Web analytics / webstats / web intelligence, who cares?
Looking at company,
What departments are focussed, or should be focussed on the company website?
And who in those departments should monitor what is happening on the company website?
So why is webanalytics only for marketeers? Or isn't it?
Please let me know,
Kind regards,
Gordon Lokenberg
Answers (12)
That's a good question.
I guess you are thinking about web statistics? In my opinion web statistics cannot stand alone but should be seen in a greater context with for example feedback from website visitors (analysis of mails or comments sent from the site), analysis of peer websites etc.
What (and how) you measure on your site should really depend on your overall strategy and succes criteria. That is where yo find the value of web analytics.
Kind regards,
Ulla Grøngaard
Muhammad D
Oracle Functional Consultant at Sapphire Consulting Services
Best Answers in: E-Commerce (1)
If there isn't any web development sort of department or web administrator then the work should be forwarded to the marketing team.
Having a web presence doesn't necessarily be a marketing stint but it do wonders to your company position and all.
As far as the web analytics, webstats and web intelligence is concerned i dont think they are only the part of marketing... Many people on Ebay use these things to target the current market trend so that they can get good bucks.
They basically are'nt only marketing related things they can help alot in finding the market trends, hot opportunities etc.
In my opinion it should be the shared responsibility of Marketing and ICT.
Your Seo Guide I
SEO and Brand Manager at Miraclestudios
Best Answers in: Computers and Software (1)
Hi Gordon,
The same question props into my mind when i decided to market the website of Miraclestudios, two years back ......
To start with i employed an SEO ......the seo kept working on our website to rank it on the most competitive keyword related our business......
Once we got the top rankings i hired three people more to increase the PAgrank of our website ..........
Also we have one copywriter to write fruitful content for our ws\ebsite and post to various online resources ..........
So all in all we have "Web MArketing TEam" comprising four people who are working to increase the traffic of our website ....
The team comprises :
One SEO
One Content Writer
One Social Network MArketer .....
And One LInk Building for increasing the links and PR of the website ..........
And after two years i can say then we are " what today " is due to the results of our website.........
MIraclestudios gives a lot of importance to it's website ......
even more then any other thing......
Links:
Alec E
Digital Strategist at BMB Ltd
Best Answers in: Business Development (3), Web Development (3), Job Search (1), Staffing and Recruiting (1), Internet Marketing (1), Search Marketing (1), Interface Design (1), E-Commerce (1)
it's all about context. Sales, marketing, crm, tech... For a video streaming company or e-com site it's a very different issue than for an architect or plastics manufacturer. Each has its own special requirements.
There's a lot of blaggers out there so be cautious of being sold a service. Chinwag's uk net marketing list is a great place for this kind question.
I would happily be more helpful if you could be specific about the nature of business concerned.
Al
Mick M suggests this expert on this topic:
Your director of marketing
Robert D
Executive VP at California Association of Nurseries and Garden Centers
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Assuming that your company's website is a vital part of your public interface, the relevant statistics should be subject to review by:
CEO and CXO team
Marketing & Sales
Customer Service/Complaint Service
Technical Support
Investor Relations
Webmaster
Content-Responsible Party
Supply Chain/Distribution
...and each should have a measurable in their MBO related to their area of interest in the website.
Why?:
The site is a primary communications tool between the company and its various publics. Customers need it and use it; Sales team need it to get info on customers, inventories, and orders; Sales are made directly or indirectly via the site; inquiries are serviced on the site; competitors are reviewing your company's performance via the site; outbound marketing is performed to individuals who came to notice via the site; site mechanics and order breakdowns are first reported via the site; revenue production, cost of service, timeliness of service and other factors are reflected first on the site; investors gauge your professionalism by your site, and your professional staff needs the feedback to make the site work. Oh, and the managers need to know how well everyone of those pieces is working.
Several individuals have posted some very good answers. In addition, given your title in LinkedIn, I have to wonder why you posted the question. Given that, I shall proceed.
A website is a tool. The company website is a calling card to the rest of the world, even if the market is regional. That calling card may be good, bad, ugly or indifferent, but it is available for the entire world to see and how the website is designed, applied and maintained will determine how the tool is used.
