WEB ANALYTICS

PROCESS
Learning Objectives
Introduction
The primary objective of carrying out Web Analytics is to optimize the website in
order to provide better user experience. It provides a data-driven report to
measure visitors’ flow throughout the website.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the topic the student should be able to:
• Describe web analytics process
• Discuss the activities of web analytics
• Describe Web analytics goals and KIPs
• Discuss examples and importance of various KIPs
Process of Digital Analytics
• The process of web analytics includes:
• Set the business goals/objectives
• To track the goal/objectives achievement, set the Key Performance
Indicators (KPI).
• Collect suitable data.
• To extract insights, Analyze data.
• Based on assumptions learned from the data analysis, Test alternatives.
• Based on either data analysis or website testing, Implement insights
NB: Web Analytics is an ongoing process that helps in attracting more
traffic to a site and thereby, increasing the Return on Investment.
Process of Web Analytics
Process of Digital Analytics
• The process of web analytics includes:
• Set the business goals/objectives
• To track the goal/objectives achievement, set the Key Performance
Indicators (KPI).
• Collect correct and suitable data.
• To extract insights, Analyze data.
• Based on assumptions learned from the data analysis, Test alternatives.
• Based on either data analysis or website testing, Implement insights
NB: Web Analytics is an ongoing process that helps in attracting more
traffic to a site and thereby, increasing the Return on Investment.
Identify Goals/Objectives
• Firms should identity the goals(objectives) and the desired outcomes
• Business objectives (actions, steps, activities) that guide company growth (in
measurable terms)
• Some examples of online business goals or objectives are increase sales
(revenue) brand experience, customer experience, brand exposure/awareness,
reduce costs etc
• Business objectives should be assigned definite metrics for tracking progress
and measuring success
• Business objectives could expressed in quantitative and qualitative term
• Increase the population of the students to 7000 by the end of 2024 (University)
• A desired action on your website could be to sell more items, create happy
customers or improve marketing effectiveness.
Identify Goals/Objectives
• Getting a customer participate in some action item on your website could be a
goal, for example achieve a given number of conversion rate per given number of
profiles.
• Goals could be page views recorded every time someone views a given page or
completes a specific action.
• Actions such as the following are effective ways of engaging customers and
encouraging website interactions
Complete the contact form
Download a brochure
Sign up to the newsletter
• Goals allow marketers to create metrics for user behavior or interaction on the
websites
• Therefore actions such as number of transactions completed, number of leads
generated, number of new account registrations etc are metrics measured to
determine achievement of business(analytic) goals
Google Analytics customized goals
Google Analytics supports four different types of customized
goals:
Destination goals, which are completed when a user visits a
specific web page or URL.
Duration goals, which are related to the total duration of a
user session.
Pages per session goals, which are completed when a user
visits a specified number of pages in a single session
Event goals, which are completed when the user triggers a
specified on-site event, such as downloading a file or
playing a video.
Identify Goals/Objectives
• In other words, if you’re not measuring the right elements and outcomes in your
web analytics tool, improving the performance of your digital marketing efforts will
be difficult
• If your business objectives are unclear or ambiguous, you will most likely end up with
useless metrics and irrelevant reports. When you don’t know what to measure, you
end up tracking a lot of things that don’t really matter to your business. Often the
real challenge is not what can be measured, but what should be measured.
• You can determine whether your digital marketing efforts are succeeding or failing
only if your strategy is clearly defined and agreed upon.
• In smaller companies this might be a straightforward exercise, but in larger
businesses it can be difficult to get different parties to agree and articulate what the
actual online strategy should be.
• As a general rule in web analytics: You shouldn’t quantify something before it has
been clarified or defined.
Identify Goals/Objectives
Business goals versus users’ goals
• Sometimes the goals of the users of your website might conflict with your
business goals. For example, your primary goal would be to sell product
and generate revenue.
• Users, however, might come to your website to accomplish various tasks
that don’t involve making an immediate purchase, such as researching
product options, finding a store location, seeking technical support for a
past purchase, or looking at job openings.
• Even when the goals align and a user wants to buy from you, some
conflict could still exist, ideally you want to maximize the transaction size
whereas the individual plans to spend as little as possible.
Identify Goals/Objectives
• Even though user and business goals may not align perfectly, it doesn’t mean
you ignore what your users want to accomplish.
• Customer-centric organizations strive to provide a positive user experience,
which often means understanding and supporting various user goals in order
to achieve their own business goals.
• There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two types of goals, and each
user interaction also represents an opportunity for behavior modification.
• For example, someone comes to your website to read a specific article but
stays longer to view other recommended content. Alternatively, a customer
visits your site to pay a bill online and ends up opening a new credit card
account.
• Online success often comes down to finding the right balance between
accommodating user goals and driving the desired goals of your organization.
Set the Key Performance indicator
• Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs).
• In web analytics, a KPI is a quantifiable measure to monitor and analyze user behavior on
a website.
• Examples include bounce rates, unique users, user sessions and on-site search queries.
University Example
• Increase the population of the students to 7000 by the end of year 2024
List at three KIPs (Measurable)
KIPs serve as measurement of performance, think of conversion goals as the KPIs of your
website, deciding on which conversion goals are appropriate for your online marketing
strategy will provide you with the means to evaluate how effective your efforts are proving.
The feedback you receive from your web analytics report will provide valuable insight
regarding consumer response and will permit you to make adjustments to those aspects of
your marketing strategy which do not meet expectations.
Collecting the data
• Measurement requires collection, analysis and storage of data about actions of users
• Data comes from a wide variety of online sources (blogs, forums, websites, social networks, mobile
apps and more).
• Businesses can collect data directly from a website or web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics.
The data mainly comes from Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests -- including data at the network
and application levels -and can be combined with external data to interpret web usage.
• For example, a user's Internet Protocol address is typically associated with many factors, including
geographic location and clickthrough rates.
Example
• Consider the ‘download a brochure’ goal from the example given above as a working example.
Think about the user experience involved in this process:
A visitor goes to your website and decides to download a specific brochure.
When they click on the button to download the brochure, a lightbox appears.
Once they fill in their first name and email address and hit ‘proceed’ this event is tracked in
Google Analytics
• The visitor can now download the brochure and, in turn, you have obtained the visitor’s email
address and have registered the download. This is an example of an effective action which provides
the digital marketer with valuable data and also gives the visitor what they want.
Analyze Data-Extract Insights
• This involves processing of the collected business data into actionable information
• Data analysis involves applying visual elements to aid in interpretation
• It is about preparing the data by synthesizing and making them easier to interpret
(Insights and information)
• Once the information is selected, cleaned and transformed, we proceed to the
interpretative visualisation of the results.
• Results (information) are used to implement corrective or specific actions, data is
transformed into learning and experience, with concrete actions that facilitate
decision-making.
• In this analysis, patterns and trends are contrasted, the influence of figures is
studied, all done in a strategic way, covering the objectives of each projected
metric (item of interest).
Test Alternatives (Strategies)
Experimenting and testing
• Businesses need to experiment with different strategies in
order to find the one that yields the best results.
• For example, A/B testing is a simple strategy to help learn
how an audience responds to different content. The process
involves creating two or more versions of content and then
displaying it to different audience segments to reveal which
version of the content performs better.
Implement insights (Develop Strategies)
• Implementing insights generated from the data requires
formulating and implementing different strategies, e.g
redesigning the website or changing the market strategy
• Developing a strategy involves implementing insights to
formulate strategies that align with an organization's goals.
• For example, search queries conducted on-site can help an
organization develop a content strategy based on what users
are searching for on its website.
• Developing strategies will be covered later in the unit