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Effective web analysts need to be able to perform business Analysis.
You may think that knowing how to create reports, update websites, improve ads and use web statistics analysis tools is enough, but in reality a web analytics consultant needs to be a business person first, an analyst second and a skilled technician third.
The ability to communicate with clients in senior management positions as well as those in marketing, services, sales and IT departments is imperative. Web analytics consultants must be able to look at the data from the client’s point of view, and use that perspective to create clear, concise reports and marketing strategies that, when put into practice, create positive, profitable results.
Web analytics consultants must be able to work with their clients to develop ways to enhance efficiency, effectiveness and profits. You will need to collaborate with people in various departments, conduct user tests and analyze user feedback.
In order to work effectually with your clients, you will need to be very familiar with the way that their business functions. To do this, you will need to perform an in-depth business analysis.
Find out what business model the company uses, what condition the business model is in, how strong their competitors are, if the demand for the product or service the company provides is in high or low demand, and what type of users purchase said products or services.
Not only will the information you collect allow you to work with people in different departments, it will help you understand their target customers and the way that the two interact with each other. Use the results of your analysis to create hypotheses and marketing strategies that will allow your clients to achieve their goals and increase their profits.
When you begin a new project, choose a suitable business model to use as a base for the work you are doing. As there are a number of different models for you to choose from, we recommend doing a bit of research on the most popular models and choosing the one most suited to your situation.
Using a marketing business model will help you keep all of your work organized. Associate Web Analytics Consultants are taught about some of the more popular business models available. These include the 3C by Kenichi Ohmae, 4P i.e. The Marketing Mix, and the 5F (Forces) by Michael E. Porter. Dr. Porter is a well-respected author, an economics and business scholar, and a professor at Harvard Business School. Other popular business models include PEST, which organizes macroscopic environmental factors, and PPM (Product Portfolio Management), used to properly evaluate products and determine how various resources should be allocated. Associates generally focus more on learning how to utilize their business models as forms of communication, customer journey maps and concept diagrams.
Senior Web Analytics Consultants will use and learn about the same business models, but instead of focusing on communication, they focus on how to use them to improve various business scenarios. Seniors will also be introduced to the 9-sell method and marketing business models like AISAS. They will lean more towards refining persona than communication.
Personas, or user personas, are fictional characters that marketers create to represent different user types. Personas are generally developed by combining data collected from data and interviews with real users. They are used to help marketers determine how hypothesized marketing strategies will be received by their target users.
In many cases, clients seem to ask what is web analytics? are not familiar with the web. They know about their business, but not the web, so they want you to help. In this case, never forget that “a project cannot succeed without cooperation from the client” and “you need perfect communication with the client without any misunderstandings.”
For instance, if the client can understand the meaning of your advice “I recommend that you conduct an in-depth interview to check the customer element in the 3C analysis again to see if it matches your understanding,” communication will become smoother. Or, it would be nice if you can say, “I did not find any problem with your product and its price but it seems that the customers are not well informed and the place in 4P may be the problem. I think the product should be exposed more via the search engine.”
While some of your clients may not be familiar with the specific business model you choose to use, they will be able to better understand the concept you are presenting due to the recognizable format.
More on the model can be found here here.
This model is mainly concerned with figuring out how various forms of media interact with people. Using this model helps you figure out answers to the questions: Who is your customer, what does the customer value, and can you deliver value at an appropriate cost?
Communication design is a mixed discipline between design and information-development. If you choose to use the communication design model you will need to be familiar with ways of combining communication with both technology and visual communication. It is particularly helpful when designing web pages.
Use data on your target audience’s personal relations and methods of communication
You will want this number to increase exponentially over time. You can make a graph showing the increase of touch points that will be shown to the client to confirm that your design is working as expected.
Your goal is to help your client company turn a profit both online and offline. Communication design illuminates the points of contact between the users and the products or services. Knowing these touch points can help you figure out ways to turn users into paying customers.
