Understanding the Importance of Web Analytics

Monte: Good. Good. So now, let’s get into the importance of web analytics. Why it’s important to someone’s business, and how it can help improve someone’s business. ‘Cause a lot of people don’t really look deep into their web stats, and obviously, one of the things, when you’re getting into search engine optimization, is to really look at where people are coming from, what their typing in, start building some internal behavioral, you know, indicators, so that you can better serve them and others that are trying to look for you. So let’s get a little bit in depth about what’s important, why and what people can do to start taking advantage of that.

Brett: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot to say about that, and basically I’ll say that in the past, you know, four years, there’s been a pretty heavy shift in what web analytics are looking at. And our industry as a whole has changed, definitely for the better, in my opinion. But it used to be people were looking at just kind of like who came to my site, what are they doing, and, you know, or did anyone come to my site, and what are they doing, that sort of thing.

Monte: Right.

Brett: And these days--and it was a little more IT focused then. These days, it’s clearly a marketing focus thing, our sales completely changed to talking directly to the marketing people. Now, that’s not to say people with IT interests can’t find value in our product, but we’re definitely targeting, you know, marketing. The whole web analytics industry is about helping people understand how people got to their site, what they did on the site, and whether they converted to one of their conversion goals. And so, you know, what I tell people often times now is the first thing you want to do is establish your goals for your website, what are your business objectives, and then build the site accordingly, put tracking in place, and then start driving the traffic through, either through organic or paid search or, you know, e-mail blast, whatever--

Monte: Right.

Brett: --the methodology you use, you need to be able to track that to see if it’s effective, especially if you’re spending either time or money to make that happen.

Monte: Right. So the key things to look for in your analytics report, and I don’t know--I assume that the offering from a lot of the hosting customers that you have, do they let you go--so if I’m a hosting company and I’m--if I’m a customer on a host [inaudible] platform or an EarthLink platform, am I able to really go deep into my own website using that application, or do I need to do something with Urchin to get me full information so that I can better optimize my site, learn more about who’s visiting me and how to make more money?

Brett: Well, I will say that with the shift in the industry, it is useful to be on a more recent version. The most recent version that we have is Urchin 6, most of the hosts are currently offering Urchin 5, and the simple reason for that is that Urchin 6 software isn’t yet available, that’ll be coming out within the next couple months, and we’ll do a big announcement so that everybody knows when that happens. But--and I anticipate that most of these hosts will upgrade at that point. But the key thing to understand is that most of the hosts, what they’re providing in a shared hosting account, or even often in a dedicated hosting account, is our base product. So the base level of reporting, it’s going to show you some pretty good information about who’s coming to your site and how they’re getting there. What it isn’t doing is the multi-visit conversion analysis. So it’s not tracking people--you know, if they came in on a Google keyword to your site and then they looked around but they didn’t buy something or convert into one of your goals or whatever--

Monte: Right.

Brett: -- it’s not gonna tell you if that same guy came back two days later and then purchased something. It won’t do the ROI [ph] analysis and tie that back to it. However, our--you can add another module. Urchin is a modular product, so that you start with the base and then you can add items as you go. If you get the conversion-tracking module, Campaign Track Module that we call it, then you can plug that in and it will do all that ROI [ph] analysis for you.

Monte: Great.

Brett: You can import your keyword costs [ph] tied in to your e-commerce system very easily. If you use Miva, it’s already done for you; if you use MonsterCommerce [ph], it’s already done for you; if you have a homegrown solution, we have a white paper that’s a fairly simple process. Anyhow, if you tie that data all together--if you allow Urchin to see all the rest of that data, then it’ll tie it together for you and do the [inaudible] analysis, so you can determine whether those keywords are effective or not or those banner ads, e-mail, whatever.

Monte: Right, right. Well, that’s great.