To optimize the site, you need to find out where your visitors came from, what exactly users want you to find, where and how it is convenient for them to make a purchase.
Web analytics – key skills and trends of the future
To increase sales on the Internet, it is important to know where users learned about the site and your product, which influenced their purchase decision, which prevented the completion of the purchase, why users left the site or switched to other pages. The collection of this statistics is done by special analytical systems that are installed on the site and / or downloaded to the user’s computer, and web analytics are engaged in the analysis, presentation and interpretation of this data.
Why should a marketer know Web analytics?
The adoption of any decisions in Internet marketing should be based on an accurate knowledge of the user’s behavior and the channels of his involvement on the site. Without this, any advertising budget will be spent inefficiently, site content and advertising campaigns will not meet the expectations of customers. In addition, very often companies in times of crisis can not afford to hire a separate web analytics staff, so its function is performed by the marketer.
The most common monitoring systems for website visitors are Google Analytics, Similar Web, Adobe Analytics, Com Score. To begin with, it is worthwhile to understand the difference between different types of data collection and analysis services on the Internet.
Types of web analytics systems
By the way information is collected:
- require the installation of a code on the site;
- Install programs on the computers of visitors to the site.
- If possible, access to information:
- Closed – information is seen only by those to whom the owner gave access;
- open – provide the statistics of the site to all users or those who paid for the service;
- Mixed – the owner chooses which data to open and which to not.
What will the Google Analytics marketer tell?
- What channels (search, mailing, social networks, advertising) brought visitors to the site;
- geography of visitors – country, city, region;
- gender, age, interests of the site visitors;
- What devices are used: desktop PC, laptop, mobile devices, which are dominated by browsers and platforms;
- how many and which pages were viewed by users;
- how long the user spends on the site;
- whether they made a purchase / registration / other conversion.
The choice of key metrics for a site is an important factor in the effectiveness of web analytics. Key metrics depend on the specifics of the business: what exactly, how and to whom do you sell, and also on the structure of the site.
Among the main skills of web analytics are knowledge of the processes of installing and configuring Google Analytics code, the ability to interpret site statistics data provided by Google Analytics and other systems, knowledge of Excel, the ability to upload internal statistics using SQL. For effective work, it is also important to understand the specifics of different traffic channels, the knowledge of internal processes in the company, the features of the product, the target audience.
Trends in Web Analytics 2018
Democratization of data: more and more specialists access statistics on site visits and conversions, learn to work with web analytics tools and use them to solve everyday work tasks.
Analysis of user behavior on the site. The role of behavioral factors will increase. With the increase in advertising budgets on the Internet, more and more importance is attached to personalized advertising, segmenting the audience not by sex and age, but by the real preferences of users on the site, expressed in the choice of keywords, sites, pages and in the features of their viewing. 95% of users are loyal to personalized advertising, so the collection of data in this direction will continue. Ability to interpret the behavior of visitors, predict and direct, based on specific statistics of the site, will be one of the key for the Internet marketer and web analytics.
In the first place – a call to action. Of the three types of web analytics – descriptive, predictive and motivational – an increasingly motivated analyst will become increasingly popular. Descriptive answers the question of what happened on the site in the past, predictive assumes the future actions of the user on the site, while the incentive (prescriptive) goes even further – convinces the user to perform an action on the site. The analysis of behavioral factors and the possibilities of predictive analytics allow us to place “user traps” on the site with sufficient precision-those windows, buttons, forms or banners that induce him to perform certain actions. For example, leave a contact, subscribe to the newsletter, download promotional materials, buy additional goods, place a post-sales service.
Integration of various data collection systems. In the future, only interpretations of Google Analytics data will not be enough. The decisions will be made based on the collection and integration of a mass of information into the single field – internal statistics of the SQL site, ERP, CRM, HR (RStudio, PowerBI) and POS systems, as well as statistics from various widgets, applications, social networks and other built-in tools reporting. The Internet of things already becomes a full-fledged data provider after the purchase of one or another device, and this trend will only grow.
Web analytics and other experts on Big Data will be even more in demand. The avalanche-like growth of various data and the blurring of the information landscape will require even more highly skilled specialists able to build a concept and strategy on this basis and monitor changes in dynamics.