You might choose to create a focus group that will help you observe user activity, you might also want to conduct group interviews or surveys, you might also choose to assign a specific landing page, email address or phone number to the ads you create in order to track user activity in real-time.
Let’s look at an example of a Wedding Planner that chose to put specific phone numbers and a specific landing page link on their flyers at train stations and on trains.
Wedding planners often receive an overwhelming number of new applications during January, May and August. These three months hold long holidays that can also be used to facilitate travel for both the couple and their guests and by couples returning to their home towns tell their families the good news.
They want to know where people are calling from so that they can increase their ads in the off-months.
Why did they choose these locations? Because weddings and travel are often linked together.
There are also a number of people who use their time waiting for their train to make phone calls. They might see an ad and call their significant other with the information or even call the company directly.
Using the data gathered, the company can choose the most effective locations to display their advertisements.
Even though business analysis often requires support data in order to conduct an accurate analysis, using web marketing analysis tools will allow you to gather a lot of data in a short amount of time.
Other tools you should learn how to use include: Micro Analysis Tools and Competitor Analysis Tools.
Primary analysis indicators in macro analysis include: the number of sessions, page views, exit rate and abandonment rate. Although this information is very important and can be used by a webmaster to improve a website, for the staff in other departments, this type of data may not be very useful.
Micro analysis needs to be done with the support of people throughout the client company. Everyone needs to be at least somewhat aware of the impacts that they are faced with in regards to the way their business operates. Promoting interest in web marketing within each department will help build an atmosphere that will, in turn, help the entire company become more successful.
Since the access log includes IP addresses, an analyst is able to examine the names of the organizations visiting the client website as well as the pages and user browsing methods from each respective organization.
If you were to conduct micro analysis of every organization using the names of said organizations, you would be able to use the information you gather at your next business meeting.
For example,
“Last month Company A looked at Product B’s webpage and bought a month’s supply. However, they also looked at the page introducing Product C, an upgrade to Product B. As we are going to be promoting Product C in lieu of Product B in the future, we should tell them more about Product C during our next round of negotiations with Company A.”
Or:
“I exchanged a number of business cards during our latest exhibition. Somebody from Company D used the link from the card to visit our webpage, so we should prioritize interactions with them.”
Or:
“Company F is visiting our website more often than usual. They also seem to be spending a longer time on our product webpages recently. There also seems to be a higher number of unique users visiting from Company F. This may be because they are discussing our business during company meetings. It may be productive to send Manager A to their company with a proposal.”
Or:
“Since there have been a lot of accesses from the food industry, we should try to strengthen the attraction of new customers by setting up a special page geared towards the food industry.”
Or:
“Recently, we have been unexpectedly receiving a lot of accesses from the electrical industry. It is possible that there was a hidden potential need in this industry. We should try to have our product development department cooperate with them in order to develop a product geared towards this industry.”
With just the data from micro analysis, you cannot determine the specific user that you are following. If you combine your micro analysis results with data from the conversion page, (it collects name, date and time records), you can identify users from their submitted inquiries. If you can find out specific user activity, you can anticipate their needs and desires and then present products that will fit their needs during negotiations. Your presentation will go much smoother if you know exactly what your client or prospective customer wants.
It is also nice to be able to confirm that the customer actually visited your website after the first stage of negotiations are completed. If they visit the site that focuses on the product or service you presented, you will know that they are interested and will most likely follow through and purchase said product or service. If so, you will be able to use this as a basis for creating a quote or a proposal geared towards acquiring a new contract.
Anticipating customer needs is the best way to successfully complete a negotiation.
Analyze browsing routes then hypothesize points for improvement
Analyze the pages viewed, the length of each session and their viewing environment. Then consider ways to guide the user to completing a conversion based on the products or services they are interested in.
One of the typical qualitative research methods other than micro analysis is a user test. User tests are time intensive and can be expensive. Look at other options like PopInsight, Inc.’s remote-user test.Data from a user test can be used in conjunction with a micro analysis to help you focus on both psychological and emotional factors involved in the purchase of the product or service you are trying to sell.
