Introduction

Planning, research and strategy are important for executing digital marketing campaigns that resonate with audiences, drive traffic and help you to build relationships. As part of executing these plans and strategies, you need to create digital assets, and then use various channels to drive traffic to those assets, and build relationships with your visitors. 

As you are doing all this, it’s important to know: is it actually working? And how might it all work better? 

This is where Optimise comes in: the process by which we track, analyse and optimise our digital assets and campaigns for the best results. (Yes, that’s Track, Analyse, Optimise, or TAO, so you’ll never forget it.) 

As Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, is reported to have said: “The Internet will transform advertising because of its trackability, not its beauty.” It’s because most actions online are recorded, whether in a logfile or in a cookie, that we can build a rich, data-driven picture of how our digital assets and online campaigns are performing. It’s because digital allows us to iterate and release new versions of advertising or web pages rapidly that we can use this data to test and improve. 

With user friendly reporting interfaces and free, powerful web analytics tools like Google Analytics, there is no excuse for not knowing what’s happening in your campaigns. The chapter on Web Analytics will help you with the standard definitions you need, as well as setting objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) so you know what it is that you need to measure. 

However, it is easy to rely on web analytics tools to report the “what” without applying your brain to understand the “why” and importantly, “what next”. 

Getting into a routine of using web analytics data to understand how your visitors are behaving and how you might influence that behavior is what conversion optimization is about. You need to use the web analytics data not just to report on how campaigns and digital assets are performing, but also to understand how to make them perform better.

Picture the scene: you’ve opened up a new fashion retail outlet in the trendiest shopping centre in town. You’ve spent a small fortune on advertising and branding. You’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that you’re stocking all of the prestigous brands. From opening day your store is inundated with visitors and potential customers. And yet, you are hardly making any sales. Could it be because you have one cashier for every hundred customers? Or maybe it’s the fact that the smell of your freshly painted walls chases customers away before they complete a purchase. While it can be difficult to isolate and track the factors affecting your revenue in this fictional store, move it online and you have a wealth of resources available to assist you with tracking, analysing and optimising your performance. 

To a marketer, the Internet offers more than just new avenues of creativity. By its very nature, it allows you to track each click to your site and through your site. It takes the guesswork out of pinpointing the successful elements of a campaign, and can show you very quickly what’s not working. It all comes down to knowing where to look, knowing what to look for, and knowing what to do with the information you find.

It is important for every business to know their customers and what they want. Companies who are offering products and services as per customer requirement achieve a greater degree of success visà-vis their competitors. The same can be said about the digital marketing companies, also. For a web based venture, the marketer needs to know how many people visited their website, where did they come from, whether they were unique visitors or repeat visitors, how long they stayed, what were they browsing, whether they bought any products and services, whether they were satisfied with the browsing experience, and where they went after they logged out of the website. The company also needs to do competitive analysis to know their page ranking, traffic, bounce rate and exit rate, conversions, return on ad spend (ROAS) and return on investment (ROI).

Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can help in tracking the vital data pertaining to web analytics. The best tool is of course Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives a dashboard with realtime analytics reports. You can also get goal flow charts, cohort analysis and customised reports with selected metrics. Apart from that there are tools like Alexa, Chartbeat, Woopra, KISSmetrics and Spring Metrics that also gives a fairly incisive analysis of website usage.

History

Testing, analysing and optimising are not new to marketing. Being able to gauge the success of any campaign is crucial to growth. 

Early web analytics packages came to the fore in the mid 1990s; a couple of years after the first Mosaic browser was launched. Early analysis reflected the nature of the early web, focusing only on hits with some very basic click stream analysis. With one page websites being the norm, it was enough to know how many clicks came to the website. Traffic meant you were doing well. You can still see hit counters on some websites today. The websites you find these on usually look as sophisticated as this tool. 

However, as websites became more complex, and as more people had access to the Internet, better analysis became more important. Measuring hits was, and is, not enough. In fact, measuring hits is a fairly meaningless task. Web analytics split into two types of tools: page tags and log files. Both continue to become more sophisticated, capturing information about visitors to a website, and recording detailed information related to their time on a website. 

There are several log file analysis tools which cost nothing to use. Sophisticated page tag web analytics became available for free when Google bought Urchin in March 2005 and launched Google Analytics as a free service. Are you wondering what the difference is between page tag and log file analysis? Don’t worry, it’s coming 

What is Web Analytics

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimising web usage. Web analytics helps to get information on the incoming visitors, their online browsing pattern, their likes and dislikes, buying preferences and many other crucial data that is essential to design an effective digital marketing strategy.

How it works (Incomplete)

1. Tracking and Collecting Data 

Currently, there are two main approaches for collecting web analytics data: log file analysis and page tagging. 

