Internet marketers are stuck on the traffic theory: Get more Web
site visitors; generate more sales. This is generally true.
However, there is a way to achieve a significantly higher number of
sales without spending additional dollars to attract new visitors:
Use Web analytics to turn current visitors into customers.
Web analytics solutions track the behavior of your site's
visitors. What pages do they visit most? What are the popular paths
through your Web site? On which pages do they leave? Site-surfing
patterns show marketers what pages to modify to better serve the
interests of their potential clients.
Timothy Holmes, founder of Holmes & Associates, in Saranac
Lake, New York, uses WebTrends' Reporting Service to optimize
the performance of several Web sites for his company. For example,
on AdirondackCraft.com, his regional e-commerce site selling
products from the Adirondack region of upstate New York, Holmes,
50, changed his shopping-cart process due to his reports. He added
estimated shipping costs to the first page of the checkout process,
giving customers critical information sooner. That modification
helped contribute to a 400 percent increase in the number of sales
in a four-month period.
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Web analytics solutions can also usually track search engine
positioning, e-mail campaigns, banner ads and other promotional
programs. Some solutions provide sales data in addition to visitor
data. This enables marketers to enhance ad campaigns and the
corresponding Web site pages for maximum sales, not just
traffic.
Don't assume Web analytics is exclusively for online
marketing. It can help marketers with offline efforts as well. For
example, Holmes studies which product pages generate the highest
interest and sales, then includes those items in direct mailings to
consumer magazines. He believes he has a stronger chance of getting
a free product review for specialty merchandise that's also in
high demand.
Thankfully, growing businesses don't have to pay a fortune
to learn how to improve their sites. Versions of ClickTracks,
HitBox, Urchin and WebTrends cost a few hundred dollars to buy the
software, or less than $50 per month to lease the reporting
service.
"For $35 per month, I can monitor five Web sites,"
says Holmes, who uses a WebTrends solution. "This is very
affordable for small-business owners, who often market multiple Web
sites."
You may even be able to get Web analytics reports for free. Ask
the ISP that hosts your Web site if it offers this service as part
of your hosting package. Because these reports hog server space,
ISPs often run and store these reports only when asked. You might
be one phone call away from receiving reports that will reveal what
your prospects are doing-and not doing-on your Web site.
Speaker and freelance writer Catherine
Seda owns an Internet marketing agency and is author of Search
Engine Advertising.