For example, you own a business that sells coffee shop downtown. There are many other businesses in your industry that you must compete with. You will want to compare your website traffic analysis to larger corporate websites like Starbucks as they will appear before yours on a search engine results page. You’ll also need to compare your website to websites from smaller café’s that are located in the same area as you.
Investigate the quantity of contents published. How many times have they posted to a social media site? Have they posted case studies? How frequently do they post or add new content? What kind of topics do they discuss? Are there any holes in their content that you can capitalize on? If you can determine topics that you can add to your content, you might be able to overtake them on the search engine results page.
Evaluate their content quality. How accurate is the content they are posting? Are there spelling and grammatical errors? Do they structure their content in a user-friendly manner? Do users share or interact with posts?
Also examine how well their website is optimized. You can perform SEO on a competitor website to see what they are doing right and wrong. Use the knowledge to improve your own website.
Google Trends and Keyword Planner will be able to tell you the number of searches, trends, and seasonal variations on search phrases. Please note that the results you will receive from Google Trends come in relative numerical values, and that the numerical values from the Keyword Planner are estimates.
Web analytics social media tools allow you to analyze trends in comments on blogs and social media websites. Remember that comments are personal opinions and should always be analyzed with a grain of salt.
There are also a variety of survey tools that are useful. They can show you the numerical values of searches and Likes on Facebook and what types of articles those users are viewing. They can show you popular and trending search words and phrases on Twitter, see how users are transmitting the words and the context in which they are being utilized. You can also analyze descriptions on websites by looking at proper nouns.
Please take advantage of the many resources available to you when performing web marketing Analysis and business Analysis.
You may think that knowing how to create reports, update websites, improve ads and use web statistics analysis tools is enough, but in reality a web analytics consultant needs to be a business person first, an analyst second and a skilled technician third.
The ability to communicate with clients in senior management positions as well as those in marketing, services, sales and IT departments is imperative. Web analytics consultants must be able to look at the data from the client’s point of view, and use that perspective to create clear, concise reports and marketing strategies that, when put into practice, create positive, profitable results.
Web Statistics Analysis Starts with Business Analysis
Web analytics consultants must be able to work with their clients to develop ways to enhance efficiency, effectiveness and profits. You will need to collaborate with people in various departments, conduct user tests and analyze user feedback.
In order to work effectually with your clients, you will need to be very familiar with the way that their business functions. To do this, you will need to perform an in-depth business analysis.
Find out what business model the company uses, what condition the business model is in, how strong their competitors are, if the demand for the product or service the company provides is in high or low demand, and what type of users purchase said products or services.
Not only will the information you collect allow you to work with people in different departments, it will help you understand their target customers and the way that the two interact with each other. Use the results of your analysis to create hypotheses and marketing strategies that will allow your clients to achieve their goals and increase their profits.
Methods for Understanding a Business Environment
In general marketing, business analysis is roughly classified into management environment Analysis and financial Analysis. Web marketing is mostly comprised of different forms of management environment Analysis.The Purpose is Not Web Statistics Analysis but Actions
Being able to create a marketing strategy that will successfully complete a PDCA cycle before starting the cycle over again is a skill that you, as a web analytics dashboard consultant, will need to cultivate. Any analysis you perform is just a single stepping stone on your pathway to success.Business Models
Business models are useful market analysis tools. A business model is an “outline of an idea” created by management scholars and consultants to analyze various aspects of business. There are various types of business models used for many purposes, including marketing and strategy planning.When you begin a new project, choose a suitable business model to use as a base for the work you are doing. As there are a number of different models for you to choose from, we recommend doing a bit of research on the most popular models and choosing the one most suited to your situation.
