In the past decade, the Internet has transformed marketing, but anyone expecting to increase their revenue and profitability using the web needs to get their facts straight with respect to web traffic. Of course, the web is a great medium to market and sell products and services. But if you don’t understand the behavior of your web site visitors in sufficient, your business is going nowhere.
So it is no great surprise that the business of web analytics has grown in tandem with business use of the Internet. Put simply, web analytics are tools and methodologies used to enable organizations to track the number of people who view their site and then use this to measure the success of their online strategy.
See Google AdWords and other PPCvendors automatically monitor invalid and fraudulent clicks and adjust PPC metrics retroactively. For example, a visitor may click your ad several times (inadvertently or on purpose) within a short space of time. Google AdWords automatically investigates this influx and removes the additional click-through and charges from your account. However, web analytics tools have no access to these systems and so record all PPC visitors.
Here are some examples of accurate metrics:
• 30 percent of my web site traffic came via search
• 50 percent of visitors viewed page X.html
• We increased conversions by 20 percent last week
• Pageviews at our site increased by 10 percent during March
With these types of metrics, marketers and webmasters can determine the direct impact of specific marketing campaigns. The level of detail is critical. For example, you can determine if an increase in pay-per-click advertising spend for a set of keywords on a single search engine – increased the return on investment during that time period.
So, as long as you can minimize inaccuracies, web analytics tools are effective for measuring visitor traffic to your online business.
