Not long ago, there were only few corporations who could afford to spend thousands of dollars per month on software, were able to track their web activity. But with the advent of free analytics programs, it has become possible for almost all webmasters to track activity on their websites.
What is web analytics?
A web analytics tool measure, collect, analyzes, and report web site traffic details in an organized manner. It also helps you understand the customer behavior; all this with the end goal of optimizing your website to yield success.
Benefits of web analytics to your e-commerce business:
Access to plenitude of information
Web analytics equip you with a pool of information that may help you:
• boost your e-commerce sales
• generate more leads, and
• inflate the brand awareness
This information includes the complete data about:
• How the customers reached to your site viz. what keywords they searched for in the search engine or referral visits
• What they do when they reach there viz. the complete customer behavior. This includes information like how many pages they visit, what path they follow, the dwelling time, the entry and the exit points, and a lot other information.
Putting this information at one place, you can take a close look at your web activity and formulate actions to attract more visitors to your site and turn those visitors into customers.
Discover revenue generating keywords
Google analytics have a keywords option under traffic sources tab. You just need to select e-Commerce from the tab options and then sort by revenue. Following this, you will get an ordered list of your top revenue generating keywords. The increasing visibility of these keywords on search engine can help you generate more income from your e-commerce website.
Spot and fix targeting issues
Sometimes you try to rank a page for a particular keyword, but Google perceives another page on your website to be more relevant and thus, instead index and rank that page. This usually results in a high-bounce rate. For instance, suppose you sell mobile accessories and you have one page dedicated to mobile accessories and another page dedicated to selling mobile earphones. Now, this earphone specific page is obviously more relevant to the user who searches for mobile earphones, but there may be instances when Google might be indexing your mobile accessories page instead. Consequently, the user arrives at that page, sees a mixed array of mobile accessories and heads back to the SERP without making any purchase. If, otherwise, they would have landed on the earphone page, they may have purchased the product.
Just go to the keywords option again, as discussed above, but this time use the dimension drop down button located just above the data table, and select landing page. This will give you the list of the most popular landing page, the associated keyword and bounce rate details. This manual diagnosis helps you identify keywords that diverted people to the wrong page or keywords where a different landing page would have been better. With this information, you can easily fix the problem and earn more money.
Expand the keyword portfolio
As discussed above, you can get a list of high revenue generating keywords through analytics. By looking for patterns in these keywords, you can easily expand your keyword portfolio to increase your traffic and sales.
Key Metrics to track using Analytics
Analytics present you a wide array of information, but focusing on the following data will be more than sufficient for you.
• No. of Visitors
• Page Views: You will get to know the popular pages and analyze this page to use the same strategy for other pages to attract more visitors.
• Referral visits
• Bounce rate and exit points: Analyzing the top exit pages, you can deduce the reason of a customer leaving the website and fix the issue (like fizzy descriptions and high prices)
• Keyword set
Thus, we see web analytics is quite an effective tool that can be used by webmasters or business owners to optimize their e-commerce websites. By providing a deep intuitive understanding of website traffic and customer behavior, it can help you improve the customer engagement and boost sales. Anyhow, your main objective is to create a shopping cart where visitors browse and buy; and analytics can help you with it.