Using a marketing business model will help you keep all of your work organized. Associate Web Analytics Consultants are taught about some of the more popular business models available. These include the 3C by Kenichi Ohmae, 4P i.e. The Marketing Mix, and the 5F (Forces) by Michael E. Porter. Dr. Porter is a well-respected author, an economics and business scholar, and a professor at Harvard Business School. Other popular business models include PEST, which organizes macroscopic environmental factors, and PPM (Product Portfolio Management), used to properly evaluate products and determine how various resources should be allocated. Associates generally focus more on learning how to utilize their business models as forms of communication, customer journey maps and concept diagrams.
Senior Web Analytics Consultants will use and learn about the same business models, but instead of focusing on communication, they focus on how to use them to improve various business scenarios. Seniors will also be introduced to the 9-sell method and marketing business models like AISAS. They will lean more towards refining persona than communication.
Personas, or user personas, are fictional characters that marketers create to represent different user types. Personas are generally developed by combining data collected from data and interviews with real users. They are used to help marketers determine how hypothesized marketing strategies will be received by their target users.
A business model can be considered a “common language”
There is another advantage to using a business model as a web analytics consultant: You can create a common language with the client. The business model you will create will facilitate communication between you both, especially if the client is well acquainted with the business model.In many cases, clients seem to ask what is web analytics? are not familiar with the web. They know about their business, but not the web, so they want you to help. In this case, never forget that “a project cannot succeed without cooperation from the client” and “you need perfect communication with the client without any misunderstandings.”
For instance, if the client can understand the meaning of your advice “I recommend that you conduct an in-depth interview to check the customer element in the 3C analysis again to see if it matches your understanding,” communication will become smoother. Or, it would be nice if you can say, “I did not find any problem with your product and its price but it seems that the customers are not well informed and the place in 4P may be the problem. I think the product should be exposed more via the search engine.”
While some of your clients may not be familiar with the specific business model you choose to use, they will be able to better understand the concept you are presenting due to the recognizable format.
More on the model can be found here here.
Business Models can be used to Understand Customers
Communication Design is a business model used to understand customers.This model is mainly concerned with figuring out how various forms of media interact with people. Using this model helps you figure out answers to the questions: Who is your customer, what does the customer value, and can you deliver value at an appropriate cost?
Communication design is a mixed discipline between design and information-development. If you choose to use the communication design model you will need to be familiar with ways of combining communication with both technology and visual communication. It is particularly helpful when designing web pages.
Developing Communication Design Schematics
Creating a communication design:
Target User Definition
First, you have to clearly define prospective customers by using broad characteristics. You do not want to use this method for specific targets.Figure out which forms of media your broadly defined targets use frequently
Analyze your target audience and figure out the online and offline media that they connect with. Use the data to help define target personalities and form a concrete plan of action.Use data on your target audience’s personal relations and methods of communication
Look at the webs that form when one person communicates with other people they know.
The groups of people they interact with include family, lovers, friends, classmates, coworkers, friends-of-friends etc. Ask yourself: Do those people know each other? How do they interact? Do they talk over the phone? The internet? Do they use Facebook? LinkedIn? Mixi? Do they text or prefer to get together for tea or coffee or do they only interact at work functions? Use all of the data you can gather to create a design that will reach your target group on as many different forms of media as possible.Increase target-user touch points
This type of communication design schematic aims to present to the client a comprehensive view of the target user’s points of contact with information sources. The term touch point refers to the time and place that the target user made contact with the media or information you created.You will want this number to increase exponentially over time. You can make a graph showing the increase of touch points that will be shown to the client to confirm that your design is working as expected.
Using Communication Design to Bring about Positive Results
Make sure that you do not narrow your perspective in order to bring about positive results. Consultants often put too much focus on web conversion, but there are times when answers cannot be found only using access analysis. This is because access analysis data is considered limited data.Your goal is to help your client company turn a profit both online and offline. Communication design illuminates the points of contact between the users and the products or services. Knowing these touch points can help you figure out ways to turn users into paying customers.
