Business is about numbers: customers, sales, profit. Web analytics in marketing studies how to increase these numbers using online advertising, a website, and social networks.
What is web analytics
Benefits of Web Analytics
Types of web analytics
Basic web analytics services and tools
How to use web analytics systems
Expert advice
What is web analytics
Table of Contents
Web analytics is a system for collecting and analyzing data. It helps to understand user behavior on a website and track their path of interaction with the product. Based on the results of data analysis, it becomes clear how to improve the product or some stage of interaction with the client.
For example, an online store launched contextual advertising on social networks, spent an impressive budget, but sales still do not grow. With the help of web analytics, it was found out that customers simply put products in the basket and leave the site. This may mean that you need to work on the order form: make it shorter and clearer so that the customer can fill in all the fields in a couple of minutes.
Working with web analytics looks different in every profession.
Web analytics is needed by specialists who analyze data, create products, promote them online and manage processes.
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Benefits of Web Analytics
Web analytics of a website helps to solve several problems at once:
1.● find and research the target audience;
2.● build a sales funnel – the customer’s path from the first contact with the product to the “Place an order” button and repeat purchases;
3.● find weaknesses and strengths in business processes;
4.● improve conversion rates at different stages;
5.● optimize the budget for attraction channels in order to spend money on promotion effectively and meaningfully;
6.● see what trends are on the market and adopt useful practices from competitors.
If you set up web analytics correctly, you can automate the processes of collecting data from all sites, analysis and visualization in the form of reports and graphs. This will allow even a small company with a modest marketing budget to bypass competitors. The competition for each client online is higher than offline, so you need to act quickly but sensibly, relying on big data and accurate figures.
The course “Internet Marketer” will help you understand how popular services are structured and which one to choose, what cross-functions analytics in the company is associated with. Experienced web marketers will teach you how to correctly build a strategy, set up web analytics systems and individual functions, create dashboards and draw up technical specifications for finalizing services for the required tasks.
Types of web analytics
Depending on the goals and scale of the business, different types of analytics are used:
● End-to-end analytics
Its main goal is to follow the customer’s path, from clicking on an advertising banner to making a purchase. For this, high-level analysis is used – only the customer’s target actions are studied, not their reasons. Target actions can be clicking on an ad, going to a website, placing an order. The analyst, as it were, stands in the customer’s shoes to understand where to look for new ones and how to attract them.
● Integrated analytics
is responsible for collecting and analyzing statistical data obtained from various sources:
– website visitor counters;
– log analyzers scan the website page and show which blocks provide an influx of new users;
– CRM systems show how the client’s actions at each stage affect the efficiency of the entire business;
– call tracking helps to track incoming calls from clients from different advertising channels;
– SEO auditors evaluate the site’s position in search engines and point out problems that prevent it from rising higher.
Small companies often use separate tools – data from Yandex Metrica, Google Analytics, advertising accounts, call tracking, which over time are combined into a system of end-to-end analytics.
In large projects, complex analytics or both are used at once. This helps to link different ways of interacting with the client into a single chain and analyze each stage in more detail.
For example, a company has a multi-channel phone and dozens of advertising campaigns. After each call, operators fill out a client profile in the CRM system to find out where they came from and how satisfied they are with the service. Then they compare the responses at the system level and the client’s responses at different stages. This helps to understand which channels work better and what can be optimized.
You can also work with product metrics. For example, find out why customers abandon the order at a certain step. Perhaps there are too many questions in the form and you have to spend extra time filling them out.
Basic web analytics services and tools
Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics, comprehensive analytics services, BI and competitive environment analysis are used as web analytics tools.
Basic services
Yandex Metrica
Yandex’s web analytics system is focused on analyzing the client’s target actions and offers businesses a base of standard reports and tools for solving problems. For example, Webmaster tracks errors in the site’s operation during visits by search robots.
Within the system, you can create scenarios for visitors and analyze different segments of products and users.
Compared to Google Analytics, there are fewer opportunities to analyze user behavior in non-standard reports. But Yandex Metrica is much easier to use even for beginners and it easily integrates with 1C or CRM databases.
Google Analytics
The advantages of Google’s comprehensive analytics system include a wide range of functions for traffic and conversion analysis, A/B testing, dashboards, and the ability to integrate reports from other services.
The tracked traffic can be segmented by source and audience, and you can also study the behavior of users in different categories of goods and services: for example, online clothing stores or buyers of online courses.
Integration with the Google Trends service helps you analyze which queries are trending in different periods of a month or year, look at the experience of competitors and build your strategy.
The disadvantages include the lack of simultaneous access for multiple users and integration with targeted advertising tools.
Both Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics have their own certification programs , thanks to which web analysts and other specialists can master all available tools and capabilities of the systems for practical use. Most often, both systems are used, supplementing them with special services for specific tasks, such as building a sales funnel or analyzing traffic.
