Often websites and online marketing campaigns like internet advertisements and e- mail marketing are significant investments. In order to derive strategic benefits, one needs to track their impact on consumer behaviour and their ability to generate direct online revenues. Intelligent businesses use the 20:80 rule to gauge effectiveness of their investments, i.e. which (20%) marketing strategies / investments deliver maximum (80%) revenues.

Smart Online Investment

Often websites and online marketing campaigns like internet advertisements and e- mail marketing are significant investments. In order to derive strategic benefits, one needs to track their impact on consumer behaviour and their ability to generate direct online revenues. Intelligent businesses use the 20:80 rule to gauge effectiveness of their investments, i.e. which (20%) marketing strategies / investments deliver maximum (80%) revenues. This is achieved by accurately analy sing the consumer behaviour data such as which web page was visited the most, at what times of the week, month, year and what level of customer conversion was achieved. By tracking this data for a definite time period, businesses can clearly establish trends of what is working and what needs to be tweaked. By taking corrective actions, a business can easily turnaround a revenue slide . However this requires constant review and analysis of the website statistics and a high level of understanding of consumer behaviour in the online space.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is a business intelligence tool whose components are encoded into each web page of your website and is also connected to the server where your website is hosted. Usually web analytics comes as a hosted solution i.e. the data analysis ‘engine’ (or software) is based at the service providers’ server and is able to supply trends analysis of your web traffic on demand. Most of the reports are free; however for high end reporting o f customi sing analytics software to suit your individual needs (like putting ‘filters’ i.e. blocking sources of information) needs you to purchase a speciali sed solution from an authori sed vendor. Experienced web analytic experts and certified vendors are a smart choice as they create crisp and actionable reports from the raw data collected as per your pre-identified business priorities. While you may get two streams of data e.g. months when the maximum traffic hit your website and the months when maximum e-commerce transactions took place – they could be different. So while the free report may just give you traffic and transaction reports, a vendor may link the two to point out important facts that led to a dip in e-commerce e.g. holidays for an office station ery supplier, even though people may be browsing a lot but only placing orders on weekdays. Thus it makes sense to have additional order fulfillment staff on weekdays, and add more product offering options on weekends.

Google Analytics

In its attempt to make the web even more attractive for business marketing strategists, Google Analytics has been launched as a powerful new tool. Google Analytics is a free website traffic analysis tool which arms businesses with focused, detailed, pre-configured,  business oriented web-visitor data. This is provided through a  user friendly web-based user interface. For many companies Google Analytics is their primary business intelligence tool for their web initiatives. Google Analytics provides answers to such critical consumer behaviour questions like which regions attracted more visitors than others, what are the most popular keywords (across all major search engines) that drive inbound web traffic, and what web-pages are popular with visitors. The e-commerce analytics package is also very popular as it focuses on critical sales drivers on web pages e.g. which products sell more etc. For people who subscribe to the Pay Per Click - PPC (Adwords) service, Google Analytics seamlessly integrates tightly with these sponsored advertisements empowering you with detailed and accurate pay per click behavior statistics (linking keywords, their search pages and the Adwords used which lead to higher web traffic or conversion rates). Google Analytics can even handle complex transaction information as the use of multiple domains to finish a transactions or even tracking different business activities across multiple sub domains. Google Analytics can prove to be a great business force multiplier along with the service offerings of companies such as ROI.com.au