VOLUME 3 ISSUE 6
Did You Know?
There's room for improvement!
- Only 41% of executives review analytics on a regular basis.
- 53% are only checking on an ad hoc basis.
Monitoring key analytics measures (see "Why Analytics?") can help best connect your Web site and marketing campaigns with your audience; and let you know if you drift off track. A minimal investment of time monthly can yield a large reduction in waste of your marketing dollars!
Source: Jupiter Research
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Featured Client - First National Bank
As one of the state's fastest growing companies, ImageDeposit service, which allows customers to deposit checks right from their desks.
Over the past year, Sitewire has paired analytics with cutting edge, creative interactive marketing solutions for First National Bank. With analytics, Sitewire tracks:
- Page views
- Exit/entry points
- Where visitors come from
- Conversion paths
By reviewing these analytics, Sitewire is better able to make effective recommendations for improved content organization and design on the First National Bank site. Used to help make decisions about what to improve, promote or remove, analytics can also be paired with promotions to help track campaign performance.
Learn more about First National Bank's service, or call a Sitewire account team to discover what analytics can do for you.
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Business.com Case Study
Want to learn more about the innovative strategies Sitewire has provided to First National Bank? Take a look at this Business.com detailing First National Bank's success in vertical search.
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Why Analytics?
- Rich Spinabella, Senior User Engineer
How can you measure the effectiveness of your site or landing pages? How can you know if something you did affected your conversion rate? How do you determine which keywords are driving the most traffic? How do you understand where is your traffic coming from? If you don't have any form of analytics on your Web site, you can't answer any of these questions.
Need more reasons?
- Analytics will tell you how many visitors came to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they looked at, which site they came from, what kind of browser they have, what country they live in and if they have been to your site before.
- Most good analytics applications will let you set up conversion goals of some type. This objective doesn't necessarily mean a sale; you may set a goal of having someone sign up for a newsletter or view a particular page. Track your goals and improve your site to hit them.
- Follow a "test and learn" approach. You can see the effect of any change to your site, know whether visitors now navigate differently and determine if they spend more or less time reading new content and what they do afterward.
- Adjust your site by looking at your most heavily visited content and analyzing why. Discover causes rather than treating symptoms. One-page visits, exit points and time spent on page measurements can all help you diagnose potential problems with your site.
- Measure your marketing ROI. If you're paying for clicks, can you get more traffic and better rankings for the terms that are doing well? Are there terms you're not ranking well for? Can you create more content for those?
- Look at what sites are referring traffic to you. Can you strengthen your relationships with those sites to get even more traffic from them? Are there similar sites that you could get links from that you haven't approached? Are there any types of sites you think you should be getting links from but aren't?
- Check the exits. Most analytics tools have a "bounce" or "exit" rate. This tells you the percentage of visitors that exited on the same page they arrived on. A large percentage means that most of the people who landed on that page just viewed it and left. A low percentage means they clicked on to other areas of your site before leaving.
- Check your site design parameters periodically to see what browsers your visitors are using, what resolution their screen is set at, what Java version they have, what operating system they use, if they have Flash installed, etc. Make sure your site is designed to look and work well for as much of your audience as possible.
Anyone can afford Web site analytics - how does 'free' sound? Just have your developer add a snippet of code to all the pages of your Web site. Here are three free analytics packages to try:
- Google Analytics
- Sitemeter
- StatCounter
By not having an analytics package running on your site, you're losing out on valuable strategic intelligence. There are so many benefits to having analytics that there's no reason not to have the functionality on your Web site.
To learn more about how analytics can empower your business, contact a Sitewire account representative today.
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Featured Employee - Chris Alfano
Chris Alfano, a seasoned search engine marketing expert, has recently joined Sitewire from iCrossing. With an extensive background in organic search optimization and pay per click, Chris is the perfect addition to the Sitewire team. Additionally, he has been involved in traditional media, spending time as a Production Assistant for VH1 and a Media Planner for Time Warner Cable.
On a daily basis Chris monitors client pay per click, or paid search, campaigns and makes constant adjustments to improve their efficiency. He also reviews monthly reports to ensure organic, or naturally occurring, rankings are up to standard and makes changes if they're not.
When he's not at Sitewire, Chris truly enjoys being outside. Most of his weekends are spent camping or hiking. Chris is also interested in photography and will often head outside to take photos for hours on end. He enjoys the beach and frequently visits friends in San Diego.
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