The New Face of Web Analytics - Content/Landscape Analysis
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A very powerful tool that many vendors provide is a visual mapping or overlay for your site, that clearly identifies hot zones on each page –- indicators that visually display which links were clicked on, and how many times. This is a very powerful way to understand which pieces of content, which action words, and which sections of landscape are attracting peoples’ eyes, and generating clicks. This enables you to know where to strategically place campaign related links, so that they’ll receive the most click-throughs. It will also identify underperforming links, so that they may be moved or removed, leaving more attention for performing links.
PPC Tracking Most of the top solutions are incorporating pay-per-click campaign tracking suites into their applications. In a situation where you’re bidding on keywords from multiple search providers, these suites would allow you to consolidate the information from all campaigns, permitting you to monitor the performance of your keywords, and make suggestions as to which keywords to juggle to generate the best returns.
Exit Pages It’s one thing to know which pages are the so-call "drop-off" pages, but it’s entirely separate and infinitely more insightful to know exactly where they’re going to. The more advanced solutions are able to monitor users’ clicks, and identify which of those clicks are on links pointing to pages external to your site or domain. If you can identify common exit pages, you can have these open in new windows, or devise another means of allowing users to retrieve that external information while still remaining on your site.
Reporting This is of course where the power of hosted Web analytics shines through. No longer must we manually compile the needed reports from data that’s actually a week old. Not only are the reports real-time and instantaneous, but most solutions provide canned reports common to B2C or B2B websites. With common functionality ranging from regularly emailed reports to Excel integration, it’s extremely easy to have relevant reports delivered to decision makers at all levels.
Conclusion Advanced Web analytics solutions are going to be the "next big thing" as far as the Web is concerned. There are already many courses available for training people on how to make effective use of such solutions. Marketers are being held more accountable to deliver tangible numbers as results of their marketing spend, and the Web is no exception. So be prepared!
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