Analysis Features for Marketing/Lead-Generation Sites

Your Web site is a marketing tool. Your goal is to pique customer interest so that they ultimately contact you, but the final sale takes place off-line or at a later date. Informative, but not laden with content, your site describes your product or service, and perhaps even offers demos or research material to help educate your customers.

While shopping for Web site traffic analysis, or analytics, solutions, you'll find that this description perfectly fits the Web sites of analytics companies themselves. You usually won't find a way to buy the product online; in fact, you’ll need to call their sales staff to even get pricing info. Other examples of sites like this would be legal or financial services, or big-ticket items like cars.

Look for these features and metrics to boost your ability to measure and hone your site's marketing power:

• Campaign Analysis: Track your campaigns through to the contact request form to see which keywords, emails, and other Web marketing tactics are generating the most leads for you.

• Market Segmentation: Along with tracking campaigns as a whole, break them down based on market segments.

• Clickstream Analysis: Watch for bottlenecks and site abandonment, then optimize accordingly. Observing clickstreams also helps delineate between researchers and buyers so that you can smooth the way for both.

• Form Abandonment: Once your visitor is ready to talk business, be sure you're not putting up unnecessary obstacles with an onerous contact form. Use an analytics tool that can tell you which field in particular is causing any drop-off you might observe.

• Solutions Integration and Data Portability: For a marketing Web site, it will be helpful to integrate with your CRM or lead management system. If you're using an online sales tool, see if it has a way to talk to your analytics service, and vice versa. If using an in-house solution, integrating directly with your marketing campaign data will tell you exactly which campaigns are producing the sales.