Web traffic statistics are data. To determine how well the tool works, the statistical data is collected and measured.
As with any statistical study, one must decide what the desired results are prior to utilizing the data to measure the actual results. Each company must decide what metrics are optimum for any given page in the website. For one particular page to have 1,000 visitors a month may be a high traffic page. For other pages, 1,000 visitors an hour may be low.
Many websites are designed to deliver something to the visitor, such as information or accept something from the visitor, such as information or money. In the case of a commerce site, a company exchanges goods or information for money and information.
In many cases, the statistical information from the page may be interesting to the marketing department. In others, the Information Technology department may find the numbers helpful in determining network bandwidth needs. Web designers should be interested in the numbers to determine if each page is attracting the number of visitors it should. If a page, or the entire site is underperforming, the web traffic statistics will reflect this and the particular parts of the page may be re-designed to attract more traffic.
Some indication of ROI should be made as the company paid for this software tool and should expect some sort of profit from it.
So, there could be many stakeholders focused on the company website and very interested in the performance of their particular area covered (or not) by the site. Each company will vary.
No, web analytics is not only for marketeers. I'll provide you one example of a solution provided within the Coremetrics standard set of reports (with minor logic changes).
An e-commerce company had no vizibility into its product landing pages.
The business issue was how best to optimize landing pages with pressure
coming from business management and the finance department to optimize.
Within the standard set of topline reports, Coremetrics provided the ability to identify landing pages, categorize and trend landing page bounce rates. Identify those landing pages where the item displayed was out of stock, provide the ability to compare bounce rates for landing pages with items in stock and/or out of stock. List all the campaigns landing on products out of stock, provide marketeers the ablity to discontinue the campaigns and/or change the landing page message.
Coremetrics thus provided marketeers the ability to act on the insight: to cut costs, improve customer experience, create process at the same time
providing business and finance with insight and a KPI if required.
As a web developer, it gives me some tangible data to work with....who to design for, how to market it - most importantly where to market it...I get to see where the hits originate from.....how the search engines and referrals help/hurt my presence online. You can track document downloads.....so much information can be derived from web analytics and tracking. It's relevant data to let you know how your online presence is performing. If your website isn't doing the work for you, you will know it.
Marketing should look at it,
Management should understand how their website functions for them.
Lowell D
Internet Marketing | eCommerce | Web Analytics
Best Answers in: Internet Marketing (11), Business Development (5), Search Marketing (2), Software Development (2), Offshoring and Outsourcing (1), Treaties, Agreements and Organizations (1), Web Development (1), Using LinkedIn (1)
Tom Davenport wrote a very cool book called “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning” where he states that the frontier for using data to make decisions has shifted dramatically. From the Red Sox to organizations like Xerox and GE, competitive strategies are being built around strong data analyses to drive business performance. This in turn helps these organizations to develop sophisticated quantitative modesl to improve business performance and predict business trends.
Let’s look at the web. With the Internet providing a new window (literally) into which a business is able to market and sell its wares, it makes sense for firms to ensure that they have an optimum strategy to capture their website statistics, analyze the same to understand what appeals to their customers in terms of marketing content, product interest, product features and other add-ons and finally craft a strategy to leverage this new medium to achieve competitive advantage on the web.
So, the short answer is sure, the marketing function in a firm has to spearhead this but it needs to work in conjunction with sales, customer support, technical support and communications to ensure that the online face of the company is attractive, interesting, reliable and relevant. And of course, one assumes (naturally) that most of the C-level team would be interested in the results piece of this thing.
This need not be as complicated as some folks make it out to be. Stick to good web design practices, create or modify your website to suit the viewpoint of a customer, don’t fill it with clunky flash animation, get some cool tips on SEOing your site online and visit Google analytics to get your free Analytics software.
It's all in the numbers - once you get some stats showing how many folks visit your website, how many of then look at products A-Z and how Product F outsells all of the others by X% margin, you can be sure that your leadership team will all have you in speed dial and green light your performance bonus.
Links:
In my opinion, there has to be an analytics department in a company which is just focused on web statistics, watching the performance of various campaigns and then analyzing certain key metrics which leads to higher ROI. After keen observation, analysts can provide useful recommendations to the various departments regarding how to increase conversions.
