So now that you have your website up and running, optimized for SEO, and even have a pay-per-click campaign chugging along, what do you do to make your site even better? Invest in a professional web analytics program. Web analytics software is becoming a bigger player in site design, site restructuring, user behavior analysis, and web reporting. Why invest in a serious web analytics tool? One simple reason – complete voyeurism. You get to see what a user does when they reach your website. You can view their actions or lack of action to help you get insight into how to make your website better. Not only can you find out if that new coupon banner is getting any clicks from Joe Q. Webuser, but you can also find out which links he likes to click the most.

There are many analytics tools out there at the moment jockeying for your dollar, so I won’t get in to who is best or what works best. ClickTracks, NetTracker, and WebTrends are among the most popular these days that are beyond basic analytic offerings. These professional analytics tools can range from cheap to expensive depending on how committed you are and how much you’re willing to spend. For example, ClickTracks allows a user to create analytics from log files or directly from each page action (using javascript code). The ultimate goal is that you get the in-depth user information to help you improve and tailor your website to your customers’ needs and then have the ability to compare SEO vs. PPC, referrer visits vs. search engine visits, and whatever else you or your client may want to track. The most powerful advantage to using a serious analytics tool is that you have the ability to compare different venues of traffic and advertising to see where your money is most efficiently spent. You can compare organic search to paid search to find out where to allocate money. If certain keywords are getting high organic results, you may want to cut back on your pay-per-click spending to save money.

Whether the goal is to sell neckties, or to sign up for a newsletter, pro web analytics tools can also help you find out what is and isn’t working on your site and then provide insight on what steps to take next. Web analytics tools give you a wealth of knowledge that was, until recently, unavailable in traditional media. Not only can you create a website that can manipulate a user’s navigation, but you can also run endless tests to see what provokes a user to move through your site. If you add a hyperlink to the company logo, will that improve site navigation? If you focus more page copy on your top five keywords, will you get more traffic? If you move the contact us link from the bottom to the top of the page, will you get more responses? With a little determination and patience, you can turn your website into a running experiment that tests how customer friendly your site can become.

To evolve your site is a giant undertaking in terms of time, money, and risk of losing valuable customers. The greatest asset of professional web analytics software is that you can finally know if that new banner or navigation bar really does help, and if not, then it can help you figure out what the next steps are in improving your website to achieve your goals.