Let's run a thought experiment. Your task is to create "brand awareness" about a brand of upscale lingerie and alas (like always), your advertising budget is limited. You have just enough funds to place one small bill board in Time Square, NYC. Or a hundred of them in front of a few retirement communities. Or a thousand in random truck stops. What would you choose?

I have some guesses, but I am 66% sure that your guess is different from mine. So, who is right? Now let's make the experiment a little more concrete.  What if you wanted to actually sell the lingerie over an e-commerce site? Your place sponsored banner ad in New York Times Online for 5 weeks, a hundred of them in local newspapers for one year, or buy ad's for 10 years in "Truck Stop Gazette"? It's a tough problem, with a shockingly simple answer: Website Analytics. Website Analytics is the art and science of forming a hypothesis, having expectations for the results and reconciling the actual results with expectations. A shocking number of people choose their best guess and go with their hunch.

The experiment that I alluded to above, is a small subset of website analytics. This is basically an exercise in measuring which referring site is getting you your highest spending customers. Website Analytics gives you a lot more. Are your most likely customers going to be from US, Brazil or Ghana ? Depends if you are selling NASCAR tickets or Immigration Services. Too easy, you say? How about which search engine? And which search term from which search engine gives you actual customers as opposed to visitors?

Getting the visitors to  your site is only 10% of the game. Your task really is to make them perform an action that is the reason of existence of your site. It could be signing up for a newsletter, providing feedback or convincing them to make a purchase. The visitor who performs this action "converts" into a customer. The name of the game is maximizing the "conversion" rate. Most website owners wrongly assume that there isn't much they can do to increase the "conversion" rate, so they focus on maximizing the "hits" to their site. The resulting visitors are usually gawkers instead of customers.

There is a saying, that all visitors to a website have an itch that needs to be scratched. If we can identify that itch, and determine that we have the ability to scratch it for them.we can have a valuable customer who can be a repeat buyer. In order to do this, we need to where they came from(country, referring site, search engine), who they are(Mac User with 1536x960 resolution), why they came(keywords), what they did(path taken, converted(?)). We now have used web analytics to profile a visitor who is most likely to convert.

This "profile" is what we call "actionable intelligence" and as analytics go, it's pure Gold. It's actionable web analytics because you have segmented your visitors and can focus your energies on attracting the profitable ones. New York times or "Truck Stop  Gazette", we don't know. But our website analytics will tell us the answer. We will also know if our PPC visitors are more likely to convert, or the Organic search people are likely. We have seen different results for different industries. Sometimes organic people are more likely to convert but it takes more than a few visits before they convert. The PPC visitors usually convert the first time, even though overall conversion ratio is lower.

We stress that its vital for every business to analyze in detail the behavior of the converting visitors. This includes keeping track of multiple visits of same visitor. In other words, the web analysis solution that you employ must have the capability to inform you that the visitor who bought, first came to your site using PPC, but bought after researching your product a few times.

Another good one is "page analysis". What landing pages are the visitors most likely to enter(the "landing" page). How about the converting ones? Analyze which pages are they most likely to exit on? If a "landing" page is same as exit page for a disproportionate number of visitors, that page itself may have a problem. If the page right before they buy is the one they are most likely to exit on, it could be that your prices are too high. Or it could be that you have a broken link. The website analytics should raise alarms for you in your quest to maximize conversion. Or the results of your analysis allow you to congratulate yourself for executing your web strategy. Like a Maestro.

We will ask you to all but abandon "hit counting"--nothing actionable in those metrics. A well thought out web analytics plan is like having Michael Jordan playing on your team(as opposed to Woody Allen playing on the "free log analyzer counting hits" team).

We have just scratched the surface here. For a bigger campaign, you want to advertise your wares through (opt in) email marketing. Or not. A test campaign, along with web analytics tracking email delivery, open rates, click rates etc. will give you the right answers. Minus the guess work. The test may be a "split" test, with different headers for each campaign(to see whether "half off" gives better results than "two for one").

We at Sofizar are here to help and provide you with a risk free solution to jump start your campaign with our web analytics solution. Our web analytics solution is based on Zaralyzer and most of our packages include customized web analytics consulting.

Suppose own the world's best bill board designed. How many visitors you expect that will have a look at it if it's placed right in middle of Sahara Desert ? Similarly, you may have an incredible website but what's its worth if it has no visitors? Ok, now you properly optimize it for search engines and / or run a pay per click campaign for your website. Now you start getting visitors. So now your incredible website is getting traffic and you think it's the solution to all your problems, right huh? Wrong.

Getting visitors to website is one thing and making them perform your desired action is a difficult but most required task for your online business. Your desired action can be like the user signing up for a newsletter, providing feed back on some thing or (most probably) making a purchase. The visitor who performs your desired action is termed to be a converted visitor. So you may have lots of traffic but your visitors are just not behaving the way you want them to. They visit your site and leave without providing any value to your business. But there is not much you can do as the website owner if the people are visiting but leaving without performing the desired action, right? Wrong.

Every visitor who visits the site has a reason to come to the site. If you can provide them a reason to come to your website, then the result is a valuable life time visitor who can be converted. But how can you analyze the needs of a website visitor?

Here is where the need arises to monitor the user needs and his behavior i.e. the need for a web analytics solution.

If you want your online business to succeed, it is vital to understand exactly how your website works and where the weak points are situated . A web Analytics solution can help you in developing strategies to acquire new visitors, retention of existing visitors ,visit path analysis, visitor behavioral analysis, search terms / search engines driving you traffic , pages that are visited most , main exit pages etc and with the help of these activities and do what is most important - maximize your profit!

With a Web Analytics solution:

.  You can monitor that from where your traffic is coming from, the IP Addresses of your visitors their actions in sequence with time stamp.

.  Understand how many unique users visit your site and how many sessions they make

.  You can view the path which your visitor followed while browsing. This includes the time spent on each path as well along with the sequence of browsing.

.  Usage data by Hits, Kilobytes and user session

.  View what were the top entry pages, top exist pages and how many files they downloaded ( most popular pages , most popular files etc)

.  See Which sites are giving you referral traffic

.  Which Search Engines are getting you traffic, Which Search Terms You are getting visitors on etc.

.  Improve Your ROI by doing behavioral Analysis of Your Visitors.

.  Distinguishing frequently visited pages is critical to understanding how to drive more traffic to the join page or shopping cart.

.  Demographics of your visitors, that from which geographic locations where your visitors are coming in.

.  Which referrals and affiliates are driving traffic to your website

After a complete analysis of the user behavior has been done, decisions are be made for the strategy. Once you have done an in-depth web log analysis, you can make any changes your website might need in order to ensure that you don't lose visitors who could be interested in your product / information. So if you ever wondered that how to analyze user behavior, know on which search terms they come , which pages they visit most , which pages are of least interest to them and how to maximize your ROI , get your hands on a Complete Web Analysis Solution. Make sure that your web analytics package helps you in doing a behavioural analysis of your website visitors , as with that information you can make the required changes to your website that your web site visitors have always been looking for.

Contact Us and put us to the test.  We are confident we can earn your business