The Challenges with Web Analytics

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Web analytics is a process that is part of Internet marketing. Simply put, it is just the process of gathering data about the user activity on the Internet. It is used to find out to some degree what the “buzz” is all about. It addresses questions such as “What are the people interested into today?” “What are the things that can help us make good money from the Internet?”

Web analytics is simply finding out how lucrative a business idea can be. Through web analytics, you can find out if, for example, selling jewelries through the Internet can be a good idea or, if not, how we can build up hype for such a project. It is also useful for developing content for search engine optimization; these web analytic or SEO tools make it possible to research what keywords in a particular niche market is currently popular in search engines.

Based on this definition, you can see how useful web analytics is. However, web analytics is simply not for everyone. This is because of the fact that web analytics can be understood by people who are professionals in the IT field. Since every web analytic solution that there is today is biased toward people who are well-versed in IT, there are some difficulties that people who don’t belong in that category can run across when trying to perform web analytic process on their own.

For example, web analytics involve a large volume of raw data. These are raw, unprocessed data that most of the times do not give a lot of significant information. It requires a good amount of time to sift through them and weed out the important information from the “noise”--or data that are otherwise unable and unqualified. This can be frustrating to most marketers, who would tend to view web analytics as simply a waste of time and effort.

A good example of this is encountered by marketers who purchase and invest on leads from third parties. Using web analytic tools, these marketers find out that a certain number of their purchased leads are unqualified and ineligible for the product offering. They do so by looking into each every lead through a variety of marketing methods and measuring their response to determine the leads’ eligibility to the product.

For these reasons, most marketers are afraid to use web analytics and decide to just go on with their marketing campaign without making use of the tool. This is because they view web analytics as not just a measure of success, but they also view it as a measure of their failure. Other marketers also balk at web analytics because it takes up most of their time instead of getting on with their business. Whatever the reasons are, web analytics is getting more and more neglected by the marketing community especially by the non-technical people.

However, web analytics is still an important part of business. What these marketers do not understand is that web analytics is a tool that can be advantageous when used wisely. It is also a tool that can mean loss or revenue for the company.

Web analytics is not just a measure of failure; it is a gauge that you can use to find out why you are failing and which parts in your campaign would need to be improved. It also helps you to find out which parts of your campaign are successful and which ones you should leverage on to further their success. It is mainly something you use to find out how good your campaign is doing so you can decide what actions you must do about it.


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Great Analytics Tools that You Can Use for Free

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Why do you need to perform lead analytics? There are a lot of reasons, but we’ll try to focus on another important process in lead management: lead scoring. In here, you are going to use a set of criteria to determine which among your huge collection of leads are qualified to become customers. These could be in terms of their purchasing power of explicit information such as their age, educational background, or salary range—simply put, their demographics.

These explicit data are given by your leads. They may fill out a registration form or answer a survey. Your sales agents may ask these directly from your prospects. Now, the problem is that not all information can be true. If you are going to use these data for lead scoring, then it means the model itself has a potential of becoming wrong.

You need lead analytics to determine another kind of demographic information: implicit ones. They can provide you with more insights of the behavior or interests of your leads. How long did they stay in your website? Did they fill out a customer form? How many times did they check your e-mail or web page?

You can also perform web analytics if you have some tools with you. Fortunately, a lot of them can be used for free.

Let’s begin with Snoop. This application, unlike most web analytics programs, is desktop-based. This means that you need to download this into your system. There’s no need to worry, though, as this works in almost all kinds of operating systems. This is also ideal if you’re a terribly busy individual. You basically don’t have the time to continuously check your web-based programs. Snoop can provide you with news if something happens. For example, you will be alerted when a previous visitor once again check out your web page. You can also determine how many returning visitors you have and where they come from. Usually, you will know of any event through a sound produced by the software. You can also tag your visitors, so you can easily identify them in your system.

If you want something that is easy to use, comprehensive, and, most importantly, convenient to customize, you can select BBClone. This one doesn’t depend on other services in order to generate information for you. It can also be personalized according to the needs of your business. For instance, you can change its language or use it for a lot of website platforms like Wordpress or Drupal. It can also produce log files. Some of the information that you can get out of this is website traffic, geographical location, and preference.

Then you have 4Q. This software is quite different from the other two. It is actually a user feedback that you’re going to send to your leads when they visit your website. The main objective with this is that you need to support the numbers that you can come up with the other programs. For example, BBClone will tell you that 50 percent of your visitors are currently located in the East Coast, but it doesn’t really provide you with more information as to his interest on your business. With 4Q, you can create real customer feedback to identify the kind of relationship he wants to establish with your company. What products is he interested in? Would he like to be a business partner, or is he already an existing customer?

These tools can then work alongside your Google or Yahoo Analytics. But there’s one thing you need to do first: train your sales agents in using them. These programs will still be useless if they cannot be maximized to their fullest potential.

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Know What Your E-mail Statistics Are Telling You

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All those who are engaged in online marketing will never fail to use e-mail messaging. Here is why: virtually all those who visit the World Wide Web have at least one e-mail address. It can be personal or corporate account—it does not matter. With this revelation, you definitely know that there are plenty of leads out there. They can give you very high conversion rate, if you can just follow certain e-mail marketing techniques and etiquette.

But like any other marketing method, it needs to be assessed. You need to be able to analyze not only the leads you have but also the reports you have gathered based on your campaign. The result will inform you if you are doing well with it or not. Sad to say, not all reports can be true. Some of them are pretty misleading. If you go on believing them, you are just opening a lot of doors for errors in lead management. You may be working with the wrong types or leads.

Seeing Things in a Different Light

Just so you can clearly read your e-mail reports well, here are the common misconceptions that you need to know:

1. Not all e-mails labeled “delivered” are actually read. If you are fond of using Outlook, for example, you know that you can actually customize your e-mail messages. If you keep the track e-mails on, you will know which of them are sent, read, and delivered. Bounced ones will be delivered directly into your mailbox.

Just because an e-mail is labeled delivered or read does not mean that your campaign is already successful. For one, it could have been delivered but straight to their Junk Mail folder. You are aware of what e-mail users do with them. If they are marked read, it may mean that they only take a quick look at it and nothing more.

2. You have a very misleading forward rate. Referrals are considered to be an online version of the word of mouth. This means that you will have 100 percent success rate of convincing other people to even take a look at your products and services. One of the most common referral methods is Forward. All e-mails do have that, and, interestingly, it can be monitored. However, there is one major issue. Most of those that are counted are those that are being forwarded using an integrated Forward feature in the e-mail. If the reader decides to click on the Forward button immediately, this will not be traced.

3. You can still have a very high unsubscribe rate without you knowing it. Though you may be taught to honor unsubscription request from e-mail users, it does not really spell well for your business. This only means that you have one potential lead that is already wasted. That is why when you have a very low unsubscription percentage it’s something that you will be proud of.

However, it doesn’t really guarantee you anything. You may even lose your leads even without you knowing it. Let’s talk about Gmail, for example. If an e-mail sounds to be spam, all the user has to do is to click on This Is Spam, and the message directly goes to the Junk Mail folder. It’s not only a particular e-mail but all that you’re going to send to them. This will then cut down the time they spend on unsubscribing.

Because of these loopholes, you may want to consider asking for other methods of communication with your sales leads. This could include home and mobile phone number, which are definitely easier to reach than e-mails.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com