Listen to what your customers are saying with web analytics

Say you owned a small retail shop (some of you may already do that!). You wouldn't dare think of doing business without asking your customers how they found your store, what they are looking for, or why they were there, would you? No, you wouldn't. But many companies do this exact thing with their online stores.

The easiest way to track what your customers want is to watch what they do online. But since you can't look over every customer's shoulder as they use your website, the next best thing is to watch them virtually through web analytics.

Web Analytics Answer Questions You Didn't Know You Had

Analytics software provides website owners one central place to watch how customers interact with the site, often in real-time. Web analytics lets you answer questions about your business such as:

• Where are my customers coming from? See how customers are finding your site, including the previous page they visited or search terms that they clicked on.
• What pages are they visiting? The most interesting stats your website generates is the visitor count of each of your pages. You can see which pages get the most visitor traffic, which is a measure of which information your customers are most interested in.
• What is preventing my customers from making a purchase? Purchases, or "conversions" as they are know in stats-speak, are the lifeblood of your site, and it is important to make sure customers complete the purchase process. Web analytics software lets you identify where common bail-out points are in your process.
• What browsers are my customers using? This information will help your web developers and designers build a site that meets your customers' needs and keeps them coming back.

Choosing Analytics Software

There are several companies that provide stats tracking code for you to use on your site, sometimes for free. Programs such as Google Analytics, StatCounter, or Yahoo! Web Analytics are free, but provide only basic reporting abilities. Omniture's SiteCatalyst is the gold standard in web analytics, and is priced according to how much traffic your website gets (but is worth every penny). If you use popular blogging software such as WordPress, Blogger, or Drupal, basic stats tracking is already built in.

Implementing Web Analytics on Your Site

Analytics software give you some pretty powerful information, so you'd think it would be hard to implement, right? It can be as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of Javascript into your site theme or template. Check with your friendly neighborhood web developer for help in putting it on your site.

Once the code is on your site, it will take a little bit of time for stats to be visible in reports, anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours. You'll want to check back periodically to make sure data is being collected. But once your data is being captured, you can run reports to your heart's content. After website owners realize the insights that can be gained from web analytics, it is often very hard to keep them from obsessively checking their stats!