This week I will post several high level thoughts on web analytics for your business. In no particular order, we will look at:

• Evaluating the acquisition strategy
• Site visitor management
• Finding low hanging fruit
• Focus on the money trail
• Search strategy
• Campaign optimization
• Creating an intelligence factory

With this post, we will look at the first three and the final four later in the week.

Evaluating the acquisition strategy

The key acquisition is to have a balanced selection of acquisition channels.  This includes search, referring sites and direct response campaigns.  Best practices (rule of thumb) suggests that search could represent around 40% of traffic, another 25% from referring sites and 25% from direct traffic and another 10% from campaigns.  If your search balance is too high, you may be overexposed and if it is low, you are likely under spending.  You need to dig into the campaign analysis detail to understand strengths and weaknesses of each channel and how to recommend new or modified strategies.  I should note that some channels such as CSE’s and Affiliates are a grouping of many sites and need to be evaluated individually or in logical segments.

Site Visitors Management

This is all about understanding how strongly visitors are attached to your site. Most marketers have access to the Google Analytics visitor log which allows you to understand visitor behavior, including how often they visit, time on site and time per page, etc.  This includes recency of visit as well as frequency of visit.  Is this analysis consistent with the business goals?  This data can be segmented by content, campaign, source, etc.

Finding the Low Hanging Fruit

Marketers spend lots of money and time acquiring traffic.  So, spend time analyzing the top places where that money is being wasted and/or spend wisely. Most web analytics tool provide this analysis as a standard report. It will show analysis such as bounce rates, indexed against site average, for the top entry points to the website.  For example, high bounce rates could mean that you are attracting the wrong audience or you are not connecting with consumers when they come to your page.