Successful marketing has to be measurable, so web analytics are becoming increasingly important in helping marketers understand the success of their digital efforts. But most of these analytics remain basic, including aspects like total web visitors, bounce rate, or conversion rate.
These basic metrics are undoubtedly important in helping you determine the success of your website. A page with a high bounce rate, for example, may need refining in order to better convince your visitors to keep browsing your website after landing on the page. But at the same time, they are also too basic to stand on their own in order to provide actionable insights into your audience. To truly get to know your b2b website visitors, you should use advanced analytics.
An Introduction to Advanced Analytics
As the name suggests, advanced analytics go beyond the basic metrics you can glean from a standard dashboard within Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. Rather than being reactionary by simply aggregating simple user behaviors on your website, they provide more actionable insights that provide tangible recommendations to improve your website.
Of course, advanced analytics are more difficult to gather than their basic counterparts. But in combination with the more standard metrics you probably already use to evaluate your marketing, they can provide you with everything you need to predict visitor behavior and optimize your website accordingly.
Examples of Advanced Analytics
Most importantly, advanced analytics share a common theme: rather than being reactionary, they track the performance of your website and user behaviors in real time. In other words, you don't have to rely on past user data in order to glean insight into visitor behavior. Instead, you can follow users and gather data as they navigate around your site, enabling you to gather more current insights than you could otherwise get.
Tracking conversions to leads and customers have become so common, most marketers no longer consider it to be advanced analytics. But tracking your audience through the entire funnel, identifying multiple conversion points and associated behaviors is a more advanced topic. Software like Google Analytics now enables marketers to track entire funnels, allowing insight into which pages were visited prior to individual conversions, and how metrics like time on site affected conversion rates. The result is a more wholesome picture that allows you to optimize your marketing for lead conversions and for the entire audience journey toward becoming customers.
On a single-page level, heat maps enable marketers to understand how their visitors read and react on individual pages within the website. The process visualizes the attention your users pay to individual aspects of your page, from images and headlines to links and more. Understanding where they pay most attention is a crucial part in adjusting your website to account for and direct desired behaviors.
Of course, where your traffic comes from matters because of how your users interact once they land on your website. While many marketers now track the source of visitor traffic, few account for the fact that this singular source is unlikely to be the only reason they land or convert on your pages. Enter multi-channel attribution, a modeling system that enables you to account for the multiple marketing touches that likely occurred prior to conversion. Implemented correctly, it gives you a more accurate estimate of the success of your individual marketing efforts and allows you to direct your efforts accordingly.
In short, advanced analytics enable b2b companies of all sizes to gain a better understanding of their visitors, and increase the success of their website and digital marketing efforts as a result. Is your company using advanced analytics to optimize its digital presence? Given the increasing sophistication needed to reach b2b audiences in a crowded digital marketing place, techniques like heat maps, funnel tracking, and multi-channel attribution may make the difference between growing your business and stagnating online.