Introduction
Controlling your marketing budget is one of the most important concerns for you at this time when mounting price rise is leading to an economic deceleration. Marketing Budget is greatly dependent on the revenue generation. It is obvious to have reduction in the marketing budget with drop in sales. Lack of evaluation in marketing programs is causing decline in marketing budget. The idea is you need to first of all identify about what part of your advertising budget is going waste.
Internet marketing is certainly an incredible way of marketing however you need be wise enough to extract best out of what you are putting in. It is not easy to reach the right market as in reaching the audience who are more likely to buy your product, convert the engrossed visitor into consumers and retain them. This is why you need to figure out which interactive channel needs to be prioritized, how much to spend and how to measure the results. In such scenarios, web Analytics has brought a wonderful revolution in the field of digital marketing.
What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data over the internet for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Apart from measuring the web traffic it also helps you in your business and market research. Through web analytics you can assess and improve the effectiveness of your web activities.
It is web analytics though which you can measure the performance of web as a marketing channel. Besides, insights from web analytics data can be used for marketing campaigns, conversion tools, segmentations and Landing pages & other important pages. Now you might have received an answer to your question that why should you invest in web analytics. Let’s go ahead and hunt some more detailed reasons to it.
Why Web Analytics?
At this juncture we all are aware with the fact that online marketing is far more responsible than conventional media in terms of ROI calculation. On top of it you can still use such web expertise to optimize your online advertising. Three facts you must follow while leveraging web analytics to improve your marketing project are
• You can evaluate the performance of your website through clearly defined website objectives and KPIs i.e. key performance indicators. It is always good to have clearly defined website objectives and form key matrices in order to improve the KPIs over a definite period of time.
• You cannot calculate and optimize website and website endorsements in segregation as both are inter-related. Hence, while planning a campaign think over both together. In order to make out how each media bit performs the guest activity on the website must be coupled to its starting place.
• Make goal pages and dish out weighs and value. You must not get confused here as goal pages are the explanation pages in the website which reveals the level of engagement with the website if the consumer stops there for some information or so. You can get an idea about the visitor’s specific interest and purpose to your offerings through goal pages.
Make sure you abide by these three points and then go ahead, take off to measure and optimize the website and endorsements.
Categories of Web Analytics
Based on functionality, there are two categories of Web Analytics which are
1. Off-site web analytics
It refers to web measurement and analysis in any case whether you own or maintain a website or not. It includes the evaluation of a website’s potential audience and their response that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
2. On-site web analytics
It measures the behavior of the visitors on your website and the performance of your website in a commercial perspective.
Optimizing E-mail marketing through web analytics
Updates would of course come and go with the passes of time but e-mail marketing will remain one of the most effective channels in online marketing. In spite of the fact that e-mail open and response rate is relatively low, e-mails are still found to be valuable for its low cost per contact. However, relevancy of e-mail must be paid attention for it to not impact your company’s brand negatively. Simply e-mailing in large numbers without concerning about its aptness will put your brand at risk and all future mails would also be deleted. It actually happens in your everyday life that once you have sorted out that the e-mail was insignificant the second time you get the mail, you straight away go ahead and delete it.
How about if there will be some tools through which you can optimize your e-mail marketing? We have a brilliant tool that we call web analytics, which helps you optimize your e-mail marketing. Unlike the conventional marketing segmentation, it also provides you with the customer behavioral data through which you can develop insights to create applicable e-mails.
Let’s take an example that a customer lands to your website, walks through the services page and then exits from there. You can consider sending an e-mail with services comparison information or so to this visitor. Or let’s say if the guest even selects some items in the shopping cart and disposes the procurement process of, you can send this visitor an e- mail with reasons supporting to buy this product.
Let’s take an analysis here for instance that suppose you sent promotional e-mail to 60 people, out of which 22 visited your website and in the end 2 made a purchase. However, if you had the behavioral data of the rest 38 people, you might have guessed the reasons as to why did they abandon the sale process and instead of sending them unnecessary mails, you would have sent across some relevant information. It would have helped your customer with some useful information rather than annoying them.