You might choose to create a focus group that will help you observe user activity, you might also want to conduct group interviews or surveys, you might also choose to assign a specific landing page, email address or phone number to the ads you create in order to track user activity in real-time.
Let’s look at an example of a Wedding Planner that chose to put specific phone numbers and a specific landing page link on their flyers at train stations and on trains.
Wedding planners often receive an overwhelming number of new applications during January, May and August. These three months hold long holidays that can also be used to facilitate travel for both the couple and their guests and by couples returning to their home towns tell their families the good news.
They want to know where people are calling from so that they can increase their ads in the off-months.
Why did they choose these locations? Because weddings and travel are often linked together.
There are also a number of people who use their time waiting for their train to make phone calls. They might see an ad and call their significant other with the information or even call the company directly.
Using the data gathered, the company can choose the most effective locations to display their advertisements.
Using Web Analytics Tools in Industry Analysis
There are a number of tools that you, as a web analyst, can use to acquire the data you need when performing a business analysis. For example, Google Trend is a tool that can see the changes in popular search keywords in every region.Even though business analysis often requires support data in order to conduct an accurate analysis, using web marketing analysis tools will allow you to gather a lot of data in a short amount of time.
Other tools you should learn how to use include: Micro Analysis Tools and Competitor Analysis Tools.
Macro & Micro Analysis Tools
Access analysis is process in which log data is collected from website over a chosen period of time.Macro & Micro Analysis
Generally, a macro analysis is used to understand site traffic analytics and user trends. It usually focuses on demographic (quantitative) data. Micro analysis is a type of access analysis that focuses on individual users or organizations. It generally aims to understand the browsing route of a specific user on the website and other psychographic (qualitative) data.
Primary analysis indicators in macro analysis include: the number of sessions, page views, exit rate and abandonment rate. Although this information is very important and can be used by a webmaster to improve a website, for the staff in other departments, this type of data may not be very useful.
Micro analysis needs to be done with the support of people throughout the client company. Everyone needs to be at least somewhat aware of the impacts that they are faced with in regards to the way their business operates. Promoting interest in web marketing within each department will help build an atmosphere that will, in turn, help the entire company become more successful.
How to Introduce Micro Analysis
As of August 2015, Google Analytics, a free analytics tool, does not perform micro analysis. Therefore, you will need to choose a different tool that does include this function. Some web analytics tools that have an excellent micro analysis function are Visionalist, Rakulog Analytics and User Insight.A Micro Analysis Example
Building a business strategy from organization name analysis (industry analysis)Since the access log includes IP addresses, an analyst is able to examine the names of the organizations visiting the client website as well as the pages and user browsing methods from each respective organization.
If you were to conduct micro analysis of every organization using the names of said organizations, you would be able to use the information you gather at your next business meeting.
For example,
“Last month Company A looked at Product B’s webpage and bought a month’s supply. However, they also looked at the page introducing Product C, an upgrade to Product B. As we are going to be promoting Product C in lieu of Product B in the future, we should tell them more about Product C during our next round of negotiations with Company A.”
Or:
“I exchanged a number of business cards during our latest exhibition. Somebody from Company D used the link from the card to visit our webpage, so we should prioritize interactions with them.”
Or:
“Company F is visiting our website more often than usual. They also seem to be spending a longer time on our product webpages recently. There also seems to be a higher number of unique users visiting from Company F. This may be because they are discussing our business during company meetings. It may be productive to send Manager A to their company with a proposal.”
Or:
“Since there have been a lot of accesses from the food industry, we should try to strengthen the attraction of new customers by setting up a special page geared towards the food industry.”
Or:
“Recently, we have been unexpectedly receiving a lot of accesses from the electrical industry. It is possible that there was a hidden potential need in this industry. We should try to have our product development department cooperate with them in order to develop a product geared towards this industry.”
