Digital marketing has become the new battleground for modern marketers, and fundamental to this is web analytics. Read on to find out why?

Since the Internet boom we have seen substantial changes within the business and consumer markets. Where once the decision-making process (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action - AIDA) and behaviour were mainly influenced by printed media campaigns (adverts, direct mails etc.), nowadays the information, decisions and actual purchases are done increasingly more via websites.

With the rapidly growing online market, companies and departments are constantly under pressure to prioritise and allocate their time and marketing budget to developing and optimising their online business and related marketing activities.

Now the Web has become the global place to be for most of the communication activities such as product information, enquiries, research, customers services, purchases, streaming media and much more.

The shift of doing more business online has also resulted in a change of the traditional five P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion and Personnel). Product, price, and promotion have now been unified into one “Place” - namely the Web. More business is done via the website than ever before. No physical products, just an image, explanation and price. The pricing can be flexible due to influences of demand and offer, the amount of clicks and/or popularity. Now all promotion is done online via banner campaigns, newsletters and/or other streaming media activities. As for personnel, there is less need for physical personal to sell the product or services to businesses and/or consumers online and on the other hand a growing need for experts to develop and optimise online business activities.

The pillars for the future

With the increase of online activities, marketing communication has never been so important and intense before. More important is the ability to understand, track and trace your visitor’s site behaviour. This is done with web analytics and each business has a different purpose for using this tool.

Ecommerce businesses use their website to increase their online purchases. Therefore anlaysing site behaviour - knowing how visitors navigate through your site - is of utmost importance in order to improve and optimise the visitors experience and maximize conversion rates.

Some organisations (government, police, non-profit) can purely use their websites as a means of public information. The goal is that information is accessible and easy to find. Web analytics can easily justify the time and money spent to optimise site content.

For CRM and customer services, web analytics is also a very useful tool to map customer behavior and interests in order to fine-tune the specific information sent to each customer individually without spamming regular customers. This helps improve the customer relationship, understanding and customer experience.

On the other sales and marketing professionals also rely on web analytics as sales are particularly interested in leads, which are formally generated by marketing via online activities. Web Analytics plays an important part in the marketing & sales process as it helps improve and optimise online activities with the result of converting more visitors into customers in a time efficient and cost effective way.

Website reporting (web analytics) helps professionals/marketers make better digital decisions, improve ROI, optimise website content and increase online conversions which is crucial for the future success of online business.

Facing the facts with Web Analytics

Using web analytics can be very enlightening and can open up new doors for improvement and development in existing and new areas. However the process of selecting and implementing web analytics is not equally easy and some organisations need more time than others, but it need not be a difficult path to follow

All in all web analytics has become the tool to help all online marketers in every vertical to improve and grow their online business to the next level. And it is for us to use web analytics and learn from it in order to move forward in giving a future to digital marketing.
It is good to remember that there will always be a Story behind the Web, now and in the future.

By Bianca Wiebenga,
EMEA Marketing Manager, WebSideStory

Email: Bianca.Wiebenga@websidestory.nl

Web: (www.websidestory.co.uk)