Web Analytics: Measuring A Marketing Campaign
Technology allows businesses to harness the Internet to market their products and services to a very large audience all over the world. Whether it’s in the form of online ad banners, market surveys, or even sales pitch articles in blogs and social media platforms, the Internet is a great place to broadcast a business. But in order to evaluate and analyse the effectiveness of a marketing strategy or campaign, businesses use web analytics.
Wikipedia defines it as the “measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” This kind of analysis is ideal for a business that has its own website. Using web analytics, a business can determine how the site and its content is performing in terms of web traffic and popularity. Web analytics can also be used as a tool for market research, and they also serve as applications in measuring the results of offline campaigns such as print ads.
Web analytics come in two main categories: off-site and on-site analytics. Off-site analytics gauges the insights of marketing campaigns, whether the business has its own website or not. Off-site analytics measure the performance of non-website campaigns such as sales pitch articles and product review articles for affiliate websites. Performance is tracked based on web article views, number of comments or shares, and audience reach. Under the analytics in social media content, a business’s insight page lists down the positive (and negative) responses from followers or viewers. These responses refer to posts, pictures, and links — whether the response is a photo view, a link click, or even a “like,” a “share,” or a “comment.”
On the other hand, on-site analytics measure the performance of all the content within a business’ website. Website-creating programs have a special tab where a business or user can view statistics of a website’s performance per webpage or as a whole. Such statistics come in line graphs that track viewership among all Internet users on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This kind of analytics also measure the number of unique visitors, which are the number of visitors who check out the site regardless of the number of times those visitors check out anything from the website. A visitor who views five pages of the site counts as one unique visitor. This kind of analytics can determine the demographics of the visitors based on age group, gender, and geographical location.
It is very important for a business to use web analytics in market research, as it determines how many people visit the site and the kind of people viewing the content. They are also helpful in pinpointing the areas where a business needs to improve, such as a low viewership in a product page or an important FAQ article. It is the job of the business or the user to create plans in improving viewership and increasing web attendance. Web analytics may be complicated to comprehend and understand at first glance, but they can certainly gauge the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns.