The Necessity for Web Analytics

In this webinar, Convert Academy hosted a presentation about the use of web analytics to improve conversion. Yehoshua Coren, our guest speaker for this webinar, is the founder of Analytics Ninja. He started as an in house SEM and PPC manager for a B2C company and B2B. He founded his company four years ago, when he realized how much he was dubbing to the web analytics tool and how powerful and useful it was, in terms of his philosophy on analytics. Analytics Ninja came into being because of his love for web analytics. If you want to know more about his company, you can visit his website here.

Analytic Necessity

In conversion optimization, it is critical to have the ability to measure and analyze the data of a website and be able to use it to improve rates. A lot of us are spending money to bring people to our sites, and this alone indicates the critical need for analytics. Analytics Ninja has worked with a lot of different industry verticals and can attest that analytics is exceedingly important to everyone with a website. But web analytics, as such, needs to be tailored for each business.

Conversion rate optimization goes along with web analytics. By using web analytics, you can create a strategy to improve conversion. Yehoshua offered two points on how to create a strategy based upon analytics data. You can either:

1. Determine what to test based on analytics data or;
2. Devise techniques to improve conversion based on analytics data

Both of these points will be tackled in the succeeding articles.

Conversion Significance

What exactly is web analytics? It is the measurement, collection, and reporting of internet data, for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web research. It really underscores how important analytics is. It enables you to understand and do something to make your website more profitable. Visual analytics should also be considered in your business because we live in a multi-device world. However, we are going to focus more on the web. But keep in mind that your measurement strategy is not just website-related anymore.

Analytics gives us a full picture of how users interact with our site. It’s much more than a simple conversion (i.e. Adwords Conversion). To put it simply, if we use a simple conversions, we can’t successfully determine if we’re meeting our goals; and we can’t measure them.

The Relationship Between CRO and Web Analytics

Conversion rate optimization is trying to get more people to accomplish the goal of your site. Those are your business goals.

[Tweet “Analytics works within the process of trying to get more of your business goals accomplished through conversion optimization”]

Analytics also helps in Identifying areas of the site to test by optimization of your traffic sources. In other words, it helps to bring more relevant, higher converting visitors to your site. Analytics will also help you to measure the impact of design changes on user behavior.

Strategic  Approach

We can’t proceed without stressing the importance of a strategic approach. In this article, Planning for Success, by Caleb Whitmore, he shared the four major keys to achieve success with Google Analytics. According to him, you need:

1. Proper Planning
2. An informed implementation that comes out of planning
3. Have a good training
4. Tools to accompany Google Analytics

In the article, Whitemore also discusses one of the keys,  proper planning, and how is one of the biggest keys for success. According to Whitmore:

…planning should always start with business goals, not metrics….

Whitmore also shares other examples on these keys and how these are important. He also explains how analysts should find the right questions to ask in order to analyze the metrics and to link between business goals. If you want to view the full presentation, you can watch the entire webinar here.