Route analysis of customers with inquiries will increase your ability to negotiate effectively
Micro analysis will yield more positive results in businesses that handle products with long decision making processes. For this reason, your ability to effectively negotiate can increase exponentially if you have the right micro analysis data.With just the data from micro analysis, you cannot determine the specific user that you are following. If you combine your micro analysis results with data from the conversion page, (it collects name, date and time records), you can identify users from their submitted inquiries. If you can find out specific user activity, you can anticipate their needs and desires and then present products that will fit their needs during negotiations. Your presentation will go much smoother if you know exactly what your client or prospective customer wants.
It is also nice to be able to confirm that the customer actually visited your website after the first stage of negotiations are completed. If they visit the site that focuses on the product or service you presented, you will know that they are interested and will most likely follow through and purchase said product or service. If so, you will be able to use this as a basis for creating a quote or a proposal geared towards acquiring a new contract.
Anticipating customer needs is the best way to successfully complete a negotiation.
Improving the Quality of Emails, Magazines and Advertisements
Micro analysis and advertising analysis can be combined to measure exit rates, conversion rates and average conversion prices from users visiting a website from referring emails, magazines and ads. The combination of data allows you to follow the user’s browsing history to figure out where they saw your ads and therefore optimize your digital advertising process.
The Implementation of Micro Analysis
A micro analysis is conducted by using the following procedure:Design sampling conditions
Choose specific users to be analyzed. Set conditions like “Users who converted” or “Users that work for an electronics manufacturer and have visited the same page.” Select which user will be analyzed from the various users available.Select target micro analysis users
Based on the sampling conditions, list your micro analysis targets. Look at trends within user browsing paths and then select the users you want to analyze.Analyze browsing routes then hypothesize points for improvement
Analyze the pages viewed, the length of each session and their viewing environment. Then consider ways to guide the user to completing a conversion based on the products or services they are interested in.
Create and implement improvement strategies
Use micro analysis to determine what products and services are popular or need improvement. Work directly with the departments in charge of said items in order to increase overall profits.Verify that your strategies are successful
After executing your strategies, verify their effects. As the results will influence the website as a whole, you should verify the effect in combination with the micro analysis.Users and Micro Analysis
Analyze the psychological transformation of users by combining a user test and micro analysisOne of the typical qualitative research methods other than micro analysis is a user test. User tests are time intensive and can be expensive. Look at other options like PopInsight, Inc.’s remote-user test.Data from a user test can be used in conjunction with a micro analysis to help you focus on both psychological and emotional factors involved in the purchase of the product or service you are trying to sell.
Identifying users
Micro analyzing tools that can identify users based on their IP address include List Finder, Mail Sonar, and SATORI. This data can be used to help improve user-friendliness and optimize the user experience.A Data Management Platform (DMP) can also be used in conjunction with micro Analysis to improve marketing automation.
Important Points to Remember When Implementing a Micro Analysis
Comply with laws, regulations, and your client company’s privacy and security policies
When you use a tool for access analysis and micro analysis, you will be obtaining private user information. Before you begin, be sure to confirm that the tool you have chosen will follow the laws of the country you are working in to the letter and comply with your client company’s privacy and security policies.
You may run into discrepancies between the data you obtain and reality
Many micro-analysis tools use third-party cookies to distinguish users. This cookie data can cause discrepancies in your data. For example, if a user visits your website on their smartphone and their PC, the cookie information will be logged twice instead of once. If they set their browser to disregard third-party cookies, the log data will record different users each time they visit.Furthermore, you can only get the name of the accessing organization if said organization has a fixed IP address. If a company without a fixed IP address accesses your website, you can only find out the name of the provider displayed instead of the organization name.Make sure to note these discrepancies in your analysis report.
Internet Audience Measurement Methodologies
Please note that access analysis only shows your client’s data. It does not take their competitors’ data into consideration. This can be detrimental to your marketing strategy as having access to competitors’ data facilitates the analysis of your client’s website.One of the ways to get competitors’ data is an Internet audience rating survey.Internet audience rating surveys differ from TV surveys in that they make various cross analyzes possible. With the data gathered from these surveys you can get a glimpse into trends the current market is experiencing and as well as data on unique users and unique visitors.
