from the advertisement you run or they are landing on your site organically through google. These analyses answer the level of intent of your customer. If they are coming organically(from google search), this means the customer intent is high on our business and they are the most likely to get converted.
2. Customers behavior
How much time spent by the customer?
This question tells you the rate of engagement of your customer with your website/business/product. If the customers spend much time navigating throughout your website, this means they are very interested. But this is not always correct. Sometimes they spend too much time because they are not able to find what they are looking for. In this case you need to correlate these numbers with other metrics called Click-through rate(CTR) or Click Depth. If the people are spending much time on the description page it means their intent is high.
How are the customers navigating on your website?
This question also helps you to understand the customer behavior and their navigation behavior. By doing this you can optimize your sales funnel. Navigation means when your customer landed on the Home Page then where most of them are navigating. After that, where they are navigating. You need to correlate these numbers with your conversion numbers as well. So this gives you the answer that the people who are navigating are really converting or reverting back. If they are reverting back then you need to improve that point from where they have reverted.
What are they searching on your website?
If you have a search box in your website, you can capture the data from it. You can capture what your customers are searching for and how many times they are getting searched. In the analytics world this is called “search Keyword”. This helps you to understand what your customer is looking for and whether they are finding those answers from your website or not. This also helps the business to understand what is trending in the market, so that you can better prioritize while introducing those products. For example in an E-commerce site, if a new keyword is getting searched many times, this means you need to introduce that particular product first over other products.
How is your conversion funnel performing?
This helps you to understand how your sales funnel is performing. At what stage the brokenness is high(Brokenness means when the customer reads about the product description but did not move forward to purchase or move forward to the last stage of the funnel). After obtaining this answer, the business needs to optimize that page to improve your conversion rate. The brokenness can occur due to various reasons. For example – the price is too high, maybe certain features are not available, maybe delivery time is longer etc.
3. Customer demography
Where do they come from?
To generate any hypothesis on your customer’s intent, you need to know first where your customers are coming from. You need to make a cohort based on your customer’s location. Like Tier wise cities/rural areas. So that you can understand their intent and can optimize/customize your products/services.
Age/sex/ethnicity of the customers
These are also a very important factor to predict lots more customer’s intentions. Sex and age are very significant factors which majorly affects customer’s choices. For example we can not show women wearing ads to men or vice versa. Although men can buy the women’s products for gifting purpose but the probability of purchasing those products by men is very less. So the way of advertisement would be for gifting purpose.
4. Product Improvement
Which product has high customer intent?
This information you can obtain by analyzing the above parameters. You can directly get it from your search keywords, which is the organic intent of your customers. There is other way too to gather this info.
How is your widgets are performing?
The answer to this question will help you to do the grooming exercise of your entire websites based on your customer adoption, likes and dislikes. For example if you introduced a recommendation widget on your Home Page. then you can obtain the information of the usage of that widget by capturing click data. If your recommendation widget works well then your clicks would be improved.
Similarly there are other kinds of information you can obtain and can improve your business in an empirical way.
- Customer adaptability in the changes of the product.
- Like disliking of your customers.
- What features do you need to add to your product?
Key benefits from web-analytics:
- Capture highly interested people, who have a higher probability of getting converted as a customer.
- Improve ROI
- Helpful for customer segmentation like high spending customer, low spending customer, high intent customer, low intent customer etc.
- Optimizes the advertisement cost.
- Product improvement by customer adoptability analysis.
- Easy to get the insights about what is trending in the market by analyzing search frequency in your website.