It is never too late to start something constructive. If you have yet not worked on the behavioral data, then start it today and get hold of some useful information about your customers’ behavior and taste. It will help you gain rise in the overall conversion rate for your company.
Optimizing SEO and PPC marketing through web analytics
SEO marketing and PPC advertising can do wonders in generating revenue for your business if you have set them up the right way. However, it is wise to keep in mind that SEO never remains constant and as far as PPC advertising is concerned you are wasting your time and money if click are not getting converted into sales. Therefore, you need to keep a constant check at strategies for both respectively.
Now how can web analytics help us here? How can you leverage web analytics to optimize SEO and PPC marketing?
You must be aware with the fact that 80% of the traffic is brought about by 20% of the keywords in search engine marketing. Besides, when you talk about keywords or phrases, we can classify then in to two categories, which are
1. Branded
2. Generic or Category Keywords
Now, let me tell you how does web analytics plays a role here. Web analytics tools helps you figure out the keywords that were bringing visitors to the website and hence helps you develop insights as to how a small amount of branded keywords and a very large number of category keywords contribute a small amount of traffic to each. Web analytics help you streamline your search engine marketing expenses by optimizing your website through SEO for branded keywords and PPC advertising for the low bid value category keywords.
Moreover, through it you can identify with the interaction levels of the visitors who arrived and analyze why conversion rates are so low and which component are holding back your sales process and why. It helps you estimate as to which keyword or phrase is bringing a good number engaging audience by relinquishing goal page values and weights. The idea is that it might happen that the customer will not buy the product in the first go. However they can still go ahead and mark them as their favorite with an intention to visit there to purchase the product leading to a hidden conversion for the marketers. Web analytics helps you examine the efficiency of your PPC campaign as you can track the conversions later on which can be credited to the basic keyword or phrase.
Optimizing Display Advertising Campaigns through Web Analytics
The three letters ROI that is ‘return on investment’ is a crucial aim for many advertisers. The idea is how can you assess your brand campaign and optimize display advertisement to get the best ROI. There are some globally used metrics such as CPC (cost per click), CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CTR (click through rate) and CPL (cost per lead generated) through which you can pore over your campaign and evaluate its success or the failure.
However when it comes to the evaluation of the factual worth of display ad campaign independently, these metrics are not enough. With hundreds of placements with unpredictable permutations of creations, website, ad size and landing pages, it becomes difficult for you to weigh up whether which combination will perform best in achieving your goals.
The good news is that web analytics offer you with a real brilliant metric CPEA i.e. ‘cost per end action’ to assess brand campaign. What does a typical brand campaign aims at for us? It certainly aims at the smooth movement of the customer through the sales funnel, starting from inducing the product awareness among them, their engagement and ending at the purchase intention by them. These three phases can be taken as three different categories of the website. Now you need to distribute the values and weights of your objective page to the relevant content pages. The end action taken by the visitor is to view the sum of objective pages that helps you assess the interaction levels of a visitor within the website.
As far as returns of using CPEA as a metric are concerned, you can really work out a lot by its application such as:
With CPEA you can accomplish overall campaign efficiency analysis. It becomes easier for you to identify the best performing combination of creations, website or property, ad size and landing pages in achieving the campaign objectives.
With the help of CPEA, you can carry out creative analysis and insinuate the best performing creative.
You even can assess the impact of non-click traffic on overall campaign efficiency.
In addition, one can easily perform post impression analysis of brand campaigns.
Hopefully, this discussion will sort out many queries about planning and upholding a campaign. You know about the investment that you are putting in but you are unaware with the outcome. From now onwards start knowing about your outputs as well, as you have got hold of some real relevant data through web analytics. If you know about every leg of your journey it becomes easier for you to reach the destiny.