Other data you can gather includes:
- Monthly Internet population, use frequency, session duration, PV, etc.
- Unique users, total PV, PV per user
- Average session duration and average sessions
- Item trends
- Pages viewed, inflow, outflow, duplicated visits and demographic comparisons between items
There are several methods you can use to gather and portray data. They include the panel method, the unified digital measuring method, indexes and bubble charts.
The Panel Method
An Internet audience rating survey is conducted as a sample survey, not a complete survey. It tracks Internet user’s habits by developing and recruiting a diverse panel of participants that are representative of the population of online users and then installing software on the panelists’ computers that tracks their online presence. Participants can provide demographic data and help eliminate duplicative traffic (hits from both work and home). This method is your best bet for gathering data from large sites with vast audiences.
There are some downsides to this method that you need to be aware of. Firstly, the panel method tracks accesses from computers only; it does not track hits from mobile devices. You might also need to filter out any at-work activities if your participant uses their computer for both work and recreation. It is also important to note that the size and diversity of your pool of participants is imperative for accurate numbers.
comScore’s software Media Metrix offers global coverage, reporting on more than 250,000 entities worldwide with audience measurement in 44 countries and 6 regions as of 2015.
The biggest advantage of the unified digital measurement method is that you can understand and make decisions based on how consumers use different devices, such as TVs, mobile phones and computers, as well as the communication environment information from Wi-Fi hot-spots.
Index = (ratio of each item [share]) ÷ ratio in overall market [share]) x 100
For example, a survey on the demographics of a web service showed that the ratio of teens was 10% while the ratio of people in their forties was 15%. It seems that this service is attractive to middle-aged people. However, if the age distribution of the Internet users over the entire society is 5% for teens and 20% for people in their forties, the index for teens is 200 while the index for people in their forties is 75. This shows that this service actually is attractive to young people. Using an index, you can objectively judge website data as compared with trends in the market.
For example, by indicating the unique users tracked this month and last month with different size bubbles, taking the visit count on the vertical axis, and taking the session duration on the horizontal axis, a bubble chart can represent the number of visitors, visit count, and session durations for the website of each company with a single graph. You can use various elements on the vertical and horizontal axes such as PV or average number of use days.
If your findings show that the visitor count is high but the PV is low or the session duration is short, you’ll be able to fix problems as they come up. These charts can help you discover glitches in the company’s website including unattractive content, difficult usability and even pages that take too long to load.
The Unified Digital Measurement Method
The online audience measurement service provided by comScore across AsiaPac uses the hybrid method, aka the unified digital measurement method, to gather information. They offer data which has migrated (i.e., transferred and converted) access logs obtained from access analysis tags embedded by portal or e-commerce website operators in addition to data obtained by the conventional panel method.comScore’s software Media Metrix offers global coverage, reporting on more than 250,000 entities worldwide with audience measurement in 44 countries and 6 regions as of 2015.
The biggest advantage of the unified digital measurement method is that you can understand and make decisions based on how consumers use different devices, such as TVs, mobile phones and computers, as well as the communication environment information from Wi-Fi hot-spots.
Notes on Internet audience rating measurement methodologies
In general, the number of unique users is different from the value obtained by an access analysis tool used by the client. This is because the Internet audience rating is an estimated value. Each Internet audience rating survey service naturally uses average values excluding abnormal values, resulting in differences of four to five times of the value obtained by the company’s analysis.Indexes
It is helpful to use an index as the standard to judge if the value indicated in the Internet audience rating survey is high or low. Indexing is a method used to compare “a value obtained from a survey” with “a value obtained from the overall market.”Index = (ratio of each item [share]) ÷ ratio in overall market [share]) x 100
For example, a survey on the demographics of a web service showed that the ratio of teens was 10% while the ratio of people in their forties was 15%. It seems that this service is attractive to middle-aged people. However, if the age distribution of the Internet users over the entire society is 5% for teens and 20% for people in their forties, the index for teens is 200 while the index for people in their forties is 75. This shows that this service actually is attractive to young people. Using an index, you can objectively judge website data as compared with trends in the market.