Log file analysis software reads the records, called log files, on the web server, which record all clicks which take place on the server. Web servers have always stored all the clicks which take place in a log file, so the software interprets data which has always been available. A new line is written in a log file with each new request. For example, clicking on a link, an Ajax call or submitting a form will each result in a new line being written. 

Page tagging, on the other hand, sends information to a third-party server, where statistics can be generated. The browser executes JavaScript code which communicates with the tracking software. 

Pixel tracking can be used to track email campaigns. Here, a tiny 1 pixel by 1 pixel is placed in the email. When you load the images in the email, you will also load the tiny image which tracks your activity. 

What you should know: 

Log file analysis 

• Log files are normally produced by web servers, so the raw data is readily available. Page tagging, however, requires changes to the website. 

• Log files are very accurate – they record every click. Page tagging can be less accurate. If a user’s browser does not support JavaScript, for example, no information will be captured. 

• Log files are in a standard format, so it is possible to switch vendors and still be able to analyse historical data. Page tagging is proprietary to each vendor, so switching can mean losing historical data. 

• Log files record visits from search engine spiders – useful for search engine optimisation. 

• Log files record failed requests, whereas page tagging only shows successful requests. 

Page tagging  

• JavaScript makes it easier to capture more information (e.g. products purchased, or screen size of a user’s browser). You can use log file analysis to capture this information, but it will involve modifying the URLs. 

• Page tagging can report on events, such as interactions with a Flash movie, something log file analysis cannot. 

• Page tagging can be used by companies which do not run their own web servers. 

• Page tagging service providers usually offer a greater level of support. This is because it is a third-party service, whereas log file analysis software is often managed in-house. 

Due to the different methods of collecting data, the raw figures produced by the two services will differ. Sometimes, both are used to analyze a website and raw figures not matching up should not be a problem. It is in the interpretation of these figures that you will be able to understand how effective your digital marketing efforts are.

Website analytics packages can be used to measure most, if not all, digital marketing campaigns. Website analysis should always account for the various campaigns being run. For example, generating high traffic volumes by employing various digital marketing tactics like SEO, PPC and email marketing can prove to be a pointless and costly exercise if the visitors are leaving your site without achieving one (or more) of your website’s goals. Conversion optimization aims to convert as many of a website’s visitors as possible into active customers.

Metrics used for Web Analytics

Before embarking on the process of web analytics, it is important to know what the important metrics that need to be measured are. The web analytics metrics can be categorised in four groups Counts, Ratios, Dimensions and KPI (Key Performance Indicators). Counts are numerical parameters. Ratios are comparative parameters. Dimensions are a general source of data that can be used to define various types of segments or counts and represents a fundamental dimension of visitor behaviour or site dynamics. KPI is linked with business strategy.

Some of the important web analytics metrics that are tracked on real-time basis are:

1. Unique Visitors

Unique visitors is the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to a particular website over the course of a specified time period. Unique visitors comprise of users that have had at least one session within the selected date range.

2. Sessions 

A session is defined as a group of interactions one user takes within a given time frame on the website. An user may do tasks like browsing pages, downloading resources and purchasing products during a session.

3. Page Views

Page views is the number of times a page was viewed. Each time a user visits a webpage, it is called a page view. Page views, also written "Page Views", are tracked by website monitoring applications to record a website's traffic. The more page views a website has, the more traffic it is receiving. However, since a page view is recorded each time a webpage is loaded, a single user can rack up many page views on one website. Therefore, unique page views are commonly tracked to log the number of different visitors a website receives in a given time period.

4. Referrer

The referrer is the page URL that originally generated the request for the current page view or object. In the case when the visitor is coming from outside the website, the referrer value is the only way of determining where the visitor came from or who referred the visitor to the website. Furthermore, the referrer URL may be accompanied by parameters that convey additional important information. For example, the content that was viewed or the keyword that was searched in the case of search portals may be passed through parameters.

5. Landing Page

A page intended to identify the beginning of the user experience resulting from a defined marketing effort.

6. Exit Page

The last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit/session.

7. Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website.

8. Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your website from the landing page itself. Bounce rate is the percentage that were the only one of the session. Bounce rate for a page is based only on sessions that start with that page.

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website from a specific page. This has to be beyond the landing or home page, and every page on your website has its own exit rate.

9. Conversion

Conversion is the completion of a targeted activity. Examples of conversions are a visitor buying a product from the web store, or filling up a form or downloading a product guide. Using Google Analytics, we can get reports on conversion by keyword, by landing page from organic search, by search engine, conversion by website and referring URL, and also conversion by ad content, keyword, or destination URL.

10. Acquisition

The acquisition report in web analytics tells us where the visitors originated from, such as search engines, social networks or website referrals. This is a key section which helps to determine which online marketing tactics are bringing the most visitors to the website.