Your Web site is much more than an information source for your customers. It’s teeming with valuable data that, when uncovered and used, can bolster your online presence and boost your bottom line. But most companies are unaware of the marketing secrets their sites hold. Here’s how to uncover those secrets and analyze the data to convert more of your site visitors into customers.

Getting your site to spill the beans

How do you get your Web site to share its secrets? Measure, measure, measure! And the only way to obtain the objective data that tells you what is going on inside your site is through Web analytics that track and collect visitor data, crunch it and produce valuable reports that help you improve your site.

There are two types of analytic tools: server-side and client-side. A “server” is the computer that houses, or hosts, your Web site. A “client” is a desktop or laptop computer running a Web browser that visitors use to view your site. The vast majority of businesses who have “tracking” on their sites use only a server-side tool that probably was installed for free by the site’s hosting company. When a user enters your URL into a Web browser or clicks a link in your site, the server “serves” the file for the requested Web page. Every time your server receives a request for a file, it “logs” or records it as a hit. Server-side reports are most valuable to your IT person, who can use them to analyze the performance of your site. It’s information that can help your IT person improve download speeds or troubleshoot errors that impact how your site runs.

However, when it comes to analyzing the marketing effectiveness of your site, server-side tools have their shortcomings. They report many of the same statistics as a client-side tracking tool, but they cannot measure user’s real behavior. Server-side tracking reports draw inferences about user activities and guess what the visitor was doing on your site when files were requested.

Client-side tracking tools analyze visitor activity directly on your Web site. These tools track user paths through your site. You can learn what keywords users entered to search for your site. What pages they visited and which ones they ignored. Client-side reports will tell you how long they stayed on each page. Whether they poked around your site or went directly to the conversion pages that impact your business – the pages where they purchase your product, download a coupon or ask you to contact them for more information. Once you have this information, you can analyze it to make guided decisions on how to improve the marketing effectiveness of your site’s design and content.

See for yourself the value of client-side analytics

To learn more about where your site users come from and how they interact with your site, check out Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). It will help you determine which keywords are most profitable to your business, compare short- and long-term trends, trace your e-commerce transactions to ad campaigns and keywords, find out where you are losing conversions on your site, see which links lead to the most conversions and much more. Best of all, it’s free. To try it, create a Google account (also free) and alter the code on your Web pages a little. It takes a little work to get it up and running, but it’s well worth the effort.

Your site’s most valuable marketing secret: conversion ratio

The depth and breadth of information you can get from your Web analytics tools can be overwhelming. If you’ve ever gotten a raw report before, you’ve seen this for yourself. A professional Web analyst can trim the statistical fat from those reports so you get only the information you want and need. But the one statistic you really want is the one that impacts your bottom line: your conversion ratio.

The conversion pages, as mentioned earlier, are the places on your site where a visitor carries out a desired action that directly or indirectly nets you business. To compute your conversion ratio, divide the number of unique visitors to your conversion pages by total visitors to your site. A unique visitor is someone who comes to your conversion page for the first time in a fixed time period, typically a 30-day period. Total visitors are all of the unique and repeat visitors who come to your site within that same time period.

While conversion rates differ between types of sites and markets, look for your site to hit the 1-2% range.

Use what you discovered to improve your bottom line

If your site isn’t hitting that range, pinpoint the strengths and weakness on your site that influence conversion. To do this, track your site on a deeper, more detailed level. Start by sitting down with your team to determine a handful of measurements that impact your conversion rate.

For example, in a recent marketing tip we talked about how to create buzz to attract prospects. Let’s say you just launched a new product and your team wants to measure the buzz it’s generating. Since your Web site is often the first step in the information-gathering phase of the buying cycle, you can review your analytics report to see which keywords people typed into search engines to find your site. Brand-specific keywords and phrases punched into a search engine are indications of how well your product is catching on in your market. So your team may choose to track and measure product visibility via searches.

There are dozens of other things besides searches you can measure and analyze with your server-side and client-side analytics tracking tools that will indicate your brand visibility, such as:

• Referrals from e-mail. One person e-mails another person the link to your product page.
• Navigation path analysis. Is your product page near the top of a user’s visit? Studying users’ paths through the site tells you if they knew what they were after or if they were just browsing. A straight path to a product page tells you that a visitor already had some knowledge on the topic before they came to your site.
• Landing pages. Set up a separate product page with an easy-to-remember URL. Reference this URL in product ads, directory listings, coupons, press releases … anything. You’ll be able to gauge not only the product’s visibility, but also the effectiveness of your other marketing pieces.
• Product literature downloads. If visitors take time to download literature, you can be sure they’re interested in your product.
• Product-specific inquiries. Label and store all Web messages regarding your product. Compare these messages from month to month and from product to product to spot trends, customer concerns, etc.
• Time spent on the product page. How long a visitor stays on a page may indicate higher interest in its content.
• Number of unique visitors to the page. If you’re looking for buzz, then you need a lot of unique visitors to be exposed to your message so they can spread the word.
• Scrolling. This is an advanced analytic available on some client-side tracking tools. It tells you how many people scrolled down the page. Since most Web visitors do not scroll, it’s a great indicator (and more reliable than time spent on a page) that your visitor is interested.

To get the greatest value from your site, measure the same issues consistently over time. Also, don’t track your Web in a vacuum. Record all of your marketing (ads, direct mail, trade shows, press releases, etc.) so you can see how they impact your Web traffic. By doing this you’ll be able to see, for example, how a direct mail piece might increase site visits and thus conversions.

Once you analyze how your handful of measurements are impacting your conversion rate, you can then zero in on specific areas of your site and experiment to see how changes impact results. With continuous analysis and strategic site improvements, you can maximize your conversion ratio and make your Web site a vital part of your marketing effort.

Analyzing Web sites and offering insights into how to improve conversion ratios are some of the ways we help our clients net more business. To set up an analysis of your site, e-mail Matt Harlow or call 800-800-9547.

Ideas are our product. We work to analyze your markets, isolate your key brand benefits and send clear, focused messages right to your target audience. Messages that build your brand image and achieve what you’re really looking for … measurable results. We call it Communication with insight.