Using a Bubble Chart
Bubble charts are often used to help visualize the Internet audience rating data. A bubble chart indicates distribution statuses using bubbles with certain sizes and positions, and can represent mutual relationships between various comparison targets.
If your findings show that the visitor count is high but the PV is low or the session duration is short, you’ll be able to fix problems as they come up. These charts can help you discover glitches in the company’s website including unattractive content, difficult usability and even pages that take too long to load.
Competitor Analysis
Conduct a Competitive Analysis
New companies and websites are constantly being launched. In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to be aware of what they are offering their customers. Performing a competitive analysis will help you create a strategy that will allow you to compete, and hopefully surpass your online and offline competitors.What is a competitor?
A competitor can be either online or offline. You can have competitors that are rivals in the same industry like Coke and Pepsi, and you can have competitors that come in the form of websites that appear ahead of you on a search results page.The purpose of a competitor analysis
You can learn a lot from a competitor analysis. By comparing content, design, ads, and their target audience, you can modify your own methods to outshine your competition. This may mean changing your methods, but it may also give you new ideas that you can turn to your advantage.What kind of websites should be analyzed?
You should choose websites from the two different categories described above when you are going to do a competitor analysis.For example, you own a business that sells coffee shop downtown. There are many other businesses in your industry that you must compete with. You will want to compare your website traffic analysis to larger corporate websites like Starbucks as they will appear before yours on a search engine results page. You’ll also need to compare your website to websites from smaller café’s that are located in the same area as you.
Three categories you should analyze
Once you have listed the websites to perform the competitor analysis upon, analyze each from the following perspectives.Analyze the target audience
Analyze the customers that visit your website and your chosen competitor websites. Analyze keywords, the age and the gender of customers. Use the data you gather to compare it with your target audience.Evaluate content quality
Look at their design, user-friendliness, shopping cart, content, navigation, sitemap, blogs, social media [What is Social Media Marketing] profiles and advertisements.Investigate the quantity of contents published. How many times have they posted to a social media site? Have they posted case studies? How frequently do they post or add new content? What kind of topics do they discuss? Are there any holes in their content that you can capitalize on? If you can determine topics that you can add to your content, you might be able to overtake them on the search engine results page.
Evaluate their content quality. How accurate is the content they are posting? Are there spelling and grammatical errors? Do they structure their content in a user-friendly manner? Do users share or interact with posts?
Also examine how well their website is optimized. You can perform SEO on a competitor website to see what they are doing right and wrong. Use the knowledge to improve your own website.
Look at the inflow route
Analyze how your target customers arrive at competitor websites. You may find a route to attract new customers to your website. For example, if a competitor is successfully increases inflows from social media sites [Benefits of social media marketing], you might want to focus on introducing or improving your own social media profiles.How to take advantage of web marketing analysis tools
We will discuss useful web marketing analysis tools in depth. Each one is different and can affect your decision making process; make sure you pick the tool that will give you the data that you need. Here is a brief overview of some of the most popular tools:Google Trends and Keyword Planner will be able to tell you the number of searches, trends, and seasonal variations on search phrases. Please note that the results you will receive from Google Trends come in relative numerical values, and that the numerical values from the Keyword Planner are estimates.
Web analytics social media tools allow you to analyze trends in comments on blogs and social media websites. Remember that comments are personal opinions and should always be analyzed with a grain of salt.
There are also a variety of survey tools that are useful. They can show you the numerical values of searches and Likes on Facebook and what types of articles those users are viewing. They can show you popular and trending search words and phrases on Twitter, see how users are transmitting the words and the context in which they are being utilized. You can also analyze descriptions on websites by looking at proper nouns.
Please take advantage of the many resources available to you when performing web marketing Analysis and business Analysis.
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