Comprehensive analytics
Amplitude
A product analytics platform that helps build a sales funnel in detail. At each stage, you can track which channels and services work better than others, what can be improved or completely changed. You can identify customers who are loyal to the company and bring more profit, so that you can focus on them first.
The disadvantages of the platform are the price from $1000 for a paid version for large teams and not very responsive support. Therefore, to work with Amplitude, it is advisable to have an analyst on staff who can configure the necessary options themselves, including at the code level.
Calltouch
The service helps to improve the efficiency of online marketing and increase sales through online channels.
Its main feature is high data accuracy: the error is less than 1%. This is important for companies that use many channels and want to know exactly how many visitors each of them brings. To do this, a separate phone number is created for each channel and how many calls came from it are counted.
The service assigns a personal number to each visitor and collects information about the keywords that visitors use to arrive.
CallTracking.ru
Tracks orders from all channels, including advertising banners, keyword searches or calls. Helps determine peak hours for the call center and evaluate the work of each operator. Integrates with the MTT virtual PBX and Amber CRM.
BI (Business Intelligence)
Business intelligence is a group of services that transform raw data into a simple and visual form so that it can be used throughout the entire business.
OWOX BI
The service allows you to download data from Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica and CRM advertising accounts into a single storage, where you can easily find what you need using the DBMS .
Analyzes all key marketing metrics – ROI , LTV, CPA – and displays them on a single dashboard, i.e. an interactive online board with manageable metrics.
OWOX BI is one of the few tools for assessing ROPO (Research Online Shopping Offline), or how each advertising channel affects sales and profits. Suitable for planning advertising budgets and marketing forecasts.
OWOX BI has a large set of useful tools and trackers, but in order to get personalized reports with all the necessary parameters, you will need a web analyst or even a web developer. There are tips and online support to help you figure it out, as well as integration with CallTouch, CoMagic, CallTracking.
Power BI
Microsoft business analytics services generate unified interactive reports based on data from CRM, Excel and log analyzers. Data can be visualized as graphs, charts or interactive maps.
Suitable for presentations and public reporting in group projects or investor meetings. Mobile apps available for iOS and Android.
The main disadvantage is that each action beyond the basic options requires modification of the code or even the purchase of an additional module.
Analysis of the competitive environment
SimilarWeb
Helps to understand where users come to the site from and compare with competitors’ traffic sources. Shows which pages attract users the most and which ones they leave immediately.
Based on the audit results, you can change the site and adjust the online strategy taking into account market trends, adopt successful practices or, conversely, occupy the niche that is currently free.
The downside is the price, which ranges from 7,300 to 30 thousand rubles per month, depending on the volume and tasks. That’s why few people use the service after the free 14-day trial period.
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How to use web analytics systems
Before implementing a system, web analysts define three main parameters: goals, scale, and budget. If the budget and scale are small, for example, an online store with 1,000 clients per month, basic tools within Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics are sufficient. They also set up the goals they plan to track:
1.● number of views;
2.● visiting certain pages;
3.● conversion from visitors to customers.
A counter is installed on the site. It records visitors and their IP addresses, so the company understands where they come from.
To track the entire customer journey from clicking on an ad to purchasing, call tracking, traffic analysis, and BI services are additionally used. They first track all customer touches on the product: ads, articles, search queries, direct visits to the site. Then they build the required dashboard version in BI.
To set up web analytics correctly, it is important to find out what data and in what volume is needed. For some, it is enough to know what visitors do on the site and at what stage they leave for competitors. Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics will cope with this task.
When you need end-to-end analytics to see all the customer’s steps in detail from the moment the banner is placed on the site until the order is paid, you need to connect additional services that will help collect all the data, for example, Calltracking or Power BI.
There is no ready-made solution for all tasks, so you have to integrate corporate CRM, web analytics systems and services. Individual functions need to be configured for business purposes. This is done by web analysts and developers on the staff or specialists on the contractor’s side.
In both cases, you will need to write a detailed technical specification to get a ready-made solution:
1.● what goals need to be set, for example, to increase conversion or the number of visitors to the site;
2.● what indicators to track – this could be traffic from certain sites;
3.● what services to connect, is basic analytics enough or are other systems needed for call tracking and BI;
5.● what systems and tools need to be linked to each other, for example Yandex Analytics and corporate CRM;
6.● what should be included in reports and dashboards: revenue, clicks, conversion or purchase indicators.
Business leaders want one thing from web analytics: a completely transparent picture that immediately shows how to increase profits. In reality, everything is much more complicated technically, but some processes can be automated to speed up the work of a web analyst. For example, with the help of a CRM system that collects data about clients at every stage. With its help, it is easy to track every call and transaction and link them into a single whole within the sales funnel.
Automation will take from 6 to 12 months, but it will simplify work with product and web analytics for years. To save time and money, it is better to hire a program implementation project manager. He will competently draw up the technical specifications and ensure that the budget and deadlines are met.
