Online Marketing with Web Analytics
If you operate a mortgage website for business and marketing purposes, but you don’t know how to access your website analytics … you’re operating under a severe handicap. Here’s how to avoid that.
What Is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is an Internet marketing term with many uses and interpretations. Basically, it refers to information about your website visitors. When people visit your mortgage website, and then go on to interact with the website in some way, that information can be collected as data.
In other words, website analytics programs allow you to monitor the activity of your mortgage website’s visitors. Obviously, this kind of website data can be very useful in your online mortgage marketing program.
Even if you don’t have a “store-bought” website analytics program installed on your mortgage website, you probably have a website log that can give you some basic information. Most web-hosting companies offer site logs with basic analytics than can tell you where your traffic comes from, home many visitors you get each day, etc.
But if you really want to know what’s happening on your mortgage website, you should install a more powerful analytics program.
Analytics Programs for Mortgage Websites
If you’d like to go the free route (which I always prefer), you could try Google Analytics. This program used to be called Urchin, but Google bought it a few years ago and renamed it. Google Analytics will give you such information as:
- Number of visitors per day
- Location of your visitors
- Key phrases people use to find you through search engines
- Top sources of traffic
- Top entry page
- Top exit page
- And more
This kind of data is sufficient for most mortgage websites, as it gives you the “intel” you need to make smart decisions about your website’s growth. And, of course, you can’t beat the price.
But if you want to get more advanced with your mortgage Internet marketing (and have the budget to support it), you might look into such products / companies as WebTrends and ClickTracks.
Posted: August 29, 2007
