Relevant Interruptions

No matter which analytics tool you're using you need to make sure you have the basic elements covered.  Web site analytics used to be something that was buried in the IT department.  Then it was a metric that the marketing department would us but it was still looking at the simple aspects of site visits, unique visitors and time on the site, etc.  Today web site analytics should be a normal part of marketing measurement and analysis.  It's important to understand what content is most important, what words make up your customers description of your products and/or services, what companies are visiting your site, etc.

The following is a list of some of the basic elements needed to ensure the analytics you receive are correct.

Page Tagging - It's important that each page you want to track has the correct page tagging to ensure it shows up in the analytics report.

IP Address Exclusion - People within your company probably visit your site a lot.  You want to make sure you exclude the companies IP address/es from the analytics so it doesn't throw off your reports.

Page Naming - Content Management Systems tend to place numbers as the page name because the page is dynamically built from elements within a database.  It's important to make sure that proper page names are created so when you look at the analytics reports it's easy to understand what the pages are without having to click on each one because you can't remember what number goes with which page.

Conversion Events - Most analytic systems today allow you to create conversion events.  These are specific events like how many people came from this source and ended up going to our contact page or purchased a product online.  These events make it easy to track each week or month without having to run the process each time in order to figure it out.

Internal Search - Most sites have them, if yours doesn't we would recommend you add it.  An internal search is on each page and allows the visitor to enter what they're looking for.  This information is very valuable because it lets you know the words your customers use to describe or represent your products and/or services.  This information is very valuable for traditional advertising as well because they can use this information in the messaging of the ad in order to make it more relevant to potential customers.

We hope this basic list helps and we hope you're using your web site analytics to help redefine your marketing efforts.  If you ever need any help just give us a call at (816) 529-9000 or visit our web site at www.ontargetinteractive.com.