Management gurus and industry honchos alike, have all said their two-bits about customer service and customer relationship management. Point: serve your customers well, listen to them.

If this was difficult to do in the physical space, it becomes even more challenging in the virtual space. You can’t see your customers, you can’t tell what interests them. Or can you? Enter web analytics. Though a familiar term for the web-savvy strategists, we attempt to explain in simple terms what it is and what it means for your website.

Most organisations today understand the need for a good website. The reason: they want to attract customers. But to know if the website has been really successful and if it really is attracting traffic, you need to analyse the traffic information. Web analytics has been built to help you do this.

It’s like your guest register, which keeps track of how many people visited your site. And unlike your physical register, it tells you a lot more like when did they visit your site, how long did they stay, which pages attracted the maximum hits, and so on.

Based on all this information, you can get an idea of which regions of the globe are most of your visitors from and decide whether that is indeed your target audience. Or whether your services match the needs of this audience, and if you need to tailor them further. Or how much of time your customers give you to convey your message.

You can also check which pages are popular (based on number of page hits), and position important information on those pages. After all, you do not want critical information hidden on some page that people will not see.

Analytics can also give you comparative pictures of the action on your website. For example, you may have changed the website content recently. Compare the traffic volumes before and after the change to see whether there are more visitors after the revamp. Of course, you will not be able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship (you may be unable to say that there are more visitors because of the change in content). But it still gives you some clues to work with.

You can get a better idea of how to use your website for improving your business success with some of these data. And yes, you’ll know whether your web exercise has indeed been worth the investment made.

*Note: this article is not an in-depth explanation of how to use web analytics or of its various features and uses. This is merely a fundamental explanation of the topic. For a more detailed understanding of how your web site can gain from analytics, do write to analytics@lucidsense.com