Analytics is the foundation for understanding your clients at a low cost with accuracy and efficiency. No other tool at its value can give you the statistical information analytics does at such an in-depth level. Analytics allows you to know where you customers are coming from, what kind of computer they are using, what software they have on their computer, what resolution or screen size their screen is set to, when they most frequently look at the website, and what keywords they typed in to find your business.
These statistics can help you in a variety of ways. Imagine you are getting sales online but you want to know how to increase them. You can look at your analytics and see that most of your customers are from Phoenix, AZ! You had no idea of this so you decide to run an advertisement in the Phoenix Newspaper. These are some of the the benefits Analytics can bring to the table.
Analytics also goes hand and hand with creating a beautiful site that is compatible across all different brands of computers and made specifically for your target audience. Customers looking for hearing aid products would have different computer settings than a customer looking to purchase a video game. The hearing aid customers would have resolutions ranging from 800x600 to 1024x768 and would be mostly using Internet Explorer 6 browsers on PC computers. The Gamers would have resolutions ranging 1024x768 to 1600x1200 with a 32-bit color range and will be using the Firefox browser instead of Internet Explorer. These values play huge factors in designing the website so that it looks best on the screen your customer sees it on with the proper size, colors, and special effects that their computer can handle.
Analytics also allows you to do something called split-testing where you can display random images and text to different customers to see which is more successful in driving a goal such as directing a visitor to another page and/or signing up for a newsletter. You would be surprised to see how much more successful your site can be by making small changes with the photos and copy.
Analytics also gives you the ability to track specific goals such as purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or watching a tutorial video. After tracking this data you can easily go in and look over the data to see how many people purchased the items or signed up for a newsletter. This makes managing your website much easier and cost you less time by organizing the data that you want to see when you want to see it.
Analytics really opened up the can of worms when it comes to web design and web marketing. If you have a website you must have analytics on it whether you are a business owner, internet marketing, web developer, designer, or programmer. Analytics has statistics that can benefit you!
