If you sit up at night worrying about subjects like application performance management and all the sub-categories it entails, you are probably already a big fan of web app analytics by AppOptics. Those useful little tools that help every site admin optimize performance. It’s a fact that when you are able to clearly see how visitors interact with your website, you learn all sorts of useful things.
But it’s about more than just learning for the sake of knowledge. Website analytics reveal multiple layers of information about everyone who ventures onto your pages. This sort of data is solid gold when it comes to planning marketing campaigns, crafting a B2B strategy or creating new sites for fresh business ventures. Unfortunately, some site owners and admins only have a general idea about how valuable analytics can be. Here’s a list of the most worthwhile things web app analytical tools can do for you and your entrepreneurial endeavors.
Understand the Source of Traffic
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This kind of smart analysis will let you know, at the very least, the IP addresses of your visitors. You’ll not only see the IP, but will often learn other particulars of each person’s origin, know whether they’re accessing you via a phone or computer, see how often they visit and for how long, find out if they are browsing from a corporate platform or a personal one, and follow them as they wander through your pages looking at various things and perhaps purchasing something.
Some apps have the ability to deliver tons of user data right to your inbox as soon as the person leaves your site. Other, more bare-bones applications will simply give you the basics about time on site, items purchased, pages visited, etc. Most of the simpler apps are downloadable for free. The more complex ones come with a cost, but most marketers consider the price well worth the payoff.
Find Leaks in Marketing
Where you lose potential customers is valuable data. Once you know where a person was when they clicked out of your website, you’ll be able to compare that information with all others who left before making a purchase, contacting you or taking some other action. Again, all information is valuable in a marketing context. Is there a particular page that seems to cause people to exit? Or, does it seem that users vanish after about one minute of browsing? Either way, you can use those facts to tweak your content, add or delete certain photos, or make other changes as needed.
Measure the Success of Campaigns
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Never underestimate the value of facts, figures and analysis. When you conduct a marketing campaign, is there a bump in site visitors immediately after? If not, then you’re probably in need of a new campaign. Keeping a close eye on your traffic, its source and its behavior will allow you to build responsive campaigns and create sales materials that get results. In the long-run, a simple website app analytic can change the entire way you do business and make you more profitable as a result.
Leverage IP Lookup Capability
There are multiple ways to look up the IP address of visitors. The function works much the same way as just looking someone’s name up in an old telephone book, but uses publicly available IP addresses of companies and individuals’ websites instead. You can either build an IP database of your own from past visitors or simply pay for one of the many online lookup services.
Costs are minimal for most lookup services, and you can really find out a lot about potential customers who linger on your website. Once you know the corporate name attached to the Internet Protocol address, you can dig up volumes of related data, like officers’ names, in-house email addresses, resumes, etc.
Analyze Visitor Behavior
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You can discover not only how many people visit your site in a given time period but also discover how long they stayed and how often they returned. Additionally, you’ll learn what pages they visited, whether they tried to purchase something, how long they spent on each area of the site, and when they left. From a marketing standpoint, each one of these individual metrics is solid gold. Even if you weren’t able to find out anything else, this data set alone could help you plan a marketing campaign, redesign your site, remove dead pages, upgrade shopping carts, and add relevant content to blogs.
Calculate the Bounce Rate
When someone visits a page on your site but then leaves without making a purchase, filling out a contact form, or doing anything else, the visit is recorded as a bounce. When you enumerate your bounces and divide that number by the total visits within the same time period, typically one day, you know your mathematical bounce rate, a highly valuable bit of information.
Note that every page of a given website will have its own bounce rate, the more popular pages having a lower rate, and the less popular pages having a higher rate. With this data in hand, you can now move forward and redesign your site. It’s your choice whether to enhance high-bounce pages or remove them. Many companies simply eliminate these pages and focus on honing the attractiveness of the lower rate pages.
Use Time Studies to Improve Offerings
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Web analytics are great at doing two things: measuring visitor actions and logging the time of events. By simply studying how much activity takes place at certain hours of the day, you can adjust marketing campaigns, tweak page designs, add additional products to your lineup, and even adjust your shopping cart’s payment structure. For example, if you do a time study of last month’s online product sales and discover that 90 percent of buyers took advantage of your weekend discounts, it means your buyers are highly sensitive to price reductions.
Based on that data, you might be able to boost sales by adding a mid-week discount or a daily after-hours price reduction on certain offerings. Simply seeing the time stamped movement of traffic can tell you a lot about what your customers and potential customers want, in terms of prices